Shelf Awareness for Thursday, March 23, 2006


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

Quotation of the Day

Manga Mania

"There was a girl in my high-school class who was always drawing, and she turned me onto it."--Lisa Ferguson, 20, a student who tries to limit herself to buying one manga and one anime a month at her local Kinokuniya bookstore, as quoted by the Seattle Times in a long piece on the growing popularity of manga and anime. Ferguson is such a fan she's studying Japanese.


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


News

Notes: UT Finds a Trade Store; ABC Expands White Award

In an unusual partnership, Follett is opening a bookstore across from the University of Texas in space it is leasing from the University Co-op, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The Guadalupe Street area, known as the Drag, has been a difficult place for retailers, and previous bookstores, including Europa Books and Barnes & Noble, have folded.

Follett has agreed not to sell "academic textbooks, UT clothing, memorabilia or other novelties available at the Co-op," and the University "will soon sign a three-year, $225,000 agreement with Follett," under which the company will hold book signings for faculty authors and other university-related events.

The university has been actively looking for a store to open on the Drag that would stock trade books (Shelf Awareness, July 28).

---

Since its founding in 2004 by the Association of Booksellers for Children, the E.B. White Read Aloud Award has gone to one book that "reflects the universal read aloud standards that were established by the work of E.B White." The association had planned to alternate awards from year to year between pictures books and book for older readers but found it difficult to choose a single title. As a result, beginning this year, the award will be presented in two categories: picture book and older readers.

New ABC executive director Kristen McLean said in a statement that the change "reflects ABC's belief that reading aloud doesn't have to stop when young readers make the leap to chapter books." This year's award winners will be announced Monday, April 3.

---

Like many other business owners in Vail, Colo., Robert Aikens of Verbatim Booksellers has been adversely affected by a slew of construction projects, according to the Vail Daily. That and Internet book-buying have led to "abysmal" sales at Verbatim. As a result, Aikens will close the store "unless he can find enough money by next month to run the store for the next two years," the paper said.

---

The Ventura County Star has an update on Barbara O'Grady, new owner of Adventures for Kids, Ventura, Calif., who is making a few changes at the long-established children's bookstore (Shelf Awareness, January 30). The former manager of the Patagonia café, she is planning to stay open later, institute a games night and adopt a few principles from Patagonia's approach. Adventures for Kids founder Jody Fickes Shapiro continues to assist in the transition.

---

Barnes & Noble plans to open a new store in Seattle, Wash., in April 2007. When the store opens, in the Northgate Mall at I-5 and Northeast Northgate Way, the company will close a B. Dalton Bookseller that operates in the mall. The new store will stock the usual nearly 200,000 book, music, movie and magazine titles and have a café.

In other B&N news, the company is returning to the Bayshore mall in Glendale, near Milwaukee, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. B&N had had a store in a part of the mall that is being rebuilt and expanded. The mall is being renamed Bayshore Town Center.

---

Oasis Christian Bookstore in Williamstown, Ky., reopened late last year in a new location with an unusual sideline: it has a restaurant and soda fountain, the Grant County News reported. Installed in the 1960s, the soda fountain has the original seats and counters.

---

Raman Agraweal and Tyler French of Gibson's Bookstore in East Lansing, home of Michigan State University, have created a "community hangout" in the store that includes wi-fi, coffee and music. "It's a humble corner, with a couple of tables partitioned off by bookshelves, but it's got a lot of heart," the Lansing City Pulse reported. "Amid Pink Pearl erasers, dusty texts and jokey greeting cards, the space has the ambiance of a quaint emporium, but it's granola-dusted with a progressive vibe." Local groups using the space include Direct Action and Grass Roots Recycling.


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


VQR: Hot Spot for New and Old Writers

In a surprise, the Virginia Quarterly Review, based at the University of Virginia and with a staff of four, was nominated for six National Magazine Awards, sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, garnering more nominations than the New Yorker, Harper's, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and other better-known and better-provided publications. Only the Atlantic Monthly, with eight nominations, had more than VQR. On Slate.com, Meghan O'Rourke described it this way: "It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game."

Announced last week, VQR's nominations were in four categories, including two each in fiction and essays. Some of VQR's nominated work is by well-known authors like Isabel Allende and Joyce Carol Oates, but the two nominated essays were by Pauline Chen and Martin Preib, who had not been published before in a national magazine. "One of the missions of little magazines like ours has always been to discover and nurture new talent," said Ted Genoways, editor of VQR since 2003. "For us, an exciting aspect of these nominations is the exposure it will bring to Chen and Preib's writing."

Slate also had this to say about VQR: "There's little that feels dutiful about the writing in VQR; nor is there anything musty about its dedication to the long-form essay (which is ever harder to find). Curiously, the challenge of being a quarterly in the age of the Internet--when news cycles spin ever faster--has come to look, in Genoways' hands, like a kind of blessing. As he put it, it gives him time to ask, 'Will we really care about this in six months?' Perhaps most refreshingly, VQR isn't responding to anything but its own sense of curiosity. It's not espousing ironic attitudes, or inveighing against capitalism. VQR doesn't believe; it scrutinizes, and does so with enjoyment."


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


Media and Movies

This Weekend on Book TV: Celebrating Gordon Parks

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, March 25

8 a.m. After Words. At an event hosted by Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, Kan., Ann Parr celebrated the life of Gordon Parks, the director and first black photographer hired by Life magazine, who died on March 7 at the age of 93. Parr's children's book, Gordon Parks: No Excuses (Pelican, $15.95, 1589804112), was published shortly before Parks's death.

8:45 a.m. History on Book TV. At an event held at the Avid Reader bookstore in Davis, Calif., Alan Taylor, a history professor and contributing editor to the New Republic, talked about his new book, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Knopf, $35, 0679454713). In the book, Taylor examines the role of Native Americans in the American Revolution and how the leaders of the Iroquois Six Nations of New York and Canada interacted with European settlers. (Re-airs on Monday at 4:45 a.m.)

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 1997, professor Sarah Gordon talked about her book Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829-1929 (Ivan R. Dee, $18.95, 1566632188), in which she chronicled, among other things, the effect of the development of the rail system on the rural economy and the lives of ordinary people.

Sunday, March 26

2 p.m. Public Lives. Michael Karin discussed his book A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Knopf, $30, 0375411356), in which he tries to tone down the image of the legendary fundamentalist, racist and populist.


Media Heat: Book Thief's Markus Zusak

This morning the Early Show hosts Lisa Scottoline, author of Dirty Blonde (HarperCollins, $25.95, 0060742909).

---

Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: Markus Zusak, author of the very hot new book, The Book Thief (Knopf Books for Young Readers, $16.95, 0375831002).

---

Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Walter Kirn, author of Mission to America (Doubleday, $23.95, 038550764X).) As the show describes it: "Walter Kirn uses comedy the way a magician uses sleight-of-hand. His hilarity conceals sadness, his levity masks gravity. Here, we talk about American spirituality and how it often manifests itself as naïve nonsense before transforming into perilous disregard for life."

---

Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Christopher Moore, whose new book is Dirty Job (Morrow, $24.95, 0060590270).

---

Tonight on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno: political consultant James Carville, whose recent book, co-written with Paul Begala, is Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future (S&S, $24, 074327752X).

---

Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Michael Mandelbaum, author of The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the Twenty-first Century (PublicAffairs, $26, 1586483609).




Books & Authors

Hugo and Campbell Nominees


Nominations in book-oriented categories for the 2006 Hugo Awards, sponsored by the World Science Fiction Society and awarded at Worldcon in August in Los Angeles, are:

Best Novel

  • Learning the World by Ken MacLeod (Orbit; Tor)
  • A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (Voyager; Bantam Spectra)
  • Old Man's War by John Scalzi (Tor)
  • Accelerando by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
  • Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Best Novella

  • Burn by James Patrick Kelly (Tachyon)
  • "Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners, Small Beer Press; F&SF September 2005)
  • "The Little Goddess" by Ian McDonald (Asimov's June 2005)
  • "Identity Theft" by Robert J. Sawyer (Down These Dark Spaceways, SFBC)
  • "Inside Job" by Connie Willis (Asimov's January 2005)

Best Novelette

  • "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi (F&SF October/November 2005)
  • "Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle (F&SF October/November 2005)
  • "TelePresence" by Michael A. Burstein (Analog July/August 2005)
  • "I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix February 15, 2005)
  • "The King of Where-I-Go" by Howard Waldrop (SCI FICTION December 7, 2005)

Best Short Story

  • "Seventy-Five Years" by Michael A. Burstein (Analog January/February 2005)
  • "The Clockwork Atom Bomb" by Dominic Green (Interzone May/June 2005)
  • "Singing My Sister Down" by Margo Lanagan (Black Juice, Allen & Unwin; Eos)
  • "Tk'tk'tk" by David D. Levine (Asimov's March 2005)
  • "Down Memory Lane" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's April/May 2005)

Best Related Book

  • Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 by Mike Ashley (Liverpool)
  • The SEX Column and Other Misprints by David Langford (Cosmos)
  • Science Fiction Quotations edited by Gary Westfahl (Yale)
  • Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop by Kate Wilhelm (Small Beer Press)
  • Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996 by Gary K. Wolfe (Beccon)

---

Nominees for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2004 or 2005, sponsored by Dell Magazines:

  • K.J. Bishop
  • Sarah Monette
  • Chris Roberson
  • Brandon Sanderson
  • John Scalzi
  • Steph Swainston

Note: There are six nominees because of a tie for fifth place.


The Bestsellers

V for Vendetta Joins B&N.com's Graphic Novel Bestsellers

The film adaptation of the 1982 graphic novel V for Vendetta became the No. 1 movie in the U.S. over the weekend and helped push the Alan Moore and David Lloyd title to as high at No. 9 on Barnes&Noble.com's Hourly Top 100 on Saturday. The book has sold well enough to join the ranks of the 10 bestselling graphic novels on B&N.com since January 2001:
 
1. Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Vols. 1 & 2) by Art Spiegelman
2. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
3. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
4. In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman
5. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman, Malcolm Jones, Mike Dringeberg and Sam Kieth
6. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Directors Cut by Jhonen Vasquez
7. The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman, Milo Manara and Glenn Fabry
8. The Sandman: The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman, Malcolm Jones and Mike Dringeberg
9. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
10. V for Vendetta for Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Ranking based on cumulative sales; multiple editions of the same title have been combined.


Powered by: Xtenit