The Nebraska Book Co., which manages more than 135 university and college stores, will begin managing Cleveland State University's bookstore, effective June 1, according to Crain's Cleveland Business. Nebraska Book Co. will be involved in planning and design for a new bookstore to be built in summer 2007. It also proposing "a $500,000 capital investment, improved customer service and a better merchandising plan," the school said.

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The Minot Daily News profiles Main Street Books, a new and used bookstore that Val Stadick opened March 27 at 16 S. Main St. in Minot, N.D. The store also sells Melissa & Doug Educational Wood Toys and Puzzles, art by local artists and a small collection of DVDs featuring current releases. Stadick will start stocking magazines soon.

Stadick graduated from Minot State University in 1999 with a major in English and minor in business administration--a good combination for a bookseller. She told the paper that she worked for six years at a local thrift shop and bought many books for herself but didn't have the energy to read them all. Still, the shop, she said, "gave me good retail experience. So, I asked myself why don't I just open up a bookstore? As a result, I'm not as tired at the end of the day and can complete my reading."

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Larry Portzline offers a glowing review of a radio story highlighting a New York City bookseller whose tiny store has a big reputation.

Our friend and Bookstore Tourism supporter Bonnie Slotnick was featured on NPR's All Things Considered over the weekend in a piece by Debbie Elliott. Her cookbook store at 163 W. 10th Street in Greenwich Village, called Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, has become a New York institution thanks to Bonnie's awesome reputation as the go-to gal for old, foreign or hard-to-find cookbooks (the interview calls her a "cookbook sleuth"). Chefs, gourmands and food critics from the U.S. and abroad often show up on Bonnie's doorstep to browse her tiny shop--and sometimes just to find a specific recipe!  The participants on my Greenwich Village bookstore trips LOVE Bonnie's store, and many of them say it was their favorite stop of the day.

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The Daily Astorian profiles Karen Emmerling, owner of Beach Books in Seaside, Ore., which opened late last year (Shelf Awareness, November 21). Among the reasons for opening the store: her husband, John, said, "We either had to open this bookstore or we were going to go broke" since his wife couldn't visit a bookstore without buying something.

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The Maui News traces the latest in the controversy in Hawaii over The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai by John Tayman, following the interview of him by a Hawaiian congressman that aired over the weekend on Book TV. Some Hawaiians say they are offended by Tayman's interpretations and claim inaccuracies.

This morning the Today Show has a full stable of authors:

• Allison Moir-Smith, accompanied by her Emotionally Engaged: A Bride's Guide to Surviving the 'Happiest' Times of Her Life (Hudson Street Press, $23.95, 1594630143).
• Cecily von Ziegesar, who dishes about her own Gossip Girl #9: Only in Your Dreams (Little, Brown, $9.99, 0316011827).
• Sebastian Junger, whose new book is A Death in Belmont (Norton, $23.95, 0393059804).
• Willa Shalit, editor of Becoming Myself: Reflection on Growing Up Female (Hyperion, $22.95, 1401301398).

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Today Ellen Degeneris talks openly with Rhea Perlman about her Otto Undercover children's book series.

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Today on the centennial of the earthquake, NPR's Talk of the Nation talks with Simon Winchester, author of A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (HarperCollins, $27.95, 0060571993).

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Today WAMU's Diane Rehm Show grooves with Peter Richmond, author of Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee (Holt, $30, 0805073833).

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Tonight on ABC's 20/20: Robert T. Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money that the Poor and Middle Class Do Not (Warner, $16.95, 0446677450).

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Tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman: Jane Fonda continues to promote My Life So Far (Random House, $16.95, 0812975766). She's also on Larry King Live tonight.

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Joe Klein, whose new book is Politics Lost: The Lost Music of American Politics (Doubleday, $23.95, 0385510276).

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Among the book and book-related winners:

• Geraldine Brooks won for fiction for her March (Viking), which focuses on the life of the often-absent father, John March, in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
• David M. Oshinsky won for history for his Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press).
• Caroline Elkins won in general nonfiction for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Holt).
  
• Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin won for biography or autobiography for their American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf).
• Claudia Emerson won for poetry for Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press).

Edmund S. Morgan won a special citation "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century." Titles by the emeritus professor of history at Yale include Benjamin Franklin, American Slavery, American Freedom, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789, The Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, among others.

In the newspaper awards, New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen won for national reporting for their stories on the Bush Administration's secret, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in the U.S.

Risen is the author of State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration (Free Press, $26, 0743270665), which came out early this year. Lichtblau is the author of Bush Justice, which Sourcebooks will publish in September 2007.

In addition, Dana Priest, the Washington Post reporter who won for beat reporting for her series on the government's counterterrorism campaign abroad, including the network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, is the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping the Peace with America's Military.

John DuVal has won the Raiziss/de Palchi Prize for his translation of Tales of Trilussa by Carlo Alberto Salustri (University of Arkansas Press), a $5,000 award sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and given every other year for the translation into English of significant work of modern Italian poetry. The judges for the award were Geoffrey Brock, Charles Martin, and Michael Palma.

Palma commented: "Trilussa's poems can be successfully carried over into another language only by retaining--or, more precisely, re-creating--the dexterity and the bite of the originals, and in John DuVal Trilussa has found his ideal translator. . . . The people of Trastevere love their poets. Like Belli, Trilussa is commemorated by a public square and a statue along the Tiber. And he has an equally handsome tribute in English, in the form of John DuVal's Tales from Trilussa."

The winner directs the program in literary translation at the University of Arkansas and has translated a range of works from Italian and French. He won the 1992 Harold Morton Landon Prize for the Translation of Poetry, also sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, for his translation of Cesare Pascarella's The Discovery of America.

The following titles have laydown dates of next Tuesday, April 25:


The Men I Didn't Marry by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger (Ballantine, $23.95, 0345490703). More entertainment from the author of Mine Are Spectacular! and The Botox Diaries.

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The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson (Random House, $24.95, 0345478991). This first novel by the New York Times correspondent who has covered Iraq features an agent who infiltrates al-Qaeda.

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Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly, $26, 0871139251). The author of Black Hawk Down examines the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran.

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Right Words at the Right Time: Your Turn edited by Marlo Thomas (Atria, $25, 0743497430). The actress-author's latest consists of stories by people about "words that changed their lives forever."

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Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss (S&S, $26, 0743217810). A biography of Roberto Clemente, the star right fielder of the Pittsburgh Pirates who died after the 1972 season in a plane crash flying supplies to victims of the Nicaraguan earthquake.

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Danica: Crossing the Line by Danica Patrick with Laura Morton (Touchstone, $23.95, 0743298144). The race-car driver spins a few tales about her unusual career in what has been largely a man's sport.

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A Writer's Life by Gay Talese (Knopf, $26, 0679410961). The master of New Journalism offers nonfiction pieces and more autobiography.

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Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (Knopf, $27.95, 0375401741). From the author of Future Shock, this title talks about prosumerism, in which the division between the creator and consumer of goods and services becomes more diffuse.

 
Beautiful Lies opens with the prologue and the first chapter set 30 years apart. In each, a woman waits in the dark, terrified, injured, pursued. How the second woman, Ridley Jones, arrives at that place is the story of a contented life that becomes a terrifying puzzle in a few heartbeats. She's a reasonably happy person, loved by her parents, loving her friends and her work as a freelance writer, living in the East Village above a pizzeria. She awakes one rainy morning to normality--a steamy shower, a hissing espresso maker, the scent of fresh pastries from the neighborhood bakery. She heads out into the day, dressed in faded Levi's and a Yankees cap, unwittingly about to perform an act of heroism that upends her life: "If I had known, I would have paused at the door to say good-bye to a perfectly lovely existence, an enviably simple, comfortable life."
 
Ridley's action was captured on camera, she has her few minutes of fame, and a few days later receives an old photograph of a couple with a small child. Attached is a note that asks, "Are you my daughter?" and so begins her search for the truth about the picture. Her parents assure her that she is their daughter, but questions about her drug addict brother Ace, who left home at 18, begin to undermine the lie of her perfect life. Her ex-boyfriend Zack, a pediatrician like her father, becomes oddly intrusive. Memories of her beloved Uncle Max, "a mountain, a shooting star, a big bear of a man, a piggyback ride waiting to happen," begin to merge with troubling facts she uncovers about his foundation to save abandoned infants. And Jake, the mysterious, sexy sculptor who has moved into her apartment building, seems a bit too eager to assist her in the search for answers. She comes to realize, as she uncovers the real story about her life, "People have died, lives have been altered, the truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed façade, leaving us naked to begin again."
 
Lisa Unger's plotting, character development, and descriptive skills seem to belie the fact that this is her first book (happily, she is writing a sequel). She excels at conveying the excitement and danger of New York City: "The streets seem harder above Ninety-sixth Street, the anger and the desperation crowd the sidewalks, dangle like legs from fire escapes." Don't start Beautiful Lies thinking you'll just read a few pages and turn out the light. You'll be up all night.--Marilyn Dahl