Moving day is approaching for Librería Martinez. The Orange County Register reported that on Saturday, "Martinez Books & Art Gallery, as it's known in English, will shut its current location and officially reopen the next day next door, at what is now a children's bookstore that's also run by owner Rueben Martinez, a 2004 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and a recently appointed Presidential Fellow at Chapman University."

Declining economic conditions prompted the consolidation, but Martinez said he has "already cried. I cried for a week. I'm ready now. . . . You know how hard it is to keep a business like this one, a challenging business? Very hard. We knew what we were getting into, and I knew that I wasn't going to get rich, but I fooled myself. We did. We became rich in the heart."

Martinez added that he resisted the temptation to close both shops. "I have never seen, in my lifetime, an economy so horrible," he said. "I haven't closed because we come from cultures that know what suffering is, what sacrificing is. We know how to cry, but we know how to work hard. We know how not to give up."

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In a Press Trust of India (via Indopia) article headlined, "Buddha feel better when youth throng bookshops and not malls," West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said, "I am not against shopping malls. But I feel good when I find young men and women thronging bookshops." He spoke at the inauguration of the 33rd Kolkata Book Fair.

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"The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them," Motoko Rich suggested in a New York Times piece on self-publishing. As other sectors of the book industry fight for survival, "there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground."

"Even if you're sitting at a dinner party, if you ask how many people want to write a book, everyone will say, 'I've got a book or two in me,'" said Kevin Weiss, chief executive of Author Solutions, which recently added Xlibris to its stable of POD imprints that includes iUniverse, AuthorHouse and Wordclay. "We don't see a letup in the number of people who are interested in writing."

But where are the readers? "For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there's two that should have been published," said Cathy Langer, lead buyer at Tattered Cover bookstore, Denver, Colo. "People think that just because they've written something, there's a market for it. It's not true."

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Actress Gwyneth Paltrow has a website called Goop, and for her January newsletter she shared book recommendations from some of her "best and most literary-minded girlfriends . . . These are the women who read voraciously and with passion." Included among her book buddies are model Christy Turlington (The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises and Pride and Prejudice) and singer Madonna (The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger). Paltrow's picks: Jane Eyre, Crime and Punishment and Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky.

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Two years ago, Nguyen The Thanh decided to open a café for bibliophiles in Hanoi, Vietnam. Quan Doi Nhan Dan reported that now "bookworms from all walks of life flock to the 60-year-old's coffee shop . . . where they are not only provided with a wide range of books to accompany their cups of Joe, but have the chance to share their love of literature with fellow aficionados."

"Not everybody can afford to buy books, " said Thanh, who now owns 3,000 volumes. "When I was young, bookshops were not widely available and my family's poverty often prohibited me from buying any. It upset me. That is why I decided to open this coffee shop to provide readers with better access to literature than I ever had."

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Rebecca Saletan, former publisher and editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has been named editorial director of Riverhead Books, the Associated Press reported.

"I have long admired this publisher, and in a very challenging time in the industry I am so thrilled to be at a house that is a paragon of stability and foresight," said Saletan, who will begin her new job in March.

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Let's Go, Inc., publisher of the student travel guide series of the same name, has entered an agreement with Avalon Travel and PGW whereby Let's Go will keep producing the series, while Avalon Travel will print and market Let's Go and PGW will manage sales and distribution. Avalon and PGW are parts of the Perseus Books Group.

Let's Go is a student-run, for-profit subsidiary of Harvard Student Agencies, and its series are researched and written entirely by Harvard undergraduates. In the past 10 years, Let's Go has sold more than 3.5 million guides.

The first 26 guidebooks published under the new agreement will be released in November to coincide with Let's Go's 50th anniversary and will include bestselling titles such as Let's Go Europe and Let's Go Italy, along with 24 other titles, including Let's Go Israel and new guides to Central and South America. The books will have a new logo and cover design. Let's Go and Avalon Travel will work together to market the series to students and market it via websites, blogs and social networks.

 

Author John Updike died yesterday. He was 76. In a New York Times obituary, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised Updike as "the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of among American men of letters."

The Associated Press lauded Updike's prolific and wide-ranging career: "A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards."

NPR noted that in an essay he contributed to the "This I Believe" series, he wrote, "I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness."

The New Yorker's website featured tributes to Updike, a contributor to the magazine since 1954, from Julian Barnes, George Saunders, Antonya Nelson and even John Cheever, who, in 1976, "received a false report that Updike had died and was moved to record the following tribute in his journal."

Salon's King Kaufman remembered "John Updike, baseball writer."

C-Span's In Depth program featured a three-hour interview with Updike in 2005. That program can be viewed at the network's video library.

 

Tonight on Charlie Rose: John Grisham, whose new book is The Associate (Doubleday, $27.95, 9780385517836/0385517831).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Sandi Richard, author of Dinner Survival: The Most Uncomplicated, Approachable Way to Get Dinner to Fit Your Life (Scribner, $22.95, 9781416543640/1416543643).

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Tomorrow on KCRW's Bookworm: Part Two of a two-part series with Toni Morrison, author of A Mercy (Knopf, $23.95, 9780307264237/0307264238). As the show put it: "In this second half of our two-part interview with Toni Morrison, the conversation continues in an attempt to discover the way a novel is built. How does a novel become resonant? How does a simple fact become dense enough to become symbolic? How does a symbol become part of a fabric of meanings? Toni Morrison reveals the ultimate meaning of A Mercy, providing, in the process, a lesson in how to read."

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Tomorrow on Oprah, during a segment about bioidentical hormones: Suzanne Somers, author of Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (Three Rivers Press, $13.95, 9780307237255/0307237257).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Hannah Holmes, author of The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself (Random House, $25, 9781400065417/1400065410).

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Tomorrow on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: P. W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (Penguin Press, $29.95, 9781594201981/1594201986).

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Tomorrow on the Late Show with David Letterman: Tony Dungy, author of Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance (Tyndale House, $24.99, 9781414326818/1414326815).

 

 

Steven Spielberg has set his cast for The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, which is scheduled for release in 2011. Variety reported that "the first installment in the 3-D motion-capture trilogy" will star Jamie Bell, of Billy Elliot fame, as Tintin and Daniel Craig as Red Rackham. The movie is "based on" the iconic character created by Georges Remi under the pseudonym Herge. The rest of the cast includes Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook. Producers are Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy. Jackson will direct the second film in the series.

 

Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture won the £25,000 (US$35,705) Costa book of the year award. Matthew Parris called the decision "an extraordinarily close ­finish," according to the Guardian, which reported that Barry "gained the support of five out of the nine judges--with the others supportive of Adam Foulds's narrative poem The Broken Word."

Parris added nearly all the judges felt the winning novel had "a lot wrong with it. They agreed that it was flawed, and almost no one liked the ending, which was almost fatal to its success." After long deliberations, however, the judges gave their nod to Barry.

Regarding the close finish, Barry offered the perfect solution for readers: "It's a no-brainer. Buy them both. [The Broken Word] is an incredible poem."

 

Finalists for the 2008 Best Translated Book of the Year award in fiction and poetry were named yesterday. Ten works in each category made the shortlist, which was posted on Three Percent, a website devoted to drawing attention to translated works of literature published in the U.S. Winners and runners-up will be announced February 19 during an event hosted by Francisco Goldman at Melville House Books, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Fiction:

• Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago)
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)
• Voice Over by Céline Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard (Seven Stories)
• The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Overlook)
• Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux (Archipelago)
• Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
• Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books)
• Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis (Melville House)
• The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review Books)

Poetry:

• Essential Poems and Writings by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Bill Zavatsky, Martin Sorrell, Jonathan Eburne, Katherine Connelly, Patricia Terry, and Paul Auster (Black Widow)
• You Are the Business by Caroline Dubois, translated from the French by Cole Swensen (Burning Deck)
• As It Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider (Ugly Duckling)
• For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions)
• Poems of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, translated from the French by Ron Padgett and Bill Zavatsky (Black Widow)
• Night Wraps the Sky by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated from the Russian by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur, and Matvei Yankelevich, and edited by Michael Almereyda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• A Different Practice by Fredrik Nyberg, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida (Ugly Duckling)
• EyeSeas by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Daniela Hurezanu and Stephen Kessler (Black Widow)
• Peregrinary by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Zephyr)
• Eternal Enemies by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

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Five emerging fiction writers are finalists for the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, administered by the Jewish Book Council. The winner, along with a Choice Award winner who will receive a $25,000 award, will be announced in May at a ceremony held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. The shortlist includes:

• The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert (Free Press)
• One More Year by Sana Krasikov (Spiegel & Grau)
• The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman (Soho Press)
• The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer (Ecco)
• Petropolis by Anya Ulinich (Viking Penguin)

 

Odyssey Award; Michael L. Printz Book Award

At Monday's award ceremony in Denver, the Odyssey Award, jointly sponsored by ALSC (the Association for Library Service to Children) and YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association), went to Recorded Books for Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, narrated by the author. Three of the five Odyssey honors went to books for older readers: Curse of the Blue Tattoo: Being an Account of the Misadventures of Jacky Faber, Midshipman and Fine Lady, written by L.A. Meyer, narrated by Katherine Kellgren (Listen and Live Audio); Elijah of Buxton (a Newbery Honor book last year), written by Christopher Paul Curtis, narrated by Mirron Willis (Listening Library/Random); and Nation, written by Terry Pratchett, also named a 2009 Printz Honor Book (see below), narrated by Stephen Briggs (Harper Children's Audio). The other two Odyssey honors went to picture book texts: I'm Dirty, written by Kate and Jim McMullan, narrated by Steve Buscemi (Weston Woods/Scholastic); and Martina the Beautiful Cockroach: A Cuban Folktale, written and narrated by Carmen Agra Deedy (Peachtree).
 
The Michael L. Printz Book Award, established in the name of school librarian Michael Printz, went to Jellicoe Road by Australian author Melina Marchetta (HarperTeen), a "roller coaster ride of a novel [that] grabs you from the first sentence and doesn't let go," in the words of the award committee. The four honor books are: Nation by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins), as mentioned above; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, the sequel to the National Book Award winner by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick); The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (Hyperion), which was a National Book Award finalist this year; and Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (Knopf), whose Black Juice was a 2006 Printz Honor Book.

William C. Morris Award; May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture

A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Levine/Scholastic) won the first-ever William C. Morris Award, which honors "a book written for young adults by a first-time, previously unpublished author." The other four finalists were: Graceling by Kristin Cashore (Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne (Geringer/HarperTeen); Madapple by Christina Meldrum (Knopf/Random House); and Me, the Missing, and the Dead by Jenny Valentine (HarperTeen).
 
The award's namesake, William C. Morris, whom many of us knew as Bill, "left an impressive mark on the field of children's and young adult literature," reads the award's citation. "He was beloved in the publishing field and the library profession for his generosity and marvelous enthusiasm for promoting literature for children and teens." Those of us who knew him also know how much Bill would have been thrilled not only with the idea of an award for new authors--in whom he took particular interest and looked after with special care--but also that the first year his award would be given would also coincide with a Newbery winner (Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book) from HarperCollins, where Bill spent 48 years (when it was Harper & Brothers).
 
That Katherine T. (or K.T., as many of us know her) Horning was named the 2010 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecturer would also have delighted Bill, as we feel certain he takes credit for Harper having published K.T.'s book, From Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children's Books. In addition to being an author, Horning serves as director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) and is a recent past president of ALSC. "Three threads clearly run through Horning's long and distinguished career," reads the Arbuthnot Committee's citation: "Freedom to read and open access to information for young people; the continued struggle to produce a body of authentically multicultural literature for young people in the United States; and the need to provide clear practical training for both new and experienced librarians, especially with regard to evaluating (and setting high standards for) literature for young people." The lecturer, announced annually at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, "may be an author, critic, librarian, historian or teacher of children's literature, of any country, who shall prepare a paper considered to be a significant contribution to the field of children's literature." Congratulations to K.T. and all of this year's winners.--Jennifer M. Brown

 

Fluttering among the pages of this novel will reveal a forbidding number of algebraic equations sprinkled through the dialogue. Don't put the book down. Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is a richly emotional experience--yes, a plunge into advanced mathematics and Japanese baseball, but so human, filled with so many telling, brilliant touches, that the math parts border on poetry and the baseball parts become a language of love between an old man and a boy who both adore the same team.

Here's a slender, newly-translated Japanese novel about three utterly likeable human beings, doing what human beings do best: gently exploring each other and helping each other to find happiness. Essentially we're talking a cast of three: a 28-year-old housekeeper and single parent who's telling the story, her 10-year-old son who's never known a father and has never seen a live baseball game, and a genius mathematics professor who has suffered a car accident and whose memory is damaged--and lasts only for 80 minutes. Little notes are pinned all over the Professor's jacket reminding him of important facts and dates. Every morning he wakes up disoriented and alone.

Like the housekeeper, the reader is captivated by the unexpected lyrical philosophy behind numbers. "In mathematics," says the Professor, "the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows. . . " Beyond the mysteries of perfect numbers are the mysteries of the Professor. Why is he so worried when he finds out the housekeeper's son has been left home alone after school, concerned enough to insist that the boy come to his house every afternoon from now on? Why does the Professor become an emotional wreck when the boy cuts his hand, rushing him on his back to the nearest medical facility?

The novel is the young housekeeper's description of the two men in her life, her employer and her son, and the fragile friendship they build around their love of the Tigers baseball team, laced with the thrill of prime numbers and the mathematical search for "the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook." Ogawa has the perfect light touch, never milking her dramatic situations, keeping her story realistic and honest. It's all exquisitely touching and impossible to read dry-eyed, an utterly masterful depiction of friendship, a warm-hearted tribute to the unexpected ways that damaged people can change our lives.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A story of three people helping each other to find happiness, laced with advanced mathematics and Japanese baseball, The Housekeeper and the Professor is a masterful depiction of friendship.

 

So I'm at the checkout counter of my local supermarket on Monday, waiting behind two customers who seem to be stocking up for Armageddon. What to do? I consider going with their instincts and buying lots of batteries, but recall making that mistake during the Y2K scare a decade ago.

I resist the panic impulse. Instead, with fluorescent lights glaring and bad, bad music wafting obnoxiously (as if sound could literally stink), I take out my iPod touch, open Stanza and continue reading Emerson's Representative Men.

This moment is a perfect example of "incidental reading," a phrase that Agate Publishing's Doug Seibold used in last week's column. Here's one advantage to reading Emerson on an iPod: If I stood in the same place and read my hardbound copy, I'd feel conspicuous and a little pretentious. But I can read anything in public on an iPod and nobody cares, since it looks like I'm checking my phone or performing any of the other blips and bleeps that keep us going these days.

Just before it's my turn to start "loading the belt" with my items, I incidentally and coincidentally read:

Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.

Suddenly, I'm thinking about digital evolution, revolution and devolution; the ongoing debate over copyright and intellectual property issues; and the presumed death of the book as we know it. I also consider, again, my relationship to books and e-books and audiobooks and that magical iPod from my perspective as a reader and writer.

We can cite plenty of statistics about declining book readership and the seemingly endless aftershocks from our economy's quake, which continue to reverberate through the book world. November's AAP sales figures (Shelf Awareness, January 26, 2009) showed an expected, yet nonetheless unnerving, downward spiral. E-book sales were one of only two categories that were exceptions. Even though the numbers are still small and reflect Amazon's Kindle push, the November total--$5.1 million--was up 108.3% over 2007, and the category showed year-to-date sales of $46.7 million, a 63.8% gain.  

Does that scare me? Yes, for reasons that have to do with my concerns about indie booksellers. Does it fascinate me? Yes, because it is happening and I'm intrigued. Can I deal with the changes? Already trying to.

"I long to have been a writer in the 1920s. But I'm not. So I need to do what it takes to be a writer in the 2020s," noted Michael Perry in response to last week's column. Perry's books include Population: 485, Truck: A Love Story and Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting, which will be published this spring.

"I spent many years hanging out with and writing about musicians and what I'm seeing now in book publishing holds many parallels to what happened ten years ago in the music industry," he observed. "The musicians who thrived weren't necessarily the early adapters, but the early adjusters. They kept abreast of developments, read the future with a realists eyes and incorporated change as it came along, but never let their primary focus drift from craft and performance. So I try never to forget that the number one key to my survival is that I must write--regardless of the state of the industry and/or its 'delivery systems.' I am certainly concerned about the future of publishing, but thanks to the musicians I try to focus on navigating--rather than flailing against--those changes."

I agree. With change in the air, Emerson has been on my mind a lot recently. His works are always within reach on my shelves (and in my iPod). I'm funny that way. My fascination with the new requires grounding in the old. Call it perspective.
    
When I return from the supermarket, I open a well-thumbed and copiously underlined copy of Emerson in His Journals for a different kind of incidental reading. Eventually I stumble upon the following cautionary note:

In the progress of Watt and Perkin's philosophy the day may come when the scholar shall be provided with a Reading Steam Engine; when he shall say Presto--& it shall discourse eloquent history--& Stop Sesame & it shall hush to let him think. He shall put in a pin, & hear poetry; & two pins, & hear a song. That age will discover Laputa.

I forgot about Laputa. Time to read Swift again, I guess.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)