Shelf Awareness for Friday, September 18, 2009


William Morrow & Company: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

Del Rey Books: Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

Peachtree Teen: Romantic YA Novels Coming Soon From Peachtree Teen!

Watkins Publishing: She Fights Back: Using Self-Defence Psychology to Reclaim Your Power by Joanna Ziobronowicz

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

News

Notes: No E-fairness in Conn.; What Will Oprah Read?

E-fairness was one of the victims of Connecticut's recent budget battles. Bookselling This Week reported that the "$37.6 billion budget, which went into effect the week of September 7, does not include the e-fairness provision, which would have clarified state laws to require non-Connecticut merchants with an affiliate network in the state to collect sales tax on purchases shipped into Connecticut."

"We are, quite frankly, surprised that the Connecticut legislature cut the e-fairness provision from the budget," said ABA CEO Oren Teicher. "Every year, Connecticut is losing tens of millions of dollars in sales tax revenue to online retailers, many of which have nexus in the states due to affiliate relationships. To allow large, out-of-state retailers to continue to skirt tax laws at the expense of Connecticut's own businesses is simply mind-boggling."

Teicher said that in spite of the discouraging news, "it is important to remember that there was strong support for e-fairness among many in the Connecticut legislature. We expect that it will again become a legislative issue, so it is important to let the governor and your state lawmakers know where you stand."

---

Today Oprah Winfrey reveals her first book club choice since last September's nod to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, but the Washington Post reported that the "book turns out to be Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them, according to information unintentionally leaked Thursday from a book distribution company."

Yesterday the Post had noted that "Akpan's book is currently #165,769 on Amazon.com's sales rankings. We'll see how long that lasts." Not long, as it turned out. With the rumor mill churning, by 10 p.m. last night it had risen to #2,151; and at press time this morning it was #997. Stay tuned.

---

Amazon on the chopping block? The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon.com "is quietly expanding its private-label business in a bid to diversify away from its online bookstore roots and become more like a general retailer. . . . The latest sign: The Seattle-based e-commerce giant--known for high-tech innovations like one-click checkout and the Kindle e-reader--last month received a U.S. design patent for a wooden chopping block. The $24.99 Pinzon bamboo cutting board is being sold as part of a line of Amazon's own kitchen products on its website."

---

Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., will be one of the independent booksellers taking advantage of a recent agreement reached between Google Book Search and On Demand Books, the makers of the Espresso Book Machine, to offer access to the more than two million public domain books in Google's digital files.

The Harvard Square bookshop will unveil its own Espresso Book Machine September 29 at an event featuring owner Jeffrey Mayersohn, On Demand Books founders Jason Epstein and Dane Neller, and author E.L. Doctorow.

To help introduce this new technology to the Cambridge community, Harvard Book Store is holding a Name Our Book Machine! Contest.

---

Spellbound Children's Bookshop, Asheville, N.C., "is busy planning a month-long celebration to mark the bookstore's fifth anniversary and enjoying the healthy stream of local customers and tourists" a year after moving to a prime downtown location, Bookselling This Week reported.

"I have no doubt the move saved my business," said owner Leslie Hawkins, who noted that two members of her book club suggested she contact Alisha Silver, whose photography studio now shares the space where "each have a storefront display window on either side of a shared front entry."

Silver's "sales counter is near her window, mine is near mine," said Hawkins, "and we try to leave it as open and integrated as possible. She does have a studio space in the back separated by a partition wall displaying her photos."

---

Happy 30th anniversary to Square Books, Oxford, Miss., which features a delightful video chronicling its storied history on the bookshop's website.

---

Cool idea of the day: Three Lives & Co., New York City, celebrated the sale of its first copy of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown on Wednesday afternoon by giving it to the person who intended to buy it. Owner Toby Cox said, "He was delighted." He added, "We had our Dan Brown on September 1, and her name is Lorrie Moore."

---

Book trailer of the day: for The Art of Aging by Alice and Richard Matzkin.

---

Hands at Work: Portraits & Profiles of People Who Work with Their Hands, which was written and published by Iris Graville, won the annual BuzzBooks competition at the 2009 PNBA trade show last week. Approximately 130 booksellers and librarians visited the booths of seven competing titles, listened to impassioned pitches by the authors or sales reps, and then voted for the most BuzzWorthy title.

---

On Slate, Brian Palmer answered the question: "Can You Really Be a Professor of Symbology?"

---

Jesse Kalfel plans to host a literal launch party for his book, So You're Cremated . . . Now What?, aboard the Yankee Clipper on September 26, when the "So I've Got These Ashes and Need to Do Something With Them" cruise sets sail from Newburyport, Mass.

 


Now Streaming on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME: A Gentleman in Moscow


Image of the Day: Love Is a Four-Letter Word

Two nights ago at Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, N.C., at a reading for Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts edited by Michael Taeckens, whose day job is publicity director at Algonquin: flanking Taeckens are two contributors to the book, Patty Van Norman and Margaret Sartor.

 


GLOW: Greystone Books: brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe, illustrated by Reuben Coe


Media and Movies

Movies: Bitch Is the New Black; The Passage

Miramax Films has acquired the film rights to Bitch Is the New Black by journalist Helena Andrews. Variety reported that the memoir, which will be published by HarperCollins next year, is "a satirical look at the new generation of young, successful black women in Washington, D.C."

Andrews, who will write the screenplay, is a culture columnist for Slate's the Root.com and has also worked as a reporter for the New York Times and Politico.

---

John Logan will adapt Justin Cronin's vampire novel, The Passage, which is "being developed for Ridley Scott to potentially direct. It marks the first time that Logan and Scott have collaborated since the Oscar-winning Gladiator," according to Variety. The book, acquired by Fox 2000 two years ago, "was originally auctioned under Jordan Ainsley, a pseudonym for PEN Hemingway Award-winning author Cronin. Scribe sold the book based on the first 400 pages and an outline, but the film adaptation awaited his completion of the book, which is nearly 1,200 pages."

 


BINC: Apply Now to The Susan Kamil Scholarship for Emerging Writers!


Books & Authors

Awards: Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Biz Book of the Year

The shortlist for the £30,000 (US$49,337) Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award features six books that "together sum up what went wrong in the crisis and may provide a route map away from the error-strewn past," according to the Financial Times. The winner will be announced October 29.

The finalists:

  • Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
  • Good Value by Stephen Green
  • Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani
  • The Match King by Frank Partnoy
  • Animal Spirits by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
  • In Fed We Trust by David Wessel

 


Shelf Starter: All This Belongs to Me

All This Belongs to Me by Petra Hůlová, translated by Alex Zucker (Northwestern University Press, $17.95 trade paperback, 9780810124431/0810124432, October 30, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

Here at home when a shoroo hits, plastic bags go chasing each other round and round the ger. Sometimes I sit outside and watch as the sand spins in whirls, the horizon turns a golden-brown, and the sun through the swirling yellow dust is dim and shaky. Boots turn gray under a thick layer of dust, a dust that stings the eyes and crunches under the horses' hoofs, so the whole herd's on edge and the barking nokhoi has his work cut out to separate the in-foal mares with young from the rest.

Here at home when a shoroo hits and there's nothing to do, since you can't even see to take a step and if I went out I'd choke to death or I wouldn't be able to find my way back, I sit out in front of the ger on the right and wonder what it looked like before, when there were no plastic bags and families like us didn't have even a decent knife and couldn't earn extra money selling cookies and cigarettes, like our papa did whenever someone happened to stumble across us. Lately it's been pretty often.

Supposedly it's because someone in Bulgan sells good, cheap manjing, carrots, and onions, so people go shopping there more than before and more of them pass by our ger on the way. But I don't think that's it, since they also sell vegetables in Davkhan, and only a few people a week pass by in that direction.

Maybe the Davkhan grower is an erliiz, same as his father, and that's how come no one buys from him. The Chinese are a tricky bunch, and nobody here trusts them.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl


Book Brahmin: Douglas Clegg

Douglas Clegg is the author of more than 25 books, including Isis from Vanguard Press, illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne, which goes on sale September 29. Clegg is a proponent of animal rescue, and he and his better half live in a house at the beach in New England with a mutt, a wild cat, two crazy rabbits and one very lucky mouse.

On your nightstand now:

Kiss of Life by Daniel Waters. Beautiful, dark, fascinating--zombies and high school.

Favorite book when you were a child:

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.

Your top five authors:

Isak Dinesen, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant, Ford Madox Ford.

Book you've faked reading:

Fun with Dick and Jane
. I never found out what really happened to Spot. Did he run? Does he sit? Will he roll over?

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Power of One
by Bryce Courtenay. I feel as if this one is not as well-known as it should be. A wonderful novel.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Perfume by Patrick Susskind. And a great read beneath the cover, as well. Murder and fragrance and France . . . what's not to love?

Book that changed your life:

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen. She was one of the best writers of the 20th century, followed--in my opinion--by Truman Capote.

Favorite line from a book:

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."--From The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

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

Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca. What a novel to discover on the first read of it. But a second one for this category would be Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, a novel with twists and turns and surprises.



Book Review

Book Review: Fromms

Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis by Gotz Aly (Other Press, $23.95 Hardcover, 9781590512968, October 2009)



There's no sense in which the story of Julius Fromm's financial destruction at the hands of the Nazis can be compared with countless entries in the catalogue of horrors that was the Holocaust. Yet in their compact, thoroughly-researched account of the travails of Fromm and his family, historian Götz Aly and journalist Michael Sontheimer have used that story effectively as a proxy to illuminate the breadth and ruthless efficiency of Hitler's economic war against the Jews.

Born in a small Russian town in 1883, Fromm moved with his family to Berlin as a 10-year-old, and by age 31 had founded the company known as Fromms Act, the first brand-name condom manufacturer. The company benefitted from the loosening of sexual mores in Weimar Germany along with a desire for more dependable forms of family planning. Fromm was a stickler for quality control, and his company prospered as his condoms quickly earned a reputation for reliability. At its peak in 1931, Fromms Act (which also manufactured pacifiers and hot water bottles) employed 500 people and produced more than 50 million condoms per year, distributed throughout Europe.

Julius Fromm's reluctant decision to sell the company and move to London undoubtedly saved his life and that of his wife, Selma. Not so fortunate were three family members who perished in concentration camps. By the time negotiations began in earnest in mid-1938, a Nazi decree required that all sales of Jewish businesses be approved by the Reich. And while Aly and Sontheimer observe that Fromms Act's "compulsory sale turned out reasonably well in comparison to other Aryanizations at that time," the company ultimately was sold to Hermann Göring's godmother for a small fraction of its value. In exchange for her good fortune, the purchaser bestowed a gift of two medieval castles on her prominent godson.

As painful as the loss of his thriving business may have been, even more devastating to Fromm was the systematic looting of the substantial assets he was forced to leave behind in Germany. The authors meticulously document that depredation, from the loss of the family home to the coolly efficient raiding of his safe deposit box, and they're unafraid to point to the complicity of ordinary Germans (including appalling examples of postwar denial) in the process. By the end of the war, Aly and Sontheimer estimate the Nazis stole from Fromm a sum equivalent to 30 million euros in current purchasing power, much of it used to finance the war effort and the extermination of Fromm's fellow Jews. That's the final, chilling irony of this painful account.--Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: Through the story of Julius Fromm, once the prosperous owner of a German condom company, two German writers recount Hitler's economic war against the Jews.


Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: A Book Un-banned

Their books served the people; were published in huge editions; were supplied by a system of automatic mass distribution to all libraries; and months of promotion were devoted to them.

You already know that Banned Books Week, the annual cautionary celebration of our Freadom, will be held September 26-October 3. My contribution to the discussion this year is to point out a recently un-banned book in another country.

The opening sentence of this column, which expresses the thoughts of an "acceptable" writer bristling under Soviet censorship, is from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, The First Circle. That paragraph concludes:

Of course, they couldn't write much of the truth. But they consoled themselves with the thought that someday things would change, and then they would return to these times and these events, and record them truthfully, revising and reprinting their old books. Right now they must concentrate on that quarter, eighth, sixteenth--oh, all right, that thirty-second--part of the truth that was possible. Even that little bit was better than nothing.

Appropriately enough, as Banned Books Week approaches and the "better than nothing" question continues to be a relevant dilemma for readers, writers, booksellers, teachers, librarians and publishers internationally, Solzhenitsyn's name has appeared in the news again.

According to the Associated Press, the "book that made 'Gulag' a synonym for the horrors of Soviet oppression will be taught in Russian high schools, a generation after the Kremlin banned it as destructive to the Communist cause and exiled its author." Russia's Education Ministry has ruled that excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's three-volume indictment of the imprisonment of tens of millions of people--and deaths of millions as a result of privation and forced labor--will be added to required reading lists.

Like most of Solzhenitsyn's early work, Gulag circulated underground in his country while being translated and published in the West. It also played a substantial role in the Kremlin's decision to expel the dissident author in 1974. He spent the next 20 years in exile and, as the AP noted, when he returned home in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union he "expressed disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books."

Perhaps some of them will now.

The politics of this recent decision are muddy. Russia's economy is in bad shape, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin "is pushing to restore pride in the Soviet past." Thus, the AP observed, "the decision could be a reflection of the Russian establishment's struggle to reconcile that pride with the freedoms that Russians take for granted nearly 20 years after dumping communism and embracing democracy and the free market." Further complicating the issue are communism-redux incidents: Josef Stalin "was recently voted by Russians as their third greatest historical figure, and lyrics praising him have been inscribed in the vestibule of a prominent Moscow subway station," the AP reported.

Anti-Stalin activist Lev Ponomaryov suggested "the introduction of the books is a rather good way to decrease the popularity of the Communists among the young people."

They might also consider reading Invisible Allies, a 1990s work paying tribute to ordinary yet extraordinary citizens who took enormous personal risks to help Solzhenitsyn preserve and circulate his work. The book includes a moving tribute to Q (Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya), a woman who "had led an entirely conventional Soviet existence" until events in the 1960s, which included reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, inspired her to devote her life to Solzhenitsyn as a covert typist/editor and part of his samizdat distribution network until she was caught and subsequently died in what might be described as a "questionable" suicide.

"Q used to chide me in her letters after each of my sharply worded statements: 'What's the point of getting involved in a bullfight on such unequal terms? Why do you insist on hastening events?'" Solzhenitsyn wrote. "The fact is that no one hastened them more than she did. This elderly, ailing, lonely woman, gripped by fear and without meaning to do so, set the mighty boulder of The Gulag Archipelago rumbling into the world, headed toward our country and toward international communism."

In a footnote dated 1978, Solzhenitsyn observed that "Verdi's Requiem, given to me by Q, is with me in Vermont, and I play it every year at the end of August in her memory."

I'm listening to it now. The power of music . . . and of words. During Banned Books Week this year, I'll be thinking about Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

 


Powered by: Xtenit