At the final breakfast of the Winter Institute last week, John Evans, co-owner of Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland, Malibu and Brentwood, Calif., thanked the booksellers for such a big morning turnout, considering the many distractions New Orleans offers.
Evans gave a special nod to those who made merry at an Absinthe party sponsored by MP Publishing and an '80s dancing extravaganza at One Eyed Jack's spearheaded by the tweets of Random House's Ruth Liebmann. "I see a green haze back there," said Evans. "I wonder what time you got in." Then he got down to business, observing that "as booksellers," there is a certain "indie wavelength we share" with independent publishers.
Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon said it is a "great time for independents" with a "return to editorially driven quality books." In April, Seven Stories releases The Graphic Canon, Vol. 1: Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons, edited by Russ Kick. Calling Kick a "true Renaissance man," Simon said the three-volume project brings together "great comic artists with the great literature." More than 130 graphic artists are featured in the comprehensive reimagining of literature.
"Like a lot of you in this room, I was an English major," said Simon. As such, he said he often felt great works were often "entombed." These reinterpretations, he said, "remind us that these are books with guts, that are very earthy and human."
After thanking booksellers for supporting its past titles and its new Tonga imprint, Europa's Michael Reynolds presented Three Weeks in December by Audrey Schulman, a novel about a young American engineer overseeing a railroad in East Africa, to be released at the end of the month. "I knew I'd take it this book to Winter Institute as soon as I read it," said Reynolds. "And it doesn't even have an awkward title, " he added, nodding to its bestselling Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry.
Chelsea Green's Michael Weaver took a lighthearted swipe at his company's image, saying that he would take to calling most of its authors "tireless activists," as he presented works by two who clearly fit that bill: Michael Shuman (Local Dollars, Local Sense, Feb.) and Sandor Ellix Katz (The Art of Fermentation, May). Chelsea Green hopes to partner with booksellers to create local events for the former and welcomes an introduction by Michael Pollan in the latter.
The only nonprofit literary distributor in the country, Small Press Distribution offers titles that help indie booksellers have inventory that distinguishes them from chain stores, said the company's Meg Taylor. Among the works she highlighted: The Modern Predicament, essays by George Scialabba (Pressed Wafer), with a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, which gets to the "core of relevant current events" against the backdrop of the Occupy movement, and the Dorothy Publishing Project, a initiative publishing works of fiction and "near fiction" by (mostly) women writers, including Renee Gladman. "A black, lesbian poet writing fiction?" Taylor asked. "That's really SPD for you."
Tin House is known for translations and passion projects, and among the books Nanci McCloskey highlighted were: No One by Gwenaelle Aubry, with an introduction by Rick Moody, a "fictional memoir" by a daughter about a father with bipolar disorder; and Welcome to Paradise, the prize-winning book by Mehi Binebine, translated by Lulu Norman, which McCloskey said contained "the most shocking ending" she has read in "recent history."
Albert Whitman is known for publishing "issues books for children," and author Alison Formento and illustrator Sarah Snow follow up the success of This Tree Counts! with These Bees Count!, exploring the environmental ramifications of hive collapse. Margaret Coffee also promised Whitman would deliver a prequel to the Boxcar Mysteries that "explains how they got in the boxcar in the first place" and How to Be Friends with a Dragon by Valeri Gorbachev, because you never know when you'll need the "do's and don'ts" of dragons.
Children were not left out of the indie press picks at WI7. Neil Sedaka and son Marc have a new book coming form Charlesbridge in February, Dinosaur Pet, which revisits his hit song "Calendar Girl." Charlesbridge's Donna Spurlock also featured David McPhail's forthcoming Pig Pig Meets the Lion, by "the master of hilarious details," and Bambino and Mr. Twain by Priscilla Maltbie, about a special cat who might have enriched Samuel Clemens's old age.
Finally, in a Winter Institute first, Richard Mason, author of History of a Pleasure Seeker (Knopf, Feb.), presented his Orson & Co., a creator of digital apps, which he called a "groundbreaking advance in storytelling." While some booksellers wondered why an app publisher was part of the program, others were curious about how Orson's "digital originals" are distinguished from other book apps. The website barol.com previews the expansion of History of a Pleasure Seeker beyond the page.
From the indie press world to the indie bookseller world, Evans concluded: "There's lots to talk about." --Bridget Kinsella