Congratulations to Jenny Brown, our children's editor, whose election to the 2015 Newbery Committee was announced on Friday by the American Library Association! For the full roster, click here.
BookCourt North: Catskill Bookstore and Writers' Retreat
BookCourt, Brooklyn, N.Y., hopes to buy Bibliobarn in South Korthright, N.Y., in the Catskill Mountains, and create BookCourt North: Bookshop, Event Space, and Writers' Retreat. As Zack Zook, who heads events and development at BookCourt, put it, BookCourt North will be "an escape to the wilderness with all the perks of urban literary community."
Under the BookCourt plans, the main floor of the building would stock new and used books, stationery and art journals and have space to host literary events, book clubs, workshops and more. On the top floor, BookCourt will launch a writers' residency program for as many as a dozen people. On the property, the store will build writers' "sheds," straw-bale houses, perhaps even yurts.
Zook, son of BookCourt founders Henry Zook and Mary Gannett, has the support of Bibliobarn owners H.L. and Linda Wilson, who founded the rare and used bookstore in 1996 and have put it up for sale.
BookCourt has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $300,000 for the project, seeking the support of "customers, writers, friends and book lovers around the world." Some $260,000 would go to purchase the property and the rest will be used for renovations, inventory and writers' housing.
The owner is Ken Kennedy, owner of Language Advantage, who leads Spanish Story Time programs in the area, which is just south of Annapolis. "There aren't any bookstores of any kind in Edgewater, especially children's books," Kennedy told the Patch. "The closest for them is in Baltimore."
Besides books, the store will offer educational toys and some teacher supplies. As the business grows, Kennedy hopes to host story times and a summer reading program, among other things.
Kennedy has long wanted to open a store, he said. "I have always enjoyed reading. I got my first library card when I was 5 years old so I have always been around books. On the last day of school my mom always took us to the library to find new books."
Kennedy is already involving the community in preparing the store: he's seeking high school juniors or seniors to paint an ocean-themed mural on the walls of the store.
Several regular customers expressed sadness about the impending closure of the store, which is in on the eastern side of Honolulu. One told HawaiiNewsNow: "That takes away the author talks, that takes away the opportunities for kids to work together in a group--for Moms and Dads to bring their kids in and just sit down and read. It's important to have."
B&N has two other stores in Hawaii, one in the Ala Moana Center closer to the center of Honolulu and the other in the Lahaina Gateway Shopping Center on Maui.
Brenda Knight has become publisher of Cleis Press and Viva Editions. She was formerly associate publisher of Viva Editions, which she founded. As part of the move, Felice Newman, who has been co-publisher and CFO of Cleis Press, will remain CFO. Frederique Delacoste, co-publisher and co-founder of Cleis with Newman, will remain president of Cleis Press and publisher of Midnight Editions.
"This is a new beginning for Cleis, a handing of the baton from two dedicated lifelong publishers to a talented and equally dedicated woman of exceptional integrity," Newman said.
Newman and Delacoste hired Knight in 2008. Earlier she worked at Conari Press and HarperCollins. She is also the author of Women of the Beat Generation, Wild Women and Books and other titles.
Newman and Delacoste attributed the company's health in large part to Knight, noting that as of May 1, Cleis Press sales are up 42.2% from last year and up 80% in sales of paper books. Delacoste said Viva Editions has been "blazing new trails in the gift market. Five years ago, we never thought we would have books in Costco, Walmart, Hallmark, Whole Foods or Target, and now we do."
Harper Lee Sues to 'Re-secure' Mockingbird Copyright
Harper Lee filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court in Manhattan to re-secure the copyright for To Kill a Mockingbird, the Associated Press reported. The suit, which seeks unspecified damages from Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Lee's former literary agent, and companies he allegedly created, claims that he "failed to properly protect the copyright of the book after his father-in-law, Eugene Winick--who had represented Lee as a literary agent since the book was published in 1960 through the firm McIntosh and Otis--became ill a decade ago."
Lee alleges that Pinkus "took advantage of her declining hearing and eyesight seven years ago to get her to assign the book's copyright to him and a company he controlled," the AP wrote.
Random House held its second "Open House" in six months at its Manhattan offices on Friday, May 3, an all-day session attended by a few hundred avid readers and book bloggers. One of the first authors brought out to entertain the crowd was Lauren Graham--the former star of Gilmore Girls currently appearing in NBC's Parenthood--whose debut novel, Someday, Someday, Maybe, was recently released by Ballantine. Graham recalled how she made the decision to try writing a novel because, although she was reflecting on how far she had come since her early years of trying to launch an acting career, "I don't feel like I have enough to say" for a memoir. She also spoke about the anxiety she felt over the manuscript: "Do you really like this, or do you just like Parenthood?" she remembered asking her editor, Jennifer Smith, to whom she then commented, "I think I was pushing you to push me harder." For her own part, Smith declared, "I fell in love with Lauren's voice, regardless of what her other career was."
After the presentation, guests waited patiently on line while Graham signed copies of the novel, which Random House had included in a goodie bag; they had similar opportunities to get autographs from bestselling novelist William Landay (Defending Jacob) and Iron Chef Alex Guarnaschelli (Old-School Comfort Food), culminating in a "buzz books" session where Karin Slaughter, Colum McCann and Marisha Pessl discussed their upcoming novels. Through it all, Random House's role in bringing these books to market was a recurring theme--but the "inside baseball" stories were presented in a modest, at times even self-deprecating tone. (Landay's editor, Kate Miciak, recounted with great relish how she hadn't believed Nicholas Sparks was on the phone, ready to break his no-blurb rule.) Even the lunch break turned into an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes perspective, and a session with the staff working on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire cycle quickly became standing room only. --Ron Hogan
Andrew J. Offutt, who published more than 50 books under a variety of names, died on April 30 after an extended illness, Morehead News reported. He was 78. He served two terms as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and was a consultant to Writers' Digest Criticism Services. Offutt was also the father of novelist Chris Offutt.
On Friday, Octavia Books, New Orleans, La., hosted a packed event for Augusten Burroughs whose This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't (Picador) is now out in paperback.
A celebration of the life and legacy of Bryan Pearce, the longtime CEO of the University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., who died last month, will be held 6:30-8:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 19, at the University of Washington Club on the university's Seattle campus. The organizers request that attendees RSVP to lgroom@uw.edu and wear purple, "Bryan's favorite color." Contributions to the Bryan D. Pearce UBS Endowment may be sent to the University of Washington Foundation, Box 359505, Seattle, Wash. 98195-9505; checks should be made payable to the UW Foundation with a notation "Bryan D. Pearce UBS Endowment."
Poet and critic Robert Bly, whose most recent book is Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer (Graywolf), was asked in a recent New York Times Book Review interview to name his favorite bookstores.
"The best is Birchbark Books, owned by Louise Erdrich, and run by a great staff that sometimes includes her family members," he replied. "The store is near us, and we can walk there. There is always something excellent to take home. Just down the street we have some good used-book stores. Magers & Quinn [which also sells new books] is one. They have had a fine reading series off and on."
Christian Blonshine has been appointed executive v-p of HCI. He was formerly licensing and subsidiary rights director and earlier worked for Titan Financial Group.
HBO has released a 12-minute "making of" featurette for Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, the TV movie based on Scott Thorson's memoir Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace. The project, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Thorson, airs May 26. Indiewire reported that the featurette offers "lots of footage from the movie, visits to the set, backgrounds on the characters and so much more. It's essentially a 'Behind the Candelabra 101' and a pretty good watch if you're even mildly interested in the film."
This morning on Fox & Friends: Vanessa Williams, co-author of You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (and Each Other) (Gotham, $18, 9781592407590). Tomorrow she will also be on CBS's Entertainment Tonight.
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Today on the View: Sonia Sotomayer, author of My Beloved World (Knopf, $27.95, 9780307594884).
Also on the View: Jim Gaffigan, author of Dad Is Fat (Crown Archetype, $25, 9780385349055). Tomorrow night he will be on the Late Show with David Letterman.
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Today on Access Hollywood Live: Glennon Doyle Melton, author of Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed (Scribner, $25, 9781451697247).
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Tonight on CNN's Piers Morgan Live: Damien Echols, author of Life After Death (Plume, $17, 9780142180280).
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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Robert A. Caro, author of The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf, $35, 9780679405078).
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Tonight on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon: Marilu Henner, author of Total Memory Makeover: Uncover Your Past, Take Charge of Your Future (Gallery, $16, 9781451651232). Tomorrow she will also be on the Today Show,Access Hollywood Live and Current's Say Anything with Joy Behar.
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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Martha Quinn, authors of VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave (Atria, $25, 9781451678123). They will also appear on the View.
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Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Phil Robertson, co-author of Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander (Howard, $24.99, 9781476726090). He will also appear on Nightline and EXTRA.
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Tomorrow on MSNBC's the Cycle: Damien Echols, author of Life After Death (Plume, $17, 9780142180280).
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Tomorrow on the Tavis Smiley Show: Elizabeth Becker, author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781439160992).
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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, $26.95, 9781591844761).
'MommyJuice Marketing': An Author's Unusual Partnership
"The challenge for authors, now and in the future, is finding your audience," said Jeanine Cummins, author of three books and a former member of Penguin's sales team. "Books used to be a logical, easy, tidy business. It's gotten really messy in the last few years, and will only get messier."
For her new novel, The Crooked Branch (NAL), released in March, Cummins has found an audience through an unusual partnership: MommyJuice Wines, San Martin, Calif., has provided free wine for nearly all of The Crooked Branch events and signings.
"I saw MommyJuice in my local wine shop, and I thought it was really funny, and I knew immediately that this was my readership," explained Cummins. "The women who are buying this wine, who are drawn to this wine, are my readership: young, smart, irreverent mothers."
The Crooked Branch is the story of Majella, a young, overwhelmed mother in Queens, N.Y., who discovers the diary of an ancestor who lived during Ireland's Potato Famine. The novel alternates between the ordeals of Majella's ancestor and Majella's own struggles in the present day, as she deals with "what some would describe as postpartum depression."
Cummins insists, though, that despite the grim-sounding synopsis, it is "not an entirely depressing book." Majella has a sharp, dark sense of humor, and while there is little humor in the parts of the novel pertaining to the famine, there is, according to Cummins, a lot of beauty. She was drawn to form a partnership with MommyJuice partly out of a desire to show that not everything in The Crooked Branch was grim and serious.
"When the book first came out, I was really aware of how heavy the themes of the book were," said Cummins. "I wanted [the partnership] to reflect a bit of the lightness and humor of the book as well."
This Thursday, May 9, Cummins will be at the MommyJuice winery for its third annual Mom's Nite Out event, which features food, shopping and prizes provided by local vendors. It is the first time that MommyJuice has ever brought an author to the event, and local indie BookSmart in nearby Morgan Hill will be selling copies of The Crooked Branch.
The partnership is attractive to MommyJuice because most of Cummins's events are in the eastern U.S., where it has limited distribution, and boosts recognition among a target demographic that the winery would not be able to reach normally. Said Cummins: "It just made sense to partner together."
MommyJuice is considering creating a new wine label just for book clubs, and plans to create a "Book Club Gift Pack" containing several copies of The Crooked Branch and three bottles of wine. Cummins believes that this sort of creative and collaborative promotion will be vital for authors who are required to work harder than ever to promote their own work. "Everyone's overtaxed," she said. "You have to do whatever you can as an author to supplement the efforts of your publishers and their marketing team.
"I'm trying to always think outside the box," Cummins said. "I try to do stuff that seems like fun, stuff I would want to go to. I never drive by an indie bookstore without stopping to say hi and introduce myself." --Alex Mutter
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
(Riverhead, $28.95 hardcover, 9781594631764, May 21, 2013)
Like the ripples of a pebble falling into a lake, the decision of an Afghan villager to give his daughter to a wealthy couple for adoption will have an impact from the 1950s to the present day, from Kabul to Paris and San Francisco--while, simultaneously, the cataclysmic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban will have even more deeply felt repercussions. In And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini presents a multitude of windows into the souls affected by these events. The novel's rich kaleidoscope of images coalesces around one theme: the powerful and often excruciating legacy of family ties within the maelstrom of history.
Unlike Hosseini's previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed never lingers with one point-of-view character. Instead, he links multiple narratives together by blood or circumstance, tying them to a single mansion in Kabul and a desolate Afghan village. In that sense, it is almost a book of short stories, but not quite. Hosseini's remarkable talent for engendering empathy for his characters is in full force; the opening sentences of each section introduce a distinct personality and worldview that draws the reader in, whether he's writing about the village boy who loses his treasured sister to adoption, their shy stepmother with a terrible secret in her past or the adopted daughter herself and her attempts, as a well-heeled Parisienne, to grapple with her Afghan identity. In later years, the narrative crosses the Atlantic to touch upon the experience of Afghans living as immigrants far from the village of their birth, building a new life while coping with a perpetual sense of loss.
Other characters in the diverse cast include a Greek surgeon who finds his life's work as a foreign aid worker, a young Afghan-American doctor in Kabul who unexpectedly faces a humanitarian dilemma and a boy who discovers that his sage and philanthropic father is in fact a war criminal. The common thread connecting these stories is Afghanistan, but it is also the seismic shifts of identity that war and immigration can create and the lasting effects across generations--from intimate bereavement to a psychological void left by the erasure of an entire way of life. Readers get a glimpse of a cosmopolitan, culturally brilliant Kabul--and feel the tragedy when the curtain of fundamentalism and violence descends. --Ilana Teitelbaum
Shelf Talker: Hosseini's vividly rendered characters cross paths with each other over more than half a century, their stories coalescing around a Kabul mansion and an Afghan village.
1. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey 2. Night by Elie Wiesel 3. Lord of the Flies by William Golding 4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 5. Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence by Sarah Young 6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 7. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill 8. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber 9. Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch 10. Animal Farm by George Orwell
The bestselling signed books on AbeBooks.com in April:
1. The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson 2. The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher 3. Life after Life by Kate Atkinson 4. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks 5. Wool by Hugh Howey 6. The Path to Power by Margaret Thatcher 7. The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks 8. A Delicate Truth by John Le Carre 9. The Golden Egg by Donna Leon 10. Dead Air by Iain Banks
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BookCourt, Brooklyn, N.Y., hopes to buy Bibliobarn in South Korthright, N.Y., in the Catskill Mountains, and create BookCourt North: Bookshop, Event Space, and Writers' Retreat. As Zack Zook, who heads events and development at BookCourt, put it, BookCourt North will be "an escape to the wilderness with all the perks of urban literary community."
The Barnes & Noble at Kahala Mall in Honolulu, Hawaii, is closing this year, according to HawaiiNewsNow. The store's lease reportedly ends in January.
Brenda Knight has become publisher of Cleis Press and Viva Editions. She was formerly associate publisher of Viva Editions, which she founded. As part of the move, Felice Newman, who has been co-publisher and CFO of Cleis Press, will remain CFO. Frederique Delacoste, co-publisher and co-founder of Cleis with Newman, will remain president of Cleis Press and publisher of Midnight Editions.
Harper Lee filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court in Manhattan to re-secure the copyright for To Kill a Mockingbird, the Associated Press reported. The suit, which seeks unspecified damages from Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Lee's former literary agent, and companies he allegedly created, claims that he "failed to properly protect the copyright of the book after his father-in-law, Eugene Winick--who had represented Lee as a literary agent since the book was published in 1960 through the firm McIntosh and Otis--became ill a decade ago."
Random House held its second "Open House" in six months at its Manhattan offices on Friday, May 3, an all-day session attended by a few hundred avid readers and book bloggers. One of the first authors brought out to entertain the crowd was Lauren Graham--the former star of Gilmore Girls currently appearing in NBC's Parenthood--whose debut novel, Someday, Someday, Maybe, was recently released by Ballantine. Graham recalled how she made the decision to try writing a novel because, although she was reflecting on how far she had come since her early years of trying to launch an acting career, "I don't feel like I have enough to say" for a memoir. She also spoke about the anxiety she felt over the manuscript: "Do you really like this, or do you just like Parenthood?" she remembered asking her editor, Jennifer Smith, to whom she then commented, "I think I was pushing you to push me harder." For her own part, Smith declared, "I fell in love with Lauren's voice, regardless of what her other career was."
A celebration of the life and legacy of Bryan Pearce, the longtime CEO of the University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., who died last month, will be held 6:30-8:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 19, at the University of Washington Club on the university's Seattle campus. The organizers request that attendees RSVP to lgroom@uw.edu and wear purple, "Bryan's favorite color." Contributions to the Bryan D. Pearce UBS Endowment may be sent to the University of Washington Foundation, Box 359505, Seattle, Wash. 98195-9505; checks should be made payable to the UW Foundation with a notation "Bryan D. Pearce UBS Endowment."
Poet and critic Robert Bly, whose most recent book is Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer (Graywolf), was asked in a recent New York Times Book Review interview to name his favorite bookstores. 
Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck (NAL), a timely novel from the author of Hemingway's Girl.
"The challenge for authors, now and in the future, is finding your audience," said Jeanine Cummins, author of three books and a former member of Penguin's sales team. "Books used to be a logical, easy, tidy business. It's gotten really messy in the last few years, and will only get messier."
The Crooked Branch is the story of Majella, a young, overwhelmed mother in Queens, N.Y., who discovers the diary of an ancestor who lived during Ireland's Potato Famine. The novel alternates between the ordeals of Majella's ancestor and Majella's own struggles in the present day, as she deals with "what some would describe as postpartum depression."
Like the ripples of a pebble falling into a lake, the decision of an Afghan villager to give his daughter to a wealthy couple for adoption will have an impact from the 1950s to the present day, from Kabul to Paris and San Francisco--while, simultaneously, the cataclysmic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban will have even more deeply felt repercussions. In And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini presents a multitude of windows into the souls affected by these events. The novel's rich kaleidoscope of images coalesces around one theme: the powerful and often excruciating legacy of family ties within the maelstrom of history.