Shelf Awareness for Friday, November 13, 2009


Del Rey Books: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

Overlook Press: How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

Charlesbridge Publishing: If Lin Can: How Jeremy Lin Inspired Asian Americans to Shoot for the Stars by Richard Ho, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên and Phùng Nguyên Quang

Shadow Mountain: The Orchids of Ashthorne Hall (Proper Romance Victorian) by Rebecca Anderson

Letters

Donald Harington Praised and Remembered

Our obituary note yesterday about Donald Harington evoked several tributes.

Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Bookstore, Boulder, Colo., wrote:

Although his novels were set in a region of the country that I have never visited, Donald Harington made Stay More, Ark., feel like a bizarre home. It's upsetting that Harington never broke through to the larger audience that he richly deserved. He was a terribly funny writer with a great satirical streak and the ability to write some of the oddest sex scenes I've ever read. I thank Toby Press for keeping the work of this important writer in print. The two novels I'd highly recommend are The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks and Thirteen Albatrosses.

Mark Levine, former sales director at St. Martin's and Holt, wrote:

I first discovered Donald Harington while, as a sales rep, climbing the dusty stacks of Bookazine, I was struck by the original and startlingly lovely Wendell Minor jacket. I took the book home on Bookazine owner Bill Epstein's two-for-one book swap program (one contributed two of one's own samples for one from another publisher). Reading it, I asked myself--even then--why hadn't I heard of this guy? Harington was demonstrably a find, a discovery and he brought me countless hours of enjoyment, thought and laughter with each new book and the re-reading, many times, of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Let Us Build a City and Some Other Place, the Right Place, my favorites.

I have always been a missionary for him, and particularly so in the two weeks preceding his untimely passing, after I read his latest. Enduring is a treasure and a summation of the saga with the air of a finale, but Harington characteristically and self-referentially includes a few hints that there might be others. We should all hope that these manuscripts are in the hands of his publisher, Toby Press. I hope that talking up this book will provide Don Harington, RIP, with the wide recognition he has always deserved. His aggregate work is among the very best fiction of our lifetime.

Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, wrote:

Don Harington was my art history professor at Windham College in Putney, Vt. (John Irving was my creative writing teacher there, too). Little did he know that he had a future sales rep sitting in his lecture hall! I wish I'd kept up with him all these years, but I'm happy that he finally met the Toby reps and found out how human they really were.

 


HarperOne: Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster


News

Notes: Scholarship Winners for ABA's Wi5; AP Reads Palin

The American Booksellers Association named 22 booksellers who will receive publisher-sponsored scholarships to ABA's 2010 Winter Institute. Bookselling This Week published the complete list of winners.

"We hope all ABA members will join us in thanking these publishers for their continuing support of independent booksellers." said ABA COO Len Vlahos.

Summer Moser of Summer's Stories, Kendalville, Ind., is the recipient of ABA's inaugural Avin Mark Domnitz Scholarship, "awarded to a participant in the 2008 ABACUS Survey in honor of the former ABA CEO's wide-ranging contributions to independent bookselling," BTW wrote.

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The publicity juggernaut for Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, gathered more momentum after the Associated Press "was able to purchase a copy Thursday" and offered an early peek at the pre-release bestseller.

The New York Times noted that, "Despite her disdain for the media, Mrs. Palin spent part of Thursday on the first part of a media blitz for the book, taping an interview to air Monday on the Oprah Winfrey show. . . . Her book tour will take her to smaller cities across the country, but this week, she is in New York, taping appearances on several television shows, including an interview with Barbara Walters that is to air in several parts over the next week on ABC."

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Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) is on the move. The author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books is selling the North American rights for a new four-part series to Little, Brown rather than HarperCollins, which had published the earlier works. The New York Times reported "Handler’s longtime editor, Susan Rich, will join Little, Brown as an editor-at-large in the young readers’ group."

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Congratulations on 30 years and counting, coast to coast.

In Washington, Griffin Bay Bookstore, Friday Harbor, will celebrate its 30th anniversary Saturday "with an open house, sale and complimentary treats from Bakery San Juan, Cynthia’s of Course and Caffe Umbria," the San Juan Journal reported, noting that current owner Laura Norris "has operated the landmark bookstore since July 2006 following the death of long-time owner and friend, Susan Eyerly, who, over the course of 25 years, developed a special rapport with myriad readers--not only local but countless from all over the world. Norris maintains this vital connection to book lovers, and adheres to Eyerly’s tradition of stocking the store with all manner of books, paying particular attention to customers’ preferences and tastes, and choosing books she believes will feed their love of the written word."

In Vermont, Rick and Ellen Havlak will host an open house tonight in celebration of their 30th anniversary as owners of the Bennington Bookshop, which was established in 1928. The Banner reported that the Havlaks, who purchased the book department and business name in 1979, "have moved the shop twice and have been located at 467 Main St. since 1995."

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Frank Kramer, owner emeritus of Harvard Book Store and co-chair of Cambridge Local First, was one of eight speakers who addressed the issue of e-fairness "at a public meeting on tax policy held in Cambridge by the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Revenue. The meeting, which was part of the Joint Committee's 'Listening Tour,' was one of several held throughout the commonwealth. The focus was tax policy and working families. Kramer was one of eight speakers during the night," Bookselling This Week reported.

Kramer noted that he "attended because the Massachusetts sales tax just went up by 25%, from 5% to 6.25%, and local merchants have mentioned that this increase is definitely forcing more consumers to the Internet to save the tax. I'm personally outraged that Massachusetts leadership is slashing and cutting programs and payrolls because of the decline in revenues while they are either overlooking or--far worse--deciding to forgo the millions that Internet sellers should be collecting and paying to Massachusetts. And, by doing so, they are giving an unfair competitive advantage to businesses outside of Massachusetts at the expense of locally owned businesses."

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Obituary note: Robert W. Cameron, photographer, founder and publisher of Cameron & Company, died Tuesday. He was 98. Cameron published the popular "Above" series of books featuring aerial photographs of nearly 20 cities, including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London.

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John Grisham's Ford County is only the second short story collection ever to enter USA Today's bestseller list at number two. USA Today noted that "short stories can be a tough sell. Stephen King's 1992 Everything's Eventual is the only short-story collection to make its debut at number one on the list."

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In experimental trials, a proposed computerized marking system for U.K. schools expressed displeasure with the written work of some high profile test subjects, including Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, William Golding and Anthony Burgess.

The Times of London wrote that the computer program criticized passages from Lord of the Flies for having "inaccurate and erratic sentence structure" and Clockwork Orange as "incomprehensible."

 


Park Street Press: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey by Peter A Levine


Media and Movies

Media Heat: 2012

Today on Good Morning America and tonight on an ABC News Nightline special about the film 2012, which opens today:

Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, $15.95, 9781585425921/1585425923) and Toward 2012 (Tarcher, $16.95, 9781585427000/1585427004).

John Major Jenkins, author of The 2012 Story (Tarcher, $25.95, 9781585427666/1585427667).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Weekend Edition: Roy Williams, author of Hard Work: A Life on and off the Court (Algonquin, $24.95, 9781565129597/1565129598).

 


G.P. Putnam's Sons: Take Me Home by Melanie Sweeney


Television: The Bradbury Chronicles

Author Ray Bradbury will develop the Bradbury Chronicles, a TV miniseries based on six of his short stories, for White Oak Films. Variety reported that Bradbury and John Dayton are executive producers for the project. White Oak's Merrill Capps, Todd Klick, Cory Travalena and Dale Olson will produce.

"My partners and I see this series as an homage to a man who has inspired us all," said Dayton.

 


Movies: Something Borrowed

Luke Greenfield (The Girl Next Door) will direct Something Borrowed, a screen version of Emily Giffin's novel that will be "produced by Alcon Entertainment toppers Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson along with Hilary Swank and Molly Smith through their 2S Films banner," according to Variety. The film is "being fast-tracked for a shoot in the spring and summer."

 



Books & Authors

Shelf Starter: George Sanders, Zsa Zsa, and Me

http://news.shelf-awareness.com/files/1/shelf-awareness/411/pa/slavitt.JPGGeorge Sanders, Zsa Zsa, and Me by David R. Slavitt (Northwestern University Press, $18.95 trade paper, 9780810126244/0810126249, November 28, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

This is true. George Sanders, the actor, had an Uncle Sasha whom he remembered from the old days in St. Petersburg. The uncle had spent much of the revolution lying in a great carved bed with a .22 pistol beside him on the coverlet that he would, from time to time, use to shoot flies that had landed on the ceiling to eat the jam his footmen had smeared there. They stood by while he did this, ready with champagne, extra rounds of ammunition, and orange marmalade and strawberry jam--either for him or for the flies.

I read this a month or two ago and stopped as one does sometimes, not merely to consider this odd scene but to ask myself why it spoke to me and what it suggested about how things are. It does invite a certain degree of compassion for a man so driven by boredom or disgust as to while away his mornings in this fashion. The gunshots would not have been particularly noticed--there was a revolution going on outside, after all. And the footmen must have been accustomed to the eccentricities of these extravagant people. One does not, in this instance, want to be a fly on the wall, but the scene persists in the imagination, its fixative being the knowledge that Sanders, some years later, committed suicide in a resort hotel in Barcelona, leaving behind a note to explain he was doing this because he was bored.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

 


Book Brahmin: Katie Freeman

http://news.shelf-awareness.com/files/1/shelf-awareness/411/pa/KFreeman3%20%28Small%29.jpg
Katie Freeman is a senior publicist for Pantheon and Schocken Books, where she came to work in the bookroom as a college junior and then just kept coming back until they hired her. She tweets @PantheonBooks and blogs personally. Originally from Iowa, she lives in Brooklyn and is currently working on Mary Gordon's Reading Jesus, Brad Matsen's Jacques Cousteau and Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever

On your nightstand now: 

Ha Jin's new story collection, A Good Fall; the forthcoming memoir by Malcolm Jones, Little Boy Blues; Hwang Sok-yong's The Old Garden; Darien Leader's The New Black; Roberto Bolano's 2666; Soseki Natsume's I Am a Cat; Nicole Brossard's Fences in Breathing; and numerous other titles which will soon unceremoniously have to make way for new flapped and jacketed desires.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Corduroy and Goodnight, Moon tie for that honor. As an older child, I have to admit: The Baby-Sitter's Club, which my mother hated and my uncle from NYC smuggled into the house for me in his suitcase.

Your top five authors:

Andre Dubus and Madeleine L’Engle, for everything they wrote; Ursula K. LeGuin for Dancing at the Edge of the World; Carol Shields for Unless; Jane Kenyon's poetry and Donald Hall's memoir, The Best Day the Worst Day.

Book you've faked reading:

Voltaire's Candide. Haven't a clue what happens in it, but think I wrote a paper about it once. I do love Chris Ware's cover for the new Penguin edition.

Book you're an evangelist for:

I think it's hard to be an evangelist for a book in general; the book must be the right fit to create a love affair. As friends--and new acquaintances--can attest, there's little I adore more than playing book matchmaker. Here are some recent favorites: Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Mo Willems's Elephant and Piggie books; and Atul Gawande's Better and Complications.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I love a good cover. The most recent: Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu, found at St. Mark's Bookshop. The inside was just as fabulous.

Book that changed your life:

Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face. I read it as a very lonely freshman in high school , and it taught me empathy. I still have my original copy with its lightly penciled-under sentences. Ann Patchett's memoir of Grealy, Truth and Beauty, is heartbreaking as well.

Favorite line from a book:

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?" From "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver. "One wild and precious" is going to be my second tattoo; my first, a lotus on my left wrist, is for Madeleine L'Engle's A House Like a Lotus.

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

Jane Eyre. I've read it uncountable times now and it's lost its magic for me, like a necklace worn so often you forget its beauty and what it felt like the first time you put it on.

 


Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: Building a Shame List from Scratch

When I met Jamie Fiocco, Sarah Carr and Land Arnold--co-owners of Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.'s newest indie bookstore--at this year's SIBA trade show, I was immediately impressed with their knowledge and passion as booksellers, as well as their undeniable courage as business people.

Next Monday, Flyleaf will debut with a "soft opening" (a January grand opening is planned), and since we've been exploring Shame Lists recently, I thought it might be interesting to ask booksellers who've been deeply enmeshed in the process of creating opening-day stock how they approached the Shame List challenge.

"These days, at least for me, my favorite books and reading in general seem to be the last things on my mind," Fiocco observed. "I must say, though, as we’ve plowed through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of title lists, it’s a real joy to have an old friend emerge from the black-and-white lines. Land, Sarah and I had some funny conversations, usually yelled across the hallway as we were going through lists of books for opening day: 'Which knife skills cookbook do you want?' 'Oh, I don’t remember the exact name, but it’s from Norton and it’s got a white cover with an avocado at the top and every other chapter is for lefties.'"

Arnold has selected most of the adult titles for Flyleaf's stock and Carr is ordering children's books. Fiocco is "pitching in on a few categories and some nonfiction, like cookbooks. So, the merging hasn’t been too painful because we all have our 'own' categories, plus Land and I were working together at the same store [McIntyre's Books, Pittsboro, N.C.] before Flyleaf."

One aspect of the process she noticed while figuring out opening stock was that "no one quite understands we want to pick it out ourselves, from scratch. We have found wholesalers happy to create an entire 'opening-day order' for us, but not capable to just give us the data we know we need, like recommended steady sellers in specific niche categories. I’m not saying the wholesalers aren’t helpful; all of them have been incredibly supportive and very helpful, whether we were giving them business or not. It’s just that our decision to start up with stock primarily direct from publishers has been a major undertaking. And if the publisher has only an electronic catalogue, they’re the last to get ordered--just not the right medium for a collaborative approach to buying."
 
Fiocco shared some titles from "my personal 'shame' list, including cooking, but I’d like to say I have a penchant for cookbooks that make good reads."

  • Joy of Cooking, 75th Anniversary Edition (which Ethan Becker "restored" back to the focus of the original '70s edition)
  • Quick and Easy Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (Indian cooking is neither "quick" nor "easy," but this is a great introduction to cooking the cuisine, and Jaffrey’s comments before each recipe are fun to read.)
  • Quick and Easy Chinese by Nancie McDermott (local N.C. food writer; same fun anecdotes and relatively easy recipes)
  • The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (I love cookbooks you can read, and this is one of the best. The line drawings scare off some folks but it’s just a joy to read through and learn about everyday food in the process.)
  • The Sultan's Kitchen: A Turkish Cookbook by Ozcan Ozan 
  • Knife Skills Illustrated: A User's Manual by Peter Hertzmann
  • Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue by John & Dale Reed (a great picture book, travelogue and just plain fun to read)
  • Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crooks Corner by Bill Smith (just another great read about food and people)
  • A Love Affair with Southern Cooking by Jean Anderson (another romp through Southern cultural history, and oh yeah--recipes, too)
  • Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This (because it explains in scientific detail why water boils faster with the top on)

She also offered some non-cooking favorites "I would hate to be without."

  • Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead
  • So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger
  • A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
  • The Last Voyage of Columbus by Martin Dugard (Audiobook version)
  • Grayson by Lynne Cox (great YA/adult crossover)
  • Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
  • A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
  • Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace
  • Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
  • The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
  • The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
  • City of Thieves by David Benioff (the perfect foil to The Madonnas of Leningrad)

With the initial orders in place and opening day on the near horizon, Fiocco concluded that she's "never been more convinced that book buying is an art and not a science. Land, Sarah and I know that when we open our doors on Monday, we’re not going to have the correct inventory. We can look through catalogues and sort through spreadsheets until the cows come home, but until we open those doors and start talking to folks in our community, we’re not going to have the right stock, hence the 'soft opening.'"--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

 


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