"Why do all of us want to hear stories? Why do some of us want to tell them?" Actor John Lithgow read these words from his upcoming book, Drama: An Actor's Education (Harper) to a packed house yesterday at an Insight Stage Signature Event.
"I've chosen not to stand at a podium," he said. "I'll just sit here and chat." Holding an ARC of his book, Lithgow spoke about his life on stage and off. He also read selections from the new memoir and took questions, ending the pre-signing portion of the event with a passionate recommendation worthy of the best indie bookstore handseller: "I'm dying for you to read the book."
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At another Insight Stage event, Bloomsbury USA publishing director George Gibson and Dava Sobel discussed their work together as editor and author on her book A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos, which will be published in September.
Sobel's intriguing approach was to chronicle the history of the Copernican Revolution with a dramatic twist--the narrative history bookends her play, And the Sun Stood Still, an imagined dialogue between German mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus and Copernicus during their months together. Sobel described her process as "knitting a narrative history into a play and then out again. I knew from the beginning this could not be a history lesson or an astronomy discussion."
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Unbridled Books has established a reputation as a publisher of fiction, including the novels of Emily St. John Mandel (pictured here with co-publisher Fred Ramey). In a change of pace, Unbridled's fall list includes four nonfiction titles."The list developed as more heavily nonfiction than before," said Ramey, "but we'll likely be swinging back to fiction in the spring. People have been interested in the nonfiction we're showing here, though." At the booth, ARCs of one of the upcoming nonfiction titles, The Mistress Contract, are tucked inside brown paper bags featuring an enticing bookseller cautionary note: "Maybe you should read this ARC before you sell the book to your neighbors."
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BEA YA Editors Buzz (from l.): Erica Sussman, editor of The Carrier of the Mark by Leigh Fallon (Harper); Margret Raymo, editor of Au Revoir Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Courtney Bongiolatti, editor of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin (S&S); Susan Chang, editor of Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham (Tor/Macmillan); moderator Jack Martin, New York Public Library; Alvina Ling, editor of Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Turner (Little, Brown).---
Let's hear it for the boys! Eoin Colfer, Mac Barnett, Matt de la Pena, Jack Gantos, Jarrett J. Krosoczka (in full Thriller attire), and Jon Scieszka (from l.) discussed their new anthology to keep boys in books, Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Scieszka.
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Nancy Pearl of Book Lust fame meets Art Spiegelman of Maus fame at the Knopf Meet the Authors party on Tuesday night at Cognac. Here Spiegelman explains to Pearl how tough it was to approach the beginning of his new Meta Maus, and yet he finally cut into the material "like a surgeon with a knife."
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Harry Belafonte, Jr., flanked by his wife Pamela, and AARP The Magazine books editor Allan Fallow at the Knopf Meet the Authors party on Tuesday at Cognac.
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Walkin' in a Wimpy Wonderland at BEA to celebrate Jeff Kinney's winter-themed book number 6, due in November.