Dan Wickett has an amazing month by month list of new releases he is anticipating for next year. From his list, Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork sounds fantastic as do Joseph Coulson's Of Song and Water (I'm on a Great Lakes kick these days as I review Fresh Water for Booklist) and Felicia Sullivan's The Sky Isn't Visible From Here (killer title!).

Dan also mentions Brad Vice's The Bear Bryant Funeral Train which was sucked into a huge plagiarism controversy two years ago. Oxford American has a story about the book in its new issue (which has a ton of other great stuff as well) where writer Michelle Richmond tries to understand just what went wrong and why some people overreacted. Here's an excerpt:

But I do believe a good argument can be made that Vice, as author and archivist, has recovered “something useful or important to the collective spiritual imagination,� has continued a conversation about Alabama’s difficult past that should not, in good conscience, be relegated to some dusty basement of the mind.

Even if a reader were to perform the intellectual acrobatics necessary to accept Vice on these terms, though, they’d first require access to the stories, which would need to be hunted down in the various literary journals and anthologies in which they appeared. This makes the University of Georgia Press’ hasty response all the more distressing. By performing a radical act of erasure upon Vice’s book, the Press curtailed an important conversation before it could even begin. What emerged instead was a cacophony of galvanized voices battling it out in the blogosphere and, to a lesser extent, the print media, debating not the merits of the collection, which few had actually had read, but instead circling around the subjects of plagiarism, allusion, postmodernism, and legal issues of copyright—a worthy discussion, but one which, by the omission of the book in question, was inherently incomplete.

Vice's book is definitely one I plan to read.

There are a few other titles I am particularly looking forward to next year as well, and in no particular order, here are the ones that come immediately to mind:

I was particularly delighted to see that Anne Fadiman has a new essay collection due out in May: At Large and At Small. These are essays on all sorts of titles close to her heart and the catalog copy reads: With the combination of humor and erudition that has distinguished her as one of our finest essayists, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions: from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from her wistfulness for the days of letter-writing to the challenges and rewards of moving from the city to the country.

Fadiman is one of my all-time favorite essayists and I consider A Common Reader to be mandatory rereading each year.

Subterranean Press is releasing a new Charles de Lint short novel (it has stretched beyone novella length) about one of his core characters, Jilly Cooper. Jilly: The Early Years (title to change) delves into her long ago history and early arrival in de Lint's amazing city of Newford. Preoder this week and you will also receive the chapbook, Riding Shotgun, a 20,000 word collection of short stories.

I already have Caitlin Kiernan's Daughter of Hounds which is a further exploration of the world of the Children of the Cuckoo, the ones taken from home by ghouls and forced to live between the two worlds, ours Above and their's Below. Cailtin just does dark fantasy so blindingly well - I'm having trouble resisting this ARC right now as I tie up all my other loose ends.

Living on Air by Anna Shapiro is the Soho title I'm most excited about. Set in 1966 Levittown, it follows 14 year old Maude who escapes her self-absorbed father with a scholarship to a prestigious prep school. Then her struggle begins to balance a life between high art and social privilige. Sounds like it could work both as adult or YA.

I have been reading about the 1000 Journals Project for awhile now and just as Post Secret seems to have taken on a life of its own, this project also has captured international imagination. Chronicle has put together a book with some of the more startling entries and it sounds very unique. I'm always intrigued by what people have to say when they can say it freely - and this looks like an artistic way to get those original words out there.

The Buried Book by David Damrosch - history lost, found, stolen, missing, unbelieved and rescued all wrapped up in a big story about war, colonialism and Gilgamesh. It sounds too exciting to believe, which is what makes this nonfiction title all the more amazing.

Margo Rabb's Cures for Heartbreak is a loosely autobiographical and based on her own grief over the loss of her mother. It follows a teenage girl, her new relationship with her father and sister and how she gets by. Rabb is a wonderful author, both of YA girl detective fiction and short stories for adults. This is the book she has been writing for eight years, and I look forward to savoring her accomplishment.

Thomas Mallon also has a new book due out in April, Fellow Travelers. I can find next to nothing on what the book is about but I love Mallon's writing. I'll be looking over the next month or so for some more information on what we can expect.

I'm sure there are many other books I will yearn for in the coming months (and I will post about them here of course), but these are the ones I'm looking forward to now with the most anticipation.