BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS! HOORAY! Looks to be a pretty decent week, as far as new releases go. Here are the highlights for June 8, 2010!

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. (Hardcover)
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

via Random House

The Passage by Justin Cronin. (Hardcover)
“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

Interested in this? I know I am! Watch out on Friday for my review of The Passage RIGHT HERE! Maybe it’ll tip your decision one way or another if you’re still on the fence.

via Enter The Passage

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony  Bourdain. (Hardcover)
Medium Raw marks the return of the inimitable Anthony Bourdain, author of the blockbuster bestseller Kitchen Confidential and three-time Emmy Award-nominated host of Without Reservations on TV’s Travel Channel. Bourdain calls his book, “A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook,” and he is at his entertaining best as he takes aim at some of the biggest names in the foodie world, including David Chang, Alice Waters, the Top Chef winners and losers, and many more. If Hunter S. Thompson had written a book about the restaurant business, it could have been Medium Raw.

A book for the brain AND the appetite! Delicious.

via HarperCollins

(P.S. I thought his show was called No Reservations? Have I been calling it the wrong name all this time?!)

You Never Give Me Your Money by Peter Doggett. (Hardcover)
Now, for the first time, You Never Give Me Your Money tells the dramatic story of the personal and business rivalry that has dominated the Beatles’ lives since 1969. It charts the almost Shakespearean rivalry of the Lennon and McCartney families, the conflict in George Harrison’s life between spirituality and fame, and Richard Starkey aka Ringo’s efforts to escape the alcoholism that threatened to kill him. It documents the shifting relationships between the four as they strive to establish their identities beyond the Beatles, and it chronicles the transformation of their multi-media company, Apple Corps, from a bastion of 1960s counter-culture into a corporate behemoth.

via The HarperStudio.

Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters. (Paperback)
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters coauthor Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina: an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a strange new world of robots, cyborgs, and interplanetary travel.

via Quirk Classics

I was going to review Android Karenina, really I was, until I recalled that I never particularly enjoyed Anna Karenina in the first place. Whether or not cyborgs and gadgets can save it for me remains to be seen. I’m sure I’ll read this at some point but it’s not on my immediate to-do list.

What is, you ask? Well, in case you merely glossed over the new release titles, let me catch you up to speed: I’ll be reviewing Justin Cronin’s The Passage later this week, so keep an eye out for that! As always, if there are any books you’ve found particularly interesting, mind blowing or life altering, please don’t hesitate to share your questions, comments and words of wisdom about them RIGHT HERE or on Twitter!

Happy reading, book nerds!