GOWKJ a Bestseller
From The Birmingham News April 16, 2006:
Hardcover:
1. "Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog"by John Grogan, (William Morrow, $21.95)
2. "Two Little Girls in Blue" by Mary Higgins Clark (Simon & Schuster, $25.95)
3. "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown (Doubleday, $24.95)
4. "Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal" by Keith Thompson (McAdam/Cage, $19)
5. "The Mermaid Chair" by Sue Monk Kidd (Penguin, $24.95)
6. "The Tenth Circle" by Jodi Picoult (Atria, $26)
7. "His Lovely Wife" by Elizabeth Dewberry (Harcourt, $24)
8. "Prior Bad Acts" by Tami Hoag (Bantam, $26)
9. "French Women Don't Get Fat" by Mireille Guiliano (Knopf, $26)
10. "The 5th Horseman"by James Patterson (Little, Brown, $27.95)
"GOWKJ" Book Signings Preliminary Schedule
How to get all the excitement of a whale hunt without setting foot on a deck, and with none of the whale-killing stench:
Date/Time: 4/7, 4pm
Location:Birmingham, AL
Venue/Details: The Alabama Booksmith
Date/Time: 4/25, 7pm
Location:Jefferson Parish Library
Venue/Details: Metairie, LA
Date/Time: 4/26, 5pm
Location:Jackson, MS
Venue/Details: Lemuria Books
Date/Time: 4/27, 5:30pm
Location:Oxford, MS
Venue/Details: Square Books & Thacker Mountain Radio Show
Date/Time: 6/3, 1-3pm
Location:Port Washington, WI
Venue/Details: Port Washington Pirate Festival
Entertainment Weekly's review: We give it a B
From the March 31 issue of Entertainment Weekly:
Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal
WRITER
Keith Thomson
RELEASE DATE
Mar 24 2006
GENRE
Fiction
PUBLISHER
MacAdam/Cage
Reviewed by Troy Patterson
Here we have a novel - could it be the first of its kind? - purporting to be the reprint of a blog. Gus Openshaw is an absurdist Ahab, a middle-aged cat-food cannery employee who has lost his wife, child, and right arm to a blubbery sea beast - "he'd be pushing the max if they had Big & Tall stores for sperm whales" - and who sets sail seeking vengeance. His blog entries describe silly encounters with pirates, a preppy dungeon master, a psychotic cook, the whale-huggers of "Bluepeace," and a nonagenarian navigator, among others. The love interest is his arms dealer's raven-haired intern, who's sold him a remote-controlled robotic giant squid. This is all fairly amusing and entirely inconsequential - an anti-Moby Dick. Grade: B
