Fust springs 7 new titles on readers

The seven newest titles at the Johann Fust Community Library will prove lucky for many new years readers with the latest from John Grisham and the definitive listing of the 50 funniest American writers.

From intense emotion to thrillers, this is another well-rounded library expansion at Fust. Check it out.

'Blue Nights'

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By Joan Didion

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.

Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.?

Blue Nights opens July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana's childhood in Malibu, Brentwood and at school in Holmby Hills.

Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced.

"How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?"

Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other.

Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.?

Blue Nights, the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, "the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning," like "The Year of Magical Thinking" before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

'The 50 Funniest American Writers'

By Andy Borowitz

This is an anthology of humor from Mark Twain to The Onion.

Ever wondered who makes a very funny person laugh?

Wonder no more.

Brought together in this Library of America collection are America's 50 funniest writers, according to acclaimed writer and comedian Andy Borowitz.

Reaching back to Twain and forward to contemporary masters such as David Sedaris, Nora Ephron, Roy Blount Jr., Ian Frazier, Bernie Mac, Wanda Sykes, and George Saunders, "The 50 Funniest American Writers*" is an exclusive Who's Who of the best American comic writing.

Here are Thurber and Perelman, Lenny Bruce and Bruce Jay Friedman, Garrison Keillor, Dave Barry, and Veronica Geng, plus hilarious lesser-known pieces from The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, National Lampoon and The Onion.

Who does "one of the funniest people in America" (CBS Sunday Morning) read when he needs a laugh?

'The Litigators'

By John Grisham

The two partners at Finley & Figg often refer to themselves as "a boutique law firm."

Boutique, as in chic, selective and prosperous. They are, of course, none of these things. What they are is a two-bit operation always in search of their big break, ambulance chasers who've been in the trenches much too long making way too little. Their specialties, so to speak, are quickie divorces and DUIs, with the occasional jackpot of an actual car wreck thrown in.

After 20-plus years together, Oscar Finley and Wally Figg bicker like an old married couple but somehow continue to scratch out a half-decent living from their seedy bungalow offices in southwest Chicago.

And then change comes their way. David Zinc, a young burned-out attorney, walks away from his fast-track career at a fancy downtown firm, goes on a serious bender and finds himself literally at the doorstep of our boutique firm. Once David sobers up and comes to grips with the fact he's suddenly unemployed, any job - even one with Finley & Figg - looks OK to him.

With their new associate on board, F&F is ready to tackle a really big case that could make the partners rich without requiring them to actually practice much law. An extremely popular drug, Krayoxx, the No. 1 cholesterol reducer for the dangerously overweight, produced by Varrick Labs, a giant pharmaceutical company with annual sales of $25 billion, has recently come under fire after several patients taking it have suffered heart attacks. Wally smells money.

A little online research confirms Wally's suspicions - a huge plaintiff firm in Florida is putting together a class action suit against Varrick. All Finley & Figg has to do is find a handful of people who have had heart attacks while taking Krayoxx, convince them to become clients, join the class action, and ride along to fame and fortune. With any luck, they won't even have to enter a courtroom.

It almost seems too good to be true.

And it is.??The Litigators is a tremendously entertaining romp, filled with the kind of courtroom strategies, theatrics and suspense that have made John Grisham America's favorite storyteller.

'The Marriage Plot'

By Jeffrey Eugenide

It's the early 1980s the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever.

In the cafs on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike," who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in 18th century France, real life intervenes in the form of two very different guys.

Leonard Bankhead, charismatic loner, college Darwinist and lost Portland boy, suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him.

At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus, who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange, resurfaces obsessed with the idea Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to re-evaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the 19th century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups and divorce?

With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

'Only Time Will Tell'

By Jeffrey Archer

The first novel in the Clifton Chronicles, an ambitious new series that tells the story of a family across generations and oceans, comes from No. 1 New York Times-bestselling author Jeffrey Archer.

The epic tale of Harry Clifton's life begins in 1920, with the words "I was told that my father was killed in the war." A dock worker in Bristol, Clifton never knew his father and expects to continue on at the shipyard, until a remarkable gift wins him a scholarship to an exclusive boys' school,. His life will never be the same again.

As he enters into adulthood, Clifton finally learns how his father really died, but the awful truth only leads him to question: Was he even his father? Is he the son of Arthur Clifton, a stevedore, or the firstborn son of a scion of West Country society, whose family owns a shipping line? From the ravages of the Great War and the docks of working-class England to the streets of 1940 New York and the outbreak of World War II, this is a powerful journey that will bring to life 100 years of history to reveal a family story that neither the reader nor Harry Clifton himself could ever have imagined.

'V is for Vengeance'

By Sue Grafton

The new Kinsey Millhone novel from the No. 1 New York Times-bestselling author.

Kinsey on Kinsey: "I know there are people who believe you should forgive and forget. For the record, I'd like to say I'm a big fan of forgiveness as long as I'm given the opportunity to get even first."

A woman with a murky past who kills herself - or was it murder? A dying old man cared for by the son he pummeled mercilessly. A lovely woman whose life is about to splinter into 1,000 fragments. A professional shoplifting ring racking up millions in stolen goods. A brutal and unscrupulous gangster. A wandering husband, rich and powerful. A spoiled kid awash in gambling debt thinking he can beat the system. A lonely widower mourning the death of his lover, desperate for answers that may be worse than the pain of his loss. An elegant but ruthless businessman whose dealings are definitely outside the law: the spider at the center of the web.

And Kinsey Millhone, whose 38th birthday gift is a punch in the face that leaves her with two black eyes and a busted nose.

V for Victim. Violence. Vengeance.

'Zero Day'

By David Balducci

From David Baldacci, the modern master of the thriller and No. 1 worldwide-bestselling novelist, comes a new hero: a lone U.S. Army special agent taking on the toughest crimes facing the nation.

Zero Day is where it all begins.

John Puller is a combat veteran and the best military investigator in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigative Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable drive to find the truth.

Now, Puller is called out on a case in a remote, rural area in West Virginia coal country far from any military outpost. Someone has stumbled onto a brutal crime scene, a family slaughtered. The local homicide detective, a headstrong woman with personal demons of her own, joins forces with Puller in the investigation. As Puller digs through deception after deception, he realizes that absolutely nothing he's seen in this small town, and no one in it, are what they seem. Facing a potential conspiracy that reaches far beyond the hills of West Virginia, he is one man on the hunt for justice against an overwhelming force.

Baldacci is one of the world's favorite storytellers. His books are published in more than 45 languages and more than 80 countries, with more than 110 million copies in print.