Scouting for Books

Here is a list of recent and forthcoming books that I discovered at last week’s BookExpoAmerica (#BEA14). Attendance was down slightly this year, and several major publishers chose not to attend, including Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago Press, Encounter Books, and Christian publishers such as Baker and IVP. While there were several things on offer that piqued my interest, I didn’t see any real breakout titles besides Thomas Piketty’s Capital (Harvard University Press). There’s hope for 2015, though, since it starts with the publication of a new Bible translation by Robert Alter (see below).

Recent

• The Psalms as a Christian Lament: A Historical Commentary by Bruce Waltke, James Houston, and Erika Moore (Eerdmans, February 2014)
• Wisdom’s Wonder: Character, Creation, and Crisis in the Bible’s Wisdom Literature by William P. Brown (Eerdmans, February 2014)
• Taking God At His Word: Why the Bible Is Knowable, Necessary, and Enough, and What That Means for You and Me by Kevin DeYoung (Crossway, April 2014)
• The Oldest Living Things in the World by Rachel Sussman (University of Chicago Press, April 2014)
• Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury (University of Chicago Press, April 2014)
• Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World by Mark S. Smith (Eerdmans, May 2014)

Summer/Fall

• A Literary Education and Other Essays by Joseph Epstein (Axios Press, June 2014)
• Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State by Robert Wuthnow (Princeton University Press, August 2014)
• The Bee: A Natural History by Noah Wilson-Rich (Princeton University Press, September 2014)
• Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary by Craig R. Koester (Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries series, Yale University Press, September 2014)—though I may start with his earlier book Revelation and the End of All Things (Eerdmans)
• Prayer: The Essential Guide by Timothy Keller (Dutton, October 2014)
• The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books series, Princeton University Press, November 2014)
• God’s Planet by Owen Gingerich (Harvard UP, November 2014)
• Lila: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2014)—a companion to Gilead and Home

2015

• Nature Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of the Natural World by Julia Rothman (Storey Publishing, January 2015)
• Strong as Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel, A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter (W. W. Norton, March 2015)

(Here’s last year’s list.)