Shelf Awareness for Friday, April 17, 2009


Del Rey Books: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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

Overlook Press: How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

Charlesbridge Publishing: If Lin Can: How Jeremy Lin Inspired Asian Americans to Shoot for the Stars by Richard Ho, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên and Phùng Nguyên Quang

Shadow Mountain: The Orchids of Ashthorne Hall (Proper Romance Victorian) by Rebecca Anderson

News

Notes: Borders Board to Deboard; A Bookstore Without Books

Seven of the current 10 members of the board of directors of Borders Group are leaving as of the annual meeting May 21 or in the coming months, the company said yesterday. The departing board members have all been members since at least 2005. Borders has retained a search firm to find replacementsis and is accepting nominations. Borders intends to limit the new board to eight members.

In January, shortly after Borders's management team was replaced, Mick McGuire, who has been a partner at Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund that is Borders's largest shareholder, became chairman. He replaced Larry Pollock, who has remained a director but is one of the seven who will leave this year. It's likely that new board members will have Pershing Square connections or backing.

Borders also said that it will not seek approval at the meeting of an amendment to allow a reverse stock split. That measure had been considered because of a New York Stock Exchange policy of delisting companies whose stock price falls below $1 a share. But the Exchange has temporarily suspended the policy, and Borders's shares recently rose above $1 a share.

Wall Street liked all the news. Yesterday Borders stock rose 18.6% to close at $1.72.

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Yikes. As part of an effort to cut $30 million from its 2010 budget, the California Institute of Technology is "eliminating books from the bookstore," as Campus Marketplace put it. The Caltech Bookstore is being merged with the campus convenience store and will be known as the Caltech Store. The new store will sell clothing, food and logo items. The only books available will be by Cal Tech authors.

Texts will be sold online; the staff of the store is creating a site that it hopes will link easily to a campus-wide program that is used regularly by faculty and students.

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As part of a series profiling ABA board candidates, Bookselling This Week focused on incumbent Becky Anderson, who is "part of the fifth generation of Andersons at the helm of the family business that started as a pharmacy, which also sold books. Today the business encompasses Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville, Aurora, and Downers Grove, Illinois; the 134-year-old Oswald's pharmacy; and W.W. Wickel, a children's book wholesaler, which handles school bookfairs and educational events. Becky Anderson and her three brothers own the businesses together, and she serves as the group's marketing and events coordinator, as well as the children's book buyer for the bookstores and the buyer for the wholesale business." She's also a free speech advocate, an IndieBound proponent and president of the Association of Booksellers for Children, which is considering a merger with the ABA.

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Barnes & Noble has moved its customer service center to Lyndhurst, N.J., from Secaucus. The 30,000-sq.-ft. building houses some 200 staff members and "state-of-the-art technology and training facilities." The service center reps will handle inquiries from customers of both B&N and B&N.com.

In a statement, B&N.com president William Lynch, said, "While the trend at many consumer companies is to outsource call center operations, we are proud to make this significant investment in both technology and in our people that not only keeps jobs in our country, but right in our own backyard."

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The ABA's Day of Education on Thursday, May 28, on the eve of BEA, begins with a keynote session on the relation between authors and indie bookstores. The moderator is Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia, Madison, Conn. Panelists are authors Sherman Alexie, Jon Meacham, James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline.

Panels address such topics as book clubs, the bookstore as "the third place," children's book marketing, handselling, social media, viral marketing, selling e-content and more.

For information about panelists and moderators, see Bookselling This Week.

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Luanne Kreutzer, who has owned St. Helens Book Shop in St. Helens, Ore., for 17 years, is selling the store to Lori Cardiff, an employee, effective April 27, BTW reported. The store will move July 1 to Columbia Boulevard, and Cardiff plans to expand the children's books and toy section while maintaining strong adult fiction and nonfiction sections. The new space has more space for events, storytelling and browsing.

Besides being a bookseller, Cardiff has worked as a teacher, nonprofit development manager and a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. She was also recently appointed to the St. Helens Public Library board.

Kreutzer is not severing all ties with the store: she will work there part-time after the sale.

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The Phoenix Best of 2009 list included the "best way for a bookworm to simultaneously buy local and save the environment," which went to the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., and Metro Pedal Power. As the paper wrote:

"So you just saw Revolutionary Road and now you want to read the book. You could shell out $4 or so in T fare to get to the nearest bookstore and back. You could be an asshole and drive over. Or you could call Harvard Book Store and have them bike the book to you. The store, in conjunction with Metro Pedal Power--which operates via emissions-free vehicles--is now offering same-day/next-day delivery to Cambridge and parts of Somerville and Allston for $5 (the surrounding Boston area will have to wait one-to-three business days for orders). The service is offered six days a week, with a $1 charge for each additional book ordered. So, that's one or two measly bucks more than the cost of a subway ride and you're helping support two excellent local businesses as well as the environment? We feel greener already."

Harvard Book Store also won the Phoenix's more traditional "best bookstore for new books" award.

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Effective May 4, Joy Dallanegra-Sanger will join the Macmillan Children's Publishing Group as senior v-p, director of marketing, a new position. She was formerly v-p, director of field sales, for Random House Children's Books and before that was v-p, associate publisher for trade paperbacks, in Random House's Doubleday Broadway imprint. Earlier she held sales and marketing positions at the Knopf Publishing Group, including Vintage, Pantheon and Schocken, and worked at Waldenbooks.

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Kathy Warren has joined Dover Publications as national accounts manager, where her account responsibilities include Amazon, Ingram, Follett stores, NACS and Books-A-Million. She previously worked at Sellers Publishing.

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Effective May 1, RoseMary Honnold becomes editor-in-chief of VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) magazine. Honnold is young adult services coordinator at Coshocton Public Library, Coshocton, Ohio, and was until recently editor of YALS, the journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association. She was a member of the YALSA Teen Read Week Committee and is a presenter and author about teen reading.

VOYA is owned by Scarecrow Press, part of the Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, and is published bimonthly. VOYA was founded in 1978 by librarians and intellectual freedom advocates Dorothy M. Broderick and Mary K. Chelton "to identify the social myths that keep us from serving young people and replace them with knowledge."

 


HarperOne: Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster


Lightning Source Serves Up Titles for Espresso Book Machine

Beginning in May, Lightning Source, the Ingram POD company, is launching a pilot program to provide about 85,000 titles from some 13 publishers on Espresso Book Machines. The machines, developed by On Demand Books, are or will soon be installed in some 15 locations, mostly bookstores and libraries, around the world, and can print a paperback book as quickly and richly as a veteran barista can whip up a latte.

The participating publishers, which include Hachette, S&S, Wiley, Macmillan and Norton, already work with Lightning Source. After the pilot, other publishers that print and distribute with Lightning Source will have the option of participating in the Espresso Book Machine program. That should occur in the second half of this year.

In a statement, David Taylor, president of Lightning Source, said that the program would allow "the many thousands of publishers with whom we already work the chance to get their books into this new distribution channel with minimal effort."

On Demand will be demonstrating the Espresso Book Machine 2.0 at the London Book Fair next week.

 


Park Street Press: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey by Peter A Levine


Fodor's on BEA: Eating Near the Javits Center

At first glance, the Javits Center may appear to be located in a culinary wasteland. But fear not: Fodor's has scouted out the best, bargain-oriented lunch spots nearby to ensure that you'll have a tasty place to refuel before busy afternoon meetings and sessions.

The name says it all at Burgers & Cupcakes (458 Ninth Ave., near 35th St.; 212-643-1200), where these two comfort food favorites are headliners on a short, yet varied menu. You'll have your choice of burger, ranging from standard beef or veggie burger, to the more daring free range bison and ostrich patties. And it's simply wrong to leave without trying a sweet treat; the chocolate peanut butter marshmallow and strawberry cheesecake cupcakes are just two of the many temptations.

If you're in the mood for a burger--hold the cupcake--head a few blocks farther to Five Napkin Burger (630 Ninth Ave., near 44th St.; 212-757-2277) for its signature plate: 10 oz. of fresh ground chuck served with comté cheese, caramelized onions and rosemary aïoli that's sure to require at least three napkins, if not five for backup. The wide-ranging menu also offers entrée salads, sandwiches and even sushi maki rolls.

Some of New York's best barbecue can be savored at Daisy May's BBQ USA (623 Eleventh Ave., at 46th St.; 212-977-1500). This casual spot with cafeteria-style seating is the perfect place to dig in to pulled pork, Memphis dry rub ribs and beef brisket, not to mention all of the stick-to-your-ribs Southern sides like mac 'n' cheese, collard greens and spicy corn bread.

The popular Hallo Berlin (626 Tenth Ave., near 44th St.; 212-977-1944) offers excellent German comfort fare. The lunch special here is a steal: for $6.50 to $8, choose from combination plates like a Bavarian meatball combo or a two wurst platter, each including German home fries, red wine sauerkraut and sautéed onions. If it's been a long morning, you can say danke schön for the lengthy beer list.

The relaxed Market Café (496 Ninth Ave., near 38th St.; 212-967-3892) is the place to go for standard American fare at a reasonable price. This casually chic café serves up sandwiches like a grilled chicken club or fresh tuna salad, a variety of pizza-like flatbreads and entrées like seared Atlantic salmon and pan-roasted cod.

For a quick snack or a sandwich to go, head to the always reliable Così (498 Seventh Ave., between 36th and 37th Sts.; 212-947-1005). Its fresh baked flatbread is what draws people back to this sandwich chain, but the hand-tossed salads and savory soups are reason enough to stop in for lunch on the fly.

For more New York City restaurant recommendations, check out Fodor's New York City 2009, the full-color guide the New York Times calls "the can't-go-wrong choice" or visit fodors.com.

 


G.P. Putnam's Sons: Take Me Home by Melanie Sweeney


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Robert Goolrick and his Reliable Wife

On Saturday on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: Paula Deen, author of Paula Deen's Deen Family Cookbook (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9780743278133/0743278135).

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On Saturday on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered: Robert Goolrick, author of A Reliable Wife (Algonquin, $23.95, 9781565125964/1565125967).

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This weekend on NBC's Weekend Today and Fox's Cavuto on Business: Suzy Welch, author of 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea (Scribner, $24, 9781416591825/1416591826).

 


Movies: Chameleon

The financial thriller Chameleon by Richard Hains is being adapted for film by Mac Gudgeon, with Richard Gibson directing. The author, a 20-year veteran of the financial world, is producing the movie with Mark Pennell at Resolution Independent. Variety reported that the film "will be set amid the post-2008 financial crisis." 

 


Books & Authors

Awards: Indies Choice Winners; Miles Franklin Shortlist

The winners of the first Indies Choice Book Awards, formerly the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards and sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, are:

  • Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction): The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press)
  • Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction): The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead)
  • Best Author Discovery: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski (Ecco)
  • Best Indie Young Adult Buzz Book (Fiction): The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins)
  • Best New Picture Book: Bats at the Library by Brian Lies (Houghton Mifflin)
  • Most Engaging Author: Sherman Alexie

The winners were chosen by ABA members and will be honored at the Celebration of Bookselling lunch on Friday, May 29, at BookExpo America in New York.

For the five honor winners in each category, click here.

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The shortlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award, one of Australia's most important literary prizes and worth $42,000 (about US$30,000), is:

  • Breath by Tim Winton (to be published here by Picador in May)
  • Ice by Louis Nowra
  • The Pages by Murray Bail (to be published here by Vintage September 22)
  • The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
  • Wanting by Richard Flanagan (to be published here by Atlantic Monthly May 12)

Bookseller and Publisher Online pointed out that Winton has won the Miles Franklin award three times already and Bail has won once. The winner will be announced June 18.

 


Book Brahmin: Diana Preston

Diana Preston is a British writer and historian who studied modern history at Oxford University. She enjoys writing about events that illumine human motivation and experience and help us look with a clearer eye at our world today. She and her husband, Michael, who is also a writer and with whom she has co-authored several books, love travelling and seek any excuse for far-flung research. Their explorations have taken them from the Isthmus of Panama, where they followed in the footsteps of the buccaneer scientist William Dampier, to the Ross Sea in Antarctica in pursuit of Captain Scott, to Armenia, Egypt and the Middle East to recreate the world of Cleopatra and Antony. Her latest book, Cleopatra and Antony: Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World, was just published by Walker & Co.

On your nightstand now:

Volume I of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the other volumes will follow in this re-reading but there's not enough space for them). Gibbon tells a sweeping story with clarity, penetration and huge narrative verve. Though he claimed he saw history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind," in his hands it becomes far more, illuminating the past and provoking us to consider the future. Also on the nightstand is the Loeb translation of Herodotus--the first travel writer and still one of the best.

Favorite book when you were a child:

When I was very young, I loved A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and still do. The characters have stayed with me. I mentally divide people into "Eeyore," "Tigger" and "Piglet" types.

Your five top authors:

Anthony Trollop's novels for their richness and humanity and also for his sharp eye for human absurdity; Barbara Tuchman for her ability to take a huge historical canvas, as she does in August 1914, and make it both explicable and accessible; Jonathan D. Spence whose brilliant works on Chinese history conjure a forgotten world; Jane Austen's novels for her skilful, funny, acerbic handling of themes that remain universal; Donna Tartt whose The Secret History and The Little Friend are totally compelling.

Book you've faked reading:

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I bought it and feel I ought to read it but haven't managed to get my mind around it yet.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy--the first modern novel though written nearly 250 years ago--full of digressions and literary conceits, including a blank page (chapter 38), wonderfully revealing of human foibles and eccentricities, killingly funny and a convincing riposte to anyone who insists that a novel must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I love cookery books--more to read than to use--and am easily seduced by an appealing cover, particularly anything with lashings of chocolate on it.

Book that changed my life:

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. It would be hard to find a more moving dissection of the frightening ordinariness of evil and of the extraordinary qualities required to confront it.

Favorite line from a book:

For me this has to be the opening sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." These few words capture the essence of one of the most captivating, funny but also socially revealing novels of its time that, each time I read it, yields something fresh.

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

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I read it as a teenager and it so caught my imagination that I dreaded reaching the end.

 


Shelf Starter: A Sandhills Ballad

A Sandhills Ballad by Ladette Randolph (University of New Mexico Press, $26.95, 9780826346858/0826346855, April 16, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

In that deep sleep she dreamt about the wind. She heard it whistle under the windowsills and through the cracks of an empty house, heard it rattle the loose No Hunting sign on a weathered post, and slam open and shut again the sagging door of an old barn. In the drifting sand she heard the story of her life. When the wind stopped, she woke to silence and to a square of light on the ceiling of a dark room. She stared into the light until she slept again--this time a sleep without dreams.

Sound returned first: a rhythmic whirring, erratic clicks, a consistent tapping interrupted by intermittent beeps, a deep hum she felt more than heard. The light, which she had seen on the ceiling earlier, she now saw was cast by a street lamp outside the window. Through the open blinds she noticed the brick wall of another building.

She saw sitting beside her, his head drooping against his chest, her father, John Rasmussen. His hair was crimped where the crown of his hat usually rested. In the dim light she could make out the gleam of his white forehead in contrast to the ruddy lower half of his face. She knew it was summer by her father's face.

He stirred. "Mary," he said, and she remembered her name. "So you've decided to come back to us?" He leaned forward, bringing his face into the light from outside. "How do you feel?"

"Heavy."

"Do you remember anything?"

"No." She looked slowly around, guessing finally she was in a hospital room.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

 



Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: 'What Poetry Is' in a Workaday World

A couple of things happened during the past week that made me consider and reconsider what poetry is.

I teach an English composition class at a community college. We've been discussing the economy--what's left of it, where the jobs have gone, where the money's gone, where the future is (or isn't) going.

In preparation for an essay assignment, we're reading a lot of articles about GM and the bank bailouts and the decline in local factory jobs. We watched Michael Moore's Roger & Me.

Last Monday we talked, a lot, about the meaning of "work." This is not a literature class, but I threw them a changeup by introducing three poems into the discussion: Yusef Komunyakaa's "My Father's Love Letters" and "The Deck," as well as Philip Levine's "What Work Is." My students knew what work is before reading these poems, but now I think they've reconsidered what poetry is.

Did they all run out and buy poetry books after class? Probably not, but they did ask me about Komunyakaa's later work, and I promised to read them something from Warhorses this week. That's a start

The second thing happened last Friday on Twitter, when Kara Pelicano of Clerisy Press mentioned a Haiku on 42nd St. postcard poetry book.

On my office wall--hanging near a framed NYC subway "Poetry in Motion" sign with lines from Elizabeth Bishop's "Casabianca"--is a foamboard poster of Haiku on 42nd St. that I've had since the mid-1990s.

Haiku on 42nd St. documents a 1994 installation, curated by Dee Evetts, that presented 26 original haikus on abandoned Times Square movie theater marquees. The photos were taken by Richard Hunt, whom I first met when he worked for Bantam Doubleday Dell. Now he heads Keen Communications, which includes Clerisy Press.

Thinking about Haiku on 42nd Street made me wonder.

That's one of the fringe benefits of poetry--wonder.

So I asked Richard for the backstory.

"Years ago, my daily path from Port Authority to BDD was the gauntlet, aka 42nd St.," he said. "Some mornings it was a battle to choose the lesser evil: the boarded-up buildings, the stench of urine and garbage, or the sadness of what was once so vibrant becoming so grim. So to round the corner one morning and see this amazing collection of haiku displayed on the old marquees was magical. The simple presence of the verse graced each morning. These snippets of imagery, especially when juxtaposed against the seamier grotto of town, were enchanting, even uplifting.
 
"Nor was I alone in this sense of wonder. What the day before had been an eyesore, a slightly toxic warm-up lap in the daily rat race of workdom, became a jaunty stroll in the park.
 
"Tangled up in Haiku on 42nd St. is a confession: when I first photographed this wild feast of words and meaning, I didn't know why I felt compelled to capture it. But it was such an interesting and exciting display that I wanted to make a visual record before I turned the corner one morning . . . and it would be gone.
 
"My aspirations were simple: to preserve the proof that words and their creators can change the face of any city and improve the lives of all who pass by. Not being a full-time professional photographer, just someone who was touched by the display, I struggled with the best way to let others enjoy it. But as a full-time publishing person, literacy and spreading the word are the yin/yang and the perpetual quest.
 
"At first this collection of images was designed as a poster--pro bono on all fronts (thankfully)--and then cards, which I produced one at a time at home. But as you know from your time in a bookstore, finding a way to display posters and greeting cards is challenging, equally so the storage and shipping. There were a number of commission groups who carried them and an equal number of bookstores that ordered them, and to both groups I'm eternally grateful because it gave the haiku some exposure to a larger world.
 
"So when we finally discovered the postcard book format, we thought we'd give that a go in hopes of preserving this project in print. There are still no royalties attached, still haven't covered the printing cost, but someday hope to nudge enough into the black that we can donate proceeds to the Haiku Society.
           
"It won't surprise you, since you live it daily, but this enterprise has redoubled the respect I have for any and all independent operations and the pure joy of public art."

Just a couple examples of what poetry is in my workaday world.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

 


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