Another Canadian bookstore has begun selling books at their listed U.S. prices, which usually are 5%-15% lower than Canadian prices, the Edmonton Journal reported. Audreys Books of Edmonton, Alberta, will continue selling the books this way through the end of the year. Co-owner Sharon Budnarchuk told the Journal, "We were very concerned about how the Christmas season was going to go. We've put a great deal of money into inventory, and you don't want to see the whole thing disappear."

Earlier this month (Shelf Awareness, October 9, 2007), Steve Budnarchuk, co-owner of Audreys and immediate past president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, had told the Boston Globe, "If we take the markdown, we take a loss on it." As the Canadian dollar has hit par with the U.S. dollar, the price differential on books has been the target of many consumers' wrath.

Steve Budnarchuk and other CBA representatives met this week with Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty who has criticized book pricing in Canada. "He keeps saying [to readers] go and shop where the price is the best," Sharon Budnarchuk said. "Well, all you're doing is sending them all down to the U.S. and online in the U.S. And that's outrageous."

In response to consumer complaints, the Journal said, Penguin Group (Canada) plans to sell U.S. books to Canadian retailers at as close to par as possible--within 1.1%--by January. Random House Canada and HarperCollins Canada are giving retailers discounts of 5% on new titles. Random is also offering a 10% adjustment on backlist titles.

Congratulations! Nancy Bass Wyden, co-owner of the Strand Book Store, New York City, and wife of Senator Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), gave birth to twins on Friday, October 26. William Peter and Ava Rose arrived at 9:23 a.m. at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Ore. Will weighed in at 6 lbs. and Ava Rose at 5 lbs. and 2 oz. Christina Foxley of the Strand assures us that "the entire Wyden family--Nancy, Ron, Adam, Lilly, Will and Ava Rose--is healthy and very excited."

---

Oh my: O'Donnell overwhelmed by O'Reilly.

A camera crew from Bill O'Reilly's show appeared at a book signing on Long Island in New York, where Rosie O'Donnell was promoting her new book, Celebrity Detox. According to Access Hollywood (via MSNBC), the crew was ostensibly inviting O'Donnell onto the show of her sometime archnemesis and questioned her about a disputed statement about September 11. O'Donnell asked the crew to turn off their cameras; they refused; they were escorted out.

---

Bill Butler, owner of Butler & Sons Books, Rosenberg, Tex., submitted the winning bid--$100,000--for a three-inch lock of hair snipped from Latin American revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara before his burial in 1967. The AP (via KXXX-TV News) reported that Butler, "a collector of 1960s items," plans to display the hair at his bookshop.

---

Earlier this month, we highlighted the return of Michael DeSanto and Renee Reiner to bookselling with their new venture, Phoenix Books, Café & Wine, Essex Junction, Vt. (Shelf Awareness, October 1, 2007). Now we can share their photographic chronicle of the journey from empty space to the bookshop that will hold its opening ceremony November 5.

---

J.W. Beecroft Books & Coffee, Superior, Wis., will close at the end of the year. According to the Superior Daily Telegram, the bookstore was doing well financially, but owners Jan and John Murphy felt it was time to close this decade-long chapter in their lives.

"It was never meant to be a life-long activity," Jan said. "It was meant to be an adventure. I want to retire . . .  pursue other things, travel. There’s a really interesting world out there and there's lots of little bookstores to explore."

---

The Grand Prize winner of the First Chapters Romance Writing Competition, sponsored by Simon & Schuster, Borders and Gather.com, is Meredith McGuire, who is working on a social science Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and receives a $5,000 advance for her novel, The Shadow's Kiss, the AP reported. Runner-up is Starr Toth, who raises horses in Ortonville, Mich., and receives $3,500 for Trust Me.

The books will be published by S&S next year.

Previously the three companies have run the First Chapters writing contest, and S&S is publishing the winners--Terry Shaw's The Way Life Should Be and Geoffrey Edwards's Fire Bell in the Night--this fall.

---

One million copies of the official Chinese language edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows went on sale this week. People's Daily Online reported that the book, which was published by the People's Literature Publishing House in Beijing, joins "nearly 10 million copies of the Chinese versions of the previous six installments [that] have been sold, and the number is rising."

---

Happy Halloween

Just in time for the scariest night of the year, Abebooks.com polled visitors on the 10 scariest characters in literature. The results:

1. Big Brother from 1984 by George Orwell
2. Hannibal Lecter from the novels by Thomas Harris
3. Pennywise the clown from It by Stephen King
4. Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
5. Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's novel
6. Annie Wilkes from Misery by Stephen King
7. The demon from The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
8. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
9. Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
10. Voldemort from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling

[Many thanks to AbeBooks.com!]

This morning on the Early Show: David A. Andelman, author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Wiley, $25.95, 9780471788980/0471788988).

---

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: David Frost, author of Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews (Harper Perennial, $14.95, 9780061445866/006144586X).

---

Tonight on the Late Show With David Letterman: Slash, author of Slash (HarperEntertainment, $27.95, 9780061351426/0061351423).

---

Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Valerie Plame Wilson, author of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (S&S, $26, 9781416537618/1416537619). Wilson is also on the Charlie Rose Show tonight.

---

Tonight on the Colbert Report: J. Craig Venter, author of A Life Decoded (Viking, $25.95, 9780670063581/0670063584).

---

Tonight on Late Night With Conan O'Brien: Ronnie Wood, author of Ronnie: The Autobiography (St. Martin's, $25.95, 9780312366520/0312366523).

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday and Wednesday, November 6 and 7:

Borat: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. and Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan by Borat Sagdiyev (Flying Dolphin Press, $24.95, 9780385523462/0385523467) gives the infamous Kazakh world traveler's tips on touring his homeland and the U.S. Includes important knowledge such as "how to get cage of your wife through airport."

Sage-ing While Age-ing by Shirley MacLaine (Atria, $26, 9781416550419/1416550410) presents the Oscar-winning actress's views on life, aging and death.

Them: A Novel by Nathan McCall (Atria, $25, 9781416549154/1416549153) examines racial tension caused by attempts to gentrify the Fourth Ward of Atlanta.

Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig (St. Martin's, $27.95, 9780312262518/0312262515) continues the Gone with the Wind franchise.

Stone Cold by David Baldacci (Grand Central, $26.99, 9780446577397/0446577391) is a new adventure for the mysterious crime fighters known as the Camel Club.

Angela and the Baby Jesus by Frank McCourt with illustrations by Loren Long (Scribner, $14.95, 9781416574705/1416574700) is a Christmas story set during the childhood of Angela from Angela's Ashes.

Tipperary: A Novel by Frank Delaney (Random House, $26.95, 9781400065233/1400065232) is the fictional memoir of an Irish healer born in 1860. While traveling the country, he interacts with important Irish figures such as Oscar Wilde and even gives writing advice to James Joyce.

Boom!: Voices of the Sixties Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today by Tom Brokaw (Random House, $27.95, 9785557566506/5557566503).

Third Degree: A Novel by Greg Iles (Scribner, $25.95, 9780743292504/0743292502) tests the limits of marital stability between a cheating wife and a husband whose medical practice is being audited by the IRS.

Creation in Death by J.D. Robb (Putnam, $25.95, 9780399154362/0399154361) takes place in 2060 when an NYPD detective must catch a serial killer who may be targeting her.

The Chase by Clive Cussler (Putnam Adult, $26.95, 9780399154386/0399154388) follows detective Isaac Bell, who is hired to catch a violent robber known as the Butcher Bandit in 1906.

Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations by John Bolton (Threshold Editions, $27, 9781416552840/1416552847) is the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during much of George W. Bush's presidency.

Stephen King's Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born by Peter David, Stephen King and Robin Furth with illustrations by Jae Lee (Marvel Comics, $24.99, 9780785121442/0785121447) chronicles the past adventures of Roland, the legendary gunslinger and protagonist of King's Dark Tower series.

Now in paperback next week:

It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh (Free Press, $14, 9780743292658/0743292650).

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama (Three Rivers Press, $14.95, 9780307237705/0307237702).

Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor, $13.95, 9780307275981/0307275981) .

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Fallout by David Michaels (Berkley, $9.99, 9780425218242/0425218244).

Invasion by Robin Cook (Berkley, $9.99, 9780425219577/0425219577).

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens (Da Capo, $17.50, 9780306816086/0306816083).

Angela Davis-Gardner, author of the bestselling Plum Wine, spent a year in Japan as visiting professor at Tokyo's Tsuda College, where she taught English and American literature. She is currently an alumni distinguished professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh, where she is at work on her new novel to be published by Dial Press in hardcover in 2008. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novels Felice and Forms of Shelter, both to be reissued as Dial Press trade paperbacks this fall.

On your nightstand now:  

Susan Richards Shreve's memoir Warm Springs and Fierce Pajamas, An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker
 
Favorite book when you were a child:

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Book you most enjoyed reading to your child:  

Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories

Your top five authors:  

William Maxwell, Lydia Davis, James Salter, Marguerite Duras, Flannery O'Connor

Book you've faked reading:

Milton's Paradise Lost
 
Book you are an evangelist for:

Touch Wood, a collection of stories by Joe Ashby Porter; Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.
 
Book you've bought for the cover:

I'm less affected by covers than by titles. Book I recently bought for the title: A Book of Luminous Things, a poetry anthology edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
 
Book that changed your life:

Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilych
 
Favorite line from a book:

"There is only this vast uneasy river of life, spreading its way into every possible niche, dreaming its way toward every possible form."--Loren Eisley, The Immense Universe
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Book you have re-read most often:

W. B. Yeats's Collected Poems

This year's surprise Booker-winner is a surprise in more ways than one. It's a cocky, sure-of-itself, in-your-face literary experience that's bracingly honest and frequently roaringly funny on the least funny of subjects: a funeral. It's not the plot that's dazzling. The story itself is hardly more than a pretext: Liam Hegarty's suicide at the age of 40 draws his nine surviving brothers and sisters back to the old over-extended family home in Dublin.

The 39-year-old narrator Veronica Hegarty was always close to Liam and wants to tell you about her brother's death, and in particular about something that happened when she was eight and Liam was nine (or, at least, could have happened, or maybe didn't happen at all), but to do so she has to go back to 1925 and the meeting of Veronica's grandmother, Ada, age 19, with the mysterious, enigmatic Lambert Nugent in the foyer of a Dublin hotel. It's love at first sight. Does Ada marry Lambert? No. Instead she marries his best friend, Charlie Spillane, who drives up with a flashy car outside. Thus, according to Veronica, her brother's fate is set in motion. What this has to do with Liam's death is the mystery.

Don't expect to find out what really happened in grandmother's house. Memory in Enright's hands is even more treacherous and unreliable than in Proust's. Veronica gives you all kinds of variant possibilities, but that's all they are, contradictory interpretations of the past, fallible guesswork.

Author Enright has a fine time entertaining you, with a spunky irony to the writing style, an exuberance in the language, a sly wisdom underlying the twists of the narrative. Her tale is pull-no-punches honest about the unfairness and disappointments of life, but playful enough to include a sex scene that didn't really happen. It's a thrillingly honest and unsentimental look at the human experience, with plenty of defiant Irish laughter in the face of mortality.

Dotted with deadpan gems, every page seasoned with Enright's irrepressible spirit, The Gathering is a good-natured tribute to the family funerals of life, where grief is "somewhere between diarrhea and sex."--Nick DiMartino