The 4 most anticipated books of the month arrive in stores on June 2nd

In The Unlikely Event by Judy Blume

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The YA legend delivers her first novel for adults in fifteen years. It is the story of three generations of families, friends and strangers. Miri Ammerman has returned to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when she was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky. Against this backdrop of actual events in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and
exciting, Blume recreates a time and place and reminds us of the icons of pop culture as well.


Muse by Jonathan Galassi

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Galassi is a poet and also the publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His debut novel concerns the rivalry between two publishing giants and Ida Perkins, an iconic poet who has obsessed them both.

Karen Bloomgarden-Smoke, writing in The New York Observer, said:

The result is a novel about a world that exists in memory, an industry that is still spoken of reverentially as a noble calling rather than a business. It’s two parts valentine, one part satire, a loving send-up of a very specific culture. Muse is a charming tale about a world where intrigue takes the form of a decade-long battle over who gets to publish a poet, where stylistic differences are exemplified by intractable beliefs about the size of author advances, and where the contrast between the smallest, most literary commercial publisher and the largest, most commercial small press means something.

A delicious extra: The characters are said to be recognizable portraits of real figures in the publishing world.


Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan

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Professor, poet and biographer Rosemary Sullivan investigates how Stalin’s only daughter wound up dying in poverty in a small Wisconsin town.

Of it, Cokie Roberts said, “If it weren’t for the pages of scrupulous footnotes and the many interviews Rosemary Sullivan pursued you would be convinced that this was fiction. But it’s a true story, thrillingly told in this fast-paced, fascinating biography.”


The Fellowship by Philip and Carol Zaleski

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The Zaleskis have produced a group portrait of the times and works of “The Inklings,” a literary club whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. For some thirty years, they met weekly to discuss literature, religion and ideas, to read aloud from their works-in-progress, to critique and support each other’s pieces.

According to the publishers’ description: “Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style.”