Shelf Awareness for Tuesday, April 19, 2022


Margaret Quinlin Books: Who Owns the Moon?: And Other Conundrums of Exploring and Using Space by Cynthia Levinson and Jennifer Swanson

Frances Lincoln Ltd: Dear Black Boy by Martellus Bennett

Soho Crime: Broken Fields by Marcie R. Rendon

Holiday House: When I Hear Spirituals by Cheryl Willis Hudson, illustrated by London Ladd

Mira Books: Their Monstrous Hearts by Yigit Turhan

News

Page After Page, Elizabeth City, N.C., Up for Sale

Susan Hinkle, owner of Page After Page in downtown Elizabeth City, N.C., has put the store up for sale. Hinkle told the Daily Advance that after 17 years of owning and operating the bookstore, she is ready to retire so she can travel and spend more time with her four grandchildren.

Hinkle is looking for a buyer who will keep the bookstore in town and ensure it stays a community institution. She noted that the shop is doing very well financially, and she would be happy to stay on to help the new owner through the transition.

"I'm willing to help in any way that I can," Hinkle said. "This is a community bookstore. It has been so well supported by the community."

Prior to moving to Elizabeth City, Hinkle worked as an engineer in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. When she moved, she knew she wanted to switch careers and run a small business of her own. Initially she imagined opening a coffee shop, or a combination coffee shop and bookstore, but then she heard from a neighbor that the local bookstore was up for sale. It proved to be a perfect opportunity that she couldn't pass up.

"I love this store," she told Daily Advance. "Elizabeth City needs to have a bookstore."


NYU Advanced Publishing Institute: Early bird pricing through Oct. 13


Parnassus Books Co-owner Karen Hayes Retiring This Year

Karen Hayes
Andy Brennan

Karen Hayes, general manager and co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., will retire from the bookstore later this year. While Hayes and store co-owner Ann Patchett are still working out many of the details, the plan is for store manager Andy Brennan to become general manager while Patchett becomes sole owner.

Hayes, who will turn 65 this year, noted that there is no timetable yet for the transition. There is "a lot to hand over," and everything will "take a little while to untangle." The announcement is happening a bit earlier than she expected, because "Andy and Ann and I had been talking, and we just wanted to let the staff know. We didn't want to keep anybody in the dark."

Everything is "amicable and happy," she continued, adding that she's been thinking of retirement seriously since last year. She's been in the book business since 1978, and she started to feel that "maybe it was time to try something new, even if that's just retirement." Hayes said she didn't have any concrete retirement plans, but she loves to travel, loves to make art and music, and with the demands of owning and operating a bookstore, she had "moved away from a lot of that."

Hayes and Patchett founded the bookstore in 2011, after Nashville's only bookstores at the time, a Davis-Kidd location and a Borders location, closed. Before that, Hayes had been a longtime Random House rep.


GLOW: Graydon House: The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay


The Children's Book Shop, Brookline, Mass., to Close

The Children's Book Shop, the 45-year-old children's bookstore in Brookline, Mass., will close permanently at the end of the month. Starting today, owner Terri Schmitz and her team will be holding an inventory sale that will last until April 30, the store's last day of business.

Schmitz announced the closure late last week, writing on her store's social media pages: "Many, many thanks to all our customers--old and young, teachers, librarians, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles--who have shopped with us, shared their stories and spread the word about good books for young people.

"We want also to thank profusely people in the publishing world--the wonderful authors and illustrators who create the books we sell, plus the editors, publicists and sales reps who take the next steps in bringing them to us.

"Unending thanks to our loyal and hard-working bookshop staff who have provided personalized services and great book advice to customers through the years. Many of them have gone on to careers in writing and illustrating, in publishing, librarianship, or teaching--a fact which makes us proud and happy."


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International Update: Authors on Canadian Independent Bookstore Day; Sweden Needs Bookshops

In anticipation of Canadian Independent Bookstore Day April 30, the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association noted: "We can't wait for you to read all the notes of indie appreciation collected by the wonderful Janie Chang behind Authors for Indies." Among the early Love Notes from writers: 

Bryn Turnbull: "There's something undeniably special about going into a bookstore like no other and running your hand along a shelf of books compiled not by an algorithm but by Beth behind the counter, who would be happy to recommend something you might not otherwise pick up, or help you find that one book (the one about Emily Brontë's ghost, don't you know the title's slipped my mind entirely but I can see it, oh gosh, it's got a red cover, I read it five years ago now...) And then to see your own book, there on that shelf of specially chosen books, waiting to be recalled when Beth is given a five-word mash of descriptors from a reader and sent on the hunt? It makes your heart grow three sizes."

Carrianne Leung: "Indie bookstores are more than simply places to make purchases. They are places for communities to form--whether it is a fleeting moment found in a chat with the salesperson who has deep knowledge and passion for your favourite genre or an event featuring local writers you are just discovering. Indie stores offer the stuff that keeps a rich literary culture alive, and as a writer, I am deeply grateful."

Charlotte Gray: "I love everything about Independent Bookstores. I love the look of them (shelves bursting with titles I want to read, and that the seller knows), the smell of them (paper, coffee, paper), the sound of them (a warm buzz, like drowsy summer bees.) I love the excitement of discovery--what titles has the seller put on the front table, and what is next to it? 

"My wonderful local bookstore, Ottawa's Books on Beechwood, cherishes all its local authors, whether self-published or major star, and shows the same affection for its customers, whether 8 or 80 years old. And did I mention the children's section, or the resident dog? Every independent bookstore has its own wonderful idiosyncrasies, and I'm deeply grateful to all of them for understanding the need to cherish Canadian authors, stories and culture."

---
 
Noting that 135 of Sweden's 290 municipalities lack a bookshop, and the number of such areas has been growing for decades, the European & International Booksellers Association's Newsflash reported that the country's "declining number of booksellers was one of the issues discussed during Sweden's first Literature Summit, which took place last month in Gothenburg. Maria Hamrefors, president of the Swedish Booksellers Association, shed more light on the issue, stating that the Swedish government supports the publication of books rather than their distribution to readers.

--- 

Congratulations to the American Book Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which celebrated its 50th birthday on Saturday, posting on Facebook: "With an extra 10% discount on all stock in our three stores, hidden Golden bookmarks to win amazing prizes, live music and seventies inspired cake, we are celebrating our 50th anniversary on this glorious sunny day! Managing director Nadine Kaplanian is welcoming you into our bookish family party to celebrate this event with us. Hope you all have a wonderful time, we certainly are!" The bookseller also operates stores in the Hague (opened in 1976) and Leidschendam (opened last year). --Robert Gray


Obituary Note: Kevin Lippert

Kevin Lippert

Kevin Lippert, founder and longtime head of Princeton Architectural Press, died on March 29. He was 63 and had battled brain cancer.

As recounted by the New York Times, the origins of the publishing house date back to 1981, when Lippert was a graduate student in architecture at Princeton University. "He and his fellow students were encouraged to study historical texts. But these books were old, fragile, oversized and cumbersome, and access to them was limited. It occurred to him that if they could be reprinted in smaller formats and made available at a reasonable price, students would happily pay for them.

"And so he gave his idea a whirl. He persuaded the school's librarians to let him take out rare books and copy them; if students had their own copies, he argued, they would not be damaging the originals."

The first book he republished was Recueil et Parallèle des Edifices de Tout Genre (Survey and Comparison of Buildings of All Types), originally published in 1800 by the French architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. But the design--with sheets 20"×26" in a box and priced at $300--was "not very practical."

The second book was Edifices de Rome Moderne by Paul Letarouilly, originally published in 1840, a classic on Roman Renaissance architecture that Lippert published as a 9"×12" bound book. He "hawked them to students for $55 apiece out of the trunk of his car. They sold out immediately," the Times wrote. "Thus was born Princeton Architectural Press." (The house has no official connection to Princeton University; Lippert did receive undergraduate and Master's degrees from Princeton and taught there, too.)

The press expanded beyond reprinting classics to include books on architecture, design and visual culture as well as books on pop culture, memoir & biography, cookbooks, crafts and hobbies, children's books and a range of sidelines, including notecards, postcards, puzzles, journals, stamp sets and games.

Lippert emphasized high quality. In 2004, he told Archinect, "I want people to think if it's one of our books, it's almost certainly interesting, handsome, well edited and well made."

Among Lippert's many interests was history. His 2015 book, War Plan Red, was about secret plans by the United States and Canada to invade each other in the 1920s and '30s. He was also a classical pianist and a computer whiz who ran a tech services company, selling hardware and software to design businesses.


Notes

Cool Idea of the Day: BAM's Cold Snap

For the upcoming appearance by author Marc Cameron at Books-A-Million in Abilene, Tex., on Saturday, April 30, Timothy Yerger, BAM co-manager and former cafe lead, created a specialty drink called the Cold Snap, after Cameron's latest thriller, Cold Snap (Kensington). Mimicking the Alaskan landscape where the book is set and the colors of the book jacket, the concoction is a cold white-chocolate vanilla cream frappe topped with whipped cream in the shape of a frozen snowcap, sprinkled with cherry Pop Rocks. 

Store general manager Samantha Pagica said, "Like the book, the Cold Snap is a delectable combination of icy and explosive that will keep your senses tingling until the last drop and the last page." 

 


'Bookstore as Home (Like an Actual Home We Sleep In)'

Posted on Facebook by Blue Cypress Books, New Orleans, La.: " 'Bookshops are my natural habitat.'--Kathy Lette
The other day, two of us accidentally referred to the bookstore as home (like an actual home we sleep in), and it took a few beats for either of us to realize what we'd said. We decided it's actually pretty excellent, as homes go."


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Amy Schumer on Ellen

Tomorrow:
Kelly Clarkson Show: Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush, authors of The Superpower Sisterhood (Little, Brown, $18.99, 9780316628440).

Ellen: Amy Schumer, co-editor of Arrival Stories: Women Share Their Experiences of Becoming Mothers (The Dial Press, $28, 9780593230282).

The View repeat: Matt Damon and Gary White, authors of The Worth of Water: Our Story of Chasing Solutions to the World's Greatest Challenge (Portfolio, $27, 9780593189979).

NBC 5 Dallas: Yolanda Gampp, author of Layer Up!: The Ultimate Glow Up Guide for Cakes from How to Cake It (HTCI Books, $29.99, 9781938447808).


Movies: The Water Dancer

Nia DaCosta (Candyman) will direct an adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates's 2019 novel The Water Dancer for MGM, Plan B, Harpo Films and Maceo-Lyn, Deadline reported. Coates, who is adapting the book for the screen, founded the production company Maceo-Lyn with his long-time friends and collaborators Kamilah Forbes and Kenyatta Matthews.

The Water Dancer marks the second collaboration between Plan B and Coates, who are also in development on the feature Wrong Answer, based on Rachel Aviv's New Yorker story of the same name, Deadline noted. Coates is adapting it, with Ryan Coogler directing, Michael B. Jordan starring and Plan B producing alongside Proximity Media and New Regency Productions. 

Additional Plan B projects set up at MGM, as part of their overall second-look feature film deal with the studio, include Sarah Polley's adaptation of Miriam Toews's novel Women Talking; Cory Finley's adaptation of M.T. Anderson's novel Landscape With Invisible Hand; as well as film adapations of Chandler Baker's The Husbands, with Kristen Wiig attached to star and produce; and Lisa Taddeo's Animal, which she will adapt for the screen.



Books & Authors

Awards: Helen Bernstein Book for Excellence in Journalism

The New York Public Library announced that Andrea Elliott won the $15,000 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, which recognizes "works written by working journalists that raise awareness about current events or issues of global or national significance," for Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City.

"This award is a tribute to all journalists working in the public interest and I am tremendously honored to receive it," said Elliott. "Thank you for recognizing Invisible Child among such a stellar group of finalists, and for shining a light on the importance of deep and hard-won reporting. It is my hope that this book will open readers' eyes to how poverty and structural racism play out on the ground, and that long after people have turned the last page, Dasani's story will stay with them."


Linda and Clara Villarosa: How Books Shaped Their Experiences

Linda Villarosa (l.) and Clara Villarosa (photo: Izzy Best)

Linda Villarosa is a journalism professor at the City University of New York and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, where she covers the intersection of race and health. Her article on maternal and infant mortality was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and her second book, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation (coming from Doubleday on June 14), grew out of her research and writing for this article. Clara Villarosa, an NAACP Image Award nominee, founded the storied Hue-Man Experience Bookstore in Denver, Colo., in 1984 and later opened a Hue-Man location in New York City's Harlem. A former board member of the American Booksellers Association, Clara Villarosa currently curates the Hue-Man Experience at Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore. Shelf Awareness invited mother and daughter to reflect upon what books have meant and continue to mean to their experiences.

Clara, what kind of books did you read to Linda and her sister Alicia?

Clara Villarosa: I didn't have or know about any Black children's books at the time, so I read the classics like Are You My Mother? and The Cat in the Hat.

Linda Villarosa: Learning to appreciate books really stuck with me. During the summers when school was out, I would spend most of my time in our local library in Denver. In junior high I won the Book Worm Award for reading more books than any other kid over the summer. I still have the certificate.

Linda, did you always want to be a writer?

LV: Yes, but my mom tried to steer me away from writing as a career.

CV: I wanted her to be a lawyer. I was worried she would be broke as a writer.

LV: Yes, she pushed me to be a lawyer. After one year of pre-law, I told her I didn't want to go to law school after college--I wanted to be a journalist.

CV: She said, "If you're so interested in law, you should go to law school," so I did. I studied law for two years, though I never finished.

How did you end up opening a bookstore?

CV: I was trained as a psychiatric social worker, and later was an administrator for a children's hospital. When the girls were older, I was the vice-president of a bank. In 1984, I ended up getting let go from that job and used my severance to open a bookstore, Hue-Man Experience in Denver.

What did you think when your mom opened Hue-Man?

LV: Mom had no experience as a bookseller, but she is a high achiever and very determined at whatever she does. Eventually, she grew her store into the country's largest Black bookstore. I feel like I contributed by introducing her to some of the Black feminist books I had read in college in Black Studies classes, like When and Where I Enter by Paula Giddings and Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace and Some of Us Are Brave by...

CV: It's But Some of Us Are Brave [edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull et al.].

Clara, how did you end up in New York City from Denver?

CV: I sold the store in Denver, retired and decided to move to New York City in 2000 to be closer to Linda, her sister and my grandchildren.

LV: Though we were all in Brooklyn, she insisted on living in Harlem. She wanted to be in the capital of Black America.

CV: I ended up getting talked into opening another Hue-Man bookstore, on 125th Street, after the chains refused to place stores in Harlem. With my partners, I ran that store until 2004, when I really retired.

Tell us about your first book, Body & Soul: The Black Women's Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being.

LV: I had been the health editor of Essence magazine, thinking deeply about African Americans and health and wellness. In the early 1990s, I went to the TH Chan Harvard School of Public Health on a fellowship, where I became grounded in the principles of public health. Those experiences convinced me to write Body & Soul, which I pitched as a sort of Our Bodies, Ourselves for Black women. It was published in 1994.

How did you feel, Clara, when Linda published Body & Soul?

CV: Very proud! I advised her about the cover. The publisher wanted mostly type. I told her to put photos of people on the cover, so that the images would make the book pop in stores. She listened, and that book sold well.

What do you think of Linda's journalism?

CV: Are you kidding? I am so proud. Her stories in the New York Times Magazine are very long and it takes me days to get through them. But I've saved all of them.

How do you come up with your stories, Linda?

LV: I generally start with a statistic that bothers me. In 2017, a friend told me that the United States is the only wealthy nation where the number of women who die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth was rising--and that Black American women were three to four times more likely to die or almost die than white women. I knew I had to do the story when I learned that education doesn't protect Black mothers: a Black birthing woman with an advanced degree is more likely to die than her white counterpart with only an eighth-grade education.

What did that statistic tell you?

LV: That something about the lived experience of being Black in America is dangerous for Black mothers and their babies, and that I wanted to be the person to cover it.

Can you talk about the 1619 Project?

LV: I was honored to be involved in this project, the brainchild of my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones. I wrote about how medical myths about Black enslaved people, invented by white physicians to justify slavery, have endured in modern medical education and practice. When the original project was expanded and published as a book last year, I spent quite a bit of time updating and expanding my essay to include the pandemic.

Have you been affected by the controversy?

LV: All of us have. My essay and the book were intentionally grounded in truth and facts, making it difficult to actually challenge--though many continue to do so. I prefer to focus on the teachers, students and librarians who are grateful to be able to use the book and the 1619 curriculum as teaching tools to tell a more complete story about slavery and its aftermath as well as celebrate the contributions of African Americans.

How did you decide to write Under the Skin?

LV: As a journalist I over-report, and each draft of my New York Times Magazine stories--on HIV/AIDS, maternal and infant mortality, Covid-19, life expectancy and environmental justice--needed to be trimmed way down before they could run. Whenever my editor would suggest cutting, she would say, "Save it for the book." At first, I was like, "I'm not writing a book." But then I thought about all the things I still had to say about Black Americans, health and race, and realized, why not write a book?

How did your mom influence this book?

LV: I learned a lot from my parents. Before she was a bookseller, my mom was a hospital administrator. My father was a bacteriologist, and my sister and I grew up hearing stories about medicine and health care at the dinner table.

CV: Don't forget about the cover.

LV: Yes, my mom's voice was in my ear reminding me that images on covers attract attention in bookstores. I remembered her advice when working with my publisher on the cover of Under the Skin.

Have you read Linda's book?

CV: Not yet.

LV: I didn't want her to read the uncorrected proofs. But once the finished book is ready, there's one thing I am sure she'll like.

CV: What?

LV: It's dedicated to you and Dad.


Book Review

Review: Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: A Memoir by Séamas O'Reilly (Little, Brown, $28 hardcover, 240p., 9780316424257, June 7, 2022)

"From certain angles, the circumstances of my upbringing are disarmingly baroque," writes Séamas O'Reilly in the opening pages of his memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? O'Reilly's mother died (as the title suggests) when he was just shy of his sixth birthday, leaving him and his 10 siblings to be raised by a single father in the heart of the Troubles. Moreover, their property's fence line corresponded with the demarcation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, complete with a checkpoint and prone to the "dystopian rigamarole undertaken by everyone who lived on [the border]." (Worse even than the backdrop of the constant bombings of the Troubles, though, was the "nerve-obliterating period between 1999 and 2001, when no less than six of [the O'Reilly] daughters were simultaneously teenagers."

It's hard to imagine a memoir about an author's dead mother could elicit actual belly laughs, but somehow, O'Reilly makes it happen. In the story that lends the memoir its title, a nearly six-year-old O'Reilly skips along and smiles up at every unlikely guest at his mother's wake to ask, charmingly, "Did ye hear Mammy died?" From this story--at once hilarious and heartbreaking--O'Reilly expands to consider his childhood from the distance of adulthood. He recalls with tenderness and care a frantic father occasionally forgetting a child (or two) at choir pickup (and who could blame him, O'Reilly seems to ask, with so many to keep track of?). On a family vacation in a caravan large enough to seat the whole family, the door fell clean off its hinges somewhere in France. He also remembers an unlikely and enormous collection of home-recorded VHS tapes cataloged in the family's garage.

While these recollections are threaded through by "everyone else's grief, cross-bred and multiplied by the twelve of us trying to make sense of it, whether together or apart," what ultimately emerges in O'Reilly's recollections is never macabre. Instead, it is a tribute to the parents who raised him--his mother, by the legacy she left behind, and his father, in his sometimes strange and yet seemingly deliberate ways of caring for each of his children through their grief. Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? expertly combines heartfelt sentiment with a dry Irish wit that will leave readers questioning if the tears on their cheeks come from joy or sadness or dark humor--or all of the above. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Shelf Talker: This unexpectedly laugh-out-loud funny memoir tells of the author's dead mother, his 10 siblings and the single father who raised them, against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.


The Bestsellers

Top-Selling Self-Published Titles

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Nightingale by Various
2. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter
3. Flame and Fortune (Miss Fortune Mysteries Book 22) by Jana DeLeon
4. The Big Long by Colin Wiel and Doug Brien
5. UpLevel Now by Ursula Mentjes
6. Those Three Little Words by Meghan Quinn
7. The Locked Door by Freida McFadden
8. Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score
9. The Secret by Max Monroe
10. Baby for the Bosshole by Nadia Lee

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]


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