Fans have held their breath for six years for Dan Brown’s follow-up to his blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, which sold an astounding 80 million copies worldwide. The wait finally ends at midnight tonight when readers can finally get their hands on The Lost Symbol, which follows Harvard’s Robert Langdon as he become enmeshed in a mystery involving the history of the Freemasons in Washington, D.C. Why such a long wait? In a rare interview appearing in this week’s issue, Brown tells Entertainment Weekly that during his long absence from the public eye, he made himself a promise. “I will not write a lame follow-up. It could take me 20 years. But I will never turn in a book that I’m not happy with. Four years ago, I wasn’t happy with the book. Five years ago, I wasn’t happy with the book.” Finally, amidst a flurry of articles trumpeting the 45-year-old author as the white knight come to resuscitate a wheezing publishing industry, he felt ready to return. “And if the book weren’t good,” he says confidently, “I’d be terrified.”
Brown makes it clear he didn’t spent that last six years procrastinating. “I write seven days a week, starting at 4 o’clock in the morning, including Christmas,” he says. “I worked on this book at 4 in the morning in my hotel room while I was living in London and going to court. I’ve probably written 10 novels worth of pages to write The Lost Symbol.” The first review, from the New York Times, has already hit the Internet — and it’s a rave.
Brown, however, knows not all critics are in love with his work, something he learned the hard way. “The Da Vinci Code had the audacity to park at No. 1 for a little bit too long,” he says. “And it became very en vogue just to trash my books.”
In the frenzy-filled final days leading up to the Sept. 15 release of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, you might think that there are no other blockbuster titles being published this month. You’d be wrong. On the same day Brown’s novel hits stores, Doubleday will also release best-selling author Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. For those who don’t remember, Tillman was the NFL star who gave up a $3.6 million contract to volunteer to serve with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Then, in 2004, he was killed by friendly fire. His life (and the cover-up surrounding his death) is the subject of Krakauer’s tear-jerking follow-up to his Mormon exposé Under the Banner of Heaven, the Everest tragedy Into Thin Air, and Into the Wild, his nonfiction blockbuster which was adapted into a movie starring Emile Hirsch and directed by Sean Penn.
Shelf Life has learned that a quote from Pres. Barack Obama has been removed from the book jacket of Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court, a memoir by University of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams that will be published by Algonquin in November.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, CBS 
Late last night, 
There’s been much fulminating in the books world lately that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, is bad for publishing. This week, former Publisher’s Weekly editor 
It all started, I suspect, with Melissa Bank’s 1999 best-selling novel-in-stories, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and its striking cover photo by Peter Davidian. This was the prototypical chick lit title that helped kick off a very lucrative fiction genre, and it put its best foot forward with an image of a single gal dressed for the elements, from her ear-flapped cap to her sturdy black rain boots. And since that epochal moment in publishing, the rain boot (or galoshes, or — for the Anglophiles out there — Wellingtons) has provided book shoppers a quick visual signal that the contents should contain a hardy soul prepared for anything, including stormy weather in the romance department. In other words, it’s become a cliché, one that’s popped up on the covers of everything from Po Bronson’s 1995 nonfiction collection Why Do I Love These People? to Marisa de los Santos’ 2008 novel Belong to Me.
