Shelf Awareness for Wednesday, November 2, 2005


Del Rey Books: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

Overlook Press: How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

Charlesbridge Publishing: If Lin Can: How Jeremy Lin Inspired Asian Americans to Shoot for the Stars by Richard Ho, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên and Phùng Nguyên Quang

Shadow Mountain: The Orchids of Ashthorne Hall (Proper Romance Victorian) by Rebecca Anderson

Quotation of the Day

The Bookstore As School of Life

"You have to educate people around stuff like books and literature and art. We want to be a place where people can learn these things, to expand their horizons."--Author Luis J. Rodriguez, in an AP profile, talking about Tia Chucha's Café Cultural, the coffeehouse and bookstore in Sylmar, Calif., he runs with his wife, Trini.

HarperOne: Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster


News

Notes: ABC Head to Retire; New New Paltz Bookstore?

Anne Irish plans to retire as executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children on February 15, according to ABC's monthly newsletter. She will work as a "transition consultant" through next year's BEA.

ABC president Ellen Davis of Dragonwings Bookstore, Waupaca, Wis., wrote that when Irish took the job four years ago, "ABC had a declining membership, depleted initiatives and a nearly empty bank account." Now membership is growing, initiatives abound, there are new member benefits and the association is financially stable.

At a recent meeting, the board decided to relaunch ABC's literacy initiative next year with a new slogan, Books Make Everything Better, which will replace Read With a Child on the association's posters and catalogue cover. Publishers are invited to submit illustrations from frontlist books for consideration to accompany the slogan.

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In the wake of the announcement that Ariel Booksellers will close, New Paltz, N.Y., resident Caitlin Welles, who has worked in chain and indie bookstores, has organized the New Paltz Book Co-Op Project, which aims to create a nonprofit, cooperative bookstore, the Times Herald-Record reported.

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The controversy about textbook prices has made the pages of the New Yorker. The Financial Page column of the current issue notes that students are "remarkably good at gaming the cycle of revisions." In "textbook fashion," students buy fewer new copies of a textbook about to be revised, a dynamic that "serves as a check on publishers, who know that if they revise too frequently they could end up losing sales." The only losers in the game, the column concludes, are "those who buy textbooks and hold on to them: graduate students, bookworms, and lazy people."

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Foodies alert! The Los Angeles Times offers a smorgasbord of stores in the area that sell cookbooks, from those that specialize in cookbooks--Cook's Library in West Hollywood and Cook's Books in Pasadena (with more than 30,000 used volumes)--to bookstores with healthy cookbook sections--Vroman's, the Bodhi Tree, Children's Book World and Kinokuniya, among others--to nonbookstores such as le Sanctuaire, a food and cookware boutique in Santa Monica, and the Autry National Center, a museum of Western history.

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Happy birthday to Diane's Books, Greenwich, Conn., which was founded November 5, 1990, by Diane Garrett. The 3,000-sq.-ft. store, which has a customer base of nearly 10,000, celebrated with a combination Halloween-birthday party last Sunday at which Garrett unveiled a nearby streetlamp she had bought "as a permanent marker of the store's history in town and a gift to the community."

"I believed that there was a place for a family bookstore, where adults and children might shop together and choose books together and learn to love reading together," Garrett said in an announcement. "And the community responded."

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Retail chain store sales are expected to rise 4% in October, up one percentage point from the previous estimate, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. The revision upward is because of increased demand for seasonal goods, ICSC said.

In the last week of the month, sales rose 0.4% because of "a chill in the air and a consumer dash for spooky goods."

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Today's New York Times interviews Man Booker Prize winner John Banville, who seems to loathe many critics and other writers as much as they loathe him.

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The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is organizing a program for investigative reporters to speak at bookstores to educate the public about the importance of confidential sources for a free press.

ABFFE is working with the MLRC Institute, which will identify a reporter in the bookseller's area who has worked on major stories that could not have been reported without the use of confidential sources. Interested booksellers should contact ABFFE president Chris Finan at chris@abffe.com or 212-587-4025.

Park Street Press: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey by Peter A Levine


Borders Additions, Some With Spanish Accents

Borders is opening five stores this month in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia and Washington:

  • A 22,000-sq.-ft. store in Baybrook, Tex., in the Baybrook Passage Shopping Center, at the intersection of Interstate 45 and Bay Area Boulevard, near NASA's Johnson Space Center. The store will have an expanded Spanish language section, including fiction and nonfiction titles for children and adults. This will be the sixth Borders store in the Houston area.
  • A two-level, 26,000-sq.-ft. store in Scottsdale, Ariz., in the new Waterfront project, at 7135 E. Camelback Road, near the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall. This store also will have an expanded Spanish language section and will be the ninth Borders store in the Phoenix area.
  • A 22,000-sq.-ft. store in Albuquerque, N.M., in the Cottonwood Corners Shopping Center, at the intersection of Coors Bypass and Ellison Drive. This store also has an expanded Spanish language section and will be the third Borders store in Albuquerque.
  • A 22,185-sq.-ft. store in Everett, Wash., in the Everett Mall, at the intersection of Everett Mall Way and Interstate 5. This is the 10th Borders store in the state.
  • A 23,000-sq.-ft. store in Suwannee, Ga., in the Johns Creek Town Center, at the intersection of Johns Creek Parkway and McGinnis Ferry Road. This is the 13th Borders store in the Atlanta area.

G.P. Putnam's Sons: Take Me Home by Melanie Sweeney


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Jarhead Swofford

Good Morning America has a closeup with Anthony Swofford, whose Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner, $14, 0743287215) is the basis for the movie of the same name opening on Friday.

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Who needs caffeine? This morning the Early Show features Jerry Lewis, author of Dean and Me: A Love Story (Doubleday, $26.95, 0767920864).

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This morning on the Today Show:

  • Martha Stewart presents the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook (Clarkson Potter, $40, 0307236722).
  • Bode Miller, author of Be Good, Be Fast, Have Fun (Villard, $24.95, 1400062357).

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Today's Diane Rehm Show on WAMU features:

  • John Hope Franklin, who looks at himself and the country in Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (FSG, $25, 0374299447).
  • Senator Barbara Boxer, whose new political thriller is A Time to Run (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811850439).

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Today on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show:

  • Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece (Random House, $24.95, 0375508015).
  • Kent Nerburn, author of Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy (HarperSanFrancisco, $24.95, 0060513012).
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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: 10 minutes of Mike Wallace, author of Between You and Me (Hyperion, $26.95, 1401300294).

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Tonight on the Charlie Rose Show, the day after All Saints' Day: Anne Rice, author of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf, $25.95, 0375412018).

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Yesterday on Fresh Air, more debate on our wars:

  • William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and author of The War Over Iraq: America's Mission and Saddam's Tyranny (Encounter Books, $25.95, 1893554694).
  • Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, co-authors of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (Times Books, $26, 0805079416).


Books & Authors

Jocelyn Wins Canadian Children's Award

Marthe Jocelyn has won the first TD Canadian Children's Literature Award for most distinguished book of the year for her Mable Riley: A Reliable Record of Humdrum, Peril, and Romance (Candlewick, $15.99, 076362120X). The award, worth C$20,000 (almost US$17,000), was created as part of TD Canadian Children's Book Week, sponsored by the Canadian Children's Book Centre and TD Bank Financial Group. The winner of the award for a French-language book will be announced on November 8.

Joseph-Beth's Books of the Year

The Joseph-Beth Group, which has eight stores under the Joseph-Beth and David-Kidd names, has selected its 2005 Book of the Year winners:

Fiction: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (Little, Brown).
Nonfiction: Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Morrow).
Kids Illustrated: Leonardo the Terrible Monster by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Children).
Kids Non-Illustrated: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic).

Voted on by Joseph-Beth Group booksellers, the winning books will be decorated with gold foil seals and be displayed prominently in each store.

Winters Winner of Lenore Marshall Prize

The Displaced of Capital by Anne Winters (University of Chicago Press, $14, 0226902358) has won the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Nation magazine. The $25,000 award goes to the best book of poetry published in the U.S. during the previous year.

In the book, the Academy said, Winters explores "the link between the allure of New York City and the harsh realities of global capitalism--Third World labor, poverty, immigration and the erasure of local culture."

Robert Pinsky, one of the three judges (the others were Louise Glück and Alan Shapiro), wrote that the book is "innovative, even startling, in ways that make its materials not remote but immediate. Vivid and reflective, documentary and visionary, re-imagining the city of New York with the same urgency that ponders the opening words of Genesis, this is a passionate, artful and re-readable book."

Winters will read selections from her book tomorrow, November 3, in New York City at the annual Awards Ceremony, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.

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