This Week's Bestsellers: May 20, 2019

On the Trail

Our review called The Pioneers by popular historian David McCullough “a fascinating and well-written look at the Cutler families and the Americanizing of Ohio.” It also, as our review and others have pointed out, suffers from “the near-omission of the native people’s perspective,” though that did not prevent the book from debuting at #3 in the country.

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Breathing Life

Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, arrives nearly two decades after his first and lands at #16 in hardcover fiction. Our starred review called his stories “brilliant experiments” that are “among the very best science fiction.” This isn’t exactly news: by the time his debut, 2002’s Stories of Your Life and Others, pubbed, he’d already won multiple awards for his work, including Hugo and Nebula Awards for the collection’s “Story of Your Life.” That novella was also the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival.

The Rule of Three

With the debut of the Melville House edition of The Mueller Report, #2 in mass market with more than 13K print copies sold, there are currently three editions on our lists of a document that can be read for free online. Combined print unit sales are nearly 180K, with Scribner’s edition claiming about 62% of that figure.

New & Notable

Furious Hours
Casey Cep
#15 Hardcover Nonfiction
“Journalist Cep makes her debut with a brilliant account of Harper Lee’s failed attempt to write a true crime book,” our starred review said. “This is essential reading for anyone interested in Lee and American literary history.”

With the Fire on High
Elizabeth Acevedo
#13 Children’s Frontlist Fiction
Acevedo’s debut YA novel, 2018’s The Poet X, won the National Book Award and Printz Award. Now comes her follow-up, which our review called “stunning” and an “unvarnished depiction of young adulthood [that’s] at once universal and intensely specific.”

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.