Opening the annual Editor's Buzz panel, moderator Betsy Burton of the King's English in Salt Lake City, Utah, noted that one reason bookselling does not feel like selling is because, like any people of faith, book folk are moved by "a creed," which in this case "rests in the right to read wildly and freely." Likewise, "buzz" is built as a professional faith--faith booksellers have in editors who acquire the books, publishers' sales reps who present those books to bookstore buyers, and in each other, a la Indie Next picks. It's this line of trust that takes books from the hands of authors and ultimately places them in the hands of readers," Burton said.
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Buzz authors: (l.-r.) Amy Grace Loyd, Wendy Lower, Katy Butler, Sheri Fink and Eric Lundgren, with Ron Hogan, who moderated their appearance on the Downtown Stage yesterday. |
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The first editor to present was Dianne Urmy, senior executive editor of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who acquired Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower (Oct. release). Lower became interested in the topic while doing graduate work in Ukraine, where she came across the testimonies of hundreds of women about Nazi war crimes. "Why did they sound so callous and so defiant?" Lower wondered; after years of research and interviews (the author is fluent in German) she discovered that more than 500,000 German women were in direct contact with Nazi atrocities in the East.
Along with exposing the role of women in Nazi history, Urmy explained that Lower also portrays a generation of women who left their villages in pursuit of careers and husbands (many in the SS). The book profiles 13 women in their roles as teachers, nurses and wives, and ultimately shows where each one ends up as either witness, accomplice or killer. In the words of the author, "genocide was women's business as much as men's."
Overlook Press editor Liese Mayer said she came upon the debut novel she was presenting through a friend at a dinner party. Author Eric Lundgren had submitted The Facades, got some nibbles from publishers, but eventually gave up. He was working as a librarian in St. Louis when Mayer's dinner party friend connected them. His novel is set in Trude, a "once-great" midwestern city, and opens on the night the celebrated opera singer disappears during a performance; her husband, Sven, starts to investigate. "I was instantly blown away by it," said Mayer.
"There are two kinds of mysteries at work," said Mayer: the husband's search for his wife in a place reminiscent of the Invisible Cities in Italo Calvino's writing, and the reader's search for the truth about Sven, who realizes he has been a passive husband and will need to become an active participant in his life if he does not want to lose everything.
Picador senior editor Anna deVries--once a bookseller at Dutton's in Hollywood and Seminary Co-op in Chicago--said she was happy to present a novel set in her hometown of New York, "which has a way of turning neighbors into family."
The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd is about Celia, a grieving widow seeking to hide from life in the apartment building she owns. Then a subletter moves in--a woman of a certain age who is seeking something from the sexual exploits with a boyfriend after her husband has left her. Celia's sanctuary is turned "into a stage for the chaos of modern life." Oh, yeah, and there is lots of sex and sensuality. Without giving away too much, deVries said, The Affairs of Others opens with a party and ends with a party. The reader leaves Celia as "a woman fully engaged in her world looking outward."
"There's a kind of nonfiction that reconstructs for the reader a whole world," began Crown executive editor Vanessa Mobley, talking about Five Days At Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink (Aug.). Fink won a Pulitzer in 2010 for her New York Times Magazine article about the horrific conditions at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.
Fink delves into what happened there after Katrina, "when the thick rope of duty that binds doctors and nurses to the people they are bound to care for started to decay." Forty-five patients died at Memorial in those fateful five days and Fink presents an investigative and narrative story that makes the reader think hard about unbearable circumstances endured, and unthinkable choices made.
The health-care system is also front and center in Knocking at Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death by Katy Butler (Scribner, Sept.)--the only book chosen for both the buzz panel and the ABA Debut Authors fall promo.
"Many of you probably hear the word death and say, 'Ugh,' " admitted Whitney Frick, the acquiring editor. In the book, Butler writes at once as a journalist, adept storyteller and loving daughter, as she shares her her father's unnatural medically managed death and her mother's graceful natural passing. "It's one family's story," Frick said, "but it's one that is going to look familiar to all of us."
The final buzz book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting by Jennifer Senior (Ecco, Jan.), is also on a familiar topic. "It's not a parenting book per se," said Burton. "It's the parenting book everyone considering parenting should buy. Of course, then there might be fewer children in the world...."
"You didn't think All Joy and No Fun was going to be the comic relief of this panel," said Lee Boudreaux, the editor who bought the book--at the time when she herself had a two-year-old. "You will recognize yourself on every single page of this book." Senior sifts through all the social science ("so you don't have to"), to examine why one of the most fulfilling parts of life is so challenging; she also lets you know you are not alone.
"She ends up sending you away in a raft of realizing that not only is there an end to each of these phases, " said Boudreaux, "but she does a poetic beautiful job of showing why it is so meaningful." --Bridget Kinsella