Top Dog

Dav Pilkey has the #1 book in the country with For Whom the Ball Rolls, which enjoyed the best first-week print unit sales of any entry in the Dog Man series to date. Also new this week, the color edition of Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People, which originally pubbed in 2006 with black-and-white illustrations, lands at #4 in children’s frontlist fiction. Two more Pilkey titles on the list—Brawl of the Wild and Lord of the Fleas—offer further evidence of the author-illustrator’s stature, as do the crowds for his current tour. Above, a a sold-out audience of 5,000 greeted Pilkey at the Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis on August 18.

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

Stamp of Approval

The #9 book in the country is Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, “a boldly articulated, historically informed explanation of what exactly racist ideas and thinking are,” our starred review said, “and what their antiracist antithesis looks like both systemically and at the level of individual action.” His previous title, 2016’s National Book Award–winning Stamped from the Beginning, which also addresses racism, has sold 35K copies in hardcover and another 58K in trade paper.

Stick the Landing

Eight years after Téa Obreht’s debut, the Orange Prize–winning novel The Tiger’s Wife, her sophomore effort, Inland, hits our hardcover fiction list at #12. Set in the Arizona Territory in 1893, it’s “a colorful portrait of the Western landscape,” our starred review said, “populated by a rogue’s gallery of memorable characters and saturated with spirits of the countless dead.” A day after the book pubbed, former president Barack Obama included it on his summer reading list.

New & Notable

Ball of Collusion
Andrew C. McCarthy
#5 Hardcover Nonfiction
McCarthy, a Fox News contributor, details why “the real collusion scheme” of 2016, as he writes in the introduction, was a two-pronged plan to get Hillary Clinton elected and, if that failed, to discredit Donald Trump.

Trick Mirror
Jia Tolentino
#6 Hardcover Nonfiction
“New Yorker contributor Tolentino debuts with a sharp, well-founded crackdown on the lies of self and culture,” our review said, “in these nine original, incisive reflections on a hypercapitalist, internet-driven age.”

Kochland
Christopher Leonard
#16 Hardcover Nonfiction
This portrait of Koch Industries shows how CEO Charles and his brother David, who died August 23, represent “American capitalism at its most successful and domineering,” our starred review said, praising “Leonard’s superb investigations and evenhanded, clear-eyed reportage.”

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 For Whom the Ball Rolls (Dog Man #7) Dav Pilkey Graphix 242,203
2 Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens Putnam 40,243
3 The Inn Patterson/Fox Little, Brown 22,543
4 We Don’t Eat Our Classmates Ryan T. Higgins Disney-Hyperion 21,805
5 The Bitterroots C.J. Box Minotaur 17,473
6 Educated Tara Westover Random House 17,137
7 The Art of Racing in the Rain (movie tie-in) Garth Stein Harper 16,416
8 One Good Deed David Baldacci Grand Central 15,109
9 How to Be an Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi One World 13,996
10 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee Harper Perennial 13,420

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.