Shelf Awareness for Thursday, August 19, 2010


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

News

Image of the Day: Mary Roach Unpacks at the Book Works

 

Earlier this month, Mary Roach, whose new book is Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (Norton), brought her suitcase to the Book Works, Del Mar, Calif., and talked about the nitty gritty of space travel. Here Roach (sitting) appears with (l. to r.) bookseller Elena Spagnolie; events coordinator and publicity manager Jennifer Chinn; bookseller Taylor Martindale; bookseller Rachel Lafortune; Book Works owner Lisa Stefanacci; Book Works founder Milane Christiansen; Stefanacci's husband, Tom Albright; Roach's escort, Larry Lewis; and Elise Capron of the Djikstra Literary Agency.

 


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


Notes: Bookstore Moving From One State to Another

And Books Too, a new and used bookstore, is moving across the Snake River to Clarkston, Wash., from Lewiston, Idaho, "sometime before October 1," the store announced. The new location has 1,200 more square feet in space and "wonderful main street visibility with great parking in the back."

The new address is 918 6th St., Clarkston, Wash. 99403.

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Modern Times Bookstore, San Francisco, Calif., is "facing a financial crisis and urgently needs an influx of cash if we are going to be able to pay our bills through the summer," the store wrote in an e-mail. "The cold, hard economic facts are these: We need to sell a certain amount everyday in order to break even on costs--taxes, rent, payroll, utilities, insurance, and new books--and right now we are not doing this."

Modern Times is, as the store put it, "one of the few remaining independent, collectively run, politically progressive bookstores in North America." Besides selling books, it hosts events, has open mics and workshop and aims to be a community center and resource in the Mission District. Modern Times was founded in 1971.

The store worker-owners estimated that if everyone on its mailing list "donated $10 we would raise enough to keep going for 3 months, $20 each would keep us in business for 6 months, donations of between $30 to $100 or more would be enough for us to keep our doors open, hopefully for good." They also suggested that members and customers who couldn't give that much consider smaller donations, all of which "will go directly towards covering the bookstore's costs, and are a part of a larger plan of action and structural change to make the business sustainable in the current economy."

Among other suggestions: supporters can become sustaining or lifetime members, sponsor a shelf, promote the fundraising drive to friends and family, organize fundraisers, "pass the hat at a party," encourage professors and teachers to buy books and have their students buy books at the store, give a Modern Times membership or gift certificate and bring friends to the store.

Mission Local noted that the store nearly closed in 2005 but survived in part by becoming the New College's bookstore.

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As the battle between Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio and challenger Ron Burkle for control of the bookseller heats up, Riggio has exercised options to buy 990,740 shares of the company at a strike price of $16.96 (amounting to $16.8 million), according to the Wall Street Journal. The strike price is higher than B&N's share price on the stock exchange (it closed at $15.35 on Tuesday), meaning that Riggio paid a premium of approximately $1.61 a share or about $1.6 million.

By exercising the options, Riggio will be able to vote the shares. His stake in the company is 17.9 million shares, which represents 29.9% of B&N's shares outstanding.

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Many of the first editions and galleys collected by the late Glenn Goldman, founder of Book Soup, West Hollywood, Calif., are being sold at auction, and LA Weekly talked about the collection with a director of the house that has been doing the sales.

Among Goldman's treasure tomes: a first edition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, a first edition of Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck's first book, a signed copy of Richard Avedon's Observations, with commentary by Truman Capote, a signed first edition of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and a galley of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

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Book trailer of the day: Arsenic and Clam Chowder: Murder in Gilded Age New York by James D. Livingston (SUNY Press).

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This is one of those book stories we love: for breakfast reading today (Pop-Tarts to go?), the New York Times provides an update on The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken, which was revised and re-published this summer by Grand Central. While sales have been "modest," the iconic cookbook that has sold more than three million copies since first appearing 50 years ago "seems to have found an audience among women yet to embrace the organic, clean-food movement," the Times wrote.

Patricia Bostelman, v-p for marketing at Barnes & Noble, confirmed this diplomatically, saying, "In certain parts of the country, the sustainable food movement books are very popular. In reality, we are selling a number of cookbooks that indicate that people are not eating that way universally."

And Jamie Raab, executive v-p and publisher at Grand Central, commented: "Our mothers all used this book. I think it's in sync with lifestyles today, and also it has charm. When people rediscovered Julia Child, for example, she had such personality. And this book is fun to read."

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You may never become president of U.S., but you can still read like one. The Daily Beast "culled from newspaper archives and peeks into Air Force One tote bags for mentions of President Obama's reading preferences," and then gathered them together as "the entire Barack Obama Book Club."

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On the other hand, the Guardian explored an all-too-familiar experience for booklovers: "When book recommendations go wrong. How many times has someone pressed a book on you 'that you'll love' which you actually loathe?"

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In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Ron Adner, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and William Vincent, a former book editor at Houghton Mifflin, argued that changes in the industry caused by e-books will lead publishers to include advertising in e-books and that "the old market segmentation of paperbacks and hardcovers will be replaced by ad-supported or ad-free books." Unread books will be less valuable sold than read books, they continued. Authors will be concerned about what ads are in their books. (Duh.) Ad agencies will help come up with a standard form for digital ads. New kinds of contracts will have to be created.

They concluded: "Ultimately, advertising will be a way to monetize that most valuable content of all: consumers' time. In a fitting irony, the technological advancements of the 21st century may see authors returning to the 18th century concept of paying per word. Advertisements may be necessary to save book publishing, but book publishing will never be the same."

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The 32nd annual International Supply Chain Seminar, which takes place Tuesday, October 5, just before the official opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, focuses this year on the application of new technology to the supply chain for both traditional and digital publications.

Scheduled speakers include Jason Hanley of Google who will talk about Google Editions; Marcus Woodburn of the Ingram Content Group on digital strategy; Scott Lubeck of the Book Industry Study Group on "a supply chain or a supply network?"; Michael Cairns of Information Media Partners on new library models in the supply chain; Hans Willem Cortenraad from the Netherlands' Central Book House, which has been in the digital forefront.

A draft program and a registration form is available at www.editeur.org/3/Events/Event-Details/68. For more information, contact info@editeur.org.

 

 


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


Obituary Note: Frank Kermode

Literary critic Frank Kermode, who "combined an eminent scholarly career with popular success," died Tuesday, the Guardian reported. He was 90.

"He's probably the greatest literary conversationalist I've ever known--it wasn't just the lectures and the monographs and the books, it's the fact that just talking about a writer he'd say incredibly pithy, intelligent things which would prompt you to go and read them again," said Alan Samson, Kermode's publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. "He knew he had exceptional gifts, but there was a modest manner about him. He knew he was smarter than everyone else, but he was this pipe-smoking, beguiling man who listened to what you had to say.... It's the wreath of pipe smoke, and the benign smile and wisdom, which I'm really going to miss."

The late John Updike praised Kermode's gifts as a reviewer, noting that his conclusions seem "inarguable--indeed just what we would have argued, had we troubled to know all that, or goaded ourselves to read this closely," and Philip Roth admitted that although he dislikes reading reviews, "if Frank Kermode reviewed my book I would read it," the Guardian wrote.

 


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


Media and Movies

Media Heat: NPR's Scott Simon on NPR

Tomorrow morning on NPR's Morning Edition: NPR's own Scott Simon, author of Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption (Random House, $22, 9781400068494/1400068495).

 


Movies: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Ellen Burstyn has been added to the cast of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, adapted from Peter Cameron's YA novel. Deadline.com reported that the Italian production began shooting this week in New York's Central Park. Burstyn joins a cast that includes Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Regbo, Lucy Liu, Stephen Lang and Deborah Ann Woll.

 


This Weekend on Book TV: The Department of Mad Scientists

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, August 21

9 a.m. A debate between John Samples, author of The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History (Cato Institute, $24.95, 9781935308287/1935308289), and Eugene Steuerle, author of The Government We Deserve: Responsive Democracy and Changing Expectations (Urban Institute Press, $18.95, 9780877666769/0877666768). (Re-airs Saturday at 7:45 p.m. and Sunday at 10 a.m.)

12 p.m. Joseph Wheelan, author of Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison (PublicAffairs, $26.95, 9780786746279/0786746270), recounts the escape of 109 Union prisoners from the Confederate Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., in 1864. (Re-airs Saturday at 11 p.m. and Monday at 4 a.m.)

9 p.m. Wayne Thorburn, author of A Generation Awakes: Young Americans for Freedom and the Creation of the Conservative Movement (Jameson Books, $37.50, 9780898031683/0898031680, November release), presents a history of the conservative political organization that was founded in 1960. (Re-airs Sunday at 11:15 a.m. and Monday at 7 a.m.)

10 p.m. After Words. Joanne Carney interviews Michael Belfiore, author of The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (Smithsonian, $26.99, 9780061577932/0061577936). Belfiore calls the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency America's greatest idea factory. (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m., and Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m., and Sunday at 12 p.m.)

Sunday, August 22

7:30 a.m. At an event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C., investigative journalist Sonia Shah talked about her book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (FSG, $26, 9780374230012/0374230013). (Re-airs Sunday at 8 p.m. and Monday at 5 a.m.)

 


Book Review

Book Review: The Lady Matador's Hotel

The Lady Matador's Hotel by Cristina Garcia (Scribner Book Company, $24.00 Hardcover, 9781439181744, September 2010)

The cover alone is enough to recommend this sensuous novel from the author of Dreaming in Cuban. It depicts the back of the shapely body of the Lady Matador, gazing in a mirror, holding her cape and wearing only long pink stockings. The reflection in the mirror shows her tip-tilted eyes--Suki Palacios is a Japanese-Mexican-American matadora.

Open the book and you will immediately fall, happily, into this tropical, unnamed Central American setting, where six variously troubled lives intersecting at the Hotel Miraflor. Two familiar themes are revisited here: the "Grand Hotel"--any book or movie following the activities of various people in a large, busy place, with some of the characters' lives overlapping in odd ways and some of them remaining unaware of one another's existence--and magical realism, that Marquezian device whereby the real-here-and-now is informed by the otherworldly. Both are used to good effect.

Suki is at the hotel to compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. She follows rituals slavishly: donning her clothes in a certain order, lighting 14 candles for her deceased mother, eating a perfect pear before leaving the hotel and, "for extra luck, silent sex with a stranger two days before a fight."

Aura, a former guerrilla, works in the garden restaurant of the hotel, following her own ritual: spitting on the order she delivers to the colonel who murdered her brother. She is polite and subservient as she plots how she will kill him. Her brother, Julio, "arrives differently each time--on a gust of wind, in the plaintive call of a mourning dove, with the shifting, whispering leaves." He is exhorting her to avenge his death.

Won Kim is a Korean businessman whose business is failing, whose 15-year-old mistress is greatly pregnant and ensconced in the honeymoon suite at the hotel, costing him a fortune. He is contemplating suicide. There is a poet, Ricardo Morán, married to a harridan with whom he has just adopted a child through Gertrudis Stüber, a German lawyer who exploits poor peasant girls in rent-a-womb schemes to fulfill the wishes of wealthy foreigners. Colonel Martín Abel, the object of Aura's plot, makes speeches, lusts after the matadora and rails against his ex-wife, set to remarry and deprive him of his sons.

These players move on and off the stage in a rondo of events, with the exploits of the matadora providing the counterpoint. All six lives will be forever changed before Cristina García finishes weaving her multi-faceted, riveting story. She has created six disparate characters and stories and interspersed them with "news flashes" from the world outside the hotel, all told with wit, desperation, humor, pathos and heroism, shot through with gorgeous prose.--Valerie Ryan

Shelf Talker: Six troubed lives intersect in a Central American hotel as a matadora readies herself to compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas.

 



The Bestsellers

Top-Selling Titles in Chicagoland Last Week

The following were the bestselling titles at independent bookstores in and around Chicago during the week ended Sunday, August 15:

Hardcover Fiction

1. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3. Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
4. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
5. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth
2. Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain
3. The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry
4. Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
5. The Man Who Sold America by Jeffrey Cruikshank

Paperback Fiction

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
2. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
3. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
4. Little Bee by Chris Cleave
5. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Paperback Nonfiction

1. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
3. Food Rules by Michael Pollan
4. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
5. Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

Children's

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (based on advance orders)
3. The Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Moore
4. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
5. Good Night Chicago by Adam Gamble

Reporting bookstores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; the Book Table, Oak Park; the Book Cellar, Lincoln Square; Lake Forest Books, Lake Forest; the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka; and 57th St. Books; Seminary Co-op; Women and Children First, Chicago.

[Thanks to the booksellers and Carl Lennertz!]

 

 


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