January « 2012 « Hyperion Books

January 31, 2012

The Anatomy of Ghosts (Paperback)

Filed under: book,forthcoming — Tags: Mystery — katherine @ 3:48 pm

1786, Jerusalem College, Cambridge

Desperate to salvage the reputation of her son, Frank, who has been locked away after seeing the ghost of a deceased woman at Jerusalem College, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs John Holdsworth to investigate. When Holdsworth, the author of a stinging argument on why ghosts are mere delusions, finds himself haunted, he becomes more determined than ever to find the deceased woman’s murderer. No one will leave Jerusalem unchanged.

“Mr. Taylor is a sophisticated writer . . . with a high degree of literary expertise.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Taylor’s latest delivers an original historical mystery that uses the language and attitude of the period in a fresh way . . . a successful piece of compelling suspense literature and sophisticated historical crime fiction.”
— Library Journal

“Those made of sterner stuff will relish Taylor’s dark and gripping tale.”
—Washington Post

“With Taylor you are in the hands of a consummate storyteller: He’s a recipient of a Cartier Diamond Dagger award for good reason.”
—LATimes.com

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January 23, 2012

Amy Atlas

Filed under: author — katherine @ 6:09 pm

Formerly a lawyer, Amy Atlas left her job and started Amy Atlas Events, specializing in unique dessert tables for all kinds of parties. Referred to as the Sweets Stylist, Dessert Table Designer, Goddess of Goodies, and Queen of Desserts, Amy has been featured in magazines such as People and on national television, including Today and Anderson. Her daily blog, Sweet Designs (blog.amyatlas.com) was named one of the best blogs by InStyle magazine. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

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Sweet Designs

Filed under: book — Tags: Cookbook, Entertaining — katherine @ 6:02 pm

Bake it, Craft it, Style it! Amy Atlas, home baker, crafter, and party planner extraordinaire, shows her readers and fans how to create fabulous sweets tables for adults and kids, combining easy recipes, dressed-up store-bought treats, and craft ideas, to make dessert a fitting grand finale to any gathering.

Amy Atlas gained an international following when she introduced the concept of meshing baking and crafting to make beautiful sweets spreads. She has designed tables for Brooke Shields, Electrolux with Kelly Ripa, Gayle King, Martha Stewart Weddings, Mindy Weiss, and O Magazine. Since 2008, hundreds of thousands of readers have flocked to her award-winning blog, Sweet Designs. Now they’ll learn how she does it for the first time in her first book filled with brand-new tables, original recipes, do-it-yourself instructions, and dozens of tips and secrets.

Sweet Designs includes 15 chapters filled with more than 100 recipes for every kind of irresistible treat, plus over 75 easy, affordable DIY craft projects to make them even more special. Each chapter features an amazing dessert table that reflects themes Amy’s clients most often request: a favorite color, design, flavor, destination, passion, or holiday. Amy tells readers how they can make just one item, mix and match items from different tables, or make the dessert tables as shown. Each chapter explains how to:

Bake It: Recipes for making decadent sweets of all kinds, including cakes, cookies, pies, brownies, mousse, truffles, popsicles, ice cream bars, and drinks.

Craft It: How-to’s for creating Amy’s signature popcorn cups, candy bar wrappers, paper pinwheels, banners, candy bags, and more, plus simple instructions for accessing her one-of-a-kind patterns and templates on her website.

Style It: Designer secrets for arranging sweets, choosing patterns, accessorizing a pedestal or serving dish, and mixing textures and colors.

Shop It: Pick up sweets from the corner store to pair with home-baked desserts and a chapter-by-chapter resource guide for finding the less common ones.

Display It: Dressed-up serving vessels, backdrops, dessert tags, and other simple display touches to create the whole dessert table or make a single treat stand out.

Switch It: Creative ways to swap the colors and desserts or platters to better suit your needs, grow them down for the kids, minimize your time with easy-does-it tips, and more.

For every maid of honor who needs to plan an epic bridal shower (and then later the baby shower), every mom who needs to put together a birthday bash her kids will never forget, and every Scrabble aficionado who wants to throw the game-night party to end all game-night parties, Amy serves up that elusive “wow factor” to make every celebration an event to remember.

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Witches of East End (Paperback)

Filed under: book — Tags: Fiction — katherine @ 2:15 pm

“Move over, zombies, vampires, and werewolves, and make way for witches. Melissa de la Cruz, author of the best-selling Blue Bloods series, ably sets the stage for a juicy new franchise.”
—Entertainment Weekly

The three Beauchamp women—Joanna and her daughters, Freya and Ingrid—live ordinary lives in mist-shrouded North Hampton, out on the tip of Long Island. All three are harboring a centuries-old secret: They are powerful witches forbidden to practice magic. But right before Freya’s planned wedding to wealthy Bran Gardiner, a mysterious and attractive man arrives in town and makes Freya question everything. When a young woman turns up dead, it soon becomes clear to all three that it’s time to dust off their wands and fight the dark forces working against them.

With a brand-new cast of characters, a fascinating and fresh world to discover, and a few surprise appearances from some of the Blue Blood fan favorites, this is a page-turning, deliciously fun, magical read fraught with love affairs, witchcraft, mythology, and an unforgettable battle between good and evil.

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January 17, 2012

The Red Book

Filed under: book — Tags: Fiction — katherine @ 4:53 pm

The Big Chill meets The Group in Deborah Copaken Kogan’s wry, lively, and irresistible new novel about a once-close circle of friends at their twentieth college reunion.

Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, homeschooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words.

Twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window slams shut. Addison’s marriage to a writer’s-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter. Hollywood shut its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her director husband can pay the bills. Jane, the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper whose foreign bureaus are now shuttered, is caught in a vortex of loss.

Like all Harvard grads, they’ve kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

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January 6, 2012

The Seven-Day Scholar: The Presidents

Filed under: book,forthcoming — Tags: History — katherine @ 3:18 pm

“A bite of history a day, all year long . . .”

Flawless storytelling, expert research, and intriguing, one-page essays make The Seven-Day Scholar: The Presidents perfect for history buffs.

The Presidents addresses formative moments in the lives of the presidents, crucial political decisions, little-known facts, and insights into the intriguing individuals Americans have selected to lead our country. Each chapter includes seven related narrative entries—one for each day of the week. The book explores many fascinating facts and issues about the presidents, including: Did Washington really enjoy dancing? Why did President Jefferson avoid speaking in public? Why did Lincoln crack down on civil liberties? Why did Eisenhower fight against big defense budgets? How responsible was Reagan for the end of the Cold War?

As well as covering each president, the book includes chapters on the Best and Worst Writers and Speakers; Most Controversial Elections; Scandals; Most Controversial Foreign Policy Decisions; The Peacemakers; First Ladies; The Best and Worst Presidents; and more. Entries also include follow-up resources where curious readers can learn more.

Readers can sweep through the book from beginning to end, or use it as a reference book, periodically exploring topics and presidents in which they are interested.

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Gail Simmons

Filed under: author — katherine @ 3:12 pm

GAIL SIMMONS is a trained culinary expert, food writer, and television personality. She is the Special Projects Director at Food & Wine magazine, and has been a permanent judge on Bravo’s Emmy-winning series Top Chef, the number one food show on cable television, since the show’s inception in 2006. Gail is also the host of Top Chef: Just Desserts, Bravo’s pastry-focused spin-off. Born in Toronto, she now lives in New York City with her husband, Jeremy.

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Talking with My Mouth Full

Filed under: Featured Book,book — Tags: Memoir — katherine @ 3:10 pm

When Gail Simmons first graduated from college, she felt hopelessly lost. All her friends were going to graduate school, business school, law school . . . but what was she going to do? Fortunately, a family friend gave her some invaluable advice—make a list of what you love to do, and let that be your guide. Gail wrote down four words:

Eat. Write. Travel. Cook.

Little did she know, those four words would become the basis for a career as a professional eater, cook, food critic, magazine editor, and television star. Today, she’s the host of Top Chef: Just Desserts, permanent judge on Top Chef, and Special Projects Director at Food & Wine magazine. She travels all over the world, eats extraordinary food, and meets fascinating people. She’s living the dream that so many of us who love to cook and eat can only imagine. But how did she get there?

Talking with My Mouth Full follows her unusual and inspiring path to success, step-by-step and bite-by-bite. It takes the reader from her early years, growing up in a household where her mother ran a small cooking school, her father made his own wine, and family vacation destinations included Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East; through her adventures at culinary school in New York City and training as an apprentice in two of New York’s most acclaimed kitchens; and on to her time spent assisting Vogue’s legendary food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, working for renowned chef Daniel Boulud, and ultimately landing her current jobs at Food & Wine and on Top Chef. The book is a tribute to the incredible meals and mentors she’s had along the way, examining the somewhat unconventional but always satisfying journey she has taken in order to create a career that didn’t even exist when she first started working toward it.

With memorable stories about the greatest (and worst) dishes she’s eaten, childhood and behind-the-scenes photos, and recipes from Gail’s family and her own kitchen, Talking with My Mouth Full is a true treat.

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January 3, 2012

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth (paperback)

Filed under: book — Tags: Current Events — katherine @ 2:11 pm

“Their stories beautifully demonstrate things we know intrinsically: that being popular is not always the same as being liked, that high school is more rigid and conformist than the military, and that the people who are excluded and bullied for their offbeat passions and refusal to conform are often the ones who are embraced and lauded for those very qualities in college and beyond.” —New York Times

In a smart, entertaining, reassuring book, Alexandra Robbins manages to cross Gossip Girl with Freaks and Geeks and explain the fascinating psychology behind popularity and outcasthood. She reveals that the things that set students apart in high school are the things that help them stand out later in life.

Robbins follows seven real people grappling with the uncertainties of high school social life: The Loner, The Popular Bitch, The Nerd, The New Girl, The Gamer, The Weird Girl, and The Band Geek. She intertwines these narratives—often triumphant, occasionally heartbreaking, and always captivating—with essays exploring the secrets of popularity; why being excluded doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you; why outsiders succeed; and how schools make the social scene worse, and what they can do about it.

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