Amazon.com's homepage was down temporarily yesterday. TechCrunch reported that the outage "was noticed by Hacker News contributor Nathan Bashaw at around 11:40 a.m. PT. Needless to say, a more than 40 minute-long outage for a site as massive as Amazon.com is very unusual."

Gizmodo featured Twitter posts by hacker group "Nazi Gods," who claimed responsibility for the attack, but after further investigation noted there is "reason enough to doubt the claim. It's hard to imagine that Amazon puts its entire homepage--its most vital property--entirely on one server.... Sources close to Amazon have told us that the outage was not related to any outside group. We'll update if there's more to say, but it sounds like old NaziGods was full of it after all."

In a statement, Amazon said its homepage "was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes," but other pages remained accessible and its AWS cloud-computing services were not affected, the Wall Street Journal reported.

This week the U.S. Small Business Administration launched a new Web page and a blog, Health Care Business Pulse, to help educate small business owners about the Affordable Care Act. Bookselling This Week reported that the initiative "is designed to connect small business owners to information provided by SBA's federal partners responsible for implementing the law, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services."

"The Affordable Care Act provides small business owners with access and opportunity to provide affordable health care options for their employees," said SBA Administrator Karen G. Mills. "SBA's new Affordable  Care Act Web page and blog will serve as a resource for small business owners who want learn more about how to take advantage of these benefits."

Left Hand Books, an all volunteer, not-for-profit bookstore that opened in Boulder, Colo., in 1979, will close April 15. On the store's Facebook page yesterday, Louise Knapp, a member of the collective that owns Left Hand Books, wrote: "We do this with much sadness, and after a year of deliberating on our options and looking for solutions. The closing is necessitated by the changing nature of the book business, and of the myriad ways that people are now able to get information.... We are grateful to everyone--volunteers, customers, teachers/faculty, supporters and donors--who have helped make Left Hand Books a success for all these years."

Just hours before the announcement of the closure, Boulder activist Jim Zarichny, one of the collective's founders, died. He was 89. Friend and Left Hand volunteer Dave Anderson remembered him as "an incredibly intelligent and very sweet person. He was always helping out in social movements and always concerned with what was going on in the world and how it make it a better place."

The Independent Book Publishers Association is launching the Benjamin Franklin Digital Awards, which will honor achievement in electronic book publishing by individuals and organizations of all sizes, including publishers, developers, designers, manufacturers, institutions and technology leaders. Entries will be judged in four categories: e-books, enhanced e-books, books as apps and new technologies.
 
The BFDA will serve as a companion to IBPA's Benjamin Franklin Awards for print. For both award programs, every entrant receives feedback from the judges regarding product improvement.
 
Unlike most awards, the BFDA is a rolling awards program--submissions will be accepted year round.

IBPA presents gold and silver award of excellence honorees with promotional opportunities that include announcements on IBPA's website and all social media outlets, in the monthly magazine, the Independent, to industry publications and more. Honorees will also be featured at an event at IBPA's annual Publishing University, to be held April 26-27 in Chicago.

Carolyn Forsman, "a former librarian who supported free expression by becoming an award-winning jewelry designer and creating pieces that celebrated the freedom to read, including her well-known 'I Read Banned Books' bracelet," died January 19, Bookselling this Week reported. She was 69.

"Carolyn was a gifted artist and entrepreneur who never lost her interest in defending intellectual freedom," said Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. "She raised more than $150,000 for free expression groups, including ABFFE."

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Ferrol Sams, "a country physician known among friends for his freely offered opinions and among his readers for his novels," died Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. He was 90. His work included the trilogy Run with the Horsemen, The Whisper of the River and When All the World Was Young.

On Tuesday night, Peggy and Tim Hansen had what Peggy called "our proudest moment": the owners of Highland Books, Brevard, N.C., for 37 years hosted a signing for daughter Megan Hansen Shepherd's first book, a teen gothic thriller called The Madman's Daughter, just out from HarperCollins and first in a trilogy. (The book has been optioned for Paramount, and Harper has signed her for another trilogy.) Between 300 and 400 people attended the launch, and the store sold 300 copies in two hours. Here proud mom Peggy with Megan, who "grew up in the store."

New Orleans, Seattle, Cleveland and Sacramento are the latest entries in Ploughshares magazine's Literary Boroughs series, which explores "little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally."

New Orleans may be getting most of its publicity this week as the site of Sunday's NFL Super Bowl, but the "literary arts are particularly on the rise in the Crescent City, characterized by an influx of writers and an exponential increase in readings and events over the past couple years," Ploughshares reported.

The city also "has the same number of bookshops per capita as Manhattan," including Octavia Books ("hosts perhaps the most active reading series for authors with newly-published books"), Maple Street Bookshop and Garden District Book Shop.

"Seattle doesn't have the literary history of a Boston or a New York, but it's become a mecca for bookish types who don't mind a bit of rain on their chunky-frame glasses," Ploughshares wrote. Among the bookshops featured were Open Books: A Poem Emporium ("no bookstore in Seattle is more beloved by its customers"), Elliott Bay Book Company, Third Place Books, University Book Store, Left Bank Books, Magus Books and Twice Sold Tales. "Amazon lurks nearby (both physically and virtually)--but please, whenever possible, buy your books from a bookstore," Ploughshares noted.

"Clevelanders are proud, noble people and have a vibrant arts culture that boasts world-class talent," Ploughshares noted. Featured bookstores were Visible Voice Books, Loganberry Books ("a bibliophile's dream") and Mac's Backs.  

Sacramento's literary scene "puts as much emphasis on how words enter public space as part of the oral tradition as it does on words impressed onto the printed page," though bookstores also abound, including the Book Collector, the Avid Reader, Beers Books and Time Tested Books.

"The heart and soul of great basketball rivalries doesn't just exist on the court but also in the old pennants, pictures and books found in quaint used bookstores," the Canton, Conn., Patch observed in its report on a recent filming session by sports cable network ESPN at used bookseller On the Road Bookshop.

Combining the bookstore's large selection of sports memorabilia with "a little digital magic, ESPN is creating several 30-second book and memorabilia-themed clips that will be shown during its college basketball rivalry week, February 11 to 18," the Patch reported.

"I envisioned a cozy, little, quaint used book store," said producer Bryan Rourke. "I fell in love with On the Road Bookshop. You can't recreate that feeling you get in a used book store."

Owner Susan Grzyb said ESPN's presence "confirms my belief that even in this modern time people still appreciate old books. Bryan, the producer, chose my shop after visiting several others, including Barnes & Noble, because of the atmosphere and the old books. So today I watched them working with modern cameras and checking their high-tech smartphones, all the while appreciating my old-fashioned low-tech bookshop. There really is a place for both in the world."

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), the first in the Finishing School YA series from the author of the Parasol Protectorate series.

Tonight on ABC's 20/20: Michael Tougias, author of A Storm Too Soon: A True Story of Disaster, Survival and an Incredible Rescue (Scribner, $24, 9781451683332).

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Sunday on CBS Sunday Morning: Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking, $26.95, 9780670026579).

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Sunday on CNBC's On the Money with Maria Batiromo: Alan S. Blinder, author of After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead (Penguin Press, $29.95, 9781594205309).

A little Super Bowl counter-programming takes place this weekend on Oprah Winfrey's OWN network show Super Soul Sunday, with special guest Ayana Mathis, whose novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is the latest Oprah's Book Club 2.0 pick.

In a pair of video excerpts, author Ann Patchett praises fellow University of Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Mathis and, as co-owner of Parnassus Books, Nashville, Tenn., explains why the rumored death of neighborhood bookstores is greatly exaggerated.  

"A lot of people think that bricks and mortar bookstores are dead, that books are dead, but Oprah and I and all of you know that that's fiction because here we are, doing great," Patchett said, adding: "When there isn't a bookstore in your city, there's an incredible void because what you realize is that the bookstore isn't just the place you come to buy books. It's a community center... I can't imagine a world without reading, without books, and I can't imagine a world without bookstores."

ABC Studios has given the greenlight to a pilot for The Returned, a serialized drama adapted from Jason Mott's debut novel, which will be published in September by Harlequin MIRA. Aaron Zelman (The Killing, Damages) will write the script and produce along with Brad Pitt's Plan B company, which is executive-producing.
 
"One of the greatest rewards of my job is discovering gifted but previously unpublished novelists," said Donna Hayes, Harlequin's publisher and CEO. "Anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one and the longing to have that person back will be enthralled as Jason Mott explores timeless and universal questions of faith and morality, family and responsibility in this wonderful novel. The Returned has elicited the kind of rave early reviews that are reserved for only the most extraordinary books.”
 
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NBC has greenlighted a pilot for Wonderland, set in the world of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland. The project will be executive produced by CSI creator Anthony Zuiker and written by Whit Anderson. Deadline.com reported that Wonderland "is set in modern times and centers on Alice and a new character, Clara. Seven years ago, Clara's life took an unexplained turn for the worse, and a mysterious stranger tells her there may be an explanation after all... an explanation that lies in the fantastical world of Wonderland. To revive her dreams and get her life back on track, Clara must wage war against Wonderland's reigning Queen, the woman we once knew as Alice."

Finalists have been named for the Claremont Graduate University's $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, which is "designed to reward a single book by a mid-career poet," Jacket Copy reported. The shortlisted poets are Marianne Boruch for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press), Edward Haworth Hoeppner for Blood Prism (Ohio State University Press) and Paisley Rekdal for Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Three finalists were also named for the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given for a debut work by a poet of considerable promise. This year's shortlist includes Rebecca Morgan Frank for Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry), Francine J. Harris for Allegiance (Wayne State University Press) and Heidy Steidlmayer for Fowling Piece (Triquarterly Books). Winners will be announced in March, and the prizes presented at a ceremony in April.

photo: Fred Schroeder

Jim Gavin received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Zoetrope, the Mississippi Review, Slice and ZYZZYVA. His debut story collection, Middle Men, will be published by Simon & Schuster on February 19, 2013. He lives in Los Angeles.

On your nightstand now:

1) Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray. I'm re-reading this. No one can touch Murray for the music of his prose, and this is one of the great novels of childhood. 2) Morbo by Phil Ball. A concise and absorbing history of Spanish soccer that helps put in context the coming of Our Lord and Savior Lionel Messi. 3) Brand New Human Being by Emily Jeanne Miller. I devoured this novel. Miller's debut is funny, fast-paced and poignant, and it depicts a father-son relationship unlike any I've read before. 4) City of Bohane by Kevin Barry. F***ing brilliant!

Favorite book when you were a child:

As a kid I only read sports books. My favorite was Bill Russell's autobiography, Go Up for Glory. I grew up in Southern California, but my mom's side of the family is all dirty Boston Irish and she brainwashed me into being a Celtics fan. Russell was her all-time favorite, and when I was in fifth grade, she gave me his book. I read it several times and I remember telling friends that Russell was my favorite player, even though I was born seven years after he played his last game. I loved the hip swagger of his voice, and I took heart in the revelation that out of nervousness he vomited before every game (I was always a wreck before games). I thought I was reading a basketball book, but really I was encountering the history of racial segregation and the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of a brave and deeply honest man who could be equal parts hero and asshole. I love the dude. Every time I see that clip of him breaking down while being interviewed after game seven of the 1969 final, I totally lose it.

Your top five authors:

James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, J.P. Donleavy, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark. Laying it on pretty thick with the Catholicism, but Greene and Spark were converts, so they don't count.

Book you've faked reading:

I often say that I love Charles Dickens, but what I mean is that I love Great Expectations, the only novel of his that I've actually finished. I've read it twice, in tearful ecstasy, I assure you, but I've never made it more than 50 pages into Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, Our Mutual Friend and a couple others. I'm a monster. Also, I've been known to throw around some choice Peter DeVries quotes, all of which I read in an article about him that appeared in the New Yorker in 2004, but I've never done the man the honor of actually reading one of his books. I don't deserve to live.

Book you're an evangelist for:

L.A. Breakdown by Lou Mathews. A lost classic that is tragically out of print, this novel is set in the late '60s and revolves around the Eastside street racing scene. Mathews was born and raised in Southern California and he worked as a mechanic for 20 years. On every page you can feel his love and mastery of the definitive SoCal artifact--the car. His grasp of working-class knuckleheadedness is magisterial, and he captures daily life in Los Angeles with the same kind of grace and authenticity that Leonard Gardner brought to Stockton in Fat City. I have faith that eventually a publisher will get wise to Mathews and give him the recognition that is long overdue.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. I didn't know anything about this book before I saw it in a bookstore. The spine, with its interlocking green bands overlaid by the illustrated faces of a boy and girl, stopped me in my tracks and when I pulled it off the shelf I had the rare sensation of knowing that I would buy this book and love it completely, and I did. Somehow everything about Murray's hugely ambitious and entertaining novel is implied in Leanne Shapton's iconic cover. Even now, when I walk past it on the bookshelf, I'll sometimes take it down, just to hold it, and then I'll flip to a section, read a little, and suddenly an hour is gone. It's one of those books I know I'll always be reading.

Book that changed your life:

Ulysses. Yeah, I know. Usually, around my fourth or fifth beer, I'll start talking Joyce. At that point, my advice is to save yourself and walk to the other end of the bar.

Favorite line from a book:

"Perhaps, I thought, while her words hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke--a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace--perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open in a dream only to reveal a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us." --from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

"There was a period of three weeks when Mr. Blue came daily to the apartment and passed the afternoon hours with me. During these visits we talked about professional football, about which Mr. Blue knew nothing, and about the two things which interested Mr. Blue most: aluminum siding, which he sold, and cunnilingus, on which he suspected I was an authority." --from A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.

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

A Fairy Tale of New York by J.P. Donleavy. I don't remember how it went exactly, but Billy Childish was once asked how many records he'd made during his long and prolific career. He guessed more than a hundred. Then the interviewer asked how many songs he had written, and Billy Childish said, "One." Donleavy has been accused of writing the same book over and over, but, as with Billy Childish, I wouldn't have it any other way. I love all his books, but Fairy Tale stands out in my mind. Chapter 20, the courtroom scene, is one of my all-time favorite comic set pieces. And I should confess that the title for one of the stories in my collection--"Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror"--is stolen from Fairy Tale. Over the years Mr. Donleavy has proven himself to be a ruthless litigator, but hopefully he'll let this one go.

Who do you follow on Twitter?

All the usual suspects from the professional comedy mafia, but my favorites are always mysterious, far-flung people who seemingly have no agenda other than being constantly and uniquely hilarious. I recommend following: @chrismurphyusa, @kbridge, @aliciahawkes, @klickitatstreet, @afbradstone, @spaterpeter

They all have a genius for transforming the mundane into something luminous and epic. Plus dick jokes.

Stephen Dobyns's The Burn Palace begins early in a late October morning in the small, quaint, "hibernating" town of Brewster, R.I. As most of the town sleeps, we see Nurse Spandax rushing to the nursery after an illicit sexual encounter with Dr. Balfour. A newborn boy is missing, replaced by a "huge snake with red and yellow stripes." She screams.

"Now, like an airborne camera," Dobyns writes, "we move back from the hospital," and are introduced to many of the town's residents. Among them are Ernest Hartmann, a visiting insurance investigator; Larry Rodman, who collects rings, "one of the perks of working at the Burn Palace," as Brewster residents call the local crematorium; Vicki Lefebvre, whose daughter, Nina, is also missing; Sheriff Woody Potter, off to investigate the babynapping; and 10-year old Hercel McCarty Jr., who can do "things" and whose pet snake is missing. Hercel's afraid of his stepdad, Carl, who has something in his gut trying to "break free." Soon it will blow up, and "then," Dobyns warns us, "people better watch out."

Things slowly begin happening, like the way one character speaks: "the words percolated into his head like water seeping into clay." While visiting an Indian burial ground, Hartmann is stabbed and scalped by a man without a face, a blood-red smiley face left on the car window. There's talk of Wiccans and witches, and the mother of the missing baby says she was impregnated by devils. Then Nurse Spandax goes missing, and so does homeless Ronnie McBride. More and more coyotes are gathering around town. Carl, hearing voices, has taken to growling and staring at knotholes in his bedroom.

Dobyns weaves the ordinary lives of these and many other characters into a huge, seamless tapestry of a narrative, each life intersecting with another's, then another's, in order to subtly unfold a suspensefully eerie tale of a town caught up in a spell ripped from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. You can't wait to turn the page to see what happens next, to what might be hiding right around the next corner, or living quietly in that sleepy house next door to yours. --Tom Lavoie

Shelf Talker: Stephen King almost never blurbs other writers, but he calls Dobyns's latest novel "authentically great... terrifying, sweet and crazily funny."

Have you seen any good books on television lately? I know. Books are on TV all the time as adaptations, serializations or, in the eyes of many viewers, ruinations. If golf is a good walk spoiled, then TV shows swiped from the printed page can often be a good read spoiled.

There is, however, a network where books do not go to die. Every weekend, C-SPAN 2's Book TV dedicates 48 hours of programming to author interviews, panel discussions, book fairs, book signings, author readings and bookstore tours around the U.S. It may be as close as the book world can, or would want to, get to reality TV.

On Wednesdays, part of my job is to scroll through Book TV's upcoming schedule, compiling a list of programs that might be of interest to Shelf Awareness readers. And every Thursday morning, we feature a "This Weekend on Book TV" section. Imagine that: a network where books matter. Even as I wrote this column yesterday, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Ret.) was being interviewed live at the Free Library of Philadelphia about My Share of the Task: A Memoir.

C-SPAN and the book world have a long and mutually beneficial relationship. That iconic C-SPAN bus gets one of the best parking spots in New York City every year, inside the Javits Center near the entrance to BookExpo America. I pass by several times each day (and have the tote bags to prove it). I also watch Book TV programming regularly, and am particularly fond, for obvious reasons, of the featured bookstore events, like Saturday's visit to Santa Fe, N.Mex., where a stop at Collected Works Bookstore is on the itinerary.

It's always fun to get a "behind the scenes," or at least on the scene, peek at some great indie bookstores nationwide. Popular Book TV venues include Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C. (home field advantage); Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe Ariz.; Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass.; and Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colo., but dozens of indies regularly get their moments on camera.

One thing I've noticed is that both C-SPAN and the indies have become more media sophisticated over the years, compared to early efforts during the 1990s when the bookshop where I worked would sometimes be a site for filming events. Production values were a bit shakier then, and the cameras tended to roll longer before and after a reading than perhaps was wise.

At the first C-SPAN event we hosted, for example, the last thing viewers saw was one of my fellow booksellers and her son making their exit from the back row by trying to sneak under the camera. Unfortunately, they tripped over each other instead, adding an unintended action sequence to the otherwise civilized episode.

Book TV is in a way the second-generation effort for the network, since C-SPAN's book genealogy really began with Booknotes, which ran from 1989 to 2004 and was hosted by the network's founder and CEO Brian Lamb, whose dry but direct interview style I found absolutely irresistible. Watching Lamb was like seeing a book version of Dragnet. His "just the facts, ma'am" style seemed to go against everything television stood for, and yet it worked precisely as he intended, keeping the spotlight on the writer being interviewed.

Mark Edmundson, author of Why Read, was the guest for the final episode of Booknotes. Inevitably, Lamb's first question was: "Why read?" He never shied away from asking for seemingly obvious information--the kind of clarification most of us wouldn't dare admit we didn't already know--as shown in this rapid fire sequence:

On C-SPAN, reading and television find common ground. Consider the question Lamb asked Shelby Foote in 2001: "What is it about the written word that's either attractive to people or separates it from television?"

Foote's reply: "I really think that the written word is what defines us as superior creatures to all the other creatures on earth. Man is characterized by a number of things. One of them is he's the only animal that knows he's going to die some day. And knowing that, he also has an obligation to make the most of whatever time he has. And making the most of it is enormously assisted by reading, by learning about the world."

Now that's great book TV. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)