The following "open condolence letter to former Amazon affiliates" comes from Kristen McLean, executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children:

Boy, it sure sucks to be dumped.

There you are, doing a great job of recommending awesome books, handing Amazon the sales, and they just up and leave the party.

To add injury to insult, I'm sure it didn't feel good to hear from the Wall Street Journal that collective sales from your sites only "account for a relatively small slice of Amazon's traffic, so the move isn't likely to cause major damage to the company's business."

It's like the morning after the prom, when in wrinkled dress and wilting corsage you realize they're just not that into you. At least, not when they may have to collect millions in state sales tax that could help fix bridges, keep schools open and fund libraries at a time when your states are truly suffering.

And they seemed so nice.

Well, I want to invite you to the indie party. While the flashy prom has been happening at the country club, we've been holding our own get-together in the gym. What we lack in glamour, we make up for in charm. Like you, we love to recommend books. We think it's cool that you're recommending books, and with us there's no such thing as too small. We won't marginalize you. And we all pay our local taxes.

Best of all we have an affiliate program too! It's called IndieBound, and we'd love to have you be a part of it. You'll get a reward for using it, your readers can keep getting their books off your site, and your state will benefit in the end. Everyone wins.

Again, we're sorry that you lost your date. (We never really liked them anyway.) We promise we won't leave you hanging.

Sue Zumberge, manager of Common Good Books, St. Paul, Minn., responds to yesterday's letter from "Miffed in Michigan":

As manager of Garrison Keillor's bookstore, I think it is important to point out that Common Good Book's overhead includes my and another manager's salary, etc. As a former bookstore owner, I would have thought of that salary as money I was making on the store. And while I agree that bookstore owners will never get rich, I am forever grateful to "non-dedicated" bookstore owners such as Mr. Keillor here in St. Paul and Louise Erdrich in Minneapolis who allow us "dedicated" bookstore managers to serve our very dedicated bookstore customers.

I am more drawn to Mr. Keillor's comments about the loss of bookstores and the ability to hold books in your hand and page through them, the wonderful smell of books and so forth. I am aware that part of our function as bricks and mortar stores is to act as showrooms for Amazon but does that blunt the joy of discussing a wonderful book (or for that matter an awful one) with a customer who has just finished reading it? We book people are addicts in our way, Garrison Keillor no less than the rest. He was just willing to put up the funds to feed his habit to the betterment of his community.

From PK in the Terrarium, Paul Kozlowski's most excellent blog:

Here's what I tell people I'm reading this summer:

1. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
2. The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
3. Lush Life by Richard Price
4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
5. The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black
6. Animal Spirts by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
7. Woman with a Birthmark by Håkan Nesser

Here's what I'm really reading this summer:

1. Job-Hunting for Dummies, 2nd Edition by Max Messmer
2. The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Resumé, 3rd Edition by Susan Ireland
3. How to Settle Your Debts without Committing Financial Suicide by Norman Perlmutter
4. Grow Your Own Pharmacy by Linda Gray
5. The Complete Do-it-yourself Bike Book by Mel Allwood
6. How to Rent a Fire Lookout in the Pacific Northwest by Tom Foley and Tish McFadden
7. Living Off the Grid by David Black

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Check out Green Apple Books's latest Book of the Month video. This hilarious "reenactment" from the San Franciscio store is for Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog, journals from the time the director made Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon.

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Conkey's Bookstore, Appleton Wis., which announced last month that it was going out of business after 113 years (Shelf Awareness, June 10, 2009), has set an official closing date of August 14, according to the Post-Crescent.

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"Often when I travel, I look for a good local bookstore." That may seem like a line most of us would use to open an article, but in this case the piece was in Ode magazine and the traveler, Keri Douglas, "discovered Diwan Bookstore in Zamalek [a part of Cairo, Egypt]. It is a special bookstore featuring books in Arabic, English, French and German. When I entered, they had on display front and center their recommended books, among them:

• The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama
• Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama in Arabic
• The Map of Love: A Novel by Ahdaf Soueif
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World by Sharon Waxman
• The Naqib's Daughter by Samia Seregeldin
• The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

"A bookstore is always a healthy reality check on society," Douglas concluded. "Here the recommended reading list includes two books by a U.S. President (note one is in Arabic); a frequently banned or censored book in the U.S.; a well-know Egyptian woman author; a book challenging the notion of who owns the antiquities; and, an Italian murder mystery set in the year 1327. The notion to include all of these books in one section is brilliant, in my opinion."

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Effective July 27, Laura Lutz is joining HarperCollins Children's Books as school and library marketing manager. She was formerly the children's materials specialist in collection development at the Queens Library in Jamaica, N.Y. (aka Politics and Prose blogger and newly minted Twitterer @foodandbooks).

Last week the archive of material by Edith Wharton (Shelf Awareness, June 23, 2009) consisting of letters documenting her 42-year relationship with Anna Catherine Bahlmann--originally Wharton's language tutor and governess and later her secretary and literary assistant--sold for $182,500 at Christie's, much higher than the estimate of $80,000-$120,000.

Chris Coover, senior v-p and senior specialist, books and manuscripts, at Christie's, called the archive "a marvelous discovery, and it will significantly enhance our understanding of Wharton's early years, plus will reveal the great influence of her German tutor, Anna Bahlmann. I am glad to report the archive sold to an American educational institution (as yet un-named)."

The New Yorker wrote about the discovery, which helped attract interest in the archive.

Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Julie Sussman and Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, authors of Dare to Repair, Replace & Renovate: Do-It-Herself Projects to Make Your Home More Comfortable, More Beautiful & More Valuable (Harper, $16.99, 9780061343858/0061343854).

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Tomorrow on the Diane Rehm Show: Vincent J. Cannato, author of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (Harper, $27.99, 9780060742737/0060742739).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown, $30, 9780316000666/0316000663). As the show put it: "While we take a mini-tour of Flannery O'Connor's life and writing, biographer Brad Gooch describes his difficulties in gaining access to the author's inner life. Since his last biography was of socially flamboyant poet Frank O'Hara, who would believe that Gooch could handle the religious, retreating, bird-lover Flannery O'Connor."

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Ed Viesturs, author of Himalayan Quest: Ed Viesturs Summits All Fourteen 8,000-Meter Giants (National Geographic, $21.95, 9781426204852/142620485X).

Michael Walsh has won the University of Arkansas Press's inaugural $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, The Dirt Riddles. The book will be published in the spring of next year. Walsh will give a featured reading at the 2010 Arkansas Festival of Writers, sponsored by the university's programs in creative writing and translation.

Judge Enid Shomer said that Walsh's "powerful first collection [is] literally rooted in the earth and in the world of animal husbandry. You can taste these poems about life on a family dairy farm in your mouth. These lyric poems produce a music in which meaning is so perfectly fused to sound that we feel the words as we read."

The two finalists, whose books will be published next spring, too, are:

• Pamela Gemin for her collection, Another Creature
• Eric Leigh for Harm's Way

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Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Chair of the judges Jacob Weisberg observed: "What made Leviathan stand out in a shortlist of wonderful reads was Philip Hoare’s lifelong passion for his subject and his skill in making his readers share it. His prose is dream-like and rises to the condition of literature."

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen by Jason Sheehan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 9780374289218/0374289212, June 23, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

We had this superstition in the kitchen: On Fridays, no one counted heads. No one counted tables at the end of the night, no one counted covers. When the last table was cleared, the dupes were just left there, mounded up on the spike. You didn't look, even in secret. No one even guessed. Bad things would happen if you did.

And even though no one looked, bad things happened anyway. Lane died on a Friday night due to complications of lifestyle--which was to say he was shot by an acquaintance in a squabble over twenty dollars' worth of shitty brown horse. He wasn't found until Saturday morning; no one thought to call the restaurant to let us know that he wouldn't be coming in to work that day. He was just considered AWOL--a no-call/no-show that left the line a man short going into the early-bird rush.

This was Tampa, Florida, in the middle nineties--a bad time for cuisine, a worse place. It wasn't a great time for me, either. Worse for Lane, I guess, but everything is a matter of degrees. Of right and wrong places, right and wrong times.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

Peter Manseau is the author of several books, including the novel Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal and published by Free Press earlier this month as a trade paperback. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he teaches writing and studies religion at Georgetown University.

On your nightstand now:

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. The former I feel I should read, and the latter I can't stop reading.

Favorite book when you were a child:

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. If I remember this one correctly, it was not so much the giant peach I liked as the giant bugs who lived inside it. Thinking back on it now, I wish I had put more giant bugs in my book. Even lacking the bugs, though, I must admit there are a few similarities between this somewhat creepy children's book and Songs for the Butcher's Daughter. James's new life with his giant insect friends surely has something to do with the themes of identity and assimilation that play such an important role in my novel . . . or at least Kafka might say so.

Your top five authors:

The first three that jump to mind: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Graham Greene, Bernard Malamud. I loved Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible enough for her to be on the list, and finally I've got to go with Dostoyevsky, if only because the man was relentless. Nothing would stop him from writing, and he did great work even under duress, perhaps because of it. I can still remember a biographical sketch of Dostoyevsky I came across while reading The Brothers Karamazov in college. One paragraph began with something like "Lonely, in despair, still writing." He was the Rasputin of struggling writers.

Book you've faked reading:

I think I've read 10 pages of Dickens. For some reason, he and I keep missing each other.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Underworld by Don Delillo. Not that he needs my help, but it's just such a great book about American lives and the way objects follow us around and what we do with the objects we want to get rid of.

Book that changed your life:

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. The autobiography of the world's most famous recluse, it nearly made me a monk myself. (Details on that misadventure can be found in my memoir, Vows.)

Favorite line from a book:

It's a line that appears in two of my favorites. In Philip Roth's Operation Shylock he has a riff on Dostoyevsky's best line: "This changes everything." Context of course is all, and in both books the line comes at a time when what seems an overstatement is a colossal and hilarious understatement. The best lines work by playing with our expectations.

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

The Brothers Karamazov. There's nothing like coming to the close of a book that size, feeling the triumph of a monumental reading experience, and coming upon the last page with its multiple exclamations of "Hurrah!" It's what reaching the end of a book should feel like, for both reader and writer.

The German Book Office has chosen Kahn and Engelmann: A Novel by Hans Eichner ($19.95, 9781897231548/1897231547) as its June book pick. Translated by Jean M. Snook, the book was released by Biblioasis, Canada, on April 27.

GBO described Kahn and Engelmann as "a novel in the shape of a memoir, telling the stories from three generations of narrator Peter Engelmann's family. Engelmann begins his story with the immigration of his grandparents from rural Hungary to Vienna, and their return to Hungary. Along with their travels, Engelmann provides a vivid and beautiful description of late 19th century Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He goes on to describe the garment store his father co-owned with his uncle, Kahn and Engelmann of the title, but tales from his own life are interspersed throughout these stories. Engelmann describes his survival of World War II, and eventual immigration to Israel to join the Jewish movement. The result is a dramatic account of the people and stories of Peter Engelmann's family."

Author Hans Eichner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, in 1921. He escaped from the Nazis into Belgium, then England. After earning a Ph.D. at the University of London, Eichner immigrated to Canada, where he became head of the German Department at the University of Toronto and wrote books on German Romantic literature. Eichner died on the eve of publication of the English translation of Kahn and Engelmann.