With the exhibits at New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center open just two days, the show floor at this year's BEA was a real free-for-all, with lots of traffic from the moment the doors opened on Wednesday, May 26. But for LJ's review editors, it was worth enduring stubbed toes and rattled nerves to find fresh and interesting titles. Here the editors describe their personal favorites.

Marilyn & More

Picture this: I'm weaving my way through a crammed aisle of the Javits when a blowup of her blondness stops me dead. Once a sucker, always a sucker for a Marilyn book, I picked up the blad for John Vachon's Marilyn: August 1953; The Lost LOOK Photos (Calla Editions, Sept.), loaded with rare,, silvery black-and-white reproductions of the young starlet and future husband Joe DiMaggio. For glimpses of the woman behind the celluloid mask, look no further than Monroe's own Fragments (Farrar, Oct.). Editor Courtney Hodell has said that this collection of Monroe's photos, poems, and musings on her men and craft reveals 'a real interior life.' Indeed, I've been waiting for validation of just that since I was 16 and first became frustrated with Monroe's 'dumb' baggage (truth: the woman read Ulysses and looked to Abraham Lincoln for inspiration). Make it three odd with Andrew O'Hagan's plucky-sounding novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (Houghton Harcourt, Dec.). Yes, another dog-as-narrator book, but what a view this Frank Sinatra'gifted Maltese had! The last two years of Monroe's bicoastal life encompassed soirees with the Actors Studio camp and divorce in Mexico. Now, for a few one-offs: I hate snow, but I know how much joy it gives others, so Birgitta Ralston's Snow Play: How To Make Forts & Slides & Winter Campfires (Artisan, Dec.) is pure genius; call it 'crafting the outdoors.' Rolling Stone was one of the best-looking magazines of the 1990s thanks to then chief photographer Mark Seliger. In his Listen (Rizzoli, Oct.), he gifts us with architectural nudes and gothic still lifes. It's a late summer pub, but so what' AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga, Vol. 1 (Top Shelf Prods.) deserves your attention for amassing from the pages of Japan's AX magazine likely the most cutting-edge comics in the world. An English-translation first that your adult patrons will eat like candy. -Heather McCormack

Worth 1000 Words

When publisher Titan launched its multivolume Simon & Kirby retrospective with The Best of Simon & Kirby in 2009, there was rejoicing among old-school comics fans. Titan also did it exactly right with killer reproductions of their work. As wonderful as that initial effort was, for many fans The Simon & Kirby 'Superheroes (Titan, Oct.) is the one they're really dying for. Although the duo worked in almost every comics genre, their superhero stuff made them gods. Everything here was handpicked by Joe Simon, including more than two dozen adventures reproduced in their entirety; once again, the artwork has been lovingly restored to its original glory. And Neil Gaiman supplies the intro top that! You might not know his name, but if you're a fan of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Hellboy, Harry Potter, Mad Max, or countless other films, then you know his work. Drew Struzan is the hottest poster artist in film and a personal fave of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and other Hollywood heavyweights. There have been several previous collections of his works, but Struzan and David J. Schow's The Art of Drew Struzan (Titan, Sept.) gathers more than 300 of his film pieces spanning 30 years. The book focuses on 40 projects, offering concept drawings in color and black and white through finished poster. Plus, Struzan explains his approach. This volume also features alternate and unused concept art for films like Blade Runner, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Star Wars and Indy geeks especially love Struzan's work and will be all over this one. Photographer Ross Halfin has been snapping pix of Metallica since the boys' garage band years. Finally, he gives us The Ultimate Metallica (Chronicle, Sept.), a collection of 250 color and black-and-white images spanning from those early days through Metallica's rise to monsters of metal. The images are a mixture of stage shots and candids, and Halfin buttresses the stills with his own insights on the band, derived from managers, engineers, roadies, you name it. Way cool.-Michael Rogers

An Audio First

Bound (Tantor Audio, Sept.), the fourth novel from the sublimely dark, emotionally dexterous Antonya Nelson, will be her first novel ever to be recorded on audio. (Her last full-length fiction, Living To Tell, was published in 2000.) Having listened to Nothing Right, her 2008 short story collection available in that format exclusively through Audible, I personally can't wait. Nelson grew up in 1970s Wichita, KS, at a time when the town was being terrorized by serial killer Dennis Rader, aka BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill). Here, she uses Rader's chilling reemergence after years of quiet to ratchet up the tension between a married couple already rattled by conflict and circumstance. Part of The New Yorker's prized fiction roster, Nelson is known primarily as a short story writer. This electric long-form tale, cast in sharp relief against her trademark discomfiting inner landscape, will surely retype her as a novelist. Audie Award winner Cassandra Campbell will narrate. [The audio clip will be available through www.tantor.com on the simultaneous Sept. 28 release of the Bloomsbury hardcover, recommended by LJ Prepub Alert editor Barbara Hoffert as 'essential for those serious about contemporary literature, 'Prepub Exploded,' BookSmack!, 5/20/10.]-Raya Kuzyk

Culinary Immersion

So many cookbooks, so little time, but among the flood of titles published I found something different at BEA this year. Combining beautiful photographs, well-researched background information on ingredients and techniques, and doable if sometimes intimidating recipes, three standout fall cookbooks aim to preserve and celebrate culinary traditions that might otherwise be lost. Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy (Univ. of Texas, Sept.) by Diana Kennedy, who has been bestowed the honor of the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the Mexican government for her 50-year effort to learn, document, and share Mexican foodways, features 300 recipes, from Salsa de panal (Wasp-Nest Sauce) to Sopa de acelgas y pasta (Swiss Chard and Pasta Soup). She writes about the difficulties she had procuring a publisher willing to retain her detailed, faithful recording of foods and their preparation and significance in a state with a high concentration of disparate indigenous communities and large urban centers. In A Feast for All Seasons: Traditional Native People's Cuisine (Arsenal Pulp, Oct.), Canadian First Nations chef Andrew George, writing with Robert Gairns, discusses his efforts to 'provide an educational tool for the general public on Aboriginal cuisine and an understanding of our customs and culture.' Although the authors have added contemporary twists to some of the recipes, they explain the traditional preparations and include dishes like Smoked Beaver Meat'the ingredient list consists of '1 beaver,' and the first step reads, 'Skin a gutted beaver and cut off the head and tail.' Shinin' Times at The Fort: Stories, Recipes and Celebrations at the Landmark Colorado Restaurant (Fur Trade Pr., Nov.) records favorite recipes from the restaurant of Holly Arnold Kinney's family alongside historic dishes from the 1830s fur-trading post it replicates. Using meats like quail, buffalo, and elk, the recipes also include salads, breads, desserts, and spirits'e.g., Shrub, a Christmas drink from Bent's Fort that consists of dark rum, sugar, and citrus juices'that are inviting and feasible.' -Anna Katterjohn

Electrifying Romance

Several announcements stemming from BookExpo struck a chord with this Romance editor and reader. First, HCI (home of the 'Chicken Soup' books) announced a new line of 'reality-based' or RB Romance' called True Vows, written by well-known romance authors and derived from the lives of real couples. The first three titles, all in trade paperback, include Judith Arnold's Meet Me in Manhattan, Alison Kent's The Icing on the Cake, and Julie Leto's Hard To Hold and will bow in September. Harlequin Enterprises, the company most associated with romance publishing, followed up on a November 2009 press release with the June launch of Carina Press, a digital-only line of women's fiction: 'from romance to erotica, sf, mystery, family sagas, choose your own adventures, horror, thriller and more.' As BEA brought out many voices from the ebook arena, Carina chimed in with an initial 37 titles to be available via its own web site as well as other e-venues. The ePub files at the heart of the project will be digital rights management (DRM)'free and accessible on numerous readers and platforms. On a more familiar Harlequin note, in October the HQN line will publish Bespelling Jane Austen, an anthology of paranormal romances that give a nod 'to the wit and wisdom of Jane Austen.' It includes Colleen Gleason's 'Northanger Castle,' Susan Krinard's 'Blood and Prejudice,' Janet Mullany's 'Little Hex to Her,' and, most exciting to this reader, Mary Balogh's 'Almost Persuaded.' The periods vary with the strengths of the authors, as Balogh and Gleason present a Regency- and a Victorian-set historical and Krinard and Mullany move through present-day New York City and Washington, DC, respectively. Jane Austen hasn't lost her luster with regard to inspiring contemporary writers. Readers intrigued by the recent spate of zombie-laced classics will want to sink their teeth into this collection, sure to warm the blood.'Bette-Lee Fox

Conversations About a Best Seller

'[I]f the Bible ended up today on the desk of a New York editor, it would get edited,' says 'Canadian journalist Mordecai Drache, interlocutor to noted critic and Amherst professor Ilan Stavans in With All Thine Heart: Love and the 'Bible (Rutgers Univ., Sept.). What would Stavans say to such editors' 'My argument to them is that classics are always imperfect,' he clarifies. 'But the Bible is not only imperfect, it is also infinite. Every generation reads it differently. Our qualms with it aren't those of previous readers. It survives because it pays no attention to qualms. It just is.' With All Thine Heart is a dialog'a stimulating format that has given us everything from Plato to this month's Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. Ideas poured through the elegant structure of dialog flow in a fashion that makes learning especially refreshing'and whatever I am reading, whether the latest wonderful Christopher Fowler mystery or this approachable yet provocative book, I read to learn. The Bible's own multiplicity of voices is well served by an arrangement that is itself not monolithic. Stavans and Drache focus exclusively on the Hebrew Bible, discussing it as both a historical and religious text'which means it reveals flawed humans as well as the clarity that faith can provide, yes, even with the Bible's 'cruel, bloodthirsty, and capricious' God, as Stavans puts it. A Jew in whom various traditions and degrees of devoutness converge, Mexican born and now holding dual citizenship, Stavans explains that his owns attraction to the Bible is to a great extent 'as a literary book and as a treasury of myths.' So where, in all of this, is the subtitular love' The conversations here are divided into seven sections, plus opening and closing discussions where the Bible's kinds of love are most closely covered. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Jews are commanded to love their God. As Stavans says of that love: '[I]t is the mind's quest: to seek a moral life, to be righteous, to mend the world.'-Margaret Heilbrun

Bonnet Mysteries

While a number of big summer and fall books generated lively buzz at BookExpo America (e.g., Justin Cronin's The Passage, Emma Donoghue's Room, Anne Fortier's Juliet, and Mary Roach's Packing for Mars), attracting my attention (and a brief mention at the Librarians' Shout and Share panel) was an equally worthy but under-the-radar regional mystery series first published in 1999 by Ohio University Press. Beginning in September with Blood of the Prodigal, followed by Broken English in October and Clouds Without Rain in November, Plume, the trade paperback imprint of Penguin Group (USA), is 'reissuing P.L. Gaus's acclaimed 'Ohio Amish Mysteries' with new packaging and a six-city tour. 'Gaus's acuity for spinning compelling mysteries with a fascinating cultural bent merits attention outside his home state,' says Plume senior editor Denise Roy, who explains that the six-book series (with a seventh in the works) was renamed the 'Amish-Country Mysteries' to reflect a growing Amish presence across the United States. 'Bonnet,' or Amish, romances are highly popular with Christian fiction fans, but will a crime series set in Ohio's Amish/Mennonite country hold the same attraction for mystery readers' Roy thinks so, noting our fascination for communities that exist simultaneously within and outside of American culture. 'Filled with the details of Amish life and thought, Amish beliefs and culture, these books [by an author who lectures and blogs on the topic] will appeal to readers open to an invitation into the unknown.''Wilda Williams

Jewish Lives

When I was growing up, I was captivated by a series of ads variously featuring a Chinese girl, a black boy, and a freckled-face redhead, evidently of Irish descent, all happily munching away over a banner that read, 'You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's. Real Jewish rye bread.' I thought of those ads on the BEA show floor while perusing Yale University Press's new 'Jewish Lives' series, which is being published in collaboration with the Leon D. Black Foundation. Sure, if you're Jewish, you'll delight in this ongoing series, which will feature crisp, insightful biographies that place each subject in historical and cultural context. But with the series covering intriguing and important individuals imaginatively paired with sharp, sometimes unexpected authors, you don't have to be Jewish to love 'Jewish Lives.' The series kicks off in September with former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb's Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, which limns the actress-to-end-all-actress's dramatic life and commitment to her calling. (Trust me, balletomane Gottlieb, who wrote tellingly on George Balanchine for Harper's comparable 'Eminent Lives' series, knows from art.) Later, Cod man Mark Kurlansky, author most recently of The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris, addresses baseball great Hank Greenberg. Other intriguing matchups to look for include legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen on Louis Brandeis, critic Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman, best-selling author and Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum on Bob Dylan, and Israeli historian Mordechai Bar-On, veteran of both the army and the Peace Now movement, on Moshe Dayan. The series even goes biblical with Steven Weitzman's Solomon. Appearing at a rate of about four a year, these 'Lives' will vary somewhat in length and price (Sarah is 250 pages and $25) but will be unified by a series jacket. They'll even be promoted through programming at New York's stellar 92nd Street Y. Great subjects, great authors, great presentation. What's not to love'-Barbara Hoffert