Shelf Awareness for Monday, April 30, 2007


Quarry Books: Yes, Boys Can!: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World - He Can H.E.A.L. by Richard V Reeves and Jonathan Juravich, illustrated by Chris King

Simon & Schuster: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Nightweaver by RM Gray

G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers: The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman

Overlook Press: Hotel Lucky Seven (Assassins) by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Brian Bergstrom

News

Sales Reps: Fujii and Heinecken to Merge

Fujii Associates and Heinecken & Associates, the Midwest independent publishers rep groups, are merging, effective January 1, 2008.

The merged company will be known as Fujii Associates and Don Sturtz of Fujii will be president and principal. The company will include all current sales and back office personnel of Fujii, most of the Heinecken sales force, and Ted Heinecken, head of Heinecken & Associates. The group will consist of eight full-time and two parttime reps as well as two full-time support staff.

The two groups cover the same 13 Midwestern states, although Fujii has a wider Southern reach, selling also in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Fujii Associates was founded by Hank Fujii in 1967. Sturtz, who became a Fujii sales rep in 1983, bought the company from Jerry Stroud in 1998. Heinecken & Associates was founded in 1978 and three years later merged with Midwest Book Travelers.



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Notes: Mrs. Imus to Tour; Book Review Support; Openings

We take a day off, and there seems to be more news than ever! 

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Deidre Imus's tour for Green This! Volume 1: Greening Your Cleaning, which was derailed when husband Don Imus's career was derailed, has been resurrected but in a limited way, according to Saturday's New York Times. The author will appear at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., and at the public library in Westport, Conn. S&S publisher David Rosenthal told the paper, "There are many booksellers who wanted her to appear and still do." TV appearances, which would have been part of the original tour, are "under discussion." Imus himself--presumably a gentler, kinder Imus--may join his wife.

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The campaign to have the Atlanta Journal-Constitution rescind its decision to let book editor Teresa Weaver go and cut back on book coverage has led to thousands of people to sign a petition to "protect Atlanta's book review." Now the campaign is planning a read-in this coming Thursday, beginning at 10 a.m., rain or shine, in front of the paper's headquarters. Participants should bring a book and either read it aloud or to themselves.

The cutbacks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and at other papers across the country have prompted several stories in defense of book reviewing and coverage. Yesterday's Los Angeles Times ran a piece by author Michael Connelly called "The Folly of Downsizing Book Reviews," a headline that speaks for itself. Also the National Book Critics Circle has launched a campaign to save book reviewing. For more information about it, go to Critical Mass, NBCC's blog.

For more information about the Read-In in Atlanta, contact Shannon Byrne

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Title Wave Books, Anchorage, Alaska, is moving into the 6,000-sq.-ft. downtown space vacated last month when Cook Inlet Book Co. went out of business, Bookselling This Week reported. Title Wave plans to have its official opening May 25; the new store will carry more than 25,000 new and used books.

Title Wave opened in 1991; its original 33,000-sq.-ft. store is in midtown Anchorage. Julie Drake, who owns the store with Steve Lloyd, called the second location "a surprise opportunity for us."

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The BEA conference keynote session featuring former Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan has been rescheduled and will now take place on Friday, June 1, at 5:15 p.m. in the Special Events Hall at the Javits Center. Greenspan will be interviewed by his wife, Andrea Mitchell, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News. The Q&A will focus in part on the process of writing Greenspan's new book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, to be published by Penguin Press in September. 

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Today is the official groundbreaking of the Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to honor the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author and her passion for labyrinths, aka mazes.

Shields researched and visited labyrinths around the world. In Larry's Party, Larry Weller has an epiphany in the Hampton Court Maze and decides to become a labyrinth designer. He returns to Winnipeg, where he builds his first labyrinth.

The real-life Winnipeg labyrinth is scheduled to open in 2009 and will be the largest in Canada and maybe in North America. It will be located in King's Park, near the University of Manitoba, where Shields taught.

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Yesterday's New York Times Week in Review quoted at length an interview with the reclusive head of Blackwater USA, the eerily named military outsourcing company that is the subject of Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, $26.95, 9781560259794/1560259795). The interview was done by Raelynn Hillhouse and posted on her blog, The Spy Who Billed Me. On June 12, Hillhouse is publishing Outsourced (Tor/Forge), a novel about "a private military corporation, not unlike Blackwater." 

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Xinhua Bookstore, the huge bookstore company that used to have a monopoly in China, celebrated its 70th anniversary last week with a ceremony at which one Communist Party official called for more reforms "to revive" the company, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Li Changchun, a member of Politbureau, said he hoped the distributing conglomerate can "meet the public's growing demands for 'food for thought' and in the face of a boom in global culture." He also wants Xinhua Bookstore to promote Chinese culture to the rest of the world.

The first Xinhua Bookstore was set up on April 24, 1937, by Communist partisans in Yan'an, where the party had a sanctuary during the civil war and the war against the Japanese. The bookstore company has been weakened in recent years by the opening of a range of independent bookstores.

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Bookselling This Week profiles Builders Booksource, the Berkeley, Calif., the solid bookstore founded by George and Sally Kiskaddon, which just marked its 25th anniversary.

Here's a great paragraph in which George illustrates what makes the store different from the usual:

"The Builders Booksource list of top-sellers differs somewhat from other Book Sense bookstores. 'When you get a bunch of booksellers around a table, they'll talk about what they're reading and what's hot, and I would mention that the Uniformed Building Code (Uniform Building Code Commission) was doing great.' Currently, books about building green are selling very well, especially Good Green Kitchens by Jennifer Roberts (Gibbs Smith). Kiskaddon also noted that the store has 'never had something as hot as Concrete Countertops' by local writer Fu-Tung Cheng and Eric Olsen (Taunton Press), which he encouraged a reluctant Taunton Press to publish. Builders Booksource alone has sold more than 2,000 copies, he said."

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Heather Plunkett and Cindi Whittemore, former booksellers at Barnes & Noble and its B. Dalton division, are setting up their own shop next month in downtown Half Moon Bay, Calif., according to the Half Moon Bay Review. Ink Spell Books will sell new and used books and be connected to the La Di Da coffeeshop next door. The pair want to encourage customers to hang out and plan to put their experience in p.r., promotion and book retail to use.

Half Moon Bay, a town of about 12,000, has four independents already. At least one of those booksellers expressed concern about another store opening, but a Review editorial said the arrival of Ink Spell "should be cause for celebration in Half Moon Bay. The city is poised to become a destination for booklovers who prefer the idiocyncracies of independents to the sterility of the chains."

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Nora Roberts and her husband, Bruce Wilder, who runs Turn the Page bookstore (Shelf Awareness, July 26, 2005), have bought several historic buildings in downtown Boonsboro, Md., and are refurbishing them to reflect their original style, according to the Hagerstown Herald-Mail.

In the former Boone Hotel, which will now be called Inn Boonsboro, the pair are decorating each of the Inn's six bedrooms in the style of a fictional couple, including Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles, Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy--and Roberts's own Eve Dallas and Roarke, who star in her In Death series written under her pen name J.D. Robb. At least several times a year, when Turn the Page hosts Washington Romance Writers events, there will likely be no room at the Inn.

Another building will house a restaurant that Roberts's son is opening.

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Another memoir that makes over the truth? Although it says that the author "has clearly not perpetrated anything as egregious as, say, James Frey," the New York Times finds flaws in Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil (Random House). Six women also involved in the beauty school in Afghanistan at the heart of Rodriguez's memoir dispute parts of her recounting of events, particularly concerning its founding, how she won control of the school and why, and her stories about several Afghani women. The author and publisher say that in the future, they will make it clear Rodriguez didn't found the school and that the Afghani women's identities needed to be protected.
 


GLOW: Berkley Books: The Seven O'Clock Club by Amelia Ireland


Cool Idea of the Day: Hungry No More

On Fridays in April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, Atticus Bookstore and Café, New Haven, Conn., gave a loaf of bread to anyone who read a poem aloud in the store, the Yale Daily News reported. The store gave away 100-200 loaves of bread each Friday, and the event led to unanticipated socializing. As the paper wrote, on one Friday, "A group of semi-strangers dragged chairs around a table near the podium at 8 p.m., and, loaves in hand, read poetry to each other."

This was not Atticus's first effort to feed the masses. Last election day, the store gave loaves of bread to people who proved that they had voted.


Media and Movies

Media Heat: At the Center at Publicity Center

In terms of publicity, former CIA director George Tenet has had a slam dunk with his new memoir, At the Center of the Storm (HarperCollins, $30, 9780061147784/0061147788), which comes out today. At the least, At the Center of the Storm shows that the political book--particularly of insiders' stories about the Bush administration--is alive and well. Stories about Tenet's charges and revelations were on the front pages of newspapers at the end of last week and led the book to climb to the topmost ranks of several online booksellers. Yesterday Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes. He appears on the Today Show this morning and Larry King Live tonight.

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This morning on the Early Show: Harlan Coben, whose new thriller is The Woods (Dutton, $26.95, 9780525950127/0525950125).

Also on the Early Show: David Ludwig, M.D., author of Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 9780618683260/0618683267).

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show, Brooks Jackson spins unSPUN: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, $12.95, 9781400065660/1400065666).

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Today on the View: Bill Bradley, author of The New American Story (Random House, $25.95, 9781400065073/1400065070). Bradley also suits up for the Colbert Report tonight.

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Today on Fox & Friends: Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz scores with Big Papi: The Story of How My Baseball Dreams Came True (St. Martin's, $24.95, 9780312366339/0312366337).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, $24.99, 9780446579803/0446579807).

 


Books & Authors

Image of the Day:

Mark Doty and fans at an interspecies reading of his new book, Dog Years: A Memoir (HarperCollins, $23.95, 9780061171000/006117100X), at Readers' Books, Sonoma, Calif.

 

 


Awards: The Edgars; L.A. Times; Yale Drama Series

The winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America and "honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television and film published or produced in 2006," are:

  • Best Novel: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (FSG)
  • Best First Novel by an American Author: The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson (Random House)
  • Best Paperback Original: Snakeskin Shamisen by Naomi Hirahara (Delta)
  • Best Fact Crime: Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson (Morrow)
  • Best Critical/Biographical: The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear by E.J. Wagner (Wiley)
  • Best Short Story: "The Home Front" in Death Do Us Part by Charles Ardai (Little, Brown)
  • Best Juvenile: Room One: A Mystery or Two by Andrew Clements (S&S Books for Young Readers)
  • Best Young Adult: Buried by Robin Merrow MacCready (Dutton Children's Books)
  • Best Play: Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure by Steven Dietz (Arizona Theatre Company)
  • Best Television Episode Teleplay: Life on Mars, Episode 1, by Matthew Graham (BBC America)
  • Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay: The Wire, Season 4, teleplays by Ed Burns, Kia Corthron, Dennis Lehane, David Mills, Eric Overmyer, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon and William F. Zorzi (HBO)
  • Best Motion Picture Screenplay: The Departed by William Monahan (Warner Bros.)

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The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, announced at the beginning of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, are:

  • Fiction: A.B. Yehoshua for A Woman in Jerusalem translated by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)
  • History: Lawrence Wright for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf)
  • Biography: Neal Gabler for Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf)
  • Current interest: Ian Buruma for Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin)
  • Mystery/thriller: Michael Connelly for Echo Park (Little, Brown)
  • The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Alice Greenway for White Ghost Girls (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)
  • Young Adult Fiction: Coe Booth for Tyrell (Push/Scholastic)
  • Science and Technology: Eric R. Kandel for In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (Norton)
  • Poetry: Frederick Seidel for Ooga-Booga (FSG)

Each prize includes a $1,000 cash award.

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The Boys from Siam by John Austin Connolly has won the first Yale Drama Series competition, a new annual award for emerging playwrights in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland. The winner of the prize, sponsored by Yale University Press and Yale Repertory Theatre and funded by the David Charles Horn Foundation, receives $10,000, a staged reading at the Theatre and publication by the press. Edward Albee chose the winner from 500 submissions. The Secret Agenda of Trees by Colin McKenna and Open Rehearsal by Lazarre Seymour Simckes were runners up.

The Boys from Siam is based loosely on the lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the twins from Siam, now called Thailand, joined at the sternum who gave rise to the phrase "Siamese twins." Much of the play takes place on the day the twins died. Connolly is a retired clinical psychologist who lives in Dublin.


Book Sense: May We Recommend

From last week's Book Sense bestseller lists, available at BookSense.com, here are the recommended titles, which are also Book Sense Picks:

Hardcover

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (Canongate, $24, 9781841959115/1841959111). "Imagine Jaws as a literary mash-up eating its way through the contemporary information explosion. Now, imagine this creature has developed a taste for you . . . and only you. Hall pushes the boundaries of fiction and design in this unique first novel."--Colin Rea, University of Oregon Bookstore, Eugene, Ore.

Love in a Torn Land: Joanna of Kurdistan: The True Story of a Freedom Fighter's Flight from Iraqi Vengeance by Jean Sasson (Wiley, $24.95, 9780470067291/0470067292). "Jean Sasson reveals the beauties and the horrors of Kurdish freedom fighter Joanna al-Askari's life in a compelling, heart-wrenching way."--Natasha Hayden, Summer's Stories, Kendallville, Ind.

Paperback

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert (Knopf, $16, 9780375710858/037571085X). "Unexpected, surreal, sensual, and full of the world's joys and sorrows, Gilbert is the real deal. Give the human world a voice and it might sound like this one." --John Evans, Diesel, A Bookstore, Oakland, Calif.

For Ages 4 to 8

Once Around the Sun by Bobbi Katz, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (Harcourt, $16, 9780152163976/0152163972). "The award for most vibrant illustrations goes to Once Around the Sun. Pham's bright, bold illustrations are brimming with color--enough to fill the book's pages and give life to its lighthearted poems, one for each month of the year."--Alison Morris, Wellesley Booksmith, Wellesley, Mass.

[Many thanks to Book Sense and the ABA!]



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