"I'm surrounded by my metaphors."--Ray Bradbury, talking with the New York Times about the objects in his study--and several "long-forgotten" works that are being published by Morrow and Gauntlet Press.

Barnes & Noble will not sell O.J. Simpson's If I Did It in its stores but will fulfill special orders and offer it online, the AP (via USA Today) reported. The company cited "a perceived lack of customer interest." By contrast, Borders will stock If I Did It, which will be published by Beaufort Books in October, but the company "will not promote or market the book in any way," spokesperson Ann Binkley told the AP.

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Jennifer Daniels has joined Barnes & Noble as v-p, general counsel, and secretary of the board of directors. An attorney, she had worked at IBM for 16 years, most recently as v-p, assistant general counsel, and chief trust and compliance officer.

At B&N, Daniels will be responsible for all legal matters and provide guidance to the company and board on "all corporate governance and Securities and Exchange Commission matters, including public disclosures."

The creation of the position of general counsel was one of several recommendations made earlier this year by a special committee that investigated B&N's stock option policies and found that they had been misdated and improperly backdated to the tune of $45.5 million (Shelf Awareness, April 4, 2007).

In part, company executives blamed board secretary Michael N. Rosen of the law firm Bryan Cave for erroneous advice. Later in April, Rosen resigned from the B&N board.

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As part of the celebration of its 25th anniversary this fall, Books & Books, Coral Gables, Fla., is asking authors, publishers, fellow booksellers, cultural leaders and customers to share memories and impressions in 200 words at most that will be collected in an online commemorative publication called Twenty-Five.

The aim is to celebrate, too, "all of us, and how we are united in this wonderful enterprise of books, writing, culture and ideas," the store said. "So, please use us as a gateway to reflect on some of those larger themes of value, community and independence. As well as anything else that might be on your mind."

Books & Books will also celebrate the old-fashioned way, with a party on Saturday, October 20, 7 p.m.-midnight.

Responses for Twenty-Five should go to anniversary@booksandbooks.com. For more information, contact events and marketing coordinator Cristina Nosti at 305-444-9044.

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Cool idea of the day: Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, Milwaukee, Wis., and 99.1 WMYX's morning show, Jane & Kidd in the Morning, starring Jane Matenaer and Kidd O'Shea, have created Jane & Kidd's Book Club. The club features authors who will appear at a lunch and do book signings. The first club event will take place on Thursday, September 20, at the InterContinental Milwaukee Hotel and host Lorna Landvik, who will promote her new novel, The View from Mount Joy (Random House, $24.95, 9780345468376/0345468376). Attendees, who pay $39.95, will have lunch and receive an autographed copy of the book.

This is the first joint project undertaken by Schwartz and the radio station.

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Lamenting the loss of Cody's, the Berkeley Daily Planet catalogues the many surviving--and thriving--bookstores in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. The story ends: "The obituaries for the non-chain brick-and-mortar bookseller may be premature. But for God's sake, get out there and buy some books!"

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Good news, bad news about reading. Some 25% of all adult Americans did not read any books in the past year and on average, adults read four books in the last year, but those who read love reading, an AP/Ipsos poll has found.

The most avid readers are women and seniors; religious works and popular fiction are the top categories. More men than women are nonreaders, and they tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious.

Speaking for nonreaders, Richard Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas, Tex., said, "I just get sleepy when I read," adding that he would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

But many of those surveyed said they read dozens of books a year and couldn't do without them. "I go into another world when I read," Charlotte Fuller, 64, a retired nurse in Seminole, Fla., told the AP. She said she read 70 books in the last year. "I read so many sometimes I get the stories mixed up."

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Harper Lee speaks!

The reclusive Pulitzer Prize-winning author was in attendance Monday night for the induction of baseball legend Hank Aaron into the Alabama Academy of Honor. According to the AP (via the Los Angeles Times), "At the end of the ceremony, Academy of Honor chairman Tom Carruthers joked with Lee, saying he knew she had something she wanted to say to the crowd."

"Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool," Lee replied. The audience laughed and gave her a standing ovation.  

 

This morning on the Early Show: Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential candidate John Edwards and author of Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers (Broadway, $14.95, 9780767925389/0767925386).

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., features two interviews:

• Betsy Burton, author of The King's English: The Adventures of an Independent Bookseller (Gibbs Smith, $15.95, 9781423601241/1423601246)
• Deirdre McNamer, author of Red Rover (Viking, $24.95, 9780670063505/0670063509)

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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This morning on the Diane Rehm Show: Bruce Watson, author of Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (Viking, $25.95, 9780670063536/0670063533).

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Today on Oprah: Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author most recently of You: On a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management (Free Press, $25, 9780743292542/0743292545).

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Today on NPR's On Point: Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (Penguin Press, $27.95, 9781594201295/1594201293).

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Connie Schultz, a Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist, wife of Senator Sherrod Brown and author of . . . And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man (Random House, $24.95, 9781400065738/1400065739).

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Tonight on Anderson Cooper 360: Irene Spencer, author of Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife (Center Street, $24.99, 9781599957197/1599957191).

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Tonight on the Charlie Rose Show: Joel Fleishman, author of The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth Is Changing the World (PublicAffairs, $27.95, 9781586484118/1586484117).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Senator Barack Obama whose latest book is The Audacity of Hope (Crown, $25, 9780307237699/0307237699).

 

Bob Smith's first book of comic essays, Openly Bob, won the Lambda Literary Award for humor. In September, Carroll & Graf will publish his debut novel, Selfish and Perverse, about three gay men and one lesbian in Alaska. Armistead Maupin has said about his new book, "A thoroughly seductive and satisfying read. It makes you laugh, it makes you horny, it makes you want to fish for salmon." Here Smith, who lives in New York City, answers questions we occasionally put to people in the industry:
 
On your nightstand now:

Send Me by Patrick Ryan (reading it for the second time), Chaos by Edmund White, Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin and Sway by Zachary Lazar
 
Favorite book when you were a child:

The Lord of the Rings

Your top five authors:

Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, Dawn Powell, Christopher Isherwood, Barbara Pym

Book you've faked reading:

The Ambassadors by Henry James. (It was back in college. I never finished the book for a class.)
 
Books you are an evangelist for:

The Man of the House by Stephen Macauley and A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym
 
Book you've bought for the cover:

Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons. I love his comic illustrations and bought the hardcover first edition back in 1982 when every hardcover purchase was momentous.  
 
Book that changed your life:

Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories
 
Favorite lines from books:  

"Cassie was forty-three, well all right, forty-eight if you're going to count every lost weekend."--Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur

"Elsie congratulated herself on providing herself with such juicy nourishment for she had devoured most of her old friends, her enthusiasms were thinning out, and she had reached a time of life when the zest for adventure properly takes itself out in belaboring a daughter-in-law, ruining a grandchild or defending a worthless son."--Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavillion   

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

Emma by Jane Austen

Author reading you'd most like to have attended:

Charles Dickens performing A Christmas Carol

Three authors you'd like to go on bar crawl with:

Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams and Joe Orton

Longtime journalist, war reporter and book author Malcolm MacPherson says the topic of Iraq in 2003--in the first flush of the U.S. occupation--is "like talking about the Revolutionary War." Yet, other than the disastrous decision to invade, the roots of the current problem lie in that period, which was when Ambassador Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army, leaving "500,000 men out of work, all with weapons in their homes, each with 30 people to support," as a CIA operative put it to MacPherson at the time. How better to help an insurgency start?

"It was a catastrophic decision," MacPherson emphasized to Shelf Awareness during a conversation last week in New York City. Adding to the chaos, billions of dollars were washing into Iraq with little or no controls and the Bush administration was still frantically looking for weapons of mass destruction, the main prewar justification for invasion.

On assignment for Time magazine in Iraq in mid-2003, MacPherson kept hearing and experiencing things that he couldn't use in his journalism. The situation was "really really wacky," MacPherson commented. "I kept 'seeing' a first draft of a satirical novel." At the time, even New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that "this stuff was too funny to make up" and wondered why no one was writing satire.

Returning to the U.S., MacPherson spent the month of November 2003 writing the amazing, hilarious Hocus POTUS (Melville House, $24.95, 9781933633282/193363328X). At times the book is laugh-out-loud funny--and features a cast of characters that includes a daft ambassador; a young aide who knew Bush's daughter Barbara at Yale and has "drunk the Kool Aid," meaning she believes completely in the Bush view of the world; a nuclear physicist leading the effort to find WMDs who finds smoking weed the only way to cope; and plain-spoken Iraqis who are glad to see Saddam Hussein gone but lament what is happening to their country. There are echoes of Catch-22, M*A*S*H, Slaughterhouse Five and The Secret of Santa Vittoria. The book was published last week.

Much of what happens is based on MacPherson's own experience. For example, the opening chapters, during which a group of people on a C-130 carrying $75 million in cash decide to steal it, is based on a time MacPherson flew on a C-130 that was carrying 17 tons of $20 bills. After he learned about the cargo, "I spent the rest of the flight trying to think of how to steal it," he said. Likewise he visited the home of Uday, one of Saddam Hussein's two sons, and he knew a young woman with White House connections who on one ride around Baghdad after curfew, insisted that the driver stop at all lights even though the electricity was dead and no other vehicles were traveling.

It was a time when "so many young neocons with such a sense of entitlement were coming over in droves to punch their resumes and go home," MacPherson said. "They had no experience, no commitment, no interest in getting hot or mucked up. For them, it might as well have been a two-week trip to Costa Rica. Bremer himself wanted to stay just long enough to become Secretary of State."

Illustrating the clash of cultures, in the book a lieutenant tells one of the neocons who is angry that Iraqis don't seem to want the help of her and other Americans: "I guess, Ma'am, if you invented writing and literature and architecture and law and . . . well, hell, western civilization, you'd think you don't need our help."

As for the plot of Hocus POTUS (POTUS is a government insider abbreviation for President of the United States.), let's just say that ample untraceable U.S. taxpayer-supplied cash, some people's desire to own substantial chunks of that cash and the U.S. leadership's mad desire to find evidence of WMDs all work together in a mutually satisfying way.

Distracted by journalism and other nonfiction book contracts, MacPherson sat on the manuscript that he knocked out in a month. "I didn't show it to anyone, including my wife," he said. "I was sure no one would publish it." But when he read Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by Bernard Henri Levy, he noticed that the publisher was Melville House, and "I thought it was a really good publishing job." Moreover, he figured that if "they were crazy enough to start an independent publishing house, they might be crazy enough to publish this." He sent the MS to the Melville House slush pile with no identification. The house's acceptance of the book under such circumstances "is what every writer wants to have happen," he said.

MacPherson said he doesn't know if this is the right time or not to release such a book. On the one hand, he called the timing "perfect." But then he asked, "Are people too sick of the war to laugh about it?" He suggested that "you couldn't sell a serious book about the war now," and noted that bestselling gung-ho memoir Lone Survivor by ex-Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell is set in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

"I have to take a Zen approach" about the book's prospects, MacPherson said. "Hocus POTUS either twigs with the readers of America or doesn't. I've always had modest expectations for this. For some, book publishing is like running around in a field in a rainstorm hoping lightning hits you, which is a one in a 20 million chance. I'm too old for that. I'd rather just stand there in the rainstorm."

The book is only the second of MacPherson's 13 books that he wrote, he said, "in the language that I use and how I view people." As a result, "it was a joy to write."

His first such book was In Cahoots, a novel about the founding of Disneyland, starring a poor family that scraped together enough money to buy a quarter acre of land about where the park would be, not to make money, but to meet Walt Disney.

He has several ideas for future novels that come from the heart. One would be a "pulling apart of the whole notion in this country of why on earth we allow ourselves to be scared"--from the Cold War to September 11. "It's a discussion that can be well handled with satire," MacPherson said. "People who are paranoid and constantly afraid of things are not only illogical but comical."--John Mutter

This may be one of our favorite bestseller lists.

Richard Davies of AbeBooks.com notes that the bestselling sex manual on the site so far this year is a Christian one from 1981 that is now out of print and four Taoist sex books are also in the top 10. Sex in the City star Kim Cattrall's sex book also got a strong response from readers. One reason for the popularity of such titles at AbeBooks.com: as Davies put it, "You don't have to face a bookseller when you order online."

AbeBooks.com's top 10 bestselling sex manuals in 2007 so far:

1. Intended for Pleasure: New Approaches to Sexual Intimacy in Christian Marriage by Ed and Gaye Wheat
2. Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships by David Schnarch
3. She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman by Ian Kerner
4. The Tao of Sexology: The Book of Infinite Wisdom by Stephen Thomas
5. The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress: Secrets of the Female Taoist Masters by Hsi Lai
6. The Multi-Orgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know by Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams Arava
7. Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy by Mantak Chia and Michael Winn
8. The Sexual Teachings of the Jade Dragon Taoist Methods for Male Sexual Revitalization by Hsi Lai
9. Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm by Kim Cattrall and Mark Levinson
10. Hot Monogamy: Essential Steps to More Passionate, Intimate Lovemaking by Patricia Love and Jo Robinson

[Many thanks to AbeBooks.com!]