Shelf Awareness for Thursday, September 23, 2010


Grove Press: 33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen

Berkley Books: These new Berkley romances leave quite an impression. Enter the giveaway!

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: How Sweet the Sound by Kwame Alexander and Charly Palmer

Palgrave Macmillan:  Scotus 2023: Major Decisions and Developments of the Us Supreme Court (2024) (1ST ed.) edited by Morgan Marietta and Howard Schweber

NYU Advanced Publishing Institute: Register today!

Frances Lincoln Ltd: Dear Black Boy by Martellus Bennett

Soho Crime: Broken Fields by Marcie R. Rendon

Quotation of the Day

Bricks & Mortar Option: 'Wander-Browse-Sample-Done'

"Indie bricks and mortar bookstores may not always be able to satisfy that desire for 'search-find-click-done' instantaneity, but they do have an edge in browseability. And I would give a physical bookstore the edge in what I might describe in parallel terms as 'wander-browse-sample-done.... If all your book-buying is done online, you might find that your local physical bookstore is no longer there when you have one of those 'I wonder what life will put in my path' sort of days. And that would be a shame."

--John Mesjak, founder and editor of my3books.com and an independent sales representative, in the Huffington Post.

 


Disruption Books: How We Heal: A Journey Toward Truth, Racial Healing, and Community Transformation from the Inside Out by La June Montgomery Tabron


News

Image of the Day: Booksellers Class of Fall '10

Prospective booksellers hailing from from Victoria, Canada, Florida, Colorado, even the Kingdom of Bahrain gathered last week on Amelia Island, Fla., for the Fall 2010 workshop retreat Opening A Bookstore: The Business Essentials facilitated by the Bookstore Training Group of Paz & Associates and co-sponsored by the American Booksellers Association. They included (back row, from l.) Ty Williams, Kate Rattenborg, Linda Merwin, Teresa Kirschbraun, Kappy Kling, Peggy Evans, Paula Baughan; (front row, from l.) Judy Hutson, Lesley McNeely, Rana Aljalahma, Olga Bof and trainers Donna Paz Kaufman and Mark Kaufman.

 

 

 


Inner Traditions: Deck the Stacks with the Best Holiday & Gift Books for Self-Transformation! Claim your samples now!


Notes: 2nd Hand & Charles; Wellesley Booksmith Sold

Books-A-Million apparently has set up a retail division that will buy and sell used books, movies, music and computer games and is opening the first of these stores, called 2nd & Charles, in Birmingham, Ala., according to the Birmingham Business Journal. Birmingham is where BAM's headquarters is located.

Until now, BAM, which has more than 200 stores in 19 states and the District of Columbia, has sold a range of new books, magazines, newspapers and sidelines. Because of the recession, "value" retailing has been the strongest segment in general retail in the last two years.

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Wellesley Booksmith, Wellesley, Mass., has been bought by Bill and Gillian Kohli, who live in Wellesley, according to the Wellesley Townsman. They bought the store from Marshall Smith, who established the store in 1999 in an old Lauriat's space and who remains the primary owner of Brookline Booksmith in nearby Brookline.

Gillian Kohli has a background in engineering and law and will become president of Wellesley Booksmith. Bill Kohli is a portfolio manager of Putnam Investments and will work at the store weekends and some evenings.

The Kohlis are retaining the staff, including manager Deb Sundin and assistant manager Kym Havens. "The booksellers themselves are so knowledgeable about all the books and products, and provide a lot of guidance for people who are not quite sure of what they want," Gillian Kohli told the paper. She added that she doesn't anticipate making changes.

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Chicklet Books, in the Princeton Shopping Center in Princeton, N.J., is holding a major sale to clear out space in its basement level to make room for the inventory of Glen Echo bookstore, which closed its downtown Princeton storefront, according to Town Topics. Both stores are owned by Deb Hunter, who said that Glen Echo, the used and collectibles bookstore opened six years ago, "wasn't pulling its weight." It will operate as a separate bookstore in its new location.

Chicklet will continue as "a fun and funky book boutique," Hunter said, but add "things like New York Times bestsellers." In addition, Hunter is aiming to collaborate with other businesses to create, for example, a section of books devoted to Princetoniana and a wine section.

 

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A recent Harris Interactive Poll of 2,775 adults found that "people with e-book devices are not only reading more than other Americans, but also more than they did before they owned the technology," Information Week reported.

"Those who have e-readers do, in fact, read more," said Regina A. Corso, director of the Harris Poll. "Overall, two in five Americans (40%) read 11 or more books a year with one in five reading 21 or more books in a year (19%). But among those who have an e-reader, over one-third read 11-20 books a year (36%) and over one-quarter read 21 or more books in an average year (26%)."

Information Week observed that these results "should also relieve some of the anxieties of the physical book publishing industry, because it showed that users of e-readers are more likely to purchase books. 'One in five Americans (21%) say they have not purchased any books in the past year compared to only 8% of e-reader users who say the same,' according to Harris.... At the moment, it is too early to tell for sure, but this early evidence is pointing to something good. People seem to be reading more if they have an e-reader which is something the publishing industry, which has been decline over recent years, is sure to celebrate."

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After 15 years at the UCLA campus in Westwood, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which has grown into one of the biggest in the country, is moving to the University of Southern California's University Park Campus, near downtown Los Angeles, when it is held next year, April 30-May 1.

Last year more than 140,000 people attended the festival, which offers exhibits, readings, signings, q&as, children's activities and more.

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This just in!

 

The Wall Street Journal examines the ever increasing popularity of paperback originals--"a format viewed by some as publishing's poor cousin"--especially for "young authors with no track record, midcareer authors with a challenging track record and international authors being published for the first time in the U.S."

One example: One Day by David Nicholls, published by Vintage this summer, a strong seller in the U.K. that now has 300,000 copies in print in the U.S. As a result, some day the next David Nicholls book here will appear first in hardcover.

 

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Gwen Cooper shared more than a reading when she appeared at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, N.C., last week to promote the paperback edition of Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat. As she reported on her blog, she presented a check for $10,000 to Alana Miller, director of the Blind Cat Rescue and Sanctuary, in St. Pauls, N.C. Cooper is donating 10% of all domestic royalties from Homer's Odyssey to organizations that serve abused, abandoned and disabled pets.

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Book trailer of the day: The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For--A Direct Democracy Toolkit by Jamie Court (Chelsea Green).

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Not many authors stop traffic, but Andrew Marr can now make that claim after 15 tons worth of his new book The Making of Modern Britain spilled from an overturned truck on the A4 Bath Road in Theale, Berkshire. BBC News reported that "one lane was shut through the night and reopened at about 1300 BST after a clear-up. The driver was unhurt."

"Firstly, apologies to anyone who has been inconvenienced on the roads," Marr said "But I can't decide whether it is a complete disastrous story for me or a triumphant one. Is it Marr's latest rotten book has been taken off to be pulped and the British transport system can't cope? Or whether public demand is so extreme that the road system has given way under the pressure, who knows? The publishers do tend to keep lorry-loads of books pretty much on the roads for 24-hours-a-day in case of emergencies. I just hope none have been lost in battle today and will eventually go to grateful owners."

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Children's author Cathy Cassidy selected her top 10 stories about sisters for the Guardian, noting that "I had a little brother, but I never did get a sister, so sister stories have always been endlessly appealing to me. In my friendships, I have often looked for something of the family as well, and have been lucky enough to find it. These days, I find that friendships, and the challenge of getting them right, are at the heart of every book I write."

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A memorial meeting and reception for Paul Casimir Williams, who died last month (Shelf Awareness, August 24, 2010), will be held Saturday, October 16, at 11 a.m. at the Meeting House of the Fifteenth Street Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in New York City at 15 Rutherford Place, near East 15th St. and Second Avenue. In Quaker style, all those attending are welcome to speak. A reception, including lunch fare and beverages, will follow. If you plan to attend, please RSVP to Livia Tenzer at ltenzer@gmail.com.

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Brooke Ann Borneman has joined Diamond Book Distributors as a sales manager. She will be based in New York City and, among other duties, will call on Barnes & Noble, Bookazine, Hudson Booksellers, HMS Host and the News Group. She has worked in book publishing more than 17 years, most recently as national sales director at Dorchester Publishing.

 

 


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G.L.O.W. - Galley Love of the Week
Be the first to have an advance copy!
Ordinary Time:
Lessons Learned While Staying Put
by Annie B. Jones
GLOW: HarperOne: Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put by Annie B. Jones

In Ordinary Time, indie bookstore owner and podcaster Annie B. Jones shares tender wisdom and lessons learned while living in a small Southern town for more than 30 years. "Annie is one of us," says Angela Guzman, senior editor at HarperOne. "If you have ever dreamed, if you've ever questioned whether you've made the right choices for your life, or if you have ever wanted more... this book is for you." Watching others move away and move on, Jones wraps readers in a comforting narrative woven like a beautiful quilt, composed of passionate, personal stories rooted in themes of love, marriage, family, faith, and friendship. The day-to-day, small-town moments she shares will undoubtedly inspire others to find meaning, joy, and purpose in life no matter where they live. --Kathleen Gerard

(HarperOne, $26.99 hardcover, 9780063411272, April 22, 2025)

CLICK TO ENTER


#ShelfGLOW
Shelf vetted, publisher supported

Media and Movies

Media Heat: Ingrid Betancourt

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Ingrid Betancourt, author of Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle (Penguin Press, $29.95, 9781594202650/1594202656).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Vince Neil, author of Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen (Grand Central, $27.99, 9780446548045/0446548049).

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Tomorrow on Oprah: a segment on the documentary Waiting for 'Superman', including an excerpt from the book Waiting for ‘Superman': How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools edited by Karl Weber (PublicAffairs, $15.95, 9781586489274/1586489275).

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Tomorrow on the View: Michael Eisner, author of Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed (HarperBusiness, $25.99, 9780061732362/0061732362).

 


Movies: The Zookeeper's Wife

Scion Films has acquired the screen rights to Diane Ackerman The Zookeeper's Wife. Variety reported that Angela Workman, who will write the screenplay, "has adapted other notable tomes, including 1421 for Warner Bros. and, most recently, Lisa See's bestselling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which Fox Searchlight will release. Other credits include Bronte."

 


Television: The Lost Girls

ABC has picked up "an untitled hourlong project" by Jerry Bruckheimer Television based on the blog LostGirlsWorld.com and the book The Lost Girls by Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett and Amanda Pressner, "who had been climbing the corporate ladder of Manhattan media, left their jobs, boyfriends, apartments and everything familiar behind to embark on a year-long search for adventure and inspiration," Deadline.com reported, noting that the project "draws parallels to another female-centered travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love." 

 


This Weekend on Book TV: Meghan McCain

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, September 25

8 a.m. Thomas Woods, author of Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century (Regnery, $24.95, 9781596981492/1596981490), examines the legal theory of nullification, the belief that a state has the ability to void a federal law it deems unconstitutional. (Re-airs Sunday at 7 a.m. and 2 p.m.)

9:30 a.m. Book TV presents live coverage of the 2010 National Book Festival from the National Mall in Washington, D.C. programming will include event coverage from the history and biography pavilion, author interviews and national viewer phone calls with authors including Laura Bush, David Remnick, Nell Irvin Painter, Wil Haygood, Evan Thomas, Adele Logan Alexander, James McGrath Morris, Richard Holmes and Stacy Schiff. (Re-airs Saturday at 11 p.m.)

7 p.m. For an event hosted by Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, Ariz., Meghan McCain, author of Dirty Sexy Politics (Hyperion, $23.99, 9781401323776/1401323774), talks about the 2008 presidential campaign, her conservatism and the current political landscape. (Re-airs Sunday at 11 p.m. and Monday at 5 a.m.)

9 p.m. Sally Pipes, author of The Truth About Obamacare: What They Don't Want You to Know About Our New Health Care Law (Regnery, $16.95, 9781596986367/1596986360), argues that the plan will leave 23 million Americans uninsured and cost taxpayers $1 trillion over 10 years. (Re-airs Sunday at 11 a.m., Monday at 1 a.m., Saturday, October 2, at 11 a.m. and Monday, October 4, at 4 a.m.)

10 p.m. After Words. Dan Moshenberg interviews Louise Knight, author of Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (Norton, $28.95, 9780393071658/0393071650). Knight discusses the contributions to American culture and politics by Addams, the first American female to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m. and Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m.)

Sunday, September 26

10 a.m. Rebecca Traister, author of Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women (Free Press, $26, 9781439150283/1439150281), explores the influence women had on the 2008 presidential election. Sunday 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., Monday at 6 a.m. and Sunday, October 3, at 8 a.m.)

8 p.m. For an event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C., Jonathan Weiner, author of Longing for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality (Ecco, $27.99, 9780060765361/0060765364), talks about a group of scientists and entrepreneurs who are working to achieve human immortality. (Re-airs Monday at 2 a.m. and Monday at 7 a.m.)

 



Books & Authors

Awards: PEN Literary Winners

The PEN Literary Awards, sponsored by the PEN American Center, have been announced. A ceremony honoring winners and runners up will take place in New York City on Wednesday, October 13:

PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers ($35,000): Paul Harding for Tinkers
PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction ($25,000): Don DeLillo
PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career ($10,000): Susan Choi
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000): Michael Scammell for Koestler
PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for a Master American Dramatist (prize consists of a gift from Bauman Rare Books): David Mamet
PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career ($7,500): Theresa Rebeck
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): Marshall Jon Fisher for A Terrible Splendor
PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000): Pat Schmatz
PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry ($5,000): Marilyn Hacker
PEN/Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature ($3,000): Esteban Bedoya for El Apocalipsis según Benedicto
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): Anne Carson for her translation from the Greek of An Oresteia
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): Michael Henry Heim for his translation from the Dutch of Wonder by Hugo Claus

Open Book Awards ($1,000):

Sherwin Bitsui for Flood Song
Robin D.G. Kelley for Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Canyon Sam for Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge

 


Shelf Starter: Boozehound

Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits by Jason Wilson (Ten Speed Press, $22.99, 9781580082884/1580082882, September 21, 2010)

 

Opening lines from a book we want to read:

 

A few years ago, I was at a fancy party with several people who have successful careers in what's commonly called lifestyle journalism. We were drinking special cocktails made with a very special gin that had been infused with cucumbers and rose petals, and mixed with rose water that had been specially imported form Lebanon.

I was chatting with a beautiful, sexy friend who wrote for a magazine that covers luxury spa vacations. She got that job, in part, because she wrote a travel book about bathing culture that one critic claimed "bred a new publishing hybrid, the beauty-travel memoir, Bruce Chatwin by way of Allure magazine."

As we chatted, I shared some good news with her: I had just been hired to write a column for a major newspaper about spirits and cocktails.

 "You really should meet my friend," she told me. "He's the perfume critic at the Times."

 "Really?" I said. "Let me just see if I'm hearing this correctly. The luxury spa columnist would like the spirits columnist to meet the perfume columnist."

 "Yes," she said, with a beautiful, sexy smile.

 "Wait," I said. "Did you just hear that?"

 "What?"

 "Oh, nothing," I said. "I just thought for a second that I heard the sound of the Apocalypse happening."

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

 

 


Book Review

Book Review: Mink River

Mink River by Brian Doyle (Oregon State University Press, $18.95 Paperback, 9780870715853, October 2010)


Brian Doyle loves words; big words, small words, fancy words, plain words, exotic words, domesticated words, adjectives, verbs and nouns especially, and because he loves words he piles them up in great juicy heaps of phrases and paragraphs and sentences and pages and whole books and makes delicious stories with them, stories about impossibly possible events and a talking crow who loves football and cares for a nun in her last days, bringing her bits of fish, dusting her room with his wings and getting drunk on wine with her, and people with unusual names, and then he tells us why they have those names because he is a first-rate storyteller who has a story to tell in this book but also digresses into disquisitions on the bicycle and Puccini and Irish lore galore and frequent quotes from Ecclesiastes and William Blake, another writer who burns "always with this hard, gemlike flame," and occasionally interspersed with bursts of Italian or Latin or Gaelic, and all of this with the wonder of a child, the soul of a poet, the compassion of a saint, the pen of an angel, the imagination of an inventor and the wisdom of a sage.
The story he has to tell is about the village of Neawanaka, on the Oregon coast; "on a clear day the Oregon coast is the most beautiful place on earth--clear and crisp and clean, a rich green in the land and a bright blue in the sky, the air fat and salty and bracing, the ocean spreading like a grin," one of those rainy places with not too many people so they all know each other and where may be found "Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries," but mostly it's about people, some of whom call themselves the People, the ones who have been there forever, and then a random collection of garden variety others. The People are the ones with the different names like Worried Man, who can smell pain and trouble and run to fix it, and Maple Head, his wife, who teaches school, and Cedar, a man they fished out of the river too long ago to remember, who has a very big story he doesn't tell, and No Horses, who hit a bad patch in her art work but then it got fixed, her husband, Owen, and their son, Daniel, who goes off a cliff on his bicycle, and Moses, that crow, who tells everyone where to find him and then instructs a she-bear to carry him to safety, and a doctor, a policeman, a very bad man and some young people just finding their way. "There's a story in everything and the more stories I hear the less sad I am." Indeed. And that is only the beginning of the wonders herein. --Valerie Ryan

Shelf Talker: A real storyteller gets going full speed ahead into an Oregon village filled with extraordinary people, a talking crow, a she-bear who follows instructions, a landscape fragrant with green growing things and a great glowing heart at the center of it all.

 


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