NOT INTERESTED: The 1993 Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who has placed a number of novels on the list, told an audience at Oberlin College last month that she has canceled plans for a memoir about growing up in nearby Lorain, Ohio. “My publisher asked me to do it, but there’s a point at which your life is not interesting,” she said, according to The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “I’d rather write fiction.”
DO NO HARM: The ubiquitous neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta, who trots the globe as a medical correspondent for CNN, turns up in an unexpected place this week: on the hardcover fiction list, where his debut novel, “Monday Mornings,” is new at No. 13. The book is a medical thriller about five surgeons at the fictional Chelsea General, and it centers on the so-called morbidity and mortality conferences in which doctors meet privately after botched surgeries to discuss what went wrong. “There’s a whole system that exists in our society if a mistake is made and a patient has been harmed,” Gupta told CNN last month. “This isn’t about that. This is about the doctors really holding each other accountable. . . . These meetings can be vicious, in some ways, far worse than what the punitive systems that exist have to offer. Getting sued or being disciplined by the administration may pale in comparison to being held accountable by your colleagues.” Gupta is also the author of two nonfiction books — and some love poetry, according to InStyle magazine, which reported on his wedding in 2004 to Rebecca Olson, a lawyer. “I wrote her a poem and in the last line asked her to marry me,” Gupta told the magazine. “Watching her read it, I was very nervous. It was over a page long.”
NOTES: Marilynne Robinson’s new essay collection, “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” is at No. 26 on the extended hardcover nonfiction list, and Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” is at No. 30. On the extended fiction list, Julian Barnes’s “Sense of an Ending” and Chad Harbach’s “Art of Fielding” are hanging in at No. 32 and No. 33.