1940 update.

It all happened within a week (or little more than a week).

In it's May issue, Library Journal gave 1940 a glowing, Starred Review, saying: "This tautly constructed, utterly readable book raises questions the reader must answer. Highly recommended."

The Los Angeles Times published an absolutely marvelous review by Tim Rutten that couldn't have been more positive - which has, subsequently, been picked up by everyone from the Orlando Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune to Today's Zaman (the largest English-language newspaper in Turkey). Here is what Mr. Rutten had to say about the book:

"Jay Neugeboren traverses the Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made him one of our most honored writers of literary fiction and masterful nonfiction. This new book is, at once, a beautifully realized work of imagined history, a rich and varied character study and a subtly layered novel of ideas, all wrapped in a propulsively readable story. Neugeboren is marvelous. Part of the power of this intelligently and finely wrought novel is that... thoughts and questions arise unforced from the story, as though from life itself."

To complete the trifecta, Commonweal also bestowed praise upon 1940: "Jay Neugeboren's 1940 is a taut, nuanced, beautifully written novel that captures an anxious and uncertain time in ways that a straight rendering of facts and dates could never achieve. Neugeboren casts a spell on the first page of his novel that never goes away. This memorable work of historical fiction is to be contemplated as well as savored."

That's the latest, but, as always, there is rumor abound that there is plenty more to come.