Shelf Awareness for Friday, February 14, 2014


Becker & Mayer: The Land Knows Me: A Nature Walk Exploring Indigenous Wisdom by Leigh Joseph, illustrated by Natalie Schnitter

Berkley Books: SOLVE THE CRIME with your new & old favorite sleuths! Enter the Giveaway!

Mira Books: Their Monstrous Hearts by Yigit Turhan

St. Martin's Press: The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction by Henry Gee

Editors' Note

Presidents Day

In honor of the Presidents Day holiday, this is our last issue until Tuesday, February 18. See you then!


Berkley Books: Swept Away by Beth O'Leary


News

Bookstore Sales Down 0.5% in December, 1.6% for Year

December bookstore sales fell 0.5%, to $1.48 billion, compared to December 2012, according to preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau. For the year, bookstore sales fell 1.6%, to $13.2 billion. In 2013, sales improved in January, March and September over 2012, but were down every other month, in part because of high sales a year earlier of the Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey trilogies.

Total retail sales in December rose 3.7%, to $485.9 billion, compared to the same period a year ago. For the year to date, total retail sales have risen 4.2%, to $5,084 billion.

Note: under Census Bureau definitions, the bookstore category consists of "establishments primarily engaged in retailing a general line of new books. These establishments may also sell stationery and related items, second-hand books, and magazines."


BINC: DONATE NOW and Penguin Random House will match donations up to a total of $15,000.


Children's Institute Speakers Announced

Graphic designer and author Chip Kidd, author and social media expert Austin Kleon and professional storyteller Anastasia McKenna will be among the presenters April 7 at the Children's Institute in San Antonio, Tex., where the ABC Children's Group at ABA has planned two focused, 45-minute talks and an hour-long education session featuring the three experts in their respective fields, according to Bookselling This Week.

"Booksellers will be there for one day, so we wanted to pack as much into it as possible," said ABA senior program officer Joy Dallanegra Sanger. "We're trying something new with our scheduling and are bringing in these compelling speakers as a way to add more value to this event."


New Owners for the Fashion Bookstore

Longtime employees Yolanda Bragg and Rina Castro have purchased the Fashion Bookstore at the California Market Center in Los Angeles from Bill and Linda Golant. California Apparel News reported that when the Golants decided to sell the store, they immediately thought of Bragg and Castro because they "know the business, the customers know them and they've seen the business grow."


For Sale: Olympia's Whodunit? Books

Linda Dewberry, owner of Whodunit? Books, Olympia, Wash., has put her mystery specialty store up for sale. A classified item at NW Book Lovers lists the sale price as "the cost of the current inventory (approx. $25,000 new and used)," noting that there "is potential for growth, a great local landlord, and a prime location with other specialty stores."

Her lease expires at the end of April and if the business, which she launched 14 years ago, hasn't sold by then, she will close, the Bellingham Herald reported.

"Eventually you know you're going to stop," Dewberry said. "I'm going to miss my customers and others, but I hope to see them in other places.... For me it's been worth it. I have no regrets."


Revenge Is Lush: Company Trademarks Amazon U.K. Exec's Name

Lush, a cosmetics company that earlier "won a high court battle against Amazon over its use of the word 'lush' to sell rival cosmetics," has trademarked "Christopher North" as the brand name for a new range of toiletries, the Guardian reported, adding that the company "has already now created a new shower gel and named it after their arch-rival, with the tagline 'rich, thick and full of it.' " North is managing director of Amazon.co.uk.

Judge John Baldwin recently ruled that the "right of the public to access technological development does not go so far as to allow a trader such as Amazon to ride roughshod over intellectual property rights, to treat trademarks such as Lush as no more than a generic indication of a class of goods in which the consumer might have an interest." (The Guardian noted that "Amazon shoppers searching for Lush products would instead be directed to similar products described as 'lush.' ")

Mark and Mo Constantine founded Lush in 1995 with one shop in Poole. The retail chain does not sell its products on Amazon, and took the online retailer to court after it ignored attempts to resolve the dispute amicably. "We asked them 17 times before we went to court," Constantine said. "After a while you realize you're being bullied."

Constantine trademarked North's name to "make a point about how upsetting it is to have something personal to you, used by someone else." What began as a joke escalated into a full-blown marketing scheme "after Amazon refused to concede it was doing anything wrong and vowed to appeal against the High Court ruling," the Guardian wrote, noting that Constantine decided he was not going to put up with Amazon's 'bullying unpleasantness' anymore."

"How are they going to behave, are they going to do the right thing, or continue to be naughty?" he said. "If this was a normal business relationship it would have been a joke between us. But this is Amazon, how will they behave?... We are going to keep this on the table and wait and see. If you're not going to behave in a way that's appropriate, there should be some comeback."


Notes

Image of the Day: Variations on Tying a Scarf

Staff at Chronicle Books celebrated the release of Lauren Friedman's 50 Ways to Wear a Scarf with a scarf-tying party yesterday at their San Francisco headquarters. Here the 50 Ways team demonstrates styles from the book: (l.-r.) Editor Lisa Tauber (#19, "The Braid"), editor Laura Lee Mattingly (#4, "The Paris"), marketing and publicity manager Lorraine Woodcheke (#7, "The Ascot") and designer Allison Weiner (#12, "The Chain Link").


Indie Booksellers Love Valentine's Day

Blind Date with a Book display at Brazos Bookstore, Houston

Happy Valentine's Day! Indie booksellers have been having great fun celebrating this year, and we have the digital evidence to prove it. Here's a sampling:

Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, Iowa: "Be our valentine! Come into the shop and Prairie Lights Cafe for cards, gifts, chocolates, books, and more. We're offering a champagne special in the cafe this Thursday through Saturday, so treat yourself and your loved ones!"

Hickory Stick Bookshop, Washington, Conn.: "Need a good book for Valentine's Day? We've got plenty!"

Lake Country Booksellers, White Bear Lake, Minn.: "First it was a Christmas book tree; now it's a Valentine book tree! We love it!"

Gibson's Book Store, Concord, N.H. (e-mail newsletter): "Love is in the air! Join us this Friday and Saturday (Feb. 14-15) as we swing into the Lovin' Downtown Stroll, a fun promotion in which many downtown merchants are participating. We will be offering 10% off any book with hearts on the cover, or any book which you, the customer, can make the case for it being about love. Convince us! Does this book demonstrate the author's love of architecture? Tell us how. Does this book deal with broken hearts? Enlighten us."

Blind book dates: Northshire Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: "We want to set you up on a blind date with our favorite books!" Mclean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, Mich.: "You don't have to spend your Valentine's Day alone! Stop in and go on a blind date with a book!"

Undead love: Kaleido Books & Gifts, Perth, Australia: "We've decided to go with a Valentine's Day promotion after all. It's pretty wrong. You're going to like it."


'This Is What a Librarian Looks Like'

For those who still cling to the outdated cliché of librarians as cranky, shushing killjoys, Salon's "This Is What a Librarian Looks Like" feature offered a counter-image in the form of Kyle Cassidy's photographs, which were taken last month American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia.

"I realized I had a stereotype in my mind of what a librarian looked like, which is one of the reasons I wanted to do this project. Whenever I think something is true, I'm often wrong," Cassidy said. "I tend to think of librarians as the ones I know from my public library and from school. But there are librarians who are researchers and archivists doing extraordinarily technical work. There are librarians who work in specialized fields who have to know about archaeology, for example, or medicine or research science. The field was broader than I had gone in there thinking."

Ingrid Abrams, a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library who participated in the project, added: "If you haven't been in a library since you were a little kid, or maybe have only seen libraries in movies, you might think we're all a bunch of humorless, shushing curmudgeons. The truth is, we're a variety of ages. We're every race, ethnicity and religious background imaginable. We can be the type who wears a suit and tie every day or someone like me, who has pink hair and dresses in bright colors. Not that any part of how we look really matters, but if the only librarian you've ever seen is the librarian ghost from the first scene of Ghostbusters, I assure you we're a really dedicated and friendly bunch."



Media and Movies

Media Heat: William Nicolson on NPR's Morning Edition

This morning on Morning Joe: Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Holt, $28, 9780805092998).

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This morning on NPR's Morning Edition: William Nicolson, author of The Romantic Economist: A Story of Love and Market Forces (Atria/Marble Arch, $16, 9781476730417).

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Today on NPR's Here and Now: Phillip Toledano, author of The Reluctant Father (Dewi Lewis Media, $19.95, 9781905928095).

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Monday on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success (Viking, $27.95, 9780670026142).

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On Monday on Dr. Oz: Nell Stephenson, author of Paleoista: Gain Energy, Get Lean, and Feel Fabulous with the Diet You Were Born to Eat (Touchstone, $16, 9781451662931).

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Monday on Chelsea Lately: Jackie Collins, author of Confessions of a Wild Child (St. Martin's Press, $26.99, 9781250050939).


TV: Astronaut Wives Club

JoAnna Garcia Swisher (Once Upon a Time) will play one of the lead roles in ABC's Astronaut Wives Club, which was recently picked up for summer with a 10-episode straight-to-series order, Deadline.com reported. The project was written by Stephanie Savage and is based on Lily Koppel's novel.


Movies: Goosebumps

Odeya Rush (The Giver, The Odd Life of Timothy Green) will join Jack Black in director Rob Letterman's (Gulliver's Travels, Shark Tale) film adaptation of R.L. Stine's bestselling Goosebumps book series. The Wrap reported that Neal H. Moritz (Fast & Furious franchise) is producing with Deborah Forte of Scholastic Entertainment. Black plays Mr. Shivers, "a Stine-like author whose scary characters literally leap off the page, forcing him to hide from his own creepy creations," the Wrap noted. Rush will play his "quirky and mysterious niece."


Books & Authors

Awards: Duff Cooper Winner; Stella Longlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett won the £5,000 (about US$8,225) Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, which "celebrates the best in nonfiction writing," for her book The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War.

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A longlist comprised of six works of fiction and six of nonfiction has been released for the $50,000 Stella Prize, which honors Australian women's writing. The shortlist will be announced March 20 and a winner named April 29 in Sydney. You can view the complete Stella Prize longlist in detail here.


Book Brahmin: Karen Tei Yamashita

photo: Carolyn Lagattita

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of the novels Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange and I Hotel, and the collection Circle K Cycles, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was a finalist for the National Book Award and received the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She is currently a U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her latest book is a collection of 10 novellas, Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance (Coffee House, February 2014).

On your nightstand now:

Percival Everett's Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati, Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wave in the Mind and Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A big picture book of Grimm's fairy tales, A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh (the original, not the Disney stuff), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Your top five authors:

How about 10, unranked and alphabetical? John Berger, Italo Calvino, Sesshu Foster, Eduardo Galeano, Jessica Hagedorn, Chang-rae Lee, R. Zamora Linmark, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk

Book you've faked reading:

The Bible.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Hmmm, wine labels, definitely, and cookbooks. And titles with the words "maps" or "geography."

Books that changed your life:

Marcel Proust's Swann's Way: Proust taught me to take my time, to think and to write more slowly.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques: I read this on the plane to Brazil, in those days flying over tremendous expanses of green forest. Even though I landed in São Paulo, an urban nightmare of 20 million people, high-rise cement structures like Manhattan spread all over L.A., from the beginning, I thought about this world with a biting sense of awe and nostalgia, beauty in extinction, things I would see and never see again.

John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Dower's history of postwar and occupied Japan created for me an intellectual and emotional bridge crossing between the two homes of my grandparents and my community's stories of Japanese-American wartime incarceration.

Favorite line from a book:

Not sure it's a favorite but one that comes to mind:

"Out, out, brief candle!" Poor Mrs. Macbeth--life and strutting, unwashed hands, and all that sound and fury and nothingness.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Melville's Moby Dick.


Book Review

Review: Coincidence

Coincidence by J.W. Ironmonger (Harper Perennial, $14.99 trade paper, 9780062309891, February 18, 2014)

Are our lives ruled by destiny or chaos? J.W. Ironmonger (The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder) examines this question from every angle in his heady, seductive novel, Coincidence.

On Midsummer's Day, 1982, three-year-old Azalea Ives is found wandering around a fairground in Devon, England. She is able to tell her name but nothing else about herself. She is turned over to social services and eventually adopted by Luke and Rebecca Folley, but this is hardly the end of Azalea's story.

A year later, the badly decomposed body of a woman is discovered on a beach in North Devon. A policeman wonders if the child and the woman might be mother and daughter--because they both have flaming red hair. This is too circumstantial, and there's no DNA testing available, so the speculation is shelved (although we readers know the truth).

Luke and Rebecca eventually take Azalea with them to a mission in Uganda founded by Luke's grandfather, which they have agreed to help run. Joseph Kony, the real-life warlord and leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, attacks the mission--and on Midsummer's Day, 1992, Azalea's adoptive parents meet their deaths.

Next, we meet Thomas Post, a lecturer in applied philosophy at a the university where Azalea works--but better known as "The Coincidence Man." When and Azalea "meet" in a seemingly chance encounter on a escalator in Euston Station, she wants to talk with him about all the Midsummer's Day occurrences and her powerful belief that she knows the date of her death.

Ironmonger is a native East African and knows all about Kony and his abduction of children to turn them into soldiers in his rebel forces. Despite this intimate knowledge, however, Coincidence does not become polemical or political, and Ironmonger does a masterful job of folding the stories together in an entirely plausible manner.

He ties his complicated plot elements together brilliantly, leaving the reader entirely satisfied with all outcomes. --Valerie Ryan

Shelf Talker: A compelling story examining chance and determinism, a sojourn in Uganda and two very different people finding their way.


Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: 'Love Letters': Common Good Books' Poetry Contest

I'm a minimalist from Minnesota,
Don't waste my time and I won't waste yours.
You are the woman I love, of course.
I'm crazy about you and always have been.
And don't make me say it again.
Cause I'm a minimalist from Minnesota,
A man of monumental brevity.
That's me.

--Garrison Keillor's poem "That's Me," from O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound (Grove Press)


Love is in the air today, but who says it can't continue through spring if you're up to the challenge of entering "Love Letters": Common Good Books' Second Annual Poetry Contest"? Author, entertainer and indie bookstore proprietor Garrison Keillor is "putting up some serious cash" in support of good verse, with a $1,000 first prize and four $250 runner-up prizes. Judges for the contest are Keillor, Tom Hennen and Patricia Hampl. Finalists will be named April 20 and winners announced April 27 at a celebration of poetry in St Paul, Minn.

"Proclaiming one's love is the great test of a poet, to put irony and satire aside and the great everlasting litany of complaint and to put your heart on the line. That is where you reveal yourself as a human being. It's not for the timid," said Keillor.

David Enyeart, the bookstore's event coordinator and assistant manager, explained that transitioning from a regional contest to a national one has been a natural evolution for the store: "Having fun and drawing some attention to poets sounds like a good day to me. But this isn't altruism. We're living up to our motto--'Live Local, Read Large'-- by showing everyone that reading and writing are important because they connect us with each other and with the whole world. That message is worth a little effort, we think."

He also noted Common Good Books "is fortunate among bookstores to have a solid base of poetry fans among our customers. So of course, we're serving them by running this contest and helping them to become better writers and readers of poetry. Last year's contest was well received here in St. Paul, and we're pleased to continue our burgeoning tradition with this year's bigger prizes.

Colin McDonald in promo video for this year's Common Good Books' Poetry Contest

"Poetry isn't just something that Minnesotans like; it's for everyone. The more people are talking about poetry and writing, the better for all of us in the book world. If our contest sends someone into a bookstore in Wichita, Kansas, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, looking for a writing guide or a slim volume of inspiration, we'll be happy. If a bookseller in Michigan can use our contest to lure a customer into their Poetry section, our efforts will not be in vain."

Poets, aspiring poets and even non-poets are welcome to enter. For those who need a little help, the Common Good Books tumblr features a contest advice page, where tips will be shared "on how to win at (writing) love from some of our country's best poets," including Tony Hoagland, Deborah Garrison (poetry editor at Knopf), Richard Blanco, Henri Cole, Sophie Cabot Black, Kathleen Flenniken, Jim Moore and Kristin Naca. Sage counsel on "How to Write a Love Poem" begins today with Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts.

Last year's poetry finalists on display at Common Good Books

To enter the Common Good Books Poetry Contest, "just craft a paean to your favorite person, place, or thing. Pour your love onto the page, shape it well, and mail your love letter to Common Good Books before April 15. Fame and fortune could be yours," the organizers proclaimed.

Why snail mail entries in a digital age? The answer is both traditional and practical, according to Enyeart: "I'm going to make entrants mail us their poems because we are proponents of ink on paper and because I need a signed release so we can publish their work."

The rules:

  • The contest is open to anyone living within the United States.
  • The poem must be a declaration of love for a specific person, or being, or object, or place--i.e., something tangible.
  • The entries must be unpublished anywhere, and the author must have full rights to the material.
  • Only one entry per person.
  • Entries must be mailed to Common Good Books (38 S. Snelling Ave., St Paul MN 55105), postmarked no later than April 15, 2014.
  • Entries must include a signed release, available at http://commongoodbooks.tumblr.com/advice


"My dream is to spark a nationwide conversation about poetry. I'd love to see grandparents and grandchildren sitting down together and writing odes to breakfast cereal or mud puddles," said Enyeart. "I'd like to know that lovers across the country will craft slightly better text messages because they honed their skills writing poems for our contest. I want to eliminate the wrinkled noses and shy stammers that come when you say the word 'poetry' in airports and shopping malls. I want to discover the next Poet Laureate in an overlooked ZIP code.

"More realistically, we'd like to show everyone that poetry is not only something that you read, it's something that you can make. And whether a poem earns a thousand dollars or just one smile, our contest aims remind people that words on paper can change lives. As booksellers and book lovers, we're big believers in the power of words on paper to move people." --Robert Gray, contributing editor


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