In major BEA news, we're happy to report that PGW is putting on its traditional blowout Saturday party. Co-hosted by Grove/Atlantic, New World Library, Avalon Travel Publishing, Gallup Press and other PGW clients, the party will be held at the newly refurbished Gramercy Theater at 127 E. 23rd St., near Lexington Ave. Headliners are Sharon Jones--known variously as "female James Brown," "the Queen of Funk" and Soul Sister #1--and the Dap-Kings. Doors open at 8:30; music starts at 9:30.

As usual, each invitation admits two. To get an invite, go to PGW's booth, # 4211.

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The Charlotte Observer lists the finalists for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance's 2007 Book Awards, which honor the best of Southern fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children, and, of course, cookbooks, including Deep South Parties: Or, How to Survive the Southern Cocktail Hour Without a Box of French-Onion Soup Mix, a Block of Processed Cheese, or a Cocktail Weenie by Robert St. John. Winners will be announced in June.

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Despite recent evidence to the contrary, the writing and reading of books "perseveres," according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book editor Bob Hoover, who "sat in on the spiels of several publishers' sales reps as they pitched their companies' upcoming titles to Joseph-Beth bookstore staff members."

Hoover discovered that publishers' reps are "no different from the peddlers of Viagra, sump pumps or beer. . . . Their product is different, though." Or maybe he discovered the reps are different, since he also wrote, "these peddlers clearly loved what they were selling--simply books--and their enthusiasm was an effective antidote to all of the moaning and hand-wringing lately."

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Have men abandoned fiction? The Kansas City Star spoke with authors Jennifer Weiner and Laura Moriarty about their success with an almost exclusively female readership.

"I’ve had to get over it," Moriarty said. "I think I resisted being typed as a 'woman author.' But if I write something and thousands and thousands of people read it, who cares?"

Weiner added that "what I’m seeing at fiction readings, and not just mine, are audiences made up almost entirely of women. I’m really grateful from a purely personal point of view. But it is strange to think men have abandoned fiction and women have ceded the rest of the culture."

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On Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world are two writers, Nora Roberts and David Mitchell.

Concerning Roberts, Time wrote, "Nora Roberts is to love as Masters and Johnson are to sex. As the world's leading romance writer, she has inspected, dissected, deconstructed, explored, explained and extolled the passions of the human heart since 1981. Millions of devoted (primarily, but not exclusively, female) readers have had their fantasy lives shaped by her work; she can make romance seem fresh and hopeful every time. And there have been many, many times. At 56, she makes her fellow authors look like slackers, having written 175 novels, the majority of them best sellers. There are nearly 300 million copies of her books in print. Befitting her career choice, Roberts fell in love with and married a carpenter who went to do some work on her house. And they lived happily ever after. The end."

As for Mitchell, who has been shortlisted for the Booker for three of his four novels, Pico Iyer wrote in Time: "David Mitchell served notice that he would be remaking the traditional novel when his first book, Ghostwritten, published in 1999 just after he turned 30, ingeniously braided together nine stories in eight countries and suggested that the same unchanging spirit ran through its central characters, whether in Hong Kong, St. Petersburg or a New York City radio station. Forget multiculturalism: this was novel globalism and an inquiry into what the boundary-dissolving author called transmigration.

"Having created the 21st century novel with months to spare, Mitchell followed it up with a whole book in the voice of a Japanese 20-year-old and then, lest we get too settled, cooked up a Möbius strip of a narrative, Cloud Atlas, which begins in Melville's South Seas (rendered in vigorous 19th century pastiche), travels to a chilling next-generation North Korea and ends up in a post-apocalyptic world--only to circle back again, in reverse, to the 19th century Pacific.

"That virtuosity tempts critics to place Mitchell next to such modern revolutionaries as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. But he is tilling his own distinctive field, drawing from the U.S. (Paul Auster), England (Martin Amis) and Japan (Haruki Murakami) to nurture something entirely original and strangely rooted. His fourth novel, Black Swan Green, threw together ferocious language, a character from Cloud Atlas and a hypercharged imagination to light up from within the travails of an ordinary 13-year-old boy in England in 1982. The ultimate magician's trick: to make one believe there's no trick--and not even a magician."

 

BookExpo America is in New York City! From now until BEA Frommer's and Shelf Awareness are offering tips on how to make the most of the long weekend in the Big Apple. Today Pauline Frommer of Pauline Frommer's Travel Guides offers the inside scoop on the New York subway's mode of entry.  

I wish I could confine all my transportation advice to just two words--"the subway"--and be done with it. To my mind, the New York City subway system, 100 years young in 2004, is the single most efficient, rapid, easy, and affordable way to get about anywhere you'd want to go in Manhattan.  
 
In order to use the subways, you'll have to purchase a MetroCard--a thin, bendable plastic "credit card" that you can fill up with money at subway stations or buy pre-filled at some neighborhood stores (most stores that sell MetroCards will post a sign). MetroCards are swiped for entry at subway turnstiles and can also be used on buses. Ostensibly, each subway ride costs $2, but because there are a number of fare card options, the amount is actually slightly flexible. An unlimited MetroCard allows you to board as many subways and trains as you like within a set period of time for one low cost. A one-day unlimited card is $7; a weeklong pass is $24. To make this unlimited card pay for itself, you'll need to ride four times in one day for the daily pass or at least twice a day on the weeklong pass. Only one person can use this type of card at a time; once swiped, it becomes inoperable for 20 minutes. If you'd prefer a pay-per-ride MetroCard, the minimum amount you can put on it is $4 (or two rides); and if you have to change from subway to bus, you'll automatically get a transfer on your card at no extra charge, so long as you board your second trip within two hours of the first. There is no limitation on how many people can share this card.

Complimentary MetroCards are provided at the ABA Hotel.

This morning on the Early Show: Joseph Califano, Jr., author of High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It (PublicAffairs, $26.95, 9781586483357/1586483358).

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Today on the Oprah Winfrey Show, relationship expert and bad boy Steve Santagati offers insight from The Manual: A True Bad Boy Explains How Men Think, Date, and Mate--and What Women Can Do to Come Out on Top (Crown, $21.95, 9780307345691/0307345696). The book becomes very available on May 29.

Also on Oprah: Dr. Mehmet C. Oz of the You series.

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Liza Mundy, author of Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World (Knopf, $26.95, 9781400044283/1400044286).

Also on the show: Newt Gingrich, whose latest offering, written with William R. Forstchen, is Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8 (Thomas Dunne Books, $25.95, 9780312363505/0312363508).

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Tonight the Late Show with David Letterman yucks it up with comedian Don Rickles, whose memoir is Rickles' Book (S&S, $24, 9780743293051/0743293053).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press and author of Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons ($13.95, 9780812975437/081297543X), now out in paperback.

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Walter Isaacson, whose new biography is Einstein: His Life and Universe (S&S, $32, 9780743264730/0743264738).
 

The second annual Lulu Blooker Prizes, devoted to "blooks"--books based on blogs or Web sites--have been awarded in three categories, fiction, nonfiction and comics. There is also a $10,000 overall winner. The awards are sponsored by Lulu, which makes POD books and an increasing number of blooks.

The overall winner and nonfiction winner is: My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell (Berkley, $15), which started as a blog that Buzzell, a machine gunner in Iraq, began to "kill time." The popular blog led U.S. armed forces brass to close down soldiers' blogs.

The fiction winner is The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky (Prandial Publishing/Lulu, $29.85), a British blogger's self-published collection of 36 color photographs of Florentine doorbells, each accompanied by "a strange story about the people and things that may or may not live inside."

The comics winner is Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies (Abrams Image, $12.95), a graphic novel telling the true tale of Fies's mother's battle with metastatic lung cancer and how it affects both patient and family. It began as serialized web comic.

 

Selected titles with a pub date of next Tuesday, May 22:

In Secret Service by Mitch Silver (Touchstone, $25, 9781416537946/1416537945). A young American academic claims the sole item in her grandfather's safe deposit box--a manuscript by Ian Fleming detailing his involvement in Allied spy craft during World War II--and discovers that people on both sides of the Atlantic will kill to keep it secret.

The Overlook by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown, $21.99, 9780316018951/0316018953). What begins as a routine homicide investigation for LAPD detective Harry Bosch turns into a race to save the city from a deadly biohazard.

Requiem for an Assassin by Barry Eisler (Putnam, $24.95, 9780399154263/0399154264). When assassin John Rain decides to retire, a rogue CIA operative forces his hand: complete a final assignment or his best friend dies.

Summer Reading: A Novel by Hilma Wolitzer (Ballantine, $24.95, 9780345485861/0345485866). Can reading change your life? Three very different women find out in this tale about friendship, inspiration, longing and the love of good books from the author of The Doctor's Daughter.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead, $25.95, 9781594489501/1594489505). The second novel from the author of the handselling and book club favorite The Kite Runner.

The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy, and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision Making, Degrade Our Democracy, and Put Our Country and Our World in Peril by Al Gore (Penguin Press, $25.95, 9781594201226/1594201226). The former Vice President offers an analysis of how the public arena has grown more hostile to reason, the impact on political and social issues and what can be done about it.

The Reagan Diaries by Ronald Reagan (HarperCollins, $35, 9780060876005/006087600X). Diaries kept by the 40th president during his two terms in office, edited by historian Douglas Brinkley.

On sale May 23:

Lethally Blond by Kate White (Warner, $24.99, 9780446577953/0446577952). In her fifth outing, celebrity journalist Bailey Wiggins tracks down a missing actor and becomes the target of a killer with a flair for the theatrical.

On sale in paperback May 22:

The Cold Moon: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel by Jeffery Deaver (Pocket Star, $9.99, 9780743491570/0743491572).

Anyone who has attended BookExpo America in recent years--with an entire hall dedicated to children's titles--might find it difficult to believe that there were once "no children's books out at all," according to Jewell Stoddard of Politics & Prose (formerly of the Cheshire Cat), Washington, D.C., who attended her first show in 1975. "We walked around and asked [publishers] if they had children's books. They'd throw them on the counter and walk off."
 
The Association of Booksellers for Children helped to change that. The organization was formed in 1985 at an ABA show in Washington, D.C., led in large part by Valerie Lewis, who, with her sister Monica Holmes, started Hicklebee's in San Jose, Calif., in 1979, and Betty Takeuchi of San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe, San Marino, Calif., and Jody Fickes (now Shapiro) of Adventures for Kids in Ventura, Calif. "We felt there was a need for a national organization," Lewis recalled. "The idea was that one individual bookseller cannot ever be the voice that a collective can be."

The original goals of the ABC were to raise the visibility of children's booksellers, to facilitate discussion between bookstores and publishers and to work as a larger body in solving problems large and small, all of which continue to be major focuses of the organization.

Today under the leadership of executive director Kristen McLean (who started at ABC in February 2006), consensus is that the organization is stronger than ever and that the collective of independent booksellers has weathered the onset of chain stores, big box stores and the Amazon of Internet sales. Though the number of independents in the ABC and ABA had been diminishing, "over the past three to four years, the trend is upward," said Becky Anderson of Anderson's Bookshops. "There are record numbers at bookseller school, and new prospective members coming to the Winter Institute, many focused on children's books."
 
Among recent initiatives, the ABC launched "The Toolbox" in March, a newsletter designed to open up a dialogue between member stores and publishers. Publishers can post their educational materials, contests, galleys and other promotional materials, and the newsletter includes links for connecting booksellers and publishers.
 
The New Voices luncheon, which launched at last year's ABC annual meeting at BEA and highlighted debut author Watt Key, made a start in spotlighting new books that might otherwise get lost among the 9,000 trade books for children published annually. The idea has evolved into a year-round New Voices program, tied into the Toolbox, which will profile a new author every month. At this year's New Voices luncheon, the ABC is adding a gallery to display new authors' works, according to current ABC President Ellen Davis of Dragonwings Bookstore in Waupaca, Wis.
 
Another important element of membership, many booksellers say, is ABC's listserv, which in effect has created a network of bookstores from coast to coast. On the listserv, new member stores gain the benefit of veterans' experiences. Eight Cousins' Carol Chittenden is a mentor on the site. "When I went into business, I didn't know an invoice from a piece of wallpaper," Chittenden said. "As children's book people, we have a special kind of sisterhood. We owe it to each other to help where we can." More experienced members compare notes on title requests, sidelines and matters of protocol.

ABC members also are supporting the kinds of "Shop Local" campaigns first championed by towns like Austin, Tex., and Salt Lake City, Utah. "It's hard to get the message across without sounding hectoring," explains Elizabeth Bluemle of Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vt. "The Shop Local campaign is effective because it puts a positive spin on it in a way that customers can understand and appreciate."

For her part, McLean said there's "a growing movement in all of the associations, in the regionals and ABA as well as ABC, toward really trying to educate consumers about what it means to spend $1 in a [local] bookstore, as opposed to a chain or online," McLean said. "That's a dollar that's not going to stay in the community."

Another concern of some ABC members is the sheer number of titles being published and the sacrifice of quality for quantity. Lewis and Cammie Manino (who's selling her store, Halfway Down the Stairs, in Rochester, Mich.) also are not happy about how chain stores and big box stores might influence which books are published: "The big box stores have the strength to determine whether or not a book will succeed if they purchase it--rather than hundreds of independents buying [a variety of titles] across the country," Lewis points out. "In a bizarre way, [the big box stores are] limiting the books sold." Manino added, "The esoteric book that sits on my shelf until the perfect reader walks in is going out of print faster."

In order to survive, the independents suggested, they must be at the heart of their communities. In the words of Children's Book World's Hannah Schwartz, "Independent stores are run by independent people." Politics & Prose hosts Monday morning book time with 75 mothers, nannies and babies. A former music teacher who processes their book orders sings with the kids. "They call him the guitar man when they run into him at the grocery store," Stoddard said. Dragonwings's Davis was approached by a woman who runs a knitting store just outside of town; every Tuesday she hosts open knitting from 1-5 in the afternoon. "There are probably 20 people involved, from 12-year-old girls to women in their 80s," Davis said. "We're a type of social center on Tuesday afternoons, with a whole different group than we have the rest of the time." As Bluemle put it, "Bookstores and grocery stores are two of the universal businesses that bring everyone in a community together."--Jennifer M. Brown