Sadly Voices & Visions: Books, Arts and Community in the Bourse building on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, Pa., is closing, effective today. The store, which emphasized the arts and community events, opened nearly two years ago (Shelf Awareness, June 29, 2005).

In an e-mail to customers and others, owner Angela Roach said, "We hope to see you again in the future--at other wonderful events, perhaps in passing, and hopefully one day in a whole new bookstore type venture. In the meantime, thank you for being a part of our lives and a part of the store. It's been a truly amazing and wonderful experience that we hope we get a crack at another time."

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In time for the summer travel season, USA Today tours airport bookstores and discovers a few unusual shops, both used bookstores:

The Renaissance Book Shop in Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport, which "may be the oldest used bookstore in an airport," stocks nearly 50,000 books. The main store is downtown; the airport branch has been open some 30 years.

2nd ed. Booksellers, a 23-year-old used bookstore with 8,000 titles at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Walter High, who owns the store with his wife, Karen, told the paper that 2nd ed. Booksellers has no difficulty differentiating itself from the new bookstore competition: "We find that people are delighted to find that there's something they don't have to pay full price for at the airport. We make a point of stocking books that the new booksellers don't. For example, I recently bought a huge collection of Civil War books that includes first editions from the 1920s. We're going to make a big display here in the store. That's stuff you're not going to see down the hall at Borders."

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Your books are virtually overdue. Campus Technology reported that Santa Clara University's future library can already be explored in Second Life, the popular online community, where "a staff of librarians can help visitors via chatting and eventually with voice communications when that feature is added. . . . Classrooms inside the library provide a way for teachers to teach classes by pre-recording lectures and screening them in Second Life, which allows video and audio streaming."

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"Ninety percent of the people over there are listening to music, head banging, and I'm over there listening to Shelby Foote," Jim Burgin, 67 told the Tennessean in an article about the increasing popularity among seniors of downloadable audiobooks.

"It has really gone gangbusters," said Pat Thompson, special projects coordinator for the Tennessee State Library and Archives. "In library service we never know what population is going to take hold. It was an interesting anecdotal discovery to find many elderly people, or people who are a little older, were taking advantage of this program."

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Artist and illustrator Charley Harper died on Sunday of pneumonia at the age of 84, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. He and his work are the subject of a major retrospective volume that is being published by AMMO Books (American Modern Books) at the end of the month. Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life is edited by Todd Oldham and comes in a $200 regular trade edition and four $400 limited editions signed by Harper and Oldham that include a lithograph by Harper. (Each of the different limited editions has a different lithograph.) With headquarters in Los Angeles, Ammo is distributed by Ingram Publisher Services. 

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Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad, blogs from the second annual Book Group Expo, which was just held in San Jose, Calif. Thanks to Carl Lennertz for the tip on his Publishing Insider blog.

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In March 2009, Barnes & Noble plans to open a store in the Biltmore Park Town Center at 33 Town Square Boulevard in Asheville, N.C.

 

This morning on the Today Show: Victoria Zackheim, author of The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly about Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal (Grand Central, $24.99, 9780446580229/0446580228).

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Today on the Early Show: Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday, $27.50, 9780385517089/0385517084).

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., has the theme "A Salute to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill" and features, in addition to a discussion with Algonquin's Craig Popelars, two interviews of Algonquin authors:

• Robert Goolrick, author of The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life (Algonquin, $22.95, 9781565124813/1565124812)
• Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse (Algonquin, $23.95, 9781565125216/1565125215)

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on the Ellen DeGeneres Show: former Vice President Al Gore, whose new book is The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press, $25.95, 9781594201226/1594201226).

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Today WAMU's Diane Rehm Show talks with Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, authors of Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB (Free Press, $27, 9781416551652/1416551654).

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Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, authors of Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown, $29.99, 9780316017428/0316017426).

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer who has covered the Iraq War for the New York Times and is author of the amusingly titled forthcoming book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War (University of Chicago Press, $35, 9780226293257/0226293254). Gilbertson also has an essay and photos in the summer issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which will be out July 1. Listeners can see the VQR material online.

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Today on Anderson Cooper's 360, Marcus Luttrell talks about Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316067591/0316067598).

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Tonight the Daily Show gets smoking with Allan Brandt, author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books, $36, 9780465070473/0465070477).

 

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958, and Anthills of the Savannah (1988), has won the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded every other year to honor "a living author who has contributed significantly to world literature." Her competition included Ian McEwan, Carlos Fuentes, Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie.

According to Bloomberg, Nadine Gordimer, one of the three judges, said that "Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature. He has gone on to achieve what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer's purpose: 'a new-found utterance' for the capture of life's complexity.''

Achebe, who was a diplomat for Biafra during its short existence, now teaches at Bard College.

Only last week, another Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria during the time when Biafra declared independence.

 

The comic misadventures of summer camp are captured in two new memoirs: Mindy Schneider's Not a Happy Camper (Grove Atlantic, $24, 9780802118486/0802118488) and Josh Wolk's Cabin Pressure: One Man's Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor (Hyperion, $22.95, 9781401302603/1401302602), both of which have just been published.

With matrimony looming on the horizon, Wolk took a leave of absence from his job as a staff writer for Entertainment Weekly and headed to the boys' camp in Maine that he had attended years earlier. "I realized it was my last chance to do it. Once I got married and had kids, I would never be able to take a summer off to go work at camp," said Wolk, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. "This place really meant that much to me that I wanted to go back there." In Cabin Pressure, he recounts his last days of bachelorhood---eight hilarious and nostalgic weeks spent as a counselor among a group of rowdy adolescent males at Camp Eastwind in the Maine woods.

A summer camp in Maine also made an indelible impression on Mindy Schneider. Not a Happy Camper transports readers to the summer of 1974, when 13-year-old Schneider left her New Jersey hometown for the co-ed Camp Kin-A-Hurra. The wooded paradise turns out to be less idyllic than she envisioned but memorable nonetheless as she endures inedible kosher food, makes new friends, experiences unrequited love and learns a few things about herself along the way.

Schneider was inspired in part to write the book after attending a camp reunion in 1997, where she reconnected with former Camp Kin-A-Hurra bunkmates and traded colorful anecdotes. The Los Angeles resident is a former screenwriter who worked on such shows as Kate & Allie, Growing Pains and Who's the Boss? According to one early fan of Not a Happy Camper, Schneider's comedic skills have translated to the page. "Her characters are simultaneously over-the-top and suffused with realness, her timing impeccable and her setups uproarious," said Schwartz Bookshops senior buyer Daniel Goldin. Schwartz will be promoting both Not a Happy Camper and Cabin Pressure in its five Milwaukee locations with prominent in-store placement and staff recommendation features in the June edition of the store's newsletter.  

Both Schneider and Wolk agree that their memoirs will appeal to readers regardless of whether or not they have attended summer camp themselves. Although Not a Happy Camper is "specific to a camp experience in the 1970s," commented Schneider, "the themes of adolescence and summer vacation are universal." As for Cabin Pressure, Wolk said, "It's something people can grab and really laugh and have a good time."--Shannon McKenna

The author of The War, the fall TV series and book about World War II mentioned here yesterday, is Ken Burns.

 

During Reading the World month, we should acknowledge a sector of the publishing world that has been quietly integrating translated works onto bookstore shelves and into readers' hands for several years.

As a bookseller, I've watched this happen, read some of the authors and talked with customers who've been reading the worlds of mystery and suspense without realizing that translation was an issue.

Recently, I executed a drive-by translation hit at the Northshire Bookstore, where I quickly nabbed--without even trying hard--Before the Frost by Henning Mankell (translated from Swedish by Ebba Segerberg), Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason (translated from Icelandic by Bernard Scudder), Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe (translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter), Have Mercy On Us All by Fred Vargas (translated from French by David Bellos), The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri (translated from Italian by Stephen Sartarelli) and a new edition of The Hotel Majestic by Georges Simenon (translated from French by David Watson).

Many of these books are on displays or feature staff recommend tags. In other words, they are selling.

Is it a mystery that translated suspense novels seem to have found a niche? An investigation seemed to be called for, so I brought in two of the best mystery handsellers I know for questioning--Northshire Bookstore's Louise Jones and Sarah Knight.

Like any great detective fiction team, they chose to respond as partners:

Do literary fiction publishers have something to learn from the way mystery publishers have marketed translated works? I realize some houses do both, but does one hand know what the other is doing?

"Mystery readers are interested in the work itself--characters, plot, locale. They read mysteries for entertainment, provocation, and to learn something new--whether it's a quirky plot, the background, the sleuth's day job, or a different landscape--so they're eager to read novels set in other countries. Perhaps it makes them more exotic. Do our mystery readers care that they are in translation? We've never had anyone comment on this. The only difficulty is with a few clumsily written mysteries and that might have been because of the bad translator."

When you handsell translated mysteries, does the word "translated" enter the conversation?

"No. We may say they are set in a foreign country--for instance, an Icelandic mystery by the author of Jar City--but we discuss the quality of the book. We assume they know it's a translation, but it doesn't seem to be important. Sometimes a customer wants us to order the book in its original language. For Greek classics, yes, the translator is important."

Are the foreign settings and characters in mystery fiction actually a draw for readers rather than a problem to be solved for publishing folks, as seems to be the case for literary fiction?

"Customers who travel like to read mysteries set in the countries they have visited. Many of our customers find the foreign mysteries interesting because the political, social and cultural backgrounds are so different; for instance, those set in China and Japan. On the other hand, we have many customers who are emphatic that they want stories set in the U.S. or in Great Britain, but it isn't a problem; it's personal taste."

Do you think fiction readers associate "translation" with "literary" and would prefer something they feel might be more accessible?

"They may feel that if the publisher went to the trouble of having a book translated, then it is a high quality, or 'literary,' novel. And it often is. Also, most of the mysteries in translation that we carry--and are popular with our customers--are in trade size and are published by 'literary' publishers: Vintage, Soho (they were early with translated mysteries), Harcourt, Picador (Holt), Grove, Penguin, Vertical, and also St. Martin's and Delta (Bantam). Some are from special mystery book divisions and some aren't. Referring to your first question, maybe the different divisions don't talk and each doesn't know what the other is publishing. Stranger things have happened."

A clue worth noting for future reference is that not one of the books I picked up lists the translator's name on the cover. As a rule, translators have been relegated to the title page, though even this is subject to change. The advance readers edition of Javier Sierra's upcoming suspense novel, The Lady in Blue, lists the translator (James Graham, for those of you keeping score at home) only on the copyright page.

What does all this mean? The investigation continues next week.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)