Frey's return: James Frey's “Bright Shiny Morning” isn't his first work of fiction, but it's his first book to be billed as such, and it crashes into the fiction list at No. 9. Frey, the author of two discredited memoirs (do I have to speak their names?), has received some upbeat reviews for “Bright Shiny Morning.” Janet Maslin, writing in the daily Times, wrote that he “stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park.” In Time magazine, Lev Grossman went about as far: “It's reminiscent of one of Tom Wolfe's billion-footed beasts, but it's even more reminiscent of the socially conscious early-20th-century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck.” Not everyone is singing along. Malcolm Jones, in Newsweek, said the book wobbles between “threadbare and preposterous.” Jones called it “a book stuffed with depthless characters, plots we already knew by heart and a writer in way over his head.” Breaking free: A few months after she helped send the polygamous sect leader Warren S. Jeffs to jail for being an accomplice to rape, Elissa Wall sends a memoir of her experience up the bestseller list. It's called “Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs,” written with Lisa Pulitzer, and it's at No. 6. The book is an account of how, at 14, she was forced to marry her 19-year-old first cousin. Wall's story is both creepy (her husband liked to wear clear nail polish) and quite moving (she had four miscarriages by the age of 17). Appearing on the ABC program “20/20,” she told John Quinones: “Opinion is a flitting thing. But truth outlasts the sun.” Father and son: Jeff Shaara's “Steel Wave,” the second book in a planned World War II trilogy, is new on the fiction list at No. 11. Shaara is the son of Michael Shaara, a novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for a Civil War novel called “The Killer Angels.” Following his father's untimely death in 1988 after many years of poor health, Jeff Shaara wrote two novels that bookended “The Killer Angels.” Since then, he's issued many novels that have appeared here. Splendid parts: Thirty-five years ago, for the 1973 summer reading issue, the Book Review's editors asked Toni Morrison to write an essay about cooking out. The lovely piece that resulted — you can find it in its entirety on the Book Review's Paper Cuts blog, by searching Morrison's name on the site — ended like this: “The day moved then into its splendid parts: a ham, fried-potatoes, scrambled-egg, breakfast in the morning air; fried fish and pan-cooked biscuits on the hind side of noon, and by the time Mama — who had never heard of Gerber's — was grinding a piece of supper ham with her own teeth to slip into the baby's mouth, and the Blue Gums had unveiled their incredible peach cobbler, the first stars were glittering through the blue light of Turkeyfoot Lake. We were all there. All of us, bound by something we could not name. Cooking, honey, cooking under the stars.” - NYT __
