Kwame Spearman

Kwame Spearman, CEO and head of the group that owns the Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colo., is running for mayor of Denver, Denverite reported.

"Not only are we emerging from a pandemic, but we're trying to stave off a recession, and right now what the city needs in this critical stage is a clear vision and policy and most importantly plans that can actually result in action," Spearman told Denverite. "For me, this is not about a race that is entirely focused on winning. This is a race that's about my home."

Saying he would be a "neighborhood mayor," Spearman will focus, Denverite said, "on efforts to bring each community what it needs, from community-specific policing to development initiatives that increase housing density where it is desired." He also supports low-interest loans for small businesses to help them raise wages.

Spearman will compete with what the Denverite calls "a string of powerhouse candidates," including a city council member, a state representative and a former state senator.

While most of Spearman's experience has been in business--including working for Bain and Company, B.GOOD and Knotel before Tattered Cover--he was involved in student government and was former Colorado Senator Mark Udall's deputy press secretary during his successful 2008 campaign.

Spearman added that if elected mayor, he will resign as CEO of Tattered Cover. Asked if he might resign sooner to focus on the race for mayor, he said, "We have a lot of contingencies in place for the next few months. We're working with our board and our senior leadership team on those things. And as soon as they are public, we will let folks know. But as of Monday, I'm still CEO of Tattered Cover."

Galaxy Bookshop hosted a grand reopening celebration on Saturday in its renovated space at 41 South Main St., Hardwick, Vt. "What a wonderful way to celebrate our reopening!!" the bookseller posted on Facebook. "Thank you to everyone who came or sent their good wishes for the day; thank you to Brett, Sean, and Alex for their work planning and promoting the party; thank you to the authors who gave their time to attend and to the businesses who generously donated food. We are so grateful for our community and so glad to be back."

Last July, Galaxy had been forced to close the location after a small fire in an upstairs apartment set off the building's sprinkler system and caused extensive damage to the store and its inventory. The bookstore had been operating out of temporary office space next door at the Flower Basket. 

Mayo Clinic Press, the publishing arm of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., has launched Mayo Clinic Press Kids, which aims to provide "engaging mental and physical wellness content for children from the most trusted name in health. Captivating stories, diverse voices, and expert authority empower young readers to care for themselves and their communities." The imprint will publish for both the trade and educational market for pre-K through YA. Mayo Clinic Press is distributed by Ingram's Two Rivers Distribution.

Among titles to be published this year are My Life Beyond Depression (May 2); The Spaces in Between (June 27); My Life Beyond Sickle Cell Disease (July 1); Spacecare: Medicine in Microgravity (July 18); and Period.: The Quick, All-Inclusive Guide for Every Uterus (August 1).

The new imprint will also publish two children's series. The Helping Paws Academy series will provide children a look at the experiences of children in a hospital setting though an unlikely source--therapy dogs. The Edge of Medicine series explores the spirit of innovation behind the greatest breakthroughs in medicine, including achievements from Mayo Clinic and elsewhere.

Editorial director Jenny Krueger commented: "Kids are powerful members of their communities. These books recognize the agency kids have and celebrate the healing power of storytelling."

On Wednesday, January 25, at 7 p.m. Eastern, Publishers Lunch and the American Booksellers Association will present a virtual Buzz Books Editors Panel, hosted by Publishers Lunch founder Michael Cader.

Six "breakout authors" will discuss new titles with their editors. The titles are Go as a River by Shelley Read (Spiegel & Grau), We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White (Astra House), Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood (Holt), The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams (Putnam), Everything's Fine by Cecelia Rabess (S&S) and The Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter (Ecco).

Russell Banks

Russell Banks, "whose vivid portrayals of working-class Americans grappling with issues of poverty, race and class placed him among the first ranks of contemporary novelists," died January 7, the New York Times reported. He was 82. The author of 21 works of fiction and nonfiction, Banks "brought his own blue-collar background to bear in his writing, delving into the psychological pressure of life in economically depressed towns in the Northeast, their stark reality often shadowed by the majestic Adirondacks of northern New York State."

His novels Continental Drift (1985) and Cloudsplitter (1998) were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Times book critic Michiko Kakutani praised Continental Drift as a "visionary epic about innocence and evil and a shattering dissection of contemporary American life." The book also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 1985. His most recent novel, The Magic Kingdom, was published last year.

"There's an important tradition in American writing, going back to Mark Twain and forward to Raymond Carver and Grace Paley, whose work is generated by love of people who are scorned and derided," Banks told the Guardian in 2000. "I have an almost simple-minded affection for them. My readers are not the same as my characters, as I'm very aware. So I'm glad when they feel that affection too."

In 1963, at the age of 23, Banks went to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he met his first mentor, the novelist Nelson Algren. He then attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he co-founded a small literary press and magazine, Lillabulero, "and entered into the social ferment of the civil rights era, becoming involved with Students for a Democratic Society and participating in protests," the Times wrote. During this time he published two volumes of poetry; a first novel, Family Life (1975); and his first short-story collection, Searching for Survivors (1975), which won an O. Henry Award.

Next came Hamilton Stark (1978) and The Book of Jamaica (1980), novels that "were ambitious works that sought to dismantle the unfulfilled promises of America through the gimlet eye of the white working class," the Times noted. "Continental Drift had its roots in The Book of Jamaica. Beginning in 1976, Mr. Banks spent a year and a half in Jamaica on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation; while there he became obsessed with the history of that island nation as well as the entire Caribbean basin." 

"I began to live my life more consciously and aggressively in racial and class terms, laying the ground on which I stood a few years later when I wrote Continental Drift," he explained in the Paris Review.

Banks spent the 1980s and '90s "solidifying his craft" in works like Affliction (1989) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991). Film adaptations of both works also brought him recognition beyond the literary world. The Sweet Hereafter (1997), adapted and directed by Atom Egoyan, received two Academy Award nominations, and Affliction (1997), adapted and directed by Paul Schrader, garnered two Oscar nominations, with James Coburn winning for best supporting actor.

Joyce Carol Oates tweeted: "[V]ery sad news that a great American writer, Russell Banks, beloved friend of so many, passed away peacefully last night in his home in upstate NY. I loved Russell & loved his tremendous talent & magnanimous heart. Cloudsplitter--his masterpiece. but all his work is exceptional."

Author Will Schwalbe wrote: "What terribly sad news. A giant of a writer. Continental Drift is as great a book as I've ever read. And Rule of the Bone is my go-to recommendation for reluctant teen readers. It transforms them into lifelong readers without fail."

The Times said that Banks's own intentions as a writer are summed up in his narrator's closing lines in Continental Drift: "Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives--no, especially wholly invented lives--deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book's objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is."

Wisconsin Life offers a video profile of Gretchen Treu, co-owner since 2018 of A Room of One's Own, Madison, Wis. In the video, Treu talks about their background growing up in rural Wisconsin, their lifelong penchant for recommending books to people, hanging out at A Room of One's Own while in high school, working as a bookseller there and then becoming an owner.

Treu discussed A Room of One's Own's move in 2021, which was "a lot of work," but gave the store "the opportunity to really make something that's ours from the beginning." They noted that "historically this is the safe space for women specifically, and our recent swap over to being a trans-inclusive space actually upset some people. I try to have respect for the store's history and I try to make space for people who remember it in a certain way while still holding firm that this is a store that has always tried to be progressive and you can't be progressive if you're not progressing."

Treu also talked about the power of stories and of books, saying, "Being a critical reader and being a reader and a person in the book world means recognizing that stories have power, stories have power to influence and affect people. What does a book do in your life, what does it change about you and what can it change about the world, I think, are questions I grapple with all the time because I do believe in the power of story and the power of books to change the world."

Good Morning America has chosen Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor (Riverhead Books) as its January Book Club pick. GMA wrote: "The story transports readers into modern-day India, following the stories of three very different but intersecting lives: a gangster family's young chauffeur, a son who desperately wants to break from the chain of violence and a young female journalist.

"Age of Vice dives deep into themes of excess, crime, betrayal, vengeance, forbidden love and class struggle, shifting between the extravagant lifestyles of the mega-rich and heartbreaking poverty."

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Reese's Book Club has selected The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes (Dutton) as its January pick. Reese Witherspoon said, "This is an absolute, can't-put-it-down thriller that follows Maya who's trying to prove once and for all that her best friend was murdered years ago by her then boyfriend, Frank. Her best friend and boyfriend at the time--Frank--were talking and then her best friend just falls down dead. As Maya digs further into Frank's past and present she finds a string of similar mysterious deaths. It's truly a wild ride that had me flying through chapter after chapter."

"Sometimes we're not feeling as creative as we'd like, but it's going to happen!" Rakestraw Books, Danville, Calif., posted on Facebook, sharing a photo of a bookless display table and a sign with the message: "This table display is--like the new Game of Thrones or the third Patrick Rothfuss novel--an eagerly awaited work in progress."

At Smith Publicity:

Marissa Eigenbrood has been promoted to president. She joined the agency in 2009 as a publicist and business development associate and was promoted several times, most recently to senior v-p.

Sandra Poirier Smith has been promoted to CEO from president, a position she held for almost 20 years.

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Domenica deSalvo has joined the Karel/Dutton Group.

Today:
Good Morning America: Prince Harry, author of Spare (Random House, $36, 9780593593806).

Also on GMA: Wheeler Parker and Christopher Benson, authors of A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till (One World, $28.99, 9780593134269).

Fresh Air: Jonathan Escoferry, author of If I Survive You (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27, 9780374605988).

Drew Barrymore Show: Stacey Abrams, author of Stacey's Remarkable Books (Balzer + Bray, $19.99, 9780063271852).

Watch What Happens Live: Sandy Yawn, author of Be the Calm or Be the Storm: Leadership Lessons from a Woman at the Helm (Hay House Business, $24.99, 9781401967680).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: James Patterson and Mike Lupica, authors of The House of Wolves (Little, Brown, $29, 9780316404297).

NPR's All Things Considered: Tonya Bolden, co-author of The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music (Anne Schwartz Books, $18.99, 9780593479872).

Late Night with Seth Meyers: Stephen Markley, author of The Deluge (Simon & Schuster, $32.50, 9781982123093).

Shape Island, Apple TV+'s new stop motion series based on the trilogy of Shapes picture books by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, will premiere Friday, January 20. The voice cast includes Yvette Nicole Brown (Disenchanted), Harvey Guillen (What We Do in the Shadows), Scott Adsit(30 Rock) and Gideon Adlon (Blockers).

The series was co-created by Barnett and Klassen, who serve as executive producers alongside Bix Pix Entertainment's Kelli Bixler and Drew Hodges (Tumble Leaf). Ryan Pequin serves as co-executive producer and head writer.

A shortlist has been released for the £2,500 (about $3,025) Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, presented by Slightly Foxed and the Biographers' Club, the Bookseller reported. The winner will be announced March 14 in London. This year's shortlisted titles are:

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
Cimino: The Deerhunter, Heaven's Gate and the Price of a Vision by Charles Elton
Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer: A Journey in Art, a Glen and Changing Times by Tony Davidson
Original Sins: A Memoir by Matt Rowland Hill
The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome by Harry Sidebottom
The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds by Osman Yousefzada 

David Mas Masumoto has built a remarkable career as a third-generation organic peach and grape farmer, which has inspired his award-winning books, including Epitaph for a Peach (1995). What began as "bad poetry" in college after a difficult breakup eventually led to writing a dozen books. Secret Harvests again features "the farm [he] had once rejected," which was initially created and nurtured by his Japanese immigrant forebears after enduring (with some family members not surviving) the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. The one person never to call the family farm "home" was a maternal aunt, his mother's older sister who was separated from the family for 70 years.

"Ghosts inhabit our family history," Masumoto writes. "One of the ghosts who inhabit our farm is Shizuko, an aunt with an intellectual disability." In 2012, a hospice worker contacted Masumoto about Shizuko, who was, at age 92, "alive, barely." The kind stranger managed to find Masumoto through the obituary he wrote for his father two years earlier. Masumoto had been told Shizuko had died in her youth. To learn otherwise "is disruptive and disturbing, a departure from my understanding of family." As a writer, he seeks answers: "I try to capture the mosaic of her life as told through family stories combined with research, visits, and interviews." What emerges is a portrait of "thriving resilience."

For her first five years, Shizuko had a seemingly idyllic childhood surrounded by parents and siblings. A bout of meningitis seized her brain, causing her to be labeled "retarded." Ironically, that now-derogatory classification saved her from World War II prison camps, but she spent decades in various state-run institutions, "the type you'd see in movies with hundreds of forlorn bodies wandering long, dingy white hallways and rows and rows of beds... she roamed these halls ceaselessly. She outlived all her roommates." For her extended relatives to meet her during her final year of life requires new understanding about family and history.

Masumoto writes with an open vulnerability, intertwining what he can puzzle together of Shizuko's missing past with generations of their shared family's intimate experiences--of alienation, isolation, reunion. He ends each chapter with piercing verse; meanwhile, his prose remains impressively lyrical throughout. Stunning black-and-white linoleum woodcuts by artist Patricia Miye Wakida--whose Japanese American parents, too, were imprisoned during World War II--enhance Masumoto's text. Together, the pair present a spectacular, symbiotic homage to storytelling, both personal and historic. --Terry Hong, BookDragon

Shelf Talker: David Mas Masumoto's empathic homage to a maternal aunt, missing for 70 years, is at the core of this superbly affecting exploration of family storytelling.