This year Grove/Atlantic celebrates the 60th anniversary of Grove Press. Here, with the support of the publisher, Shelf Awareness celebrates by focusing on three spring titles of an especially strong list: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman, Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante and Here on Earth by Tim Flannery.

The stories were written by John Mutter and Shannon McKenna Schmidt.

Say Her Name "was my way of mourning Aura, to make sure she would never be forgotten--not by me or by anyone else," explained Francisco Goldman about the inspiration for his new novel.

In 2007, Goldman and his 30-year-old wife, writer and Columbia University graduate student Aura Estrada, were enjoying a much-anticipated holiday at a Mexican beach town. But then she had an accident while body surfing and died from her injuries.

In Say Her Name, which will be published in April, Goldman melds fact and fiction to create a vivid, compelling portrait of Aura's upbringing in Mexico, her literary and academic pursuits, their courtship and marriage, its heartbreaking end and his journey through grief. Some scenes, like his wife's accident and its aftermath, are entirely factual, while other scenarios, such as ones depicting her childhood, were imagined based on conversations the couple had or snippets from Aura's diaries.

"It's emotional and moving, but there's so much humor in it as well," said Elisabeth Schmitz, v-p and executive editor. "Frank brings Aura alive for all of us who didn't know her."

Goldman began writing Say Her Name five months after Aura's death and worked on it for three years. "Writing is my way to process things," he said. "I had no choice but to write this book. I always say that if I had been a mountain climber, after Aura's death I would have tried to climb the highest mountain. You deal with these things by relying on what you know how to do."

Goldman is the author of the novels The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman and The Divine Husband and one nonfiction work, The Art of Political Murder, all of which have been published by Grove/Atlantic. (The cover of Say Her Name features an image of Aura's wedding dress taken by publisher Morgan Entrekin's wife, photojournalist Rachel Cobb.)

When his other novels were published, Goldman worried about readers' reactions and reviews. "I don't feel that way with this book," he said. "This is not a book that one feels comfortable taking congratulations for. This book has a complete humility built into it. It's painful. There's so much loss associated with it that your reactions have to be humbled, and they naturally are. I feel this preternatural calm about it."

Say Her Name has struck a chord with other writers. Kiran Desai called the novel "a tender and sacred narrative, many-angled, fearless, incandescent in its frankness." When Annie Proulx was asked on the Leonard Lopate Show what she had read or seen recently that moved or surprised her, she mentioned two books, one of which was Say Her Name.

Earlier this month, a piece Goldman wrote based on Say Her Name ran in the New Yorker and elicited an outpouring of responses. "It was gratifying that people were so moved by it," he said. He was surprised, though, by the many notes of condolence he received. "That was a little freaky because I've worked really hard, and I'm not in bad shape at all right now," said Goldman. "I realized that, in some way, because of the book, I'm fixed in the reader's mind as this person who is plunged deep in traumatic grief."

Writing Say Her Name was far from cathartic for Goldman, but he felt he owed it to Aura to keep going. "There were some days when I wanted to escape, when I didn't want to be going back into my memories," he said. "It was a kind of self-immolation. Writing it deepened my sadness, but once the book was done I realized what an important step it had been. It really made me feel like I had completed a promise."

Woven throughout Say Her Name are excerpts from Aura's own short stories, poems and other writings. In 2008, Goldman established the Aura Estrada Prize, which is awarded biannually to a female writer 35 or under from the U.S. or Mexico who writes creative prose in Spanish.

What does Goldman suppose Aura would make of Say Her Name? "I think she would see how much I loved her."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

photo: Rachel Cobb

Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet is "a twin biography--of our planet and our species--and a distillation of all I've learned as an evolutionary biologist," Tim Flannery said of his latest book, which will be published in the U.S. in April. In the book, Flannery, a world-renowned scientist, discoverer, environmental activist and author of The Weather Makers, posits that "humans and the earth system co-evolve in ways analogous to ecosystems and bodies," a co-evolution that is key to a sustainable future.

While Darwin's famous theory of evolution has been understood as a brutal, amoral competition of the survival of the fittest, this is just a mechanism of evolution, Flannery said. Evolution's broader legacy consists of "co-evolved ecosystems, societies and a co-evolved planet," he explained. There is a recurring trend toward "equilibrium and stability," established through coordination and control mechanisms--a prime example being pheromones in ant societies.

Humans and human society have become "a globally linked, intelligent species" that has been able to influence planetary processes. While human civilization was not created "through reason but by evolution, by natural selection, its survival, however, depends on how we think." Unfortunately, at a time when the world needs people to use their brains, many today live in a state of "civilized imbecility," as Flannery put it. He explained: "One of the laws of social science is that people will put in as little mental effort as is required to achieve their ends. In times past, the challenge of survival was profound. Miss the leopard prowling round the campfire, and you were dead. But then, around 14,000 years ago, dogs joined us, and their sharp noses sensed danger long before we could. Perhaps the first dog-owners were also the first humans to get a good night's sleep. From that time, we've added ever more relationships and tools to aid our survival--and in the process our brains have shrunk by 10%."

Flannery has dedicated his extraordinary mind to influencing the debate about climate change, particularly in his homeland. Recently named Australia's Chief Climate Commissioner (he was Australian of the Year in 2007), his first task, he said, is to engage Parliament in a discussion about climate change, in which he hopes "to try to find some common ground." The record in Australia over the past three years should help convince those who doubt climate change, he said. The country has "suffered through its longest drought on record, most severe and deadly brushfire, most damaging floods and its largest cyclone in living memory. Such events should act as a sobering reminder of the kinds of cost and human tragedy involved should greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase."

With Here on Earth, Grove/Atlantic hopes to introduce Flannery, who has a sizable following in this country already, "to an even bigger audience," Entrekin said. "Here on Earth is not just for people interested in global climate change. It's a fantastic ecological history of the planet."

Grove/Atlantic has published eight books by Tim Flannery, whom Entrekin called "not just a world-class scientist with impeccable bona fides, but a great science writer, a naturally gifted writer. His knowledge is deep and broad, and unlike some very learned people, he can communicate it." This is Flannery's first major book since The Weather Makers, which Entrekin became so impassioned about that he sent more than 7,000 copies to congresspeople, governors, cabinet members, mayors of the top 150 cities and newspaper editors. His enclosed letter included a note at the bottom to the secretaries or assistants who might read it, urging them to pass the book to their bosses. This resulted in some interesting responses and exchanges of ideas. (Karl Rove wrote back, "What makes you think I don't read my own mail?")

Although Flannery has an obvious focus on Australia, he has written "a biography of North America" called The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples and spent a year in the U.S. in 1999. "I love the place," he said. He'll be back in late April and early May for two weeks, making appearances for Here on Earth at, among other venues, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cooper Union in New York City, the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia's Academy of Science and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He will also appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Here on Earth was published in Australia by Text Publishing in October. Judging from its reception there, the book should do well here. The Sydney Morning Herald called Here on Earth "a high watermark in popular science writing and an impressive feat of science salesmanship. It would take a hard, uncomprehending heart to come away from this book without enriched sympathy for the natural world."

Flannery is working on his next book, tentatively titled Throwim Way Paddle, collecting reminiscences of his decades of research in the Pacific Islands. "It's great fun recalling all the fun and excitement of my early days as a field biologist," he said.--John Mutter

While watching an episode of a BBC television show featuring Sherlock Holmes, creative writing instructor Alice LaPlante's partner asked her if she would consider writing a mystery. Rather than tell a story from a detective's viewpoint, "I thought I could better imagine my way into the suspect's mind," said LaPlante. That night she wrote the opening scene of her debut novel, Turn of Mind, which will be published in July.

Dr. Jennifer White is no ordinary murder suspect. The 64-year-old retired hand surgeon is suffering from Alzheimer's, a disease that has affected LaPlante's mother for several years. After White's best friend and neighbor, Amanda, is killed and four of her fingers surgically removed, the detectives on the case believe she committed the murder. As the investigation deepens and White slips further and further into dementia, a central question emerges. Is her shattered memory preventing her from revealing the truth about the night Amanda died or helping her to hide it?

Elisabeth Schmitz, v-p and executive editor of Grove/Atlantic said that Turn of Mind is "an astonishing portrait of a fragmenting mind, but it's also a page-turning, compelling mystery. Alice has merged these two ideas beautifully."

The narrative is told from White's perspective in the first person, revealing her close yet often contentious friendship with Amanda, her complex relationships with her enigmatic late husband and her children and her accomplished medical career. "It reminds me of Patricia Highsmith, these interesting characters that are complicated, sharp and edgy, and quite dark," Schmitz continued. White responds to her condition with wry humor, even creating a Letterman-like list of "Top 10 Signs You Have Alzheimer's" (#2: You keep discovering new rooms in your house).

Writing Turn of Mind turned out to be a fairly quick endeavor for LaPlante. "I've been teaching for 20 years, so I'm really immersed in craft and process," she said. "I wasn't worrying about how to build a scene or how to mix scene and narrative. I knew how to do that and so it was really just the story that had to come out."

In addition to crafting fiction and teaching at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, LaPlante does business writing. (She holds both an undergrad degree in writing and an MBA.) Her work has appeared in the Southwest Review and Epoch and also in Discover and Business Week. She is the author of four nonfiction books, among them Method and Madness: The Making of a Story--A Guide to Writing Fiction.

When Schmitz and several others at Grove/Atlantic first read Turn of Mind, which was purchased at auction, they found the novel "immediately gripping," she said. It's one that will appeal to readers of both literary and commercial fiction as well as "people who are trying to get some insight into the mind of an Alzheimer's patient," added Schmitz. "It's rare to find a book that works well on so many levels at once."

Turn of Mind is set in LaPlante's hometown of Chicago. About every six weeks she travels to the Windy City from her home in Palo Alto, Calif., to help care for her mother. Having a personal connection to someone with Alzheimer's was one catalyst for the novel, but LaPlante was careful to avoid making the story autobiographical. "I was vigilant about that, with one exception," she said. "Jennifer's parents are my grandparents. It's more an homage to them than revealing any family secrets."

Early in the writing process, LaPlante asked her father whether he would mind if she wrote about Alzheimer's and received his support. She sent one of the first advance reading copies to a brother with whom she has a close relationship. "He gave me the response that I would dream of getting, in how he was impacted by the book," she said.

LaPlante has been visiting booksellers from coast to coast in a pre-publication blitz for Turn of Mind. "When I meet booksellers and librarians who have read it, the response has been so wonderful that I'm less nervous than I would have been if it was thrown out there without this advance peek into readers' minds," she said. "I'm thrilled. It's a book close to my heart."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

Grove/Atlantic's spring/summer list is "one of the best we've ever had," president and publisher Morgan Entrekin said. "Every publisher tries to have a list like this, but things are not always under our control, and sometimes it just happens." Noting the "incredible support" that Matterhorn received a year ago at the 2010 ABA Winter Institute and that Say Her Name and Turn of Mind received last month at this year's Winter Institute, Entrekin joked, "I'm not sure what we're going to do in 2012."

In May, the company is publishing the paperback edition of Matterhorn, which now has shipped more than 185,000 copies in hardcover. "We have big expectations for this," Entrekin said. Fans of the Vietnam War-era novel will be happy to hear that author Karl Marlantes has a new book coming soon, a nonfiction title that based on his reading of history and "what it means to go to war," as Entrekin put it.

Also in May, the company is publishing Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall by Will Self, a satirical novel about who "killed the movie." The book marks a return to Grove by Self, whose last three books were published by Bloomsbury. Grove has his backlist, which includes Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Great Apes and Grey Area. "I'm happy he's back," Entrekin commented.

Nobody's Perfect: Two Men, One Call, and a Game for Baseball History by Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce with Daniel Paisner is about one of the strangest moments in baseball, which occurred last season: umpire Joyce blew the call on a play that would have been the last out of a perfect game by Detroit Tigers pitcher Galarraga. Entrekin called it "one of the most moving sports stories I've ever heard because both of them behaved so impeccably and honorably right away."

Joyce grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where his parents worked in a Jeep factory, and he struggled for years as an umpire in the minor leagues. Galarraga comes from a middle-class family in Venezuela and signed to be a professional baseball player at a young age. "Nobody's Perfect ends with the game, when Joyce, who has long been considered an excellent umpire by players, inexplicably missed the call," Entrekin added. "He admitted immediately that he had a perfect view and blew it." Grove is publishing Nobody's Perfect on June 2, the anniversary of the game.

In April, Grove is publishing Drawing Conclusions, Donna Leon's 20th mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, a police commissioner in Venice. Leon had been published in the U.S. in the late '80s and early '90s by the late Larry Ashmead, but then she stopped, though she continued to publish in Europe with ever-increasing popularity. For a while, Leon, an American who has lived in Venice for more than a quarter century, turned down offers to be published here, but about seven or eight years ago, Entrekin was introduced to her work by her British editor. "I had in mind to do more mystery and thriller books and loved her work," he said. "For a year and a half I sent Donna notes and copies of our books and catalogues. Finally she was persuaded." Now Grove publishes Leon's titles in hardcover, and in a co-venture, Kathryn Court at Penguin publishes Leon in paperback. Grove has reissued Leon's backlist.

Entrekin called this "a kind of a strange time in publishing. The best thing we can do is to continue to try to find the best books possible and publish as effectively and enthusiastically as possible." And so it does.

photo by Graham Haber

Francisco Goldman is the author of three other novels: The Divine Husband, The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman; and one work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder. He directs the Premio Aura Estrada/Aura Estrada Prize. Goldman divides his time between Mexico City and Brooklyn.

On your nightstand now:

The Empty Family, Colm Toibin; The Long Goodbye, Meghan O'Rourke.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A four-way tie, via the stages of childhood: Green Eggs and Ham; Charlotte's Web; Pro Quarterback by Y.A. Tittle and Howard Liss; The Catcher in the Rye.

Your top five authors:

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Borges.

Book you've faked reading:

Gravity's Rainbow, I'm embarrassed to admit. Will try again.

Books you're an evangelist for:

Mis diás en Shanghai by Aura Estrada. Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Rafael Bernal's El complot mongol. The Black Minutes by Martin Solares. Bolaño's books; also Coetzee's and Thomas Bernhard's. Always, Pnin.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen--I wanted the super cute young woman on the cover to be my girlfriend.

Book that changed your life:

War and Peace--I fell hard, and sort of formatively, for Natasha. Love in the Time of Cholera--the way it influenced my idea of what a marriage should be, I guess.

Favorite line from a book: currently, from Swann's Way: "...for one thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that it's reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality. "

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

War and Peace.

Tim Flannery is a writer, scientist and explorer. He has written many award-winning books, including The Future Eaters, Thowim Way Leg and Country. His 2005 The Weather Makers became an international bestseller. He is a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, the National Geographic Society's Australasian representative and a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. In January 2007, Flannery was named Australian of the Year, and in February 2011 he was named Australia's first Chief Commissioner for climate change.

On your nightstand now:

A battered Penguin translation of the Chinese classic, Monkey--on loan from my son; Volume 3 of The Memoirs of Casanova--a gift from my wife; Annie Proulx's memoir, Bird Cloud--newly arrived.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A Complete Guide to Dinosaurs.

Your top five authors:

Samuel Pepys. Redmond O'Hanlon, Peter Matthiessen, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Grenville.

Book you've faked reading:

No, couldn't do that. If you asked what book I'd read and never fully grasped, it would be Joyce's Ulysses--a book that you sense as you read yet can never really know.

Book you're an evangelist for:

The First Fleet Diary of Watkin Tench (1788). Foundation book for Australia. Read Tench and you fall for a person, a people and their land.

Book you've bought for the cover:

No, don't do that either, but I was really struck by the cover of the first edition of Anna Funder's Stasiland and what was inside was even better.

Book that changed your life:

Luigi D'Albertis, New Guinea: What I Did And What I Saw (1881)

Favorite line from a book:

"A man's heart was a deep pocket he might turn out and be amazed at what he found there."--Kate Grenville, The Secret River

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

Pepys's diaries. I'll do them all again one day.

Alice LaPlante teaches at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, where she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and held a Jones Lectureship. Raised in Chicago, she now lives with her family in Northern California.

On your nightstand now:

Room by Emma Donoghue. I haven't actually started it yet, but have high expectations; Men at Arms, the first book in Evelyn Waugh's Sword at Arms trilogy, which I am reading for the umpteenth time to marvel at Waugh's wit and brevity; and Father of the Rain by Lily King. My editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, gave it to me, and I swallowed it in a single sitting.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit.

Your top five authors:

Alice Munro; Denis Johnson; Joy Williams; Evelyn Waugh (as you can guess from my comments above); Anthony Burgess (how on earth has he fallen from sight?).

Book you've faked reading:

I hope I don't sound superior, but I don't fake it. It's too easy to get busted by smart undergraduates.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. I frequently use it in teaching and learn from it every time.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. What an amazing photograph, but it somewhat misrepresents the book.

Book that changed your life:

Howards End by E.M. Forster. It was the first of Forster's books I read. I was completely bowled over by his generosity, intelligence, and humanity. I felt recognized.

Favorite line from a book:

From "Helpin" by Robert Stone. Elliot, having just fallen off the wagon after two years of sobriety, recalls a line from Medea: "Old friend, I have to weep. The gods and I went mad together and made things as they are."

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

A professor of mine at Stanford, Nancy Packer, told me more than a decade ago that she was looking forward to the forgetfulness of old age so she could discover Trollope again. It took me five years to get around to reading him. And I understood precisely what she meant. For myself, I'd choose Jane Austen's Persuasion. I love the dark undercurrent of the narrative, the sense that Anne is dangerously near the abyss. Although when I reread the book, I'm always relieved when Captain Wentworth rescues Anne in the end. It seems to me that Austen is struggling with demons that weren't acknowledged in her earlier work. Or maybe my own efforts to come to terms with middle age make me project things into the text that aren't there. Nevertheless, I would be delighted to read it with fresh eyes.

The following timeline traces the house's amazing publishing record and the course of its anti-censorship battles.

1951: Barney Rosset publishes three neglected masterworks: The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville, The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw by Richard Crashaw and Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn by Aphra Behn.

1954: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is published.

1957: First issue of Evergreen Review, Grove's literary magazine, is published.

1958: Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac is published.

1959: Grove publishes Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, which is promptly deemed obscene by the federal government. Grove challenges the decision and wins on the grounds that the book's literary merit justifies publication.

Barney Rosset publishes the 30-page ruling against U.S. Postal Service and in favor of Grove Press in Evergreen Review No. 9

1960: The Zoo Story by Edward Albee is published in the Evergreen Review.

1961: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller is published, but publication is stopped due to obscenity charges.

1962: Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges is published.

1962: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs is published and challenged on grounds of obscenity.

Evergreen Review No. 32 launches as a glossy, visually oriented magazine. Detectives from Nassau County's Vice Squad raid the printing plant on Long Island and carry off 21,000 unbound copies of the issue.

1963: City of Night by John Rechy is published.

1964: The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet is published.

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. is published.

The U.S. Supreme Court allows the unobstructed publication of Tropic of Cancer.

1965: Four Novels by Marguerite Duras is published.

The Supreme Court of Massachusetts rules that Naked Lunch is not obscene, echoing a 1965 ruling in California, the site of the only other action against the book.

1967: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard is published.

1968: Bolivian Diaries by Che Guevara is published.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon is published.

1969: Samuel Beckett receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe is published.

1971: Pablo Neruda receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1974: Five Decades by Pablo Neruda is published.

1975: Barney Rosset writes letter for financial help to the New York Times.

1977: American Buffalo by David Mamet is published.

Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties by Allen Ginsberg is published.

1981: John Kennedy Toole wins Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces.

1984: Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker is published.

1985: Hurlyburly by David Rabe is published.

1987: Penelope Lively wins the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson is published.

1988: Bharati Mukherjee receives the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Middleman and Other Stories.

1989: Camilo José Cela receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1990: Octavio Paz receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ron Chernow receives the National Book Award for The House of Morgan.

1992: Francisco Goldman is a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Long Night of White Chickens.

1993: Grove Press merges with Atlantic Monthly Press to form Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is published.

1994: Kenzaburo Oe receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1995: The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski is reissued in a Grove paperback.

1996: The Magic Christian by Terry Southern is reissued in a Grove edition.

Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell is published.

1997: Dario Fo receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Great Apes by Will Self is published.

Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson is published.

Charles Frazier receives the National Book Award for Cold Mountain.

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann is reissued.

1998: Sarah Lindsay is a National Book Award finalist for Primate Behavior.

1999: Mark Bowden is a National Book Award finalist for Black Hawk Down.

2003: Richard Flanagan receives the Commonwealth Prize for Gould's Book of Fish.

Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile is published.

2004: Elfriede Jelinek receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Black Cat imprint revived.

2005: Harold Pinter receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

2006: Kiran Desai wins the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss.

2007: Anne Enright wins the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering.

Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas is published.

2008: Kay Ryan appointed the Library of Congress's 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

2009: Michael Thomas received the International Dublin/IMPAC Literary Award for Man Gone Down.

Steve Hely receives the Thurber Prize for American Humor for How I Became a Famous Novelist.

2010: Sherman Alexie wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for War Dances.