Lorena Jones

Lorena Jones is returning to Ten Speed Press as v-p and publisher of her own as-yet-unnamed imprint focused on cooking and lifestyle books. She will also serve as an editor-at-large for the Crown Publishing Group's larger illustrated publishing program.

She was most recently publishing director of Chronicle Books. In 1994, she joined Ten Speed Press as an editor, rising to editorial director in 1999, then becoming publisher from 2004 to 2008.

Aaron Wehner, senior v-p and publisher of Clarkson Potter, Harmony Books and Ten Speed Press, said Jones is "a force in illustrated publishing, having developed and edited some of the most seminal books and authors in the lifestyle space over her 25 years in the business. Lorena has earned an enviable reputation with authors, agents, and colleagues alike for her superlative editorial skills, nurturing and collaborative approach, entrepreneurial spirit, and tenacity."

In other Ten Speed Press news, Hannah Rahill has been promoted to v-p, publishing director, from v-p, associate publisher.

Hennessey + Ingalls art and architecture bookstore will be trading its Santa Monica location for downtown Los Angeles next year after signing a lease "to fill 5,000 square feet of space in the massive mixed-use complex One Santa Fe at 300 S. Santa Fe Avenue," Downtown News reported, adding that the bookseller chose the new space, which is expected to open in January, "to capitalize on the architecture community at the nearby A+D Museum and the Southern California Institute of Architecture."

After 12 years in business and following a temporary closure in August, the Grove in San Diego, Calif., "has reinvented itself as West Grove Collective." Bookselling This Week reported that the Grove "was renovated and reconfigured into two businesses," one of which is Anne Mery's 1,300-square-foot book and gift store, which opened September 1. The other half of the original space now houses South Park Dry Goods.

"After years of doing something that worked reasonably well, it was time for a change. I wanted a different focus, designed to serve the audiences that live nearby and visit this great neighborhood," Mery said. "This concept has allowed me to continue to be a presence in the book business and to curate a collection that I think is important and that people respond to. It's a different approach.”

She added that the South Park neighborhood "is a cool place to have a business, and [the bookstore] is very well-supported by the neighborhood. The response from our customers after we reopened has been, 'We're so happy you're back. We've missed you!' and of course, we missed them, too. We had been part of the community, and we want to continue to be a part of the community."

Hazel-Ann Mayers

Hazel-Ann Mayers has been named executive v-p, general counsel of Simon & Schuster. She joins the company from CBS Corporation, parent of S&S, where she was most recently senior v-p, assistant general counsel, litigation and chief compliance officer. Before joining CBS, she was a litigation counsel at Viacom and an associate at Proskauer Rose and Willkie Farr and Gallagher.

She succeeds David Hillman, who was named executive v-p and general counsel, television stations, sports and broadcast operations for CBS Corporation.

S&S president and CEO Carolyn Reidy said that Mayers's "broad business and legal experience will be of great benefit to Simon & Schuster. From her position within CBS she has developed a familiarity with the unique requirements and different challenges we face, and in working with her over the years I have been struck by her impressive command of the issues and solution-oriented approach. Hazel will provide the counsel we need to accomplish our day-to-day and long-term goals in an increasingly complicated business environment."

Lisa Milton

Lisa Milton, who left her position as managing director of Orion General earlier this year, will join HarperCollins as executive publisher of its Harlequin U.K. publishing division, following "the relocation of the company from its Richmond base to HarperCollins' office at London Bridge over the summer with the intention of Harlequin becoming a second commercial fiction publishing business within the group," the Bookseller reported.

Gabrielle Burton, "a feminist novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who considered conventional marriage lopsided but identified with the pioneering Donner Party wife who perished protecting her husband," died September 3, the New York Times reported. She was 76. In addition to Searching for Tamsen Donner, which she called "part memoir, part historical re-creation," and Impatient with Desire, a fictionalized version of Tamsen Donner's missing journal, her books include I'm Running Away from Home, but I'm Not Allowed to Cross the Street: A Primer of Women's Liberation and Heartbreak Hotel.

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Jim Miles, co-founder of British children's book publisher Miles Kelly, died August 27, the Bookseller reported. He was 65. Gerard Kelly, who launched the publishing house with Miles in 1996, said: "Outside of Miles Kelly, Jim was a devoted family man. He loved playing golf and was a keen motorcyclist. His love of travel never waned, and Jim continued to visit amazing places, from the Everglades to whale watching on the Bay of Biscay.... On behalf of everyone at Miles Kelly, I can honestly say that we were fortunate and privileged to work with Jim, and his legacy of Miles Kelly will live on for many years. He will be dearly missed."

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart--co-owner of Eureka Books in Eureka, Calif.--is based on the true story of Constance Kopp, who became one of the country's first female sheriff deputies in 1914 after a traffic accident in Paterson, N.J., led to a dangerous dispute. Stewart's appearance earlier this week at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair celebrated  the N.J. launch of this N.J.-based novel. Pictured, l.-r.:  Watchung owner Margot Sage-EL; certified geneologist Maria (Ree) Hopper; Amy Stewart; and Girl Waits with Gun audio book narrator Christina Moore.

Last spring, independent booksellers nationwide were invited to submit personal essays for publication in a regional nine-book paperback series, with one or two titles to be released a year, published by Unbridled Books, edited by Carl Lennertz of ExpressEdit.net and printed with support from McNaughton & Gunn. All proceeds, once costs are recouped, will go to BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.

The original submission deadline of September 1 has been pushed back to October 1. Booksellers should submit 1,500-5,000 word essays about "unique experiences in their home state--life, travels, observations--past or present," followed by a brief bio. Illustrations and poetry are also welcome. For more, including contact information, visit here.

Imagine Queen's classic song "Bohemian Rhapsody" interpreted (well, rewritten) by the staff at Shoalhaven Libraries in New South Wales, Australia as "Librarian Rhapsody."

Is this nonfiction?
Is this just fantasy?
Work in the Library
We escape from reality
Open your eyes
Pick up a book and read...
I’m volunteering, there's many more like me

Last week, the sidewalk chalkboard outside Melville House Publishing's bookstore in Brooklyn took advantage of work being done nearby to offer customers a logical choice of destination. The pic generated a lot of social media heat. And this week, there was a follow-up sign.

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman (Simon & Schuster).

Pennie Clark Ianniciello, Costco's book buyer, has chosen Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (Penguin Books, $16, 9780143124542) as her pick of the month for September. In Costco Connection, which goes to many of the warehouse club's members, she wrote:

"This month's book buyer's pick, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, is the kind of book that you want to hand to someone and say, 'Please read this, and then let's talk about it when you're done.'

"All I'm willing to say is that when Louisa takes a job working with a man who is wheelchair bound, her ordinary life becomes considerably less plain. This novel will leave you thinking about Lou and whether your response to what she faces would be the same.

"And for anyone who's already read, recommended and discussed Me Before You, you'll be happy to know that the sequel, After You, will be available on September 29."

Today on Fresh Air: John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van: A Novel (Picador, $16, 9781250074713).

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Tomorrow night on Coast to Coast: Dr. Elisa Medhus, co-author of My Life After Death: A Memoir from Heaven (Atria Books/Beyond Words, $16, 9781582705606).

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Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos: Damon Tweedy, author of Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflection on Race and Medicine (Picador, $26, 9781250044631).

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Sunday on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live: Mindy Kaling, author of Why Not Me? (Crown Archetype, $25, 9780804138147).

An official trailer has been released for the film adaptation of Emma Donoghue's bestselling novel Room, directed by Lenny Abrahamson. The movie stars Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen and William H. Macy. Room opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 16, and nationwide November 6.

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Two new trailers are out for Todd Haynes's Carol, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt. Indiewire reported that the film "has the might of the Weinstein Company behind it, and debuted at Cannes to rave reviews (including ours) and a Best Actress trophy for Rooney Mara, who plays a young department store employee who falls in love with the titular older woman (Cate Blanchett)." Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy and Sarah Paulson also star in Carol, which opens in the U.S. November 20.

The Academy of American Poets announced the 2015 winners of its annual poetry prizes. This year's recipients are:

Joy Harjo won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award, which recognizes "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."

Marie Howe received the $25,000 Academy of American poets fellowship, which honors "distinguished poetic achievement."

Kevin Young's Book of Hours (Knopf) won the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for "the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year."

Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016) won the $5,000 James Laughlin Award, which is given for a second book of poetry by an American poet.

Roger Greenwald's Guarding the Air: Selected Poems by Gunnar Harding (Black Widow Press) the $1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, which recognizes a published translation of poetry from any language into English that demonstrates literary excellence.  

Todd Portnowitz won the $25,000 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding translations of modern Italian poetry into English, for his translation of Pierluigi Cappello's Go Tell It to the Emperor: Selected Poems.

Blake N. Campbell won the inaugural $1,000 Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award, which recognizes a student poet.

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A longlist has been released for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which recognizes the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English. The winner receives C$100,000 (about US$75,600) the other finalists $10,000 each. A shortlist will be released October 5, with the winner named November 10.

photo: Gately Williams

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including You & Me, The Interrogative Mood and Edisto (a finalist for the National Book Award), and two collections of stories. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Powell lives in Gainesville, Fla., where he co-directs and teaches at the MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida. His new collection of stories is Cries for Help, Various (Catapult, September 8, 2015).

On your nightstand now:

Laughing Gas and The Best of Wodehouse by P.G. Wodehouse; Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill; Dodgers by Bill Beverly; Making Nice by Matt Sumell.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Flamingo Prince by Rubylea Hall. The author is my grandmother; the dedication is to me. I thought that meant that I somehow could be Osceola, the book's subject.

Your top five authors:

Celebrity formative package: Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams (count as one); William Faulkner; Flannery O'Connor; Mark Twain; Donald Barthelme.

Book you've faked reading:

I don't fake; I admit my lassitude and ignorance. Were I to fake one, it would be Ulysses by James Joyce. I want badly to have read this, try every few years, and apparently just won't do it, through no fault of the book.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

Book you've bought for the cover:

I would buy my own The Interrogative Mood for the cover, done by Alison Forner. This cover placed second in an online best-cover contest, and was beaten by an image of a Victorian lady with half her face eaten off by zombies. Hard to beat that.

Book that changed your life:

Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane The hero of this book likes drugs, sex, fishing. I thought when I read it that these were things I had access to. If I could have access to these things--I had no access to being a planter during the Civil War, say--then I too could write of these things. Or if not these exact things, then some similar accessible things. It was a revelation. McGuane is a clean, strong writer. The excerpt of the book that I read was in a journal edited by Donald Barthelme, whom I would meet 10 years later. It was a big and meaningful coinkidink.

Favorite line from a book:

"Annihilating all that's made/ To a green thought in a green shade." --Andrew Marvell, "The Garden"

Which character you most relate to:

When I read Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, I felt sure I was the hero, Williston Bibb Barret. I wanted to move into the book and stay there. For weeks I did.

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

Absalom! Absalom! My comprehension of who says what to whom, and when it is said, and what what is said means, I now reckon to have been 2% the first time I read this book. I was 20. Now I am about to crawl in the grave and my comprehension is up to 7%, generously. Yet I am still seduced by this book. How can this happen? The phenomenon of this seductive impenetrability made me want to write a book like it. I was young. And yet I still am sucked into some hallowed, haunted place by this book. I will put down a tractable Faulkner.

British journalist Gavin Weightman (The Industrial Revolutionaries) examines the "eureka" moment when a new technology works for the first time, with the stories behind five of the 20th century's most transformative inventions. The airplane, television, barcode, personal computer and mobile phone were innovations on existing technologies, and Weightman uses these inventions as a framework to recount the colorful stories behind the discoveries that ushered in today's most ubiquitous tools.

He begins with the iconic Kitty Hawk and the Wright brothers' first flight on December 17, 1903, and quickly finds fresh and unexpected angles. Orville and Wilbur Wright owned a business selling and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio, using their mechanical experience and appropriating bicycle parts to build propellers and other airplane components. A century earlier, the ballooning craze, and reports of a Viennese clockmaker who used counterweights, hoists and wings strapped to his arms to become airborne, became the talk of Europe. This inspired the British inventor Sir George Cayley to build a simple glider that resulted in the first true, fixed-wing airplane flight. Other characters, like the Berlin brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal, convinced that gliding would soon be as popular as bicycling, a sport they also enjoyed, carried on their own experiments and ultimately influenced the Wrights.

Weightman brings similar behind-the-scenes stories and unfamiliar histories to each invention. The first image captured on a screen, a crude precursor to television, took place on October 2, 1925. It was the brainchild of Scotsman John Logie Baird, who was inspired by the development of the radio, the light bulb and the camera to devise a way to "see by wireless." The barcode was created by Norman Joseph Woodland, an IBM employee who first drew a prototype in the Miami Beach sand in 1949, in response to pleas from a supermarket manager who needed to help shoppers check out more quickly. It was a rare instance where necessity drove invention, rather than the more typical scenario where an invention by an amateur or outsider creates its own demand. In an ironic twist, IBM was not interested; it wasn't until the invention of laser light allowing scanning in 1960 that barcodes caught on.

Eureka is an informative look at the nature of invention and, equally important, it is an entertaining, well-written and accessible account full of wonderful stories, colorful characters and little-known events, bringing a fresh perspective and appreciation for technologies that many now take for granted. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Shelf Talker: Eureka is an entertaining account of the people and discoveries behind five major technologies that have transformed daily life.

Maybe you already know this and are still celebrating, but I think it should be noted that Tuesday was UNESCO International Literacy Day. This year's theme was "Literacy and Sustainable Societies." On its website, UNESCO stated: "Literacy skills are the prerequisite for the learning of a broader set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values required for creating sustainable societies. At the same time, progress in areas of sustainable development, such as health and agriculture, serves as an enabling factor in the promotion of literacy and literate environments."

Calling #InternationalLiteracyDay both "an occasion to celebrate the commitment of individuals and organizations striving to ensure that everyone has the skills needed to engage with the world," as well as "a day of reckoning," the Global Partnership for Education shared new data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics indicating that 757 million adults (two-thirds of whom are women), including 115 million young people between the ages of 15 and 24, still cannot read or write a simple sentence.

Here's a tiny sampling of how the world acknowledged International Literacy Day:

U.S.: "Reading is much more than a leisure activity for members of an East Cleveland court diversion program, who proudly snapped their 'literacy selfie' last Friday so they could participate in WKYC's celebration of International Literacy Day [#WeReadHere]. For these women enrolled in the court's 'From Lemons to Lemonade' program for offenders, their every-other-Friday discussions about literature have helped give them tools needed to break difficult cycles in their lives."

Belize: The Ministry of Education celebrated ILD by holding a Read Aloud Day. Lurleen Betson Gamboa said, "What we are trying to promote is that we want parents, we want teachers, we want community personnel to read to their children or read to a child and the reason for that is when you do read aloud it promotes comprehension, it promotes strong vocabulary, so when you are reading to that child he or she is able to imitate that reading as well as the child is gaining basic comprehension skills and vocabulary skills."

photo: Vanndeth Um/tuoitrenews.vn

Vietnam: Tuoi Tre News presented a World Vision Vietnam photo feature exploring how kids in remote areas "embark on extreme journeys to school... to pursue literacy."

New Zealand: Literacy Aotearoa Wellington, a specialist provider of adult literacy and numeracy education, held a giant game of Scrabble in the foyer of Wellington Railway Station as "a fun way for our staff and students to engage with the public, promote awareness of adult learning and highlight the services that LAW have to offer."

Russia: Olga Ivanova, a senior research fellow at the department of Russian linguistic culture at the Vinogradova Institute for the Study of Russian Language, "claims that Russians are simply fed up with the illiterate mangling of words that Internet communication has produced and that was fashionable just a couple of years ago. A backlash is now underway, with international projects like 'Total Dictation' promoting correct spelling and use of language throughout the world.

DR Congo: From a statement by Martin Kobler, head of the U.N. Organization Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo: "I commend the Government for the efforts made to promote literacy, which, in addition to representing a fundamental right that should be guaranteed to all Congolese people, is a development factor. Therefore, I reiterate my commitment to supporting the Government authorities to better empower the most disadvantaged sections of the population for an active contribution to sustainable development."

Fiji: "Highlighting the importance of literacy to people with disabilities," and with support from the Australian Government through its partnership with the University of the South Pacific, the Disability Resource Centre "provides a space for studies, specialized learning equipment and support from student volunteers. The initiative is part of the university's commitment to make its facilities and courses accessible under its Disability Inclusiveness Policy adopted in 2013."

photo: The Hindu

India: Students and teachers at Periyar University rallied to mark International Literacy Day, carrying placards and banners with slogans like "Education is not a preparation for life, education is life itself"; and "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance." The students and teachers "took a pledge that they will do everything possible to eradicate illiteracy."

Cayman Islands: "There still remains a segment of students who leave our schools without obtaining the literacy levels they require to contribute fully to the development and sustainability of our society," Education Minister Tara Rivers observed. "Improving literacy standards continues to be one of the highest priorities for the Cayman Islands Education System, as literacy underpins the life-skills of all individuals in our community."

At the opening ceremony for a two-day literacy conference in Paris this week, UNESCO assistant director general for education Qian Tan said ILD is a time to "renew our commitment to literacy as a human right which empowers people and transforms societies.... Without literacy, equitable and sustainable society cannot be realized." --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)