as our new release of the week: Oh the Glory of It All. by Sean Wilsey (Penguin, May 19, 2005) Sara Nelson, the new editor of Publisher’s Weekly offers her take on this new book in a recent column on “nobody memoirs,” recollections by more or less ordinary folks who just believe they have a story to tell. “Oh the Glory of It All by McSweeney’s editor-at-large Sean Wilsey is a doorstop of a book that is described on the jacket as ‘memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.’ In less confusing language: it’s a long, intricate, rueful and ultimately winning story of a poor little San Francisco rich boy,” Nelson writes. “What makes Wilsey’s book so likable, and so likely to find success, is not his fame quotient, which falls somewhere between nil and reflected (his mother was a San Francisco society fixture and columnist, his father a wealthy businessman who’d slept with the likes of Danielle Steel). Wilsey is merely himself, albeit, as a McSweeney’s vet, a “friend of Dave’s” (which may or may not count for something.) His story is not as outrageous as, say, that of Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors nor as scandalous as Kathryn Harrison’s daddy dalliance in The Kiss. But the story’s relative normalcy—misunderstanding parents, albeit very rich ones, school troubles, medium-level new-ageness—is one of its better features.”

More: The NYT, The Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker.