We take a day off, and there seems to be more news than ever!
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Deidre Imus's tour for Green This! Volume 1: Greening Your Cleaning,
which was derailed when husband Don Imus's career was derailed, has
been resurrected but in a limited way, according to Saturday's New York Times.
The author will appear at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., and
at the public library in Westport, Conn. S&S publisher David
Rosenthal told the paper, "There are many booksellers who wanted her to
appear and still do." TV appearances, which would have been part of the
original tour, are "under discussion." Imus himself--presumably a
gentler, kinder Imus--may join his wife.
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The campaign to have the Atlanta Journal-Constitution rescind its
decision to let book editor Teresa Weaver go and cut back on book
coverage has led to thousands of people to sign a petition to "protect
Atlanta's book review." Now the campaign is planning a read-in this
coming Thursday, beginning at 10 a.m., rain or shine, in front of the
paper's headquarters. Participants should bring a book and either read
it aloud or to themselves.
The cutbacks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and at other papers across the
country have prompted several stories in defense of book reviewing and coverage. Yesterday's Los Angeles
Times ran a piece by author Michael Connelly called "The Folly of Downsizing
Book Reviews," a headline that speaks for itself. Also the National
Book Critics Circle has launched a campaign to save book reviewing. For more information about it, go to Critical Mass, NBCC's blog.
For more information about the Read-In in Atlanta, contact Shannon Byrne.
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Title Wave Books, Anchorage, Alaska, is moving into the 6,000-sq.-ft.
downtown space vacated last month when Cook Inlet Book Co. went out of
business, Bookselling This Week reported. Title Wave plans to have its official opening May 25; the new store will carry more than 25,000 new and used books.
Title Wave opened in 1991; its original 33,000-sq.-ft. store is in
midtown Anchorage. Julie Drake, who owns the store with Steve Lloyd,
called the second location "a surprise opportunity for us."
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The
BEA conference keynote session featuring former Federal Reserve Bank
chairman Alan Greenspan has been rescheduled and will now take place on
Friday, June 1, at 5:15 p.m. in the Special Events Hall at the Javits
Center. Greenspan will be interviewed by his wife, Andrea Mitchell,
chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News. The Q&A will
focus in part on the process of writing Greenspan's new book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, to be published by Penguin Press in September.
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Today is the official groundbreaking of the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to honor the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author and her passion for labyrinths, aka mazes.
Shields researched and visited labyrinths around the world. In Larry's Party,
Larry Weller has an epiphany in the Hampton Court Maze and decides to
become a labyrinth designer. He returns to Winnipeg, where he builds
his first labyrinth.
The real-life Winnipeg labyrinth is scheduled to open in 2009 and will
be the largest in Canada and maybe in North America. It will be located in
King's Park, near the University of Manitoba, where Shields taught.
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Yesterday's New York Times Week in Review
quoted at length an interview with the reclusive head of Blackwater
USA, the eerily named military outsourcing company that is the subject
of Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, $26.95, 9781560259794/1560259795). The interview was done by Raelynn Hillhouse and posted on her blog, The Spy Who Billed Me. On June 12, Hillhouse is publishing Outsourced (Tor/Forge), a novel about "a private military corporation, not unlike Blackwater."
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Xinhua Bookstore, the huge bookstore company that used to have a
monopoly in China, celebrated its 70th anniversary last week with a
ceremony at which one Communist Party official called for more reforms
"to revive" the company, the Xinhua News Agency
reported. Li Changchun, a member of Politbureau, said he hoped the
distributing conglomerate can "meet the public's growing demands for
'food for thought' and in the face of a boom in global culture." He
also wants Xinhua Bookstore to promote Chinese culture to the rest of
the world.
The first Xinhua Bookstore was set up on April 24, 1937, by Communist
partisans in Yan'an, where the party had a sanctuary during the civil
war and the war against the Japanese. The bookstore company has been weakened in recent
years by the opening of a range of independent bookstores.
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Bookselling This Week
profiles Builders Booksource, the Berkeley, Calif., the solid bookstore
founded by George and Sally Kiskaddon, which just marked its 25th
anniversary.
Here's a great paragraph in which George illustrates what makes the store different from the usual:
"The Builders Booksource list of top-sellers differs somewhat from
other Book Sense bookstores. 'When you get a bunch of booksellers
around a table, they'll talk about what they're reading and what's hot,
and I would mention that the Uniformed Building Code (Uniform Building Code Commission) was doing great.' Currently, books about building green are selling very well, especially Good Green Kitchens by Jennifer Roberts (Gibbs Smith). Kiskaddon also noted that the store has 'never had something as hot as Concrete Countertops'
by local writer Fu-Tung Cheng and Eric Olsen (Taunton Press), which he
encouraged a reluctant Taunton Press to publish. Builders Booksource
alone has sold more than 2,000 copies, he said."
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Heather Plunkett and Cindi Whittemore, former booksellers at Barnes
& Noble and its B. Dalton division, are setting up their own shop
next month in downtown Half Moon Bay, Calif., according to the Half
Moon Bay Review. Ink Spell Books will sell new and used books and be
connected to the La Di Da coffeeshop next door. The pair want to
encourage customers to hang out and plan to put their experience in
p.r., promotion and book retail to use.
Half Moon Bay, a town of about 12,000, has four independents already.
At least one of those booksellers expressed concern about another store
opening, but a Review editorial
said the arrival of Ink Spell "should be cause for celebration in Half
Moon Bay. The city is poised to become a destination for booklovers who
prefer the idiocyncracies of independents to the sterility of the
chains."
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Nora Roberts and her husband, Bruce Wilder, who runs Turn the Page
bookstore (Shelf Awareness, July 26, 2005), have bought several
historic buildings in downtown Boonsboro, Md., and are refurbishing
them to reflect their original style, according to the Hagerstown Herald-Mail.
In the former Boone Hotel, which will now be called Inn Boonsboro, the
pair are decorating each of the Inn's six bedrooms in the style of a
fictional couple, including Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles,
Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy--and Roberts's own Eve
Dallas and Roarke, who star in her In Death series written under her
pen name J.D. Robb. At least several times a year, when Turn the Page
hosts Washington Romance Writers events, there will likely be no room
at the Inn.
Another building will house a restaurant that Roberts's son is opening.
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Another memoir that makes over the truth? Although it says that the
author "has clearly not perpetrated anything as egregious as, say,
James Frey," the New York Times finds flaws in Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil
(Random House). Six women also involved in the beauty school in
Afghanistan at the heart of Rodriguez's memoir dispute parts of her
recounting of events, particularly concerning its founding, how she won
control of the school and why, and her stories about several Afghani
women. The author and publisher say that in the future, they will make
it clear Rodriguez didn't found the school and that the Afghani women's
identities needed to be protected.
Mark Doty and fans at an interspecies reading of his new book, Dog Years: A Memoir (HarperCollins, $23.95, 9780061171000/006117100X), at Readers' Books, Sonoma, Calif.