Charles Simic, who has published more than 20 volumes of poetry as well as essay collections, translations and a memoir, will be appointed the nation's new poet laureate today, according to the New York Times. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington told the Times he chose Simic, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1990, because of "the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry."

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Total revenues at Indigo Books & Music during the quarter ended June 30 rose 8.5% to C$184.9 million (about US$175 million). The net loss at Canada's largest bookseller fell to C$2.8 million ($2.65 million) from C$5.8 million ($5.5 million) in the same quarter last year.

Sales at the company's Indigo and Chapters superstores and Coles small-format stores open at least a year rose 6.1% and 6%, respectively. Sales through chapters.indigo.ca grew 19.6% to C$19.5 million ($18.5 million).

In a statement, Indigo CEO Heather Reisman commented: "These are very satisfying results, reflecting our continuing strong focus on customer programs, effective merchandising, and strong inventory management."

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Congratulations to the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., which has won the 2007 Best of Boston Award for Books. Boston Magazine wrote: "Sticking it to the corporate chains is most satisfying when you can do so without, you know, sacrificing anything. Seventy-five years after Boston native Mark Kramer opened a bookstore in Harvard Square, the supersize word-maven haven is still family-owned (by Kramer's son, Frank) and still doing everything right, with a public library's worth of used tomes, and new releases to rival Barnes and Borders. In a particularly Cantabrigian touch, the shop vows to go to court before disclosing your purchases to the government or anyone else, should they for some reason ask. Take that, Patriot Act!" 

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Although Harry Potter news has dwindled from a roar to a hum over the past 10 days, there are still tales to be told. The Hindustan Times reports on an Indian Harry Potter (or Daniel Radcliffe) look-alike, who was hired by a bookstore in Dubai, where the owner "paraded him at his shop the day the book was released worldwide. . . . And he stole the show. Nearly everyone who bought a copy of the book wanted to have it autographed by the Potter clone as well. Many asked to be photographed with him, and the bookseller duly obliged (for a fee, of course)."

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Time Out New York profiled the 40-year-old Oscar Wilde Bookshop and its current owner, Kim Brinster, who expressed optimism for the future of gay indie bookstores in New York City, despite the closures of A Different Light and Creative Visions within the past six years. "In a weird way, I almost feel like the desire for them is coming back," she said. "There are so many more gay books than there were when the store first opened."

Ron Hanby, the LGBT-store liaison for Bookazine, said that the Oscar Wilde Bookshop has "gone from kind of a little dark bookstore with things all over the place and management that didn’t keep up, to a very nice, very modern shop. Kim is a pioneer, and God bless her for stepping in and buying it. . . . Being the first bookstore and next to the Stonewall, it's been part of our liberation from the start. Plus, I'm old-school. I'm almost 60 years old and I just believe in supporting gay and lesbian stores. The younger generations are not used to it--they can find anything anywhere. The older ones know what it was like to try to find gay books, even ten years ago, and not be able to."

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Inklings Bookshop, Lynchburg, Va., is expanding into the building next door, which used to house a restaurant, WSET-TV reported. A Christian bookstore, Inklings will use part of the space for books and will create the Whitehart, an eatery. Inklings's Jeremy Hopkins told the station: "We're gonna have a full service coffee shop, restaurant, cafe, um, sandwiches, small plates, nothing too heavy."

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Retail seaworthiness. "Short attention spans and easy online ordering make it hard for any independent business to survive these days--maybe even tougher on bookstores," reported the Wilmington, N.C., Star-News. "But Quarter Moon Books & Gifts owner Lori Westervelt has weathered the ups and downs of entrepreneurship just as well as the yellow building her Topsail Beach shop sits in."

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Effective September 1, Mike Bryan, international sales and marketing director for Penguin in the U.K. and U.S., is becoming CEO and president of Penguin India. He replaces Thomas Abraham who is joining the Hachette Group as managing director of its new Indian division.

 

Today's New York Times checks out the Espresso Book Machine on display for demos in the lobby of the midtown branch of the New York Public Library. There are two others in existence--showing off at the World Bank bookstore in Washington, D.C., and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.

Created by a company co-founded by Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, the Espresso Book Machine "occupies the space of two deli-style ice cream freezers [editor's note: what a pleasant summery and New York object of comparison], looks like office photocopiers attached to a tinted stereo cabinet and computer terminal. It hums, makes spitting noises, moans and then belches out a newly glued book, fresh as bread and almost as hot"--all in about 15 minutes.

The machines may sell for about $20,000. A 300-page book costs about $3 to produce. The principal market: "the nation's 16,000 public libraries and 25,000 bookstores."

Fittingly, one of the books produced while the Times reporter was on hand: Chris Anderson's Long Tail.

This morning on the Today Show: Harley Pasternak, author of 5-Factor Fitness: The Diet and Fitness Secret of Hollywood's A-List (Perigee, $14.95, 9780399532092/0399532099).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Richard Flanagan, author of The Unknown Terrorist (Grove, $24, 9780802118516/0802118518). As the show put it: "Richard Flanagan felt that his last novel, Gould's Book of Fish, widely acclaimed a masterpiece, had burnt him out. Here, he discusses the things he did to reenergize. He explores the dark, violent energy of his new book about an innocent pole-dancer accused of terrorism."

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Today on the Ellen DeGeneres Show: former Vice President Al Gore, whose latest book is The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press, $25.95, 9781594201226/1594201226).

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Senator Joe Biden, author of Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (Random House, $25.95, 9781400065363/1400065364).

Also on Diane Rehm today: Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors of Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible (Wiley, $25.95, 9780470048665/0470048662), about Russian arms dealer Victor Bout.

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Tonight on Nightline: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole, Laura Allen and Annie Danger, aka the Greywater Guerrillas, authors of Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull, $19.95, 9781932360806/1932360808). Note: Annie Danger, the illustrator, is a staff member at Modern Times, the San Francisco, Calif., bookstore!

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Michael J. Behe, author of The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (Free Press, $28, 9780743296205/0743296206).

 

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 website.

Saturday, August 4

6 p.m. In a segment first aired in 1999, Allen Weinstein, author of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era (Modern Library, $23, 9780375755361/0375755365), outlined Soviet attempts to use U.S. officials as spies to increase their understanding of American military tactics.

9 p.m. After Words: Jim Tankersley of the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau interviews Connie Schultz, author of ...and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man (Random House, $24.95, 9781400065738/1400065739). Schultz discusses life with her husband, Senator Sherrod Brown (D.-Ohio), who was elected last year; the difficult decision to give up her syndicated column with the Cleveland Plain Dealer; and the unexpected challenges and rewards of campaigning. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

10 p.m. Eve Ensler, author of A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer (Villard, $13.95, 9780345497918/0345497910), talks about her collection of writings on violence against women. The pieces were originally commissioned to be performed at the "Until the Violence Stops" festival, held in New York City in 2006.

11:15 p.m. Carrie Lukas, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism (Regnery, $19.95, 9781596980037/1596980036), argues that the women's liberation movement has had more negative effects than positive. (Re-airs Sunday at 8:30 a.m.)

Sunday, August 5

10 a.m. Book Forum on Barry Goldwater, featuring C.C. Goldwater, Lee Edwards, Franklin Foer, David Boaz and Edward Crane. The granddaughter and colleagues of the late Barry Goldwater, longtime Senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate, discuss his life, legacy and writings. (Re-airs Sunday at 3 p.m.)

12 p.m. In Depth: Edward O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, biologist and university research professor at Harvard University since the mid-1950s. His most recent books are The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (Norton, $21.95, 9780393062175/0393062171) and Nature Revealed: Selected Writings 1949-2006 (Johns Hopkins University Press, $35, 9780801883293/0801883296). (Re-airs Monday, August 6, at 12 a.m. and Saturday, August 11, at 9 a.m.)

Shelf Awareness is very happy to welcome another regular columnist, the delightful Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, who will write occasionally about graphic novels and comics. Bagnulo is the graphic novel and comics buyer for New York City bookstore McNally Robinson and is also the bookstore's author events coordinator. She serves on the Emerging Leaders Council, which aims to support young people in bookselling, and on the board of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association. She writes about comics, books and bookstores on her blog, the Written Nerd. Welcome!


There is no shortage of "Top 10" or "Top 100" lists to guide purchasing of graphic novels--everyone from Publishers Weekly to Diamond Book Distributors (the primary source for superhero comics) has their own picks. But these lists tend to focus on comics titles that are bestsellers overall and primarily in markets outside the bookstore--i.e., comics shops and conventions. They tend to skew toward the superhero stuff and include those single-issue comics that aren't usually carried by mainstream bookstores.

As the graphic novel buyer for a large bookstore whose focus is primarily literary, I'd like to offer my own opinion on which graphic novels (or as I like to call the category, Graphic Lit) no bookstore should be without. These aren't the cutting edge but the classics: those that have proven to be great sellers in a bookstore setting. Of course, my title is misleading; independent booksellers will each have to make decisions based on their own store focus and customer base. But whether or not you have a section dedicated exclusively to graphic lit, these are books that are likely to appeal to the book readers who frequent our stores. They are ordered alphabetically by author, with anthologies at the end--just like "regular" books.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95, 9780618871711/0618871713). This was the crossover hit of the year, and it deserves it; Bechdel's memoir of her distant father and of growing up as a lesbian is as funny and true a work as you could hope to find on any shelf; it could appeal to the many fans of Running With Scissors.

Black Hole by Charles Burns (Pantheon, $24.95, 9780375423802/037542380X). Ten years in the making and excruciatingly detailed, Burns's fable of a strange mutation that crops up among teenagers in the 1970s is a thinly veiled AIDS metaphor and also an irresistibly creepy tale; the gripping cover alone has assured ongoing sales for the hardcover.

The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman (DC Comics/Vertigo). Gaiman's 20-volume series about the Master of Dreams and his fellow Endless is critically acclaimed and popular with teenagers as well as myth-minded adults. If you don't have room for the whole series, start with Volume 1, Preludes and Nocturnes (Vertigo, $19.99, 9781563890116/1563890119) and special order the rest for fans or cycle through volumes as they sell.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon (Hill & Wang, $30, 9780809057382/0809057387). This adaptation of the 9/11 Commission's Report by two veteran comics artists has earned solemn praise from all sides and sells because it does well one of the things comics can do best: presenting complex information in an accessible, pictorial form. It's not dumbed down or cleaned up and gets at the heart of the matter.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (HarperCollins, $22.95, 9780060976255/006097625X). McCloud's classic 1994 comic-about-comics is not only fun and readable, but invaluable to readers coming to comics for the first time or to those curious about the genre's history and how it all works.

The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (DC Comics, $14.99, 9781563893421/1563893428). He's recently famous for Sin City and 300, but this now-classic reimagining of Batman is what made Frank Miller's name in the 1980s, helping to usher in a grittier era of superhero comics; like Alan Moore's work (see below), it still sells.

The Watchmen (DC Comics, $19.99, 9780930289232/0930289234) and V for Vendetta (DC Comics, $19.99, 9780930289522/0930289528) by Alan Moore. Alan Moore redefined the superhero genre with his 1980s dystopian epics The Watchmen and V for Vendetta, probably among the most discussed comics of all time. I have some issues with the way Moore treats women in his stories, but with the recent V movie and the good-looking reissues, there's no denying their sales potential.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon, $12.95, 9780375714573/037571457X) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Pantheon, $12.95, 9780375714665/0375714669) by Marjane Satrapi. Also available as a boxed set ($25.90, 9780375423963/0375423966). Like Art Spiegelman's Maus (see below), this is an award-winning two-volume graphic memoir. It's the story of the author's family and friends during the 1979 revolution in Iran and is a great starter title for girls interested in literary comics.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Pantheon, $14, 9780394747231/0394747232) and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (Pantheon, $14, 9780679729778/0679729771) by Art Spiegelman. Also available as a two-volume boxed set ($28, 9780679748403/0679748407) or as a hardcover single volume ($35, 9780679406419/0679406417). The most famous contemporary graphic novel is actually a memoir, with cats and mice standing in for Nazis and Jews in the story of the narrator's father. It won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992.

Bone by Jeff Smith (Cartoon Books, $39.95, 9781888963144/188896314X). An epic, Tolkienesque tale with both majestic and goofy moments, Smith's 13-year, multi-volume saga of the Bone's quest is now available in a single massive volume. Be warned: like Harry Potter, things get more serious as the tale progresses.

Blankets by Craig Thomson (Top Shelf, $29.95, 9781891830433/1891830430). Humble and human, Thomson's memoir of confused faith, adolescent love and growing up is one of the few graphic works that could fairly be compared to the best coming-of-age novels.

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Jonathan Cape, $24.59, 9780224063975/0224063979). I've heard this described as the "Ulysses of comics"; it's bleak, circuitous and not for the beginning reader but is much respected among comics literati, and Chris Ware is frequently featured in the New Yorker.

McSweeney's Issue #13 edited by Chris Ware (McSweeney's, $24, 9781932416084/1932416080). There are a number of great comics anthologies out there (maybe I will cover more of them in a later column), but this one has been around the longest and still sells. This coveted hardcover issue of the hipster literary journal McSweeney's not only contains excellent, diverse work from the best comics writers and artists of the last 30 years but also essays by Michael Chabon, John Updike, Ira Glass and others. A beautiful addition to any bookstore, though you might want to keep it in a place where the gorgeous poster-size-fold-out dust jacket won't get shelfworn.

This is only a beginning, and I'm sure there are as many lists as there are bookstores or comics readers. But here's hoping this will get you started. I'd love to hear from you with questions, suggestions or indignant objections at booknerdnyc@earthlink.net.

In her first novel, Urban captures the essence of the sixth-grade experience with humor and insight. Narrator Zoe Elias dreams of playing Carnegie Hall like her hero, Vladimir Horowitz. Zoe's mother is controller for the state of Michigan and "knows how every dime is spent." Her father has 26 framed diplomas from Living Room University and is afraid to leave the house; his best friend is the UPS man. Zoe's household sets the scene for a heroine who is both intelligent and slightly out of touch. Zoe is smart enough to know that, even as her mother impresses her classroom on Career Day by remembering every student's name and the coin she gave to each, her peers will hate her when her mother asks them to pass the coins back at the end of her presentation--especially scary Wheeler Diggs. Yet Zoe naïvely brings toe socks as a birthday gift when bare feet and "Brat" brand clogs are all the rage.

Urban's keen sense of pacing allows readers to be swept up by the humor and taken by surprise in moments of poignancy. After repeatedly requesting a piano, Zoe finds herself with a Perfectone D-60 ("A wood-grained, vinyl-seated, wheeze-bag organ") and six months of free lessons from Mabelline Person, who demands Vernors in a glass with ice. Most of the time, Zoe is an A+ lemonade-maker whose perseverance winds up inspiring everyone around her. Zoe's teacher even recommends that she compete in the Perfectone Perform-O-Rama. On her 11th birthday, however, when her mother misses her celebration due to a "ledger emergency," Zoe breaks down like an organ unplugged during a sustained chord. But that makes her human. After all, as Zoe points out, it was Horowitz who said, "Perfection itself is imperfection." Zoe's father, Wheeler Diggs and even Hugh the UPS man make surprising contributions as these winning characters--Zoe chief among them--travel along the road to a crooked kind of perfect.--Jennifer M. Brown