Indie bookstores are "holding up vs. big rivals," according to the Boston Globe, which profiled Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass. Three months after a neighboring Barnes & Noble closed, the bookshop "savors modest growth in the midst of a recession that's battering most retailers."

"I do think there's a swing back to valuing local and independent," said Booksmith manager Dana Brigham. "Small and local can be good places to do business and very healthy for your community."

The Globe also noted that "Porter Square Books and Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Newtonville Books in Newton, Buttonwood Books & Toys in Cohasset, Willow Books & Cafe in Acton, and Book Ends in Winchester all say they are holding their own."

Citing innovations like Harvard Book Store's bicycle delivery service and proactive inventory control, the Globe reported that indies can adapt more quickly. "An independent can turn on a dime," said David Didriksen, owner of Willow Books. "Big chains tend to be like the Titanic."

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Back Pages Books, Waltham, Mass., also made Boston metro area headlines with the announcement that Alex Green, the bookshop's owner, is entering the publishing business "with the release of Back Pages Publishers first selection, Howard Zinn's The State of the Union 2009: Notes for a New Administration," Wicked Local Waltham reported.

Green, who calls his new venture a "one-man show, with a lot of volunteers," said he modeled his publishing enterprise on San Francisco's City Lights. "This is what bookstores all used to do."

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Despite the economy, a pair of established Glenwood Springs, Colo., bookstores are "in it for the long haul," according to the Post Independent.

 "When you’ve been in business for so long, you learn that you just have to keep going around these curves," said Sharon Graves, co-owner of Through the Looking Glass bookstore. "People still read in an economic downturn. . . . I think a lot of people who come in here understand what’s going on with bookstores, even the tourists. Do we really want to be so homogenized that there’s no individuality? That’s why the independents are unique."

Carole O’Brien, general manager at Book Train bookshop, added, "We’re still here, and we don’t plan to go anywhere soon. . . . We’re one of the few stores down here that is open on weekends. People like that, and we want to be here for that person. And, we know our customers by name. We know who they are, and what they want to read. So, we can offer that sort of personal service.”

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WITI-TV covered this week's opening of Lanora Hurley's Next Chapter Bookshop, Mequon, Wis., at the site of a former Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop.

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The Canadian Booksellers Association will hold a conference June 20-21 at the Radisson Admiral Hotel in Toronto. Quill & Quire reported that an e-mail sent by CBA executive director Susan Dayus stated, "Over the two days, booksellers will attend educational sessions, get updated on industry trends, preview new releases, exchange views on industry challenges and opportunities, hear from sales reps, talk to key publishing management, place orders for exclusive Summer Conference Specials, meet authors, attend CBA Libris Awards and much, much, more!"

Dayus added that the organization "believes strongly that there is a need for a national forum to bring booksellers and publishers together and has designed the program and events with that in mind."

Earlier this year, Reed Exhibitions cancelled BookExpo Canada, where CBA members had met.

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Bookselling this Week profiled Betsy Burton of the King's English bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah, to begin its series on candidates for the 2009 ABA board of directors elections. BTW "will be talking to each of the Board candidates about their bookselling careers and about their focus if elected to serve the interests of the community of independent booksellers."

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Russo's Books, Bakersfield, Calif., has launched a YouTube video channel to feature book recommendations, staff profiles, author interviews and event highlights. A recent e-mail newsletter from Russo's promised "fun, quick, and quirky videos that keep you updated on the Bakersfield book scene."

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Scam alert: Teresa Huggins of Blue Elephant Book Shop, Decatur, Ga., warns of a recent order "from Jerry Cooper (at phone # 718-442-7920) for five copies of a book titled Snatched from the Fire by Patricia Amis (9781434336064/1434336069). It is a print on demand and nonreturnable. Apparently, some self-published authors order or get someone else to order their books that they know are nonreturnable so that the author makes more money."
 
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Hero pilot and newly-signed author Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III will appear at BookExpo America as a guest of honor on Saturday, May 30, at 3 p.m. He will address attendees and sign a promotional piece about his upcoming book at one of BEA's two new author stages at the Javits Center. There will be no admission charge and seating will be first come, first served.

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Back to school. In yesterday's Shelf Awareness, a quote from the Naperville Sun about the cancellation of a William Ayers event at Anderson's Books indicated that Ayers teaches at the University of Chicago. In fact, he teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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"How many daffodils did Wordsworth see, when he was wandering lonely as a cloud?" The Guardian tests the fertility of our literary knowledge about this season with a vernal quiz.

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Congratulations to Christine Onorati, owner of WORD bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., who gave birth to future bookseller Adrian Joseph, who arrived yesterday at 12:43 p.m., weighing 7 lbs., 13 oz.

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Denise Oswald has been named editorial director of Soft Skull Press and senior editor of Counterpoint, replacing Richard Nash, who left the company in February. GalleyCat reported that Oswald "worked as a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, helming the Faber and Faber list for nearly ten years."

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The Wall Street Journal reported that Tony Lucki, CEO of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has decided to retire as chief executive. He will be succeeded by Barry O'Callaghan, chairman of the publishing group's parent company, Education Media & Publishing Group Ltd.

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Karen Pennington is leaving her position as a Random House adult retail sales rep. Anyone wishing to contact her about new professional opportunities can reach her at karenpennington442@gmail.com.

 

Tomorrow on NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge: Michael Schaffer, author of One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food (Holt, $24, 9780805087116/0805087117).

 

Three debut novelists--Junot Díaz, Michael Thomas and Travis Holland--are among the eight finalists for the €100,000 (US$134,965) International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest English-language book prize, the Guardian reported. The judges  selected the shortlist from a longlist of 147 titles, which had been nominated by libraries around the world. The winner will be announced June 11.

The IMPAC Dublin prize shortlist:

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• Ravel by Jean Echenoz
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• The Archivist's Story by Travis Holland
• The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen
• The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
• Animal's People by Indra Sinha
• Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

The Madwoman of Bethlehem by Rosine Nimeh-Mailloux (Second Story Press/University of Toronto Press, $18.95 trade paper, 9781897187487/1897187483 March 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

Oasis for Troubled Women
Bethlehem, 1957

Soon, the orderlies will come knocking on the door of our ward. May Allah knock them all the way to Gehannem, those urchins of the devil!

These sons of Beelzebub think it's time for us inmates to be up, do our penance, and earn our daily bread. This block is for the good ones, though. We're fit only to be put away, but sane enough to earn our shelter and food, such as it is. I've learned to do my keeper's bidding rather than face their shoving and jabbing.

But here, in this home for the mad, this everlasting hell, is where I deserve to be. Until Allah decides I have prayed enough and paid enough for my sin. Maybe then He'll take me and put me next to my kind up there. Must be a big crowd of us in heaven. Why not? This world drives some of us to the very edge. Blessed be His name…

Perhaps this drab room of gray-plastered walls, with an iron-barred chink that teases me with tiny morsels of sky, is not a good place to pray. Church is where Allah is more likely to hear me. But church is as far away from me as heaven is. So I keep mumbling or grumbling my prayers, before floundering away to the cesspool of my past.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

 

Greg Ames lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. His work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney's, Open City, and Fiction International, among others. His novel, Buffalo Lockjaw, was published by Hyperion last month. He has taught fiction at Brooklyn College and at Binghamton University.

On your nightstand now:

David Michaelis's Schulz biography, The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, Lapham's Quarterly (the "Eros" issue) and Somebody in Boots by Nelson Algren.

There's a story behind this last one. I bartended with a guy in France who said his two favorite books were The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and Somebody in Boots by Nelson Algren. I agreed that the Bulgakov was good, but I had never heard of the Algren book. I loved the title--Somebody in Boots--and went looking. It proved impossible to find. For years it didn't even show up on search engines, but now I notice there are some copies floating around. A few weeks ago, my friend Jeff mailed me a copy. He came across Somebody in Boots in a used bookstore in Silver Lake. The type is tiny and packed tight on the page. There seems to be a lot of dialect ("he commence gittin' the all-ovah fidgits again"), which makes me a little leery, but I will crack it open at some point this year. The real question, I guess, is why I was so invested in finding an obscure book recommended by a cokehead bartender who said that, for the most part, he hated reading books. It fascinated me that he had chosen these two as his all-time favorites. I wanted to read them through that particular lens.

Favorite book when you were a child:

One day, by mistake, I took home an Edgar Allan Poe collection from the bookmobile. I was in third grade. Reading Poe was like learning a foreign language. I understood every third word. After I'd finally cracked the code of "The Black Cat," I got it, and I cried. I read the story again the next day, and I cried again. The nasty drunk man plucked out a cat's eye and then hung (hanged) the cat! It was so crazy. So I read it again. Finally my mom said, "Why do you keep reading it if it makes you cry?" And my answer was always the same: "I don't know." Now, 30 years later, I would like to believe that at such an early age I apprehended truth and beauty in a great work of art, an interpretation that pleases me more than the more probable explanation that I was really just a budding masochist.

Your top five authors:

Poe was the first, so he deserves a spot, even though I don't read him with as much enjoyment now. Raymond Carver hijacked a couple years of my life. Donald Barthelme was huge for me; much of 60 Stories still cracks me up. Flannery O'Connor's stories and novels are beautiful, courageous and savage. My number one, though, has to be Chekhov. I keep coming back to those short stories. Some people think he's depressing, but I never feel depressed after reading him, just as sad songs rarely make me feel sad. In fact, I feel pleased and exhilarated that somebody brought the news from that place.

Book you've faked reading:

The Lord of the Rings. For a few years that book was everywhere. A number of times, when I was asked if I had read it, I admitted that I hadn't, and I was met with surprise and scorn. Some of my friends looked at me with pity, as if to say, "What kind of childhood did you have?" (See answer two.) So, for a few years, I heard myself lying about Tolkien. "You've read this, right?" "Yep." End of discussion.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. It's a perfect book. I buy a copy every time I see one in a used bookstore. I have given away six or seven copies by now.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. The Dylan Thomas quote on the cover sold me. He says, "This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!" That's the best blurb ever to appear on a novel, as far as I know.

Book that changed your life:

Raymond Carver's Fires. I was 20 years old and living in Buffalo when I "discovered" Carver. During a snowstorm I ducked into the Village Green bookstore and perused the Village Green Recommends wall, always a good source for cool stuff. I flipped open Fires to a poem called "Drinking While Driving." I can't explain my delight and confusion when I finished the poem. How was this literature? If my professors were any guide, literature ended some time around D.H. Lawrence's death, and yet here was a guy who was so new. I read the next poem, a longer one called "Luck," and I just knew: This was my guy.

I tucked Carver under my arm and headed to the cash register. The book was $9 in the U.S. $11.50 in Canada. According to the faded receipt, which I still use as a bookmark, the total was $9.72 and I paid $10.02, receiving 30 cents change. I walked home in a blinding snowstorm, from time to time opening the book, peeking in at the words that were going to change my life, but I didn't want to soak the pages, so I slipped the paperback under my coat, pressed it to my gut. That night I read the entire book in my frigid apartment, couldn't put it down, and the next day I went back to the Village Green and bought Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

My life had just changed.

Favorite line from a book:

An important moment for me as a reader, and, I guess, as a writer, was when I read the last line of Denis Johnson's story "Dundun" in Jesus' Son: "If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that." The sudden shift to the second person, this direct aggressive address to the reader, blew me away. I didn't know you could do that. This is not a typical second person point of view. Here he's actually addressing you, you the reader, sitting there safe and sound in your world. He's smashing the wall and grabbing you by the shirt. That whole collection astounded me when I first read it in 1992, and it's still sending out aftershocks.

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

Donald Barthelme's 60 Stories. I read most of it in a park. I couldn't sit down to read it--I was too excited--so I walked around the park, reading. A friend of mine was out there with all the dogwalkers. I stopped briefly to chat, but then I continued on, reading and walking. It was a warm summer day. I was in my early 20s and desperate to become a writer. Barthelme was showing me how far I still had to go.

 

I love mildly deceptive headlines. Although this column is meant to be about Poetry Month, I must begin with a little spring cleaning in the form of an apology for leaving out an important contributor to the cultivation and preservation of Brian Moore's novels, which seem doomed to retail exile in the forgotten kingdom ruled by the evil Wizard of OP.

Elizabeth Davis of the Hartford Public Library, Hartford, Conn., offered "a gentle reminder: when an author you love is OP, turn to your library for the possibility of reading those more obscure gems! I read your article two days after reading Nothing to Be Afraid Of by Julian Barnes. Brian Moore being one of his favorite writers as well, I felt I must confirm what titles my library holds. Besides the 14 in our online catalog, we have another four from the days before barcoding. Until the last of us wears out, we librarians will defend and protect shelf space for the undeservedly forgotten author. P.S.: I am now reading Catholics and finding it quite fascinating."
 
Duly humbled, a mea culpa on order, I checked my local library and found seven Moore novels on the shelves there. So find him where you can.

And now I face the challenge of mid-column transition from Moore to Poetry Month. Maybe I'll just return briefly to Catholics and the scene where we began MooreQuest, with a helicopter landing on monastery grounds and the Abbot quoting Lewis Carroll's poem, "Jabberwocky," while musing about the vorpal blade going snicker-snack.

Soon the chopper lifts off again: "The frumious bandersnatch, the Abbot said to himself. The words fuming and furious made frumious, and frumious it was now as it rose, levitating a few feet above the grass, hesitating as though looking for directions. Getting its bearings, it tilted forward, moving up and out to sea."

Our frumious bandersnatch today is a websiteseeing helicopter, which will permit us to highlight a few National Poetry Month promotions that caught my Jabberwockin' "eyes of flame":

In addition to a number of events planned throughout the month, McNally Jackson Books, New York, N.Y., is featuring lines from favorite poems on Twitter, beginning with "Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you," from "Remember" by Joy Harjo.

The Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, Mass., is offering a 20% discount on all poetry titles for the month and has a special event next Tuesday, April 7, when Maria Luisa Arroyo will read from her collection, Gathering Words/Recogiendo Palabras. Odyssey notes that the the book "gives a voice to the oppressed, the abused, and the forgotten. It speaks from battered women's shelters and from inside homes that hide domestic violence and child abuse. Laying bare the stark realities of life with phrases that are alternately elegant, blunt, and rich with vivid imagery, María Luisa Arroyo writes with spine-tingling candor that does not allow us to deny the truth."

The staff at Politics and Prose Books, Washington, D.C., "has picked a table full of poetry in translation, especially for you! Russian, Israeli, Albanian, French anthologies; Neruda, Bolano, Rilke, Virgil, Akhmatova, Celan, Zagajewski, Szymborska, Mort, Rumi, and Hafez--just to name a few. Come and browse both this international display and the English language sections!"

Poetry Month is a year-round affair at City Lights Booksellers, San Francisco, Calif. The bookshop's latest e-mail newsletter carried the subject header "Poets Still Waiting For Bailout," and I really love this trailer for a documentary film, Ferlinghetti, that will premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 28.

Perhaps because I'm a Vermont native, I found an Associated Press report on this week's celebrity-studded Poetry Month kickoff event at Lincoln Center an especially apt example of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways poetry can affect a person's life. The AP noted that author and humorist Roy Blount Jr. "spoke of a high school teacher whose oppressive reverence for Robert Frost inspired an especially cruel prank: The students tricked her into believing Frost had died, so upsetting the teacher that she stuck her foot in a waste basket."

Said Blount: "That's why people in my high school were grateful to Robert Frost."

The Poetry Month websiteseeing helicopter will stay in the air for a while, its "vorpal blade" spinning, so tell us what you're up to.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

 

The following were the bestselling titles at independent bookstores in the Chicago area during the week ended Sunday, March 29:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
4. Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult
 
Hardcover Nonfiction
 
1. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin
3. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey
4. Food Matters by Mark Bittman
 
Paperback Fiction
 
1. Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
2. The Commoner by John B. Schwartz
3. Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
4. The Shack by William Young
5. Pride and Prejudice and the Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
 
Paperback Nonfiction
 
1. Three Cups of Tea by Gary Mortenson
2. People Are Unappealing by Sara Barron
3. The Middle Place by Kelly Corigan
4. Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
5. The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
 
Children's
 
1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney
2. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
3. Maximum Ride: MAX by James Patterson
4. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Do It Yourself by Jeff Kinney

Note: Because of multiple ties for the No. 5 spot, some categories list only four bestsellers.

Reporting stores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; Book Table, Oak Park; the Book Cellar, Lincoln Square; Lake Forest Books, Lake Forest; the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka; and 57th St. Books; Seminary Co-op; Women and Children First, Chicago