Books: Consumed and Digested -- Reviews, news, interviews by Edward Nawotka

Book review: 'The Possessed' by Elif Batuman

2010-03-08T02:38:00.000-08:00

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives.com

Russian literary scholars aren't known for their sense of humor, unless they're Elif Batuman. Her new book, The Possessed, a collection of essays that can best be described as a series of academic misadventure stories, is possibly the best thing to come out of a graduate program in recent years.

Describing a conference about the writer Isaac Babel (author of The Red Cavalry) at Stanford University, where Batuman did her graduate work and now teaches, she notes that "some Russian people are skeptical or even offended when foreigners claim an interest in Russian literature." This parochial attitude can easily turn into obtuseness, as when a scholar suggests that Batuman would never be able to fully understand Babel because of his "specifically Jewish alienation."

To which she replies: "Right, as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew." To which the man replies: "So you see the problem."

Batuman rarely confronts such oddities head on. She usually lets people and events speak for themselves – often hilariously. On a trip to St. Petersburg for The New Yorker, where she's gone to visit the re-creation of an 18th-century palace made of ice, she's instructed by her editor to "interview the guy who made the doorknobs." Later, the builder of the ice palace asks, "What doorknobs?"

But Batuman isn't merely setting up straw men so she can appear more intelligent. She wears her knowledge lightly, while at the same time still conveying her passion for the books and the people who made them. She's also not shy about discussing the vagaries of academic life, such as hustling for grant money.

In a chapter titled "Who Killed Leo Tolstoy?" she wants grant money to help pay for a trip to a conference at Tolstoy's estate. To qualify for an extra $1,500, she devises a theory that Tolstoy was murdered. Her academic department doesn't buy it, but she makes the trip nevertheless, losing her luggage along the way. "Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you," she quips.

As she is forced to wear the same flannel shirt, sweat pants and flip-flops, the collected Tolstoy scholars come to believe she's a committed Tolstoyan – that is, a follower who's vowed to return to a peasant lifestyle, shunning materialism for a life of work and simplicity. It doesn't help that she wanders the grounds "looking for clues" to Tolstoy's "murder." Ultimately, she determines: "The flies buzz across generations; I know they know, but they won't tell me."

Throughout the book, she conveys a graduate seminar's worth of scholarship in many of the great Russian authors and a few who are not so great, plus some who aren't even technically Russian. (She has a wonderful, moving three-part story interspersed throughout the book about a summer she spent trying to learn Uzbek.)

By writing about her personal experiences with such charm, Batuman manages to make literature accessible in a way few critics can: She loves the Russians, and because, over the course of the book, you come to love her a little bit, you come to love the Russians as well. She's an example of not just how to appreciate literature, but how to live life through literature – without losing yourself.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com.

Book review: 'Happy' by Alex Lemon

2010-01-14T10:46:00.001-08:00

Dallas Morning News, Sunday, January 10, 2010

We are, as a culture, obsessed with medical dramas. Just look at the history of television and you'll see dozens of shows based in hospitals, from St. Elsewhere to ER to House.

And while plenty of books have been written about medicine from the doctor's perspective, far fewer have come from the patients. Rarer still are those written by men. One thinks of William Styron's Darkness Visible, about his descent into depression; last year's Guts by Robert Nylen, about his battle with cancer; or Tony Judt's recent work for the New York Review of Books about suffering from ALS. Alex Lemon's Happy is a welcome addition to that short bookshelf.

The title is itself deliberately deceptive. "Happy" is the author's nickname from when he was a foul-mouthed, hard-partying catcher for the baseball team at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. As we meet him at the start of the book, he thinks: "I must have drunk a bottle of Drano last night, snorted a bag of glass, and leapt open-armed from the top of the stairs. A tree. A roof. The moon." His head is "fuzzy," he can't focus, he has vertigo so bad that he falls over getting dressed, and his vision is blurry and bounces so badly that he can't catch a baseball.

An MRI reveals that Happy has a vascular malformation in his brain and that it has been hemorrhaging.

What follows is Lemon's chronicle of living with the ailment, with the help of friends, lovers, family and lots of self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. When that proves impossible, he decides to have the malformation operated on. The problem is on the brain stem, and the surgery puts him at risk of death. Lemon's description of his erratic behavior in the face of his fear – leading up to the surgery and during his recovery – is gripping, visceral and moving.

Lemon's tales of debauchery and sheer panic make for as compelling a story as others by young men who party too much and put themselves in peril, such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (however disingenuous) and Brad Land's Goat. The book is full of memorable observations, such as his description of a neurologist's exam room and its row upon row of plastic models of brains that "line and stack the shelves like championship basketballs" and moments of honest pain, such as when he uses an X-Acto knife "like a toothpick" to slice his gums when he chews tobacco while anticipating his surgery.

Needless to say, Lemon survived; he now teaches English at Texas Christian University. In this fine memoir, he touches briefly on at least one more subject – his abuse as a child at the hands of a teenage cousin – that would merit further autobiography. If he finds he has the strength (for he still suffers some from his illness) and emotional resilience to write, it too would be welcome.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives.com.

books@dallasnews.com

2009 Year in Review from the Dallas Morning News

2009-12-27T19:07:00.000-08:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

The year 2009 has been described as the Year of Anxiety, so it should come as no surprise that the books published in 2009 reflected scary stuff – from government conspiracy theories to zombies and, natch, vampires.

In Texas, writers both living and deceased made their mark on the national literary scene. Meanwhile, booksellers were battling it out for your discretionary dollar by making books cheap, cheap, cheap. All told, 2009 was a great year to be a book lover.

Herewith, our top 10 literary events of 2009:

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Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

1. The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown's follow-up to his global best-seller The Da Vinci Code was the one book everyone wanted to read. And Brown didn't disappoint. Trading the mysteries of Christianity for the mysteries of American history, Brown titillated his fans with conspiracy theories dating back to the Founding Fathers. Brown's publisher, Doubleday, printed 5 million copies to start, andAmazon.com readers downloaded it faster than any other book in the retailer's history. It was just what most people needed in a tough year: a bit of frivolous distraction.

2. Going Rogue: Love her or hate her, Sarah Palin is hard to ignore. After failing to become the first female vice-president, the lady from Alaska moved home, quit her job, and (with help from writer Lynn Vincent) penned this book, which has taken her from Oprah to Plano – where her reading at Legacy Books drew more than 1,000 supporters, who snapped up all available tickets in less than two days.

3. The Last Olympian: Perhaps the most popular book to come out of Texas this year was the finale of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Published in May, the novel entranced teens, who raced through its 400 pages to learn the fate of Percy (a son of Poseidon) and his friends as they fight an army of monsters to get to the portal to Mount Olympus (which is on the top of the Empire State Building). Look for Riordan's popularity to soar as the movie adaptation of the first in the series, The Lightning Thief, hits theaters in February.

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4. Attention for Texas authors:Austinite John Pipkin, former executive director of the Writer's League of Texas, picked up the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize for his bookWoodsburner, which depicts the day Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down the forest surrounding Walden Pond. And the late Houston novelist and short-story writer Donald Barthelme finally got the biography he deserved in the form of Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man –something that should firmly establish Barthelme's place high in the American literary canon.

5. Two top tens: A pair of books firmly rooted in the Lone Star State – Lit by Mary Karr and Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls – landed on the New York Times Book Review's list of the top ten books of 2009. In Lit, Karr, who hails from Groves, Texas, offers a chronicle of her descent into alcoholism and unexpected conversion to Catholicism. Walls' Half Broke Horses is a fictional account of the life of her West Texas grandmother.

In a year with so many A-list authors, from Barbara Kingsolver toMargaret Atwood, putting out "big books," it's nice affirmation to know that lives lived in this part of the country are as interesting to a national audience as are those lived in Manhattan or Brooklyn, where far too many books seem to be set.

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Seth Grahame Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

6. Zombie-mania: Something must have eaten book buyers' brains, as avid readers put Pride and Prejudice and Zombies onto the best-seller list. The parody by Seth Grahame-Smith injected the undead into Jane Austen's classic Regency romance and proved astonishingly popular. It also established a new genre of "enhanced" classics which now includes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, The Adventures of Huck Finn and Zombie Jim and others.

7. Christians vs. vampires: It wasn't long ago when the Left Behindbooks, a series of Christian novels depicting the "end of days," rivaledHarry Potter for the top of the best-sellers list. The times have changed, and there was no surer sign than the failure of the much-hyped Christian Book Expo held in March at the Dallas Convention Center. Organizers had expected 10,000 to 15,000 people, but only 1,500 attended.

In contrast, more than 3,000 fans of Stephenie Meyer's vampire-romance Twilight series paid $255 each to attend the inaugural TwiCon at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel in August. The event was so successful, organizers are moving it to Las Vegas and Toronto for 2010.

8. Mayborn conference: One book event in the area that was an undeniable success was the fifth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, held in July in Grapevine. Hundreds gathered to hear talks from A-list literary figures including Paul Theroux, Ira Glass and Alma Guillermoprieto. Interesting, focused and efficiently run by the administrators from the journalism school at the University of North Texas, The Mayborn can be ranked among the best writers' conferences in the United States.

9. Book price war: In October, Amazon.com and Wal-Mart reduced the price of some hardcover bestsellers, including John Grisham's FordCountry, to $9 or less. The low-low prices didn't last, but it underscored how, in no point in history, have there never been more books available to so many people for so little.

10. E-books gain popularity: It took a decade, but e-books are finally catching on. The introduction of new, easier-to-use reading software for smart phones, such as the iPhone, and new devices, such as Barnes & Noble's recently-introduced Nook, have made them all the more appealing.

Amazon.com's Kindle still reigns supreme, with many of the books priced at $9.99. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now says that the company sells e-books to print books at a ratio of nearly one to two; he is confidently predicting the day will soon be here when Amazon will sell more electronic books than physical books. Keep an eye on two Austin-based firms – LibreDigital, a company that converts books to digital formats, and BooksOnBoard, one of the biggest e-book retailers in the United States. Both are innovators in the field of digital publishing.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives.com.

MPIBA Gets Boost from Guns, Tourists, Hype

2009-09-30T09:53:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 9/29/2009 1:34:00 PM

"Many of our stores are small, in remote or rural areas, and don't have the opportunity to travel to BEA, so the trade show is important to them," said Meghan Goel, children's book manager at BookPeople Bookstore in Austin, TX and the incoming president of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA) (who had just returned from Kenya where she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro). The annual meeting returned to Denver after shifting last year to Colorado Springs, and attracted approximately the same number of attendees as last year.

At the association’s general meeting, executive director Lisa Knudsen praised outgoing president Andy Nettell of Arches Book Company in Moab, UT for his three years of service and his “calm” demeanor. She announced that 13 new stores had joined MPIBA since last year bringing the total number of members to 167. She admitted that the association’s finances had suffered due to last year’s market meltdown, with the association losing nearly a third of its financial reserves, some $78,000 in the stock market. “We’re still here,” said Knudsen, who added that as the market has bounced back, so has MPIBA’s finances.

She also touted a number of marketing moves the MPIBA has recently made, including the launch of the “Reading the West” program this past June. The program selects specific titles that are relevant to the region to promote at MPIBA, each month. “The board wanted to do this because some of our members are not in the ABA [American Booksellers Association] and don’t use IndieBound.” The association has also launched a new blog at http://www.mountainsplains.org/blog/.

In April, the MPIBA hosted the first of a planned series of “Regional Focus Meetings,” with the inaugural session held in Austin, Texas. Twenty people from 12 stores attended. Plans for 2010 include meetings to be held in Texas, most likely in Houston, as well as in Colorado, Utah, Montana and Arizona. “We’re still pinning them down, but we’ve had a lot of interest,” said BookPeople’s Goel.

Additional information sessions focused on coping with the recession, with numerous booksellers reporting that they have cut staff (often by not replacing lost employees) and added additional sidelines. This being the West, and considering the incredible jump in sales of firearms since the election of President Obama, it should come as no surprise that a number of stores reported a sizable boost coming from the sales of books about firearms.

That being said, there was little evidence of gun-related titles on the exhibition floor. Smaller booths from some of the major publishers -- Random House for example, had just a single table – were somewhat offset by the addition of seating next to each table, a change Knudsen said was intended to facilitate more sit down meetings for the taking of orders. Small regional publishers dominated the floor, ranging from Denver’s Flying Pen Press – a specialist in sci fi and speculative fiction -- to Mukilteo, Washington’s Basho Press, which is entirely focused on haiku gift books and was given a slot to speak at the “pick of the list” sessions.

Hachette Book Group produced a specialist catalog of “staycation” titles for the show, a likely response to the economic crisis. The branding proved a mismatch for what booksellers – particularly in heavily touristed locals – were reporting.

Tommie Plank of Covered Treasures Bookstore in Monument, Colo. remarked, “People are still traveling, they’re just driving a few hours, instead. Sure, people aren’t traveling to Europe and we’re not seeing as many people from the coasts, but we are seeing a lot of tourists from Colorado and surrounding states. Daiva Chesonis, book buyer for Between the Covers in Telluride, Colo. concurred, saying that one of the stores bestselling titles this summer was a Colorado driving atlas.

As far as sales are concerned, booksellers seem to be holding steady throughout the region. Plank reported that her store’s sales were up 2% over last year, due both to continued tourist traffic and the store’s proximity to the Air Force Academy and various military bases. “We have a lot of retired military in our area and since they’re retired they can’t lose their jobs, so they’re buying just as many books as before.” Local author Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman is currently proving popular.

Even so,“The economy has tempered expectations for the fall,” said Drew Goodman, a MPIBA board member and sales manager of the University Campus Store at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “It’s hard to tell what direction things are going to go in – is the recession over, as everyone is saying, or is this just a lull?,” said Goodman. “It’s hard to tell and there are mixed feelings out there. One thing that we know is there are a lot of big books out there for the season, it’s one of the best I can remember in a long time.” Goodman added that although his store was selling plenty of copies of The Lost Symbol and True Compass, his profits came from his ability to “make books” by hand selling. He offered Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night as an example: “In August, we picked it as ‘Book of the Month’ and sold 30 copies, making it one of our bestselling titles,” he said.

Cathy Langer of the Tattered Cover agreed, adding that it’s the “sleepers that rise to the surface” that really matter to independent stores. One book she expected to do especially well in the region is Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn. She’s also encouraged by the appearance of Brown, Kennedy, Krakauer, and even Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro on the fall lists. “After all the glum news this year, the hype is nice,” she said.

In 'Strength in What Remains,' author tells story of immigration, return to home country

2009-09-22T05:58:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Tracy Kidder's ninth book, "Strength in What Remains," tells the story of Deogratias — called Deo — a Burundian medical student who, after fleeing his country's civil war in 1994, makes his way to New York with $200 in his pocket and speaking only French. There he squats as a homeless person in Central Park; he delivers groceries for $15 a day.

This is before he's taken in by Charlie and Nancy Wolf, a charitable couple with a big heart and a Manhattan apartment with an extra room — one that happened to be full of books, one Kidder describes as "a room for the end of a journey of the body, but also for the continuation of a journey of the mind." They encourage Deo to pick up with his studies, and he eventually enrolls at Columbia University and, ultimately, Dartmouth Medical School.

What initially might seem like an intriguing, if conventional, tale of transformation turns out to have a remarkable coda, as Kidder divides the book between Deo's stateside story and his return to Burundi to open a free clinic in his home town.

Kidder spoke by phone from his home in Massachusetts.

Austin American-Statesman: You were introduced to Deo through Dr. Paul Farmer, his mentor and the subject of 'Mountains Beyond Mountains' (Kidder's 2003 book about a doctor who conducts medical missions to Haiti). Is this new book a kind of sequel to the Farmer book?

Tracy Kidder:Deo and Paul do have things in common — they are very close friends. When I first met Paul, he was already very well known in medical anthropology; he was a clinic hospital-builder par excellence. He's extraordinary. Deo had been through a crucible of war, been through a miraculous escape, come to America, learned English, but Deo is more of an ordinary person than Paul. So, in that sense, they are not sequels.

The first half of the book focuses on Deo's travails in New York, and it's not a part of the city people often see in books — homeless people living in Central Park, the service entrances to Fifth Avenue high-rises. Was that deliberate?

First and foremost I'm a storyteller, and that's an important part of Deo's story. But that part of New York is designed to be invisible. It's very tempting if you're privileged, particularly in a place like New York, to think that the world is properly ordered or that your job is representative of who you are. When you get into a taxi and the driver has a foreign accent, you should wonder, "Where did they come from? Why they are here?" At Columbia, one of Deo's favorite writers was W.E.B. DuBois, who said, and I'm paraphrasing: To be a poor man anywhere is hard, but to be a poor man in a country of dollars is the hardest of all.

You clearly admire Deo, and Paul Farmer for that matter, and many of your books seem to be about people pushing the limits of human potential.

The story I've told is about courage and endurance and idealism enacted. We have to remember that we all walk around with the most complex structure in the known universe on our shoulders. Deo is pretty extraordinary.

To what do you see this as a distinctly American story? The embodiment of the American dream?

I think it is distinctive insofar that he's now an American citizen; he rallied a collection of American and Burundians to something he had dreamed of as a child: to go back to Burundi to create a medical system to serve the poor of whatever ethnicity. He's done that and his aims are much larger. This is one small beginning.

Would you describe the clinic Deo started?

It's called Village Health Works and in its first year it saw 28,000 patients — from Burundi, but also from Tanzania and the Congo. A few who came weren't sick. When asked why they came, they said, "To see America." At first I thought this was a misconception, but it was true. This represents America at its best. In miniature, it's what President Obama was talking about in Ghana — African and American cooperation; it's a little instrument of peace.

It's also a different view of Africa than one usually gets from the news, for example.

We tend to look at Africa as a single dysfunctional country, which is nonsense. It is many dozens of countries with different problems. I am aware that Westerners only talk about the bad news from Africa, and I distrust that sentiment in Western mouths — either that or something that sounds like political correctness, and that is usually a sign that that group is really getting shafted. I wrote a book about a person who came from a place that hasn't produced a lot of good news in a century, but has a different story to tell. The real question is how to get people in the West and in the Western countries to help in an effective way.

Is that something you are trying to accomplish with your writing?

I think the trick for people attempting to write stories about Africa is to find a way to move people, to find that this suffering person is the same as you, just like you, and in another circumstance it could have been you.

Review: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

2009-08-23T20:30:00.001-07:00

'Await Your Reply' is a compelling look at a trio with similar traits whose lives intersect

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, August 23, 2009

A man is hurtling along a pitch-dark highway in rural Michigan with his son shaking in pain. The son's severed hand rests on ice in a Styrofoam cooler on the seat between them. So begins Dan Chaon's fascinating second novel, "Await Your Reply," and the book never lets up from there. What follows is an unsettling, modern gothic novel about the nature of identity, one that wonders whether dozens of lesser lives can ultimately add up to one big one. It's a book, literally and figuratively, about taking lives.

The novel shifts between three distinct storylines. There's Lucy, an 18-year-old high school graduate who runs off with her Maserati-driving history teacher to an abandoned hotel on a dried-out lake in Nebraska. There's Ryan, the young man with the severed hand, who is presumed dead after disappearing from Northwestern University, but is living with his previously absentee, pothead father in a cabin in the Michigan woods. Finally, there's 31-year-old Miles Cheshire, a drifter who works in a Cleveland magic shop and has spent much of the past decade chasing his schizophrenic twin brother, Hayden, across the country. These three characters share numerous traits: estranged or dead parents, mentally ill siblings and a fierce intelligence. Each is also part of a couple that is wholly intimate - the sentence "You're the only person in the world who still loves me" is repeated several times - but also virtual strangers.

Inevitably, the storylines intersect, but it is Miles and Hayden's story that dominates. As "Await Your Reply" progresses, we learn that the twins began to diverge in high school, a time when Hayden's illness began to manifest itself and he started shifting between reality and a series of fantasy lives, one as an abused cabin boy on a pirate ship, who repeatedly has his throat slit, and another in which the history of the United States is mixed up with a personal mythology. As a teen, and with the help of Miles, Hayden began recording this mythology in an atlas and includes such phenomena as pyramids in North Dakota and spirit towers in arctic Canada. As an adult, the mythology would expand to include a vast global conspiracy run by the big banks, powerful lawyers and other assorted Bilderbergers.

"Looking back," Chaon writes, "it was as if there had been two different lives that Miles was leading - one narrated by Hayden, the other the life he was living separately ..." Halfway through the novel, having chased Hayden to Omaha, Neb., Houston, and even farther afield, Miles begins to question his own grip on reality. Along with Miles, the reader is forced to question what is real and what is merely fantasy, and a kind of literary game ensues.

Chaon sets the action almost entirely in the blank, wide-open Midwest, a characteristic that makes "Await Your Reply" all the more haunting. The characters rarely encounter other people, except in memory, and their physical isolation gives them ample opportunity to explain themselves to each other in a series of stories that are both truth and lies. It's like a literary version of Epimenides' famous paradox: Am I lying, or am I lying when I say that I never tell the truth? Teasing out the truth is one of the numerous pleasures of this fine novel.

Another is the plot, which is surprisingly kinetic for what is largely a psychological drama. To describe what happens is likely to give too much away, but the title does offer a hint: The phrase "await your reply" is referenced as the closing line in a common spam message, specifically the kind that offers you millions of dollars provided you're willing to give your bank account and Social Security numbers to a grieving stranger in West Africa. That should give you an idea of where the book is, eventually, headed.

Chaon's timing couldn't be better: "Await Your Reply" arrives Tuesday, a week after the Justice Department indicted three men (two of them Russian) for the theft of more than 130 million credit card numbers in what is said to be the biggest case of computer fraud and identity theft in U.S. history. If you want to get into the heads of the perpetrators, this book is a place to start.

But saying this is a book about computer-assisted identity theft is like saying that murder can be reduced to the weapon used - each is just a tool to achieve a greater (or lesser, depending on your point of view) psychological aim.

There are echoes and allusions to H.P. Lovecraft, Patricia Highsmith, Peter Straub, Stephen King and Shirley Jackson all over "Await Your Reply"; however, a more apt and timely comparison is with Thomas Pynchon. I'm not talking about the Cheech and Chong-meet-Raymond Chandler variety of Pynchon seen in the recently released "Inherent Vice," but the vintage paranoid Pynchon of "V" and "The Crying of Lot 49." Chaon has produced a book that is closer to Pynchonesque than has Pynchon himself.

Of course, that kind of recommendation might just turn people off the book, so let me say that another set of books to which Chaon's might invite comparison is Stieg Larsson's best-sellers "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played With Fire," books that also feature an orphaned computer hacker - albeit one who is a hero and not a villain.

These titles share some of the same DNA or, if you will, computer code with "Await Your Reply," though Chaon's book is far less cartoonish, which makes it all the more chilling and convincing in its conclusions about the ultimate fragility of the self.

Dallas to host 4 days of 'Twilight'

2009-07-29T09:08:00.001-07:00

12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, July 29, 2009
By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com and covers the South for Publishers Weekly.

If you encounter a group of dramatically dressed women walking the streets of downtown Saturday night sporting Goth garb, Venetian masks and fangs, cover your necks: You've just encountered some of the 3,000 Twilight devotees in town for TwiCon 2009, four days of Stephenie Meyer-inspired mania.

Expect lots of screaming – of a good kind.

The Twilight books, featuring the star-crossed lovers Edward, a vampire, and Bella, a human, have sold 53 million copies worldwide. The first movie in the series grossed more than $380 million, and the sequel New Moon is due in November. So if the phenomenon is not quite at Harry Potter levels, it does seem here to stay.

TwiCon 2009 has sold out, even at $255 a ticket. That buys attendees four days of access to serious-minded academic panel discussions (one is called "Your mood swings are kinda giving me whiplash: Twilight Fans and the Negotiation of Gender and Feminism"), Bella-themed self-defense classes, a TwilightMOMs meeting room, a fan fiction contest and (natch) a Red Cross blood drive.

Meet the cast

The highlight for many will be the opportunity to mingle with cast members from the movies. None of the leads will be there, but the schedule includes a half-dozen others, such as Alex Meraz, who plays a werewolf in New Moon, and one-time Midland resident Jackson Rathbone, who played Jasper Hale in Twilight. (Autograph and photography sessions with the stars cost extra.)

There are sessions on running Twilight fan sites, writing seminars, talks about vampire genetics and an end-of-conference "Volturi Masque Ball" – a Venetian-style ball modeled on one from the books and hosted by the Volturi, the de facto royal family of vampires, who live in Italy. TwiCon's version will feature music by Twilight tribute bands, and the Volturi will be played by the conference organizers.

Online groundswell

TwiCon is the brainchild of 19-year-old Becka Grapsy, a student at Penn State University, and Bailey Gauthier, a 20-something Canadian (a.k.a., vlogger "NoMoreMarbles"), who together last year circulated an online petition among Twilight fans asking about interest in a convention and gathered some 10,000 names.

The result caught the interest of North Carolina-based freelance book publicist Becky Scoggins. "I contacted Becka and Bailey last August, and we decided to form a company to stage it," Scoggins said. She emphasizes that the event is unofficial and not endorsed by Meyer or her publisher Little, Brown.

Dallasites may be disappointed to learn that their city was chosen as the site for TwiCon not because Twilight fans have any particular affinity for the place, but because it is convenient to get to and relatively affordable.

Contrary to the general perception that Twilight fans are primarily tween girls, "Eighty percent of those registered fall in the 25- to 40-year-old age range," said Scoggins. "The rest are 13-25, and nearly all are girls and women. There are some men, but those are almost all dads."

A few guys

One young male fan who will be there is 20-year-old Richardson-native Kaleb Nation, who runs the popular Web site TwilightGuy.com and whose debut novel, Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse, is being published on Sept. 1. He's one of the featured guests.

Scoggins says interest in the convention has been strong enough that she and her partners have planned two more for next year: one in Las Vegas and one in Toronto.

And if all goes well, Scoggins says that she might approach Meyer, her publisher and Summit Entertainment, who is producing the films, to officially participate.

"Our biggest goal for this year is to make sure that Stephenie knows we appreciate her," said Scoggins. "We're not trying to make money off of her, we just want her to know that 3,000 fans got together to talk about her books. To even think that people are getting together to talk about books feels really good."

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com and covers the South for Publishers Weekly.

Book review: 'Driving Like Crazy' by P.J. O'Rourke

2009-06-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 21, 2009
By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com and covers the South for Publishers Weekly.

This Father's Day, I'm in the unenviable position of telling my own dad that he was wrong. As a child of Detroit, born in Henry Ford General Hospital, I've heard all my life that I should have dropped the writing career to become an engineer. "The Big Three are always hiring," my 69-year-old father would occasionally tell me. He still buys a new fully loaded Mustang with "sport package" every other year.

Well, I never thought I'd see the day come when journalism, a beleaguered industry if there ever was one, looked like a more secure prospect than building cars. What a shame.

Like me, P.J. O'Rourke grew up around the car business. Born in Toledo, Ohio, an hour south of the Motor City, his family owned a Buick dealership. His cousin would go on to run the Ohio Car Dealers Association, while O'Rourke would go on to become a world-famous political satirist and journalist. But cars remained in his blood, a passion he indulged by taking long road trips on four and two-wheeled vehicles alike, writing about them for magazines such as Car and Driver, Rolling Stone and Esquire.

His latest book, Driving Like Crazy, collects and updates 18 of these stories. The span covers the arc of O'Rourke's life, from convertible guy to SUV guy, and provides some wonderful contrasts between the younger and wiser O'Rourkes.

"Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street?" he writes in "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your ... [ahem] Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink." O'Rourke wrote that in the early 1970s for National Lampoon.

Today's version is titled: "How to Drive Fast When the Drugs Are Mostly Lipitor, the ... [ahem] Needs More Squeezing Than It Used to Before It Gets the Idea, and Spilling Your Drink Is No Problem If you Keep the Sippy Cups from When Your Kids Were Toddlers and Leave the Baby Seat in the Back Seat so that When You get Pulled Over You Look Like a Perfectly Innocent Grandparent." About the only thing that stays the same from the earlier piece is his advice about what car handles best: "Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car," his younger self writes. "Nothing handles better than a rented car." (No surprise, he later profiles the founder of Rent-a-Wreck.)

Elsewhere in this treat of a book are moving homages to NASCAR, SUVs, Jeeps and the American car in general. But mostly there are road trips: Michigan to Indiana on a Harley, Canada to Mexico in a Jeep, across Baja and California in races, and through Pakistan and India in a Land Rover. His traveling companions range from Houstonian Michael Nesmith (of the 1960s band The Monkees) to his own children. As with almost all of O'Rourke's work, it's easy reading, and he's just as good, if not better, at cracking wise about cars and driving as he is about liberal politics.

Here he is on the driving dynamics of a Mercedes M-class SUV, which he admits is really a minivan: "The M-class rode like your boss' executive office chair, steered like the prize dressage horse owned by your boss' wife, and stopped faster than your paycheck would if you got caught naked on any of these things."

He's still got it. Fortunately for us, he chose journalism over being a Buick dealer. If the latter had been the case, he'd probably be out of work, and we wouldn't have this wonderful collection with which to reminisce about the heyday of Detroit.

It's hard to think about anyone ever getting as passionate about a Prius (or Insight or Volt, for that matter) as O'Rourke (or my father, for that matter). He remains a fan of the growling, gas-guzzling, big American roadster, may it rest in peace.

Ed Nawotka lives in Houston. He is editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives.com and covers the South for Publishers Weekly.

books@dallasnews.com

Driving Like Crazy

Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed To Be – With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

P.J. O'Rourke

(Atlantic Monthly, $24)

'How to Sell': The Dallas jewelry trade as Nietzchean nightmare

2009-06-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, June 21, 2009

Clancy Martin's debut novel, "How to Sell" — set in the Dallas-Fort Worth jewelry business in the 1980s and '90s — is the kind of book that leaves you feeling dirty. It rubs off on you and makes a mark you'll want to try to scrub off.

First, provided you've ever bought jewelry or a Swiss watch, you might wonder at the authenticity of the thing, question whether you got taken. Is that Rolex bogus? Is your wedding band made of real gold or platinum? Or is it just plated something or other? A fraud?

"How to Sell" centers on two brothers, Bobby and Jimmy, who were separated when their parents divorced (the younger brother, Bobby, lived in Calgary, Alberta, with his mother, while Jimmy wound up in Scottsdale, Ariz., with his father). They reunite when Jimmy invites Bobby to work with him at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange. The year is 1987 and Bobby is a 16-year-old high school dropout when he starts work. At first, he is given menial tasks — cleaning showcases, setting watches — until he sells a gold Rolex President for $4,995. The sale was a mistake, it turns out, since the watch was the display model. All the while, Jimmy introduces Bobby to drugs, fast cars, posh living and loose women. Key among the women is Lisa, Jimmy's sometime mistress, for whom Bobby falls.

"How to Sell" is a roman à clef, based on Martin's own life, which, according to publicity material from his publisher, included a career as a "conman and luxury jeweler" in Dallas in the 1980s and '90s. Today, Martin, who was born in Canada but graduated from Baylor and later the University of Texas with a doctorate — writing a dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of deception under the late Robert C. Solomon — teaches philosophy at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Martin is a fantastic fiction writer, and in "How to Sell" he weaves together both a gripping tale of debauchery and a more nuanced work of philosophical inquiry. The result is a very readable, if somewhat didactic, morality tale that is also extremely edifying about business, greed and human nature.

The "shark tank" of the jewelry business that Martin describes is like a foreign land, one you think you know, but come to realize you can't begin to comprehend. There are the minor scams — putting off customers who've paid for watches that may never get delivered by lying that the watch is delayed by customs, or selling someone a $400 cleaning and adjustment on an automatic-movement watch because the customer thinks it's broken, when it's just stopped because automatic movements self-wind only when worn. Then there's the big stuff, like selling used Rolexes as new, or selling diamonds with bogus papers.

Frequently, one character or another is imparting a lesson to Bobby. "In this business, always trust your eyes," a Jewish diamond dealer tells him, just before the old man pistol-whips a would-be robber. A Swiss watch dealer known as Granddad teaches Bobby "the twenty-two logical fallacies." When Bobby's not hustling a buck, he's reading books on Zen and Buddhism at bookstores, a habit picked up from his father, a semi-homeless, former Canadian Olympic goalie who wanders the Southern United States and Caribbean sleeping with women and starting churches — a fallen Nietzschean Übermensch if there ever was one.

The book sets up a dichotomy between faith in the material — what you can see and feel, such as diamonds and gold — and the immaterial — what you can't see and must simply trust, such as loyalty and love. The conclusion is that value is in the eye of the beholder.

This is not a book about redemption: Nearly all the characters are bent. The men are disloyal, greedy, self-centered philanderers and crooks, while the women are almost all literal or figurative prostitutes. Some characters come to a bad end, while others are merely subsisting until the inevitable crash.

Mostly, "How to Sell" concerns the constant power struggle of the buy-sell relationship. In this, it is Nietzschean to the core.

What you're likely to remember — aside from the queasy feeling you'll be left with — is to distrust salesmen even more than perhaps you already do. You might also learn to pity them: As a jeweler named Old John observes near the book's end of Bobby, who is now in his mid-20s, with a wife, a child and two girlfriends — one, Lisa, now living as a prostitute, the other, his chief employee, a gun-toting beauty — "A salesman is the opposite of a businessman, Bobby. A businessman cares about the practical details of life. A salesman is an artist. He can't tie his own shoelaces. He lives on tomorrow. He's a cloud-and-sky guy, a rainbow man. He can't make a ... dollar out of four quarters and a can of glue, if you want to hear the truth of it."

Ultimately, though, it is Martin, the professor, instructing us on everything from how to sell a diamond engagement ring to a couple to why men in the industry prefer stainless steel Blancpains and IWC watches to gold Rolexes. The premise of the book boils down to this: "This is how to sell," Martin writes. "A golden lie in a nest of truths." That's also a heck of a description of fiction writing itself.

How much of "How to Sell" is true to Martin's own life story doesn't really matter. As Nietzsche wrote, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth," and this is one powerful novel, offering an unsettling, gritty and raw view of the business of life.

E-publisher Stay Thirsty Lures Veteran Writers

2009-06-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 6/29/2009

Shamus Award–winning mystery writer David Fulmer first heard about Stay Thirsty Press when a friend sent him an e-mail. “It was a notice from Craigslist that a publisher was looking for original works to publish as e-books,” said Fulmer. “I'd had this book, The Last Time, that had technically been shopped around by my agent, but it was different from all my other work and was always at the bottom of the stack. I'd been working on it for eight years, and thought, what have I got to lose.”

The Craigslist posting was from a new Chicago e-book publisher, Stay Thirsty Press. That was on June 1. By June 7, Fulmer's seventh novel, The Last Time, was available as a digital-only download for the Kindle on Amazon.com for $9.99, published by Stay Thirsty Press. With editors and authors being let go by many traditional publishers, Dusty Sang, publisher of Stay Thirsy, said, “I thought maybe this was a great time to find authors I'd be interested in working with. I put an ad in Craig's List New York and have had hundreds of submissions.”

A former entertainment lawyer, Sang, 61, became a publisher because of a family tragedy. In 2004, his 24-year-old son, Ryan, died from complications related to bipolar disorder; as a tribute, Sang funded the launch of StayThirsty.com, an online music and art magazine run by Ryan's friends. Today, Sang's leveraging the brand into e-books as an effort to monetize the site. Stay Thirsty's first book, Mrs. Beast by Pamela Ditchoff, went on sale March 22, just three weeks after she contacted Sang. Before signing with Stay Thirsty, Ditchoff published the novel Seven Days & Seven Sins (Shaye Areheart Books, 2003) and earlier, The Mirror of Monsters and Prodigies (Coffee House Press, 2005). She plans to publish the sequel to Mrs. Beast with Stay Thirsty.

The first royalty checks went out to Ditchoff 60 days after the book first went on sale. The press sends the author the sales statement from Amazon, and does a 50/50 split.

Stay Thirsty has just published its first nonfiction title: a collection of columns from EDGE magazine by David Toussaint entitled Toussaint! Toussaint penned Gay and Lesbian Weddings for Ballantine Books in 2004, but found no takers for this work. “Dusty doesn't have the clout of Random House,” Toussaint said. “The upside is that he's only working with a couple of writers, so the personal attention is wonderful. As for the e-book thing, of course it's a compromise. Some people have flat-out told me they won't read anything digital. On the upside, I've spoken with people who loved having it on their phone. They also liked the $9.99 price.”

Book review: 'Guts' by Robert Nylen

2009-06-10T09:08:00.001-07:00

12:00 AM CDT on Tuesday, June 2, 2009

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Edward Nawotka is a Houston freelance writer.

Robert Nylen completed his memoir Guts shortly before he died of colorectal cancer in December. He was 64. A lifelong ad salesman, Nylen understood the power of words to persuade and so he chose not to dignify his disease with a proper name, opting to call it by a nickname that can't be printed in a family newspaper.

As you might expect, the disease doesn't get top billing in the book. He focuses on his combat experience in the Vietnam War, where he was wounded "two-and-a-half" times, and his various business ventures: He was once vice president and associate publisher of Texas Monthly and later founded Beliefnet.com, despite being neither "spiritual nor religious," just "sanctimonious."

Throughout, Nylen meditates on modern manhood and, in particular, on the meaning of the word "tough," a word he calls a "fittingly compact fortress."

The final fifth is given over to documenting the progress of his cancer, diagnosed in 2004, and the many, often difficult, treatments. As his body declines, he relates moments of humility (some comic, some sad) and he becomes more contemplative – analyzing the work of Susan Sontag (who also wrote about and died of cancer), and flirting with the idea of Stoicism (which he rejects because he believed the Stoics favored man-boy homosexuality).

By the end, Nylen comes to believe the highest virtue is a willingness to go all-out, not in the sense of "superlative adspeak," but in the sense of being resilient, of taking responsibility for the course of one's own life, doing what's right and living each day as if it's the last, no matter what the situation.

Edward Nawotka is a Houston freelance writer.

books@dallasnews.com

Guts

Combat, Hell-raising, Cancer, Business Start-ups and Undying Love: One American Guy's Reckless, Lucky Life

Robert Nylen

(Random House, $25)

Change Makers: Joyce Meskis

2009-05-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

Tattered Cover owner adds new role with Denver Publishing Institute

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 5/11/2009

As a student at Purdue, Joyce Meskis envisioned her future as that of a college English professor. “In my mind's eye, I saw myself kicking the fall leaves on a campus as I walked to my nice but not ostentatious house, where French doors would be open and I could hear the strains of Chopin being played by my children,” she says. But a stint at the college bookstores changed her course, and today Meskis is known to all as owner of Denver's esteemed Tattered Cover Book Store and one of the most outspoken free speech advocates in bookselling. Meskis added to her bookselling career in January 2008 when she was named to succeed Elizabeth Geiser as the director of the University of Denver's summer Publishing Institute.

The institute was founded by Geiser in 1976, just two years after Meskis purchased Tattered Cover, and the two institutions have grown side by side. The institute has graduated nearly 3,000 students, while Tattered Cover has grown from a single location of 950 square feet to three locations. Her store's growth over the past three decades—and the very fact of its survival—is something she credits to the growth of Denver rather than to any particular ambition of her own. “There's a misperception about Denver that it's a community steeped in a western tradition, if you will,” she says, “but people were attracted to the city. They came here, had families—it became a magnet for well-educated people all over the country. It's no different than in a place like Portland, which grew Powell's, for example.”

Over her 35-year career, Meskis's success as a bookseller has sometimes been overshadowed by the store's well-documented legal battles in defense of First Amendment rights. Her line in this regard is well rehearsed: “Trouble finds us, we don't go looking for it,” she says. “When you're in a general community, you will always have challenges. There are things I didn't expect. I didn't expect so many court battles. You've got to do what you've got to do.”

Meskis describes the rewards of bookselling as two-fold. Empirically, she says, “There is an incredible bubble that rises in me when I hear a customer, especially if it's a child, say, 'Oh, wow, you've got that book.' It's exquisitely gratifying.” Philosophically, she says, it's the social profit that makes up for the struggle to make a financial profit. “Being there for the community of readers that you serve and doing the very best that you can do to encourage and enhance the reading lives of the people in your community is how we can contribute to making a better world,” Meskis says.

She sees publishing as serving much the same function, and it's a message she's been delivering to students at the University of Denver's Publishing Institute for nearly 20 years, where she has been a regular lecturer on bookselling. Now, as director, she has the opportunity to instill this philosophy even deeper into the program.

While it might seem like a tough time to be steward of a program that promises to train students for jobs in an industry that has seen so much bloodletting in recent months, the facts prove otherwise. In 2008, 96 students graduated from the four-week program, and this year the number of applicants is up. “The applicants we're getting are even better than last year,” Meskis adds, “and many of them are stating in the applications that while they recognize there are changes in the industry, they continue to love the idea of publishing and reading and doing something worthwhile.”

Meskis's has enticed an A-list of some 50 publishing people to lecture this summer, and Harper Studio's Bob Miller will give the keynote and Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, will give the graduation speech. “I see the students as being able to participate as agents of change, people who will be able to make publishing work best for the community that they choose to serve,” Meskis says.

Though a full-time university career may have been seductive in her youth, Meskis still plans to devote the bulk of her time and attention to her bookstores. “It's extremely gratifying work,” she says.

“People may love their technologies, but ink on paper between boards is part of the pleasure of reading,” says Meskis. “Bookshops are the focal point in a community where reader and writer come together. It's important that publishers continue to recognize and acknowledge that.”

Profile

Name: Joyce Meskis

Age: 67

Company: Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver; University of Denver Publishing Institute

Title: Co-owner; Director

First job: working “semester rush” at Purdue's bookstore.

Publishing in the future: a work in progress, as it incorporates new techologies with the continuing demands and challenges of the marketplace.

Keeping the Mailer Spirit Alive

2009-05-04T09:50:00.001-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 5/4/2009

A few months before Norman Mailer died in November of 2007, his longtime collaborator Lawrence Schiller sat down with the legendary author to discuss his legacy. “There's a whole generation of people out there who don't know who you are,” Schiller told Mailer, “and I don't want you to be an author who someone reads six or seven books and doesn't read the rest.” Since Mailer's death, Schiller has devised a plan to make sure that doesn't happen, launching the Norman Mailer Writing Awards, organizing the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and enticing publishers to reissue or repackage some of Mailer's lesser known books. “Usually all an estate does in the first five years after a writer's death is issue a comprehensive book of letters—and, yes, we'll do that—but this has a different energy to it,” Schiller said.

The first Norman Mailer Writing Awards will be presented this October 20 at a benefit gala chaired by Tina Brown and David Remnick at Cipriani in New York City. Four awards will be presented. Toni Morrison will be honored for “lifetime achievement” and the late David Halberstam for “distinguished journalism”; as well, there will be two winners of a new nationwide writing contest, sponsored by the Norman Mailer Writing Colony and administered by the National Council of Teachers of English. One prize of $5,000 will go to a high school senior and a $10,000 award will go to a college student. The idea behind the awards, explained Schiller, is to expose Mailer's name to as many young people as possible. “I want students to go out and discover who Norman Mailer was and is,” he said.

The Writers Colony, situated in Mailer's former home in Provincetown, Mass., will induct its inaugural class of fellows this July. The first list of seven fellows includes Philip Shenon, author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, and Alex Gilvarry, a former editor at Scholastic. Lasting a month, it caters to emerging writers of fiction and nonfiction who will be given room, board and a community with which to discuss their work. The program will be overseen by Greg Curtis and Jim Magnuson, both of the University of Texas at Austin, where the Mailer archive is held. In addition, starting this month, the colony will begin a series of workshops taught by Mailer's friends, ranging from J. Michael Lennon teaching “Writing Techniques of the New Journalism” to Douglas Brinkley on “Historical Research and the Narrative.” All workshop participants, save for two of seven spots, will be funded by scholarships from the colony.

Finally, Schiller has enlisted publishers to publish collections of letters and take another look at some of Mailer's lesser-known works. The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Playboy have all published excerpts from Mailer's letters, while Taschen has two new books planned, including MoonFire, a collection of photos of the first moon landing that will incorporate text from Mailer's 1970 book on the landings, A Fire on the Moon, and America, a photographic compendium, also with text by Mailer. “All the introductions to Mailer's works from now on will be done by young writers. Colum McCann will introduce MoonFire, for example,” said Schiller.

“What Larry is doing is something that encapsulates all sides of Mailer, his public persona and his private side,” said Chris Napolitano, Playboy's editorial director, who has worked with both Mailer and Schiller. “Our various projects—the colony, prizes, publications—are not only to preserve interest in his writings, but his craft,” Schiller said. “The way he worked—the tenacity, creativity and generosity—is in some way just as important as the books, the films and his run for mayor.”

'Woods Burner' by John Pipkin: Engaging debut novel about Henry David Thoreau

2009-05-03T18:20:00.001-07:00

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 3, 2009
By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Edward Nawotka is a Houston freelance writer.

In September 2003, Harper's magazine ran a "Harper's Index" item that read: "Estimated acres of forest Henry David Thoreau burned down in 1844 trying to cook fish he had caught for dinner: 300."

That line became the seed for Austinite John Pipkin's wonderful debut novel, Woods Burner, which recounts the day of the fire from the perspective of Thoreau and the members of the community who come together to battle the conflagration, one that threatened to raze Concord.

Pipkin, who holds a doctorate in romantic poetry from Rice University and served as the executive director of the Writers' League of Texas from 2006 to 2008, draws a detailed picture of then 26-year-old Thoreau as conflicted man, one on the verge of abandoning his literary aspirations.

As the fire smolders around him, the result of an ill-conceived decision to spark a campfire in a tree stump on a windy day in the midst of a drought, he commits himself to a life of pragmatism, vowing, "Henceforth I shall sign my name Henry David Thoreau – Civil Engineer."

Of course, any school-aged child knows that things turned out quite differently. Throughout the novel, Pipkin imagines a series of encounters that galvanize Thoreau and lead him to live in isolation at Walden Pond just one year later.

As the fire rages, all manner of townsfolk, privileged and poor, white and black, are compelled to fight the inferno. At one point the young Thoreau finds himself side-by-side with a man he dubs "Young America," one he's surprised to learn has "lived in the woods, alone." Readers will already know this man is Oddmund Hus, a Norwegian immigrant and farmhand, who is obsessed with his employer's Irish wife, Emma.

It is through these imagined characters (a foppish Boston bookseller, a troubled reverend) that Pipkin depicts the American melting pot, still simmering with strife from the Revolutionary War and preparing to boil into the Civil War.

However didactic and cerebral this may sound, the story is infused with moments of genuine drama, peril and suspense. Woods Burner is edifying, engaging and satisfying, an exemplary illustration of how fiction can illuminate the past, bring history to life and make it feel as fresh and relevant as the present day.

Carmichael's Bookstore: Bookseller of the Year

2009-04-27T10:26:00.001-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/27/2009

On a cold, rainy night in April, more than 60 people drift into Carmichael's bookstore on Frankfort Avenue in Louisville, Ky., the bookstore owned by Michael Boggs and Carol Besse. They are there for a showing of Paperback Dreams, the PBS documentary about the struggles of Cody's and Kepler's, independent bookstores in Northern California. “It's like that old Joni Mitchell song says—'You don't know what you've got till it's gone' ” remarks Besse at the end of the movie.

Among those in the audience that night is Norton sales rep Johanna Hynes, who, along her husband, Bob Barnett, a sales rep for Cambridge University Press, lives a few blocks from the store. “Carmichael's is the reason I chose to live here in Louisville,” says Hynes in the ensuing discussion about independent retailing, one that featured panelists John Timmons, owner of Louisville's Ear X-tacy record store, and David Daley, lifestyles editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“I spend most of my time on the road living in Hampton Inns,” continues Hynes. “So when I get home, it's important to me to walk into a bookstore that isn't generic, where they know my taste in books, know my family. My son thinks Michael Boggs is a hero. How many five-year-olds have a bookseller as their hero?”

Boggs and Besse opened Carmichael's—the name is a combination of their first names—on April, 15, 1978. The choice of Tax Day was deliberate. “You didn't need to worry about taxes unless you were making money,” says Boggs. The couple met while college students at Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) in St. Petersburg and later worked together at Barbara's Bookstores in Chicago. “We learned everything from Barbara's,” notes Boggs.

The couple operate two Carmichael's locations. The original store is on Bardstown Road in the Highlands neighborhood. It measures a mere 976 sq.-ft. The second, on Frankfort Avenue, is about a mile from the first, in the Crescent Hill neighborhood. It, too, is small, just 1,521 sq.-ft., including the small office space Besse and Boggs share just off the sales floor. (In 1992, the couple opened a third location in the suburb of Prospect, which closed in 1996.)

The two stores' small size has proven more of an advantage than one might think, says Boggs, particularly when it comes to buying. “I have to be ruthless about what I bring into the store,” he says. “So I need to know what my customers want.” He orders as much as possible direct from publishers and minimizes the use of wholesalers. “The biggest mistake small bookstores make is trying to be like a big bookstore, so I don't sink tens of thousands of dollars into sections where I cannot compete against the chains or the Internet.”

He doesn't stock sports, business, computer and spoken-word audio titles. Sidelines are limited to just a selection of cards and journals. You also won't find many politically conservative titles. “I don't feel a need to cater to everyone and make no apologies for my love of peace, love and progressive politics,” explains Boggs. “I don't see that as censorship, but as an exercise of my personal freedoms. People know what to expect when they come here.”

Efficiency extends beyond buying to general operations. Boggs and his staff create all promotional materials and signage themselves, and Boggs doesn't hire people to do anything he feels he can do himself. He even programmed his own computer inventory system, back in 1982, and still uses it today; though it still looks like a souped-up version of DOS, he points out that it's so simple to use that he was able to convert it to the 13-digit ISBN system in a weekend.

“We just never lost the idea of doing everything on a shoestring,” says Besse. “Of course, part of the reason was that for a long period we weren't making much money.” At various times either Boggs or Besse held full-time jobs outside the store.

The focus on efficiency extends to the way they govern their staff of eight full-timers and 10 part-timers. “We don't have a lot of rules or regulations,” says Besse. “They are simply encouraged to do what is necessary to make our customers happy.”

Trust, in part, derives from the fact that three full-time staffers are members of their immediate family: Boggs and Besse's 27-year-old daughter, Miranda; Besse's older sister Diane Estep and Diane's daughter Kelly. “I serve as a kind of peacemaker at times between my parents,” says Miranda, who serves as Carmichael's returns manager. “I'm also a sounding board for employees who want to know what my parents might think of this or that.”

Miranda's cousin Kelly started working when she was 12, dusting shelves and learning to use the computer. She took a full-time position when she was 19 and now manages the Bardstown Road store and buys children's books.

Kelly met her husband when she hired him as a part-timer. Now their two young children spend two days a week at the store where they are looked after by the children's grandmother Diane, who manages the Carmichael's school sales division and serves as bookkeeper.

Diane Estep is nearly as important to Carmichael's success as either Boggs or Besse. Her school sales division supplies trade books to 225 local public schools throughout Jefferson County and contributes nearly a third of Carmichael's $2 million of annual revenue. The bookstore first won the county contract in 1996, after a clerk at their main independent competitor, the now defunct Hawley-Cooke bookstore chain, failed to sign the annual bid sheet. They shared the contract for the next decade, and when Hawley-Cooke was sold to Borders in 2003, Carmichael's assumed the entire job. Though the margins are smaller, Estep says the arrangement is vital to the store's cash flow. “The school district always pays within 30 days,” she says, “which in turn allows us to pay our bills quite fast.”

Estep says the closing of Hawley-Cooke was one turning point for the store. The other, she says, came in 2002 when Besse returned to work at Carmichael's full-time. “It was like we got renewed ownership without having sold the store,” says Estep of her sister. Perhaps the most significant contribution Besse made was a commitment to store events. With the demise of Hawley-Cooke, Carmichael's became the go-to bookstore for publishers looking for an independent. It has since hosted a bibliography's worth of A-list authors. Among them was David Sedaris, who drew a crowd of 600—a crowd that required Carmichael's to close off the street outside. (Sedaris is returning again this summer for his paperback tour for When You Are Engulfed in Flames.)

Besse refers to keep events in-house, which typically means the larger Frankfort Avenue store, where there is room to seat 60 with standing room for another 100. “You want your event to bring people into the store so they will be surrounded by your books and buy them,” she says, though she's not averse to off-site events when circumstances call for it.

Daley of the Louisville Courier-Journal calls Carmichael's “the intellectual heart of our city. It's the one store with a commitment to literature, and to these neighborhoods in particular,” he says.

Kate McCune, the Midwestern sales rep for HarperCollins and PW 2007 Rep of the Year, championed Carmichael's nomination for Bookseller of the Year, agrees. “It's very seldom these days that I go into a store and feel as defined an identity and a relationship with a community like I do with Carmichael's and Louisville,” she says.

Community—not profit—is the one word you hear most often at Carmichael's. The staff see their customers as a kind of extended family. “We're closely woven into the fabric of our community,” says Besse. “We pay serious attention to our customers, their likes and dislikes, needs and wants. We give gift certificates to just about anyone who walks into our door and asks for a donation for a local school, church, neighborhood or community nonprofit.”

Carmichael's relentless focus on efficiency, customer services and community building is paying off; over the past 10 years, sales have tripled and profits doubled. Even in this difficult economy, business is up 9% over 2008.

Asked why his store is so successful while so many others have faltered, Boggs is blunt. “I think booksellers today may be encouraged to waste too much time and money doing things that don't sell books,” he says. “The thing you have to do in this business is sell books.”

'Wonderful World' by Javier Calvo: Pulp fiction with a European twist

2009-04-14T09:28:00.001-07:00

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, April 12, 2009

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston. E-mail books@ dallasnews.com.

Spaniard Javier Calvo's first novel to be translated into English, Wonderful World, is a peculiar amalgam of crime caper, literary homage and Eurotrash sideshow.

It is December 2006, and the city of Barcelona is plastered with posters touting the arrival of the latest Stephen King novel, Wonderful World, "the story of a man that wakes up one day and discovers that everything around him has turned perfect ... His co-workers are friendly to him. His ex-wife, too ... .Wars end. Politicians turn smart."

Meanwhile, in the real world, antiques dealer Lucas Giraut is coping with the fallout from his father's death three months earlier. His affairs are as complicated as the cartonniers, antique desks filled with secret compartments, he collects.

Giraut's mother, Fanny, whose face has been rendered an immovable mask by a series of collagen injections and face-lifts, is challenging Giraut's mental competence in a bid for taking over the family's restoration business. He has enlisted a motley group to steal a quartet of Irish paintings his father had tried to acquire, landing him in jail. The thugs include: a gangster named Bocanegra (Black Mouth) who wears women's fur coats and runs a strip club called Dark Side of the Moon; a white Russian Rastafarian jewel thief; a thuggish giant who resembles the Thing from the Fantastic Four; and a sex addicted ex-cop.

All the while, he can only confide in his downstairs neighbor, a pre-pubescent girl named Valentina Parini, the self-proclaimed "Top European Expert on the work of Stephen King," who daydreams methods of creatively killing her schoolmates.

As Giraut journeys deeper into the underworld (and both Calvo's and the faux King novel progress), the book's strange mysteries begin to unravel. Why, for example, was Giraut's father so deathly afraid of Windows and why was he so obsessed with the band Pink Floyd? Whether this will matter to the reader depends entirely on how much you're willing to indulge Calvo's picturesque imagination. This is not a novel about deep emotions; rather, it is one intended to dazzle with its audacity. It is loaded with X-rated vice and entertains through exaggeration. (Think of a Pedro Almodóvar film.)

Despite the allusions to Stephen King, he isn't the model for the work. Calvo is taking his cues from American writers such as Jonathan Lethem – Calvo is married to his sister, who also translated this novel – and David Foster Wallace, whom Calvo has translated into Spanish. Fans of either of the aforementioned writers will best be able to appreciate this European riff on post-modern American pulp.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Wonderful World

Javier Calvo

(HarperCollins, $27.99)

A Good Time To Be Selling Used Books

2009-04-14T09:27:00.001-07:00

by Jim Milliot with Ed Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/13/2009

Not all businesses do badly in a recession; one segment of the book market that appears to be holding up fairly well is used books. “People are looking for bargains,” said Kathy Doyle Thomas, executive v-p at the used bookstore chain Half-Price Books, “and Half-Price is a bargain hunter's paradise.” Brian Elliott, president of the online marketplace Alibris, said sales rose about 18% in 2008, slower than in previous years but still a solid gain in difficult times. Sales at Alibris slowed in September, but bounced back enough at the end of the year for holiday sales to increase 8%. Sales continued strong in January, slowed in February, but came back again in March, Elliott said. At Half-Price, sales in the July through February period were up 9% and the company is optimistic it will finish fiscal 2009 on an up note.

The recession has not only increased consumers' interest in looking for inexpensive items but also increased interest in selling old books to raise cash, which has bolstered used book dealers' inventory and lowered purchase prices. “We're paying less for our used books because we're seeing more of the same titles,” Thomas said. While the online marketplaces don't buy books, Hannes Blum, president of Abebooks, said many of the sellers who use its service have increased their inventory. Elliott noted that part of Alibris's growth has come from expanding its partnerships with retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders.

The higher inventory has helped slow what had been one of the industry's biggest concerns, sliding prices. “Prices have stabilized a bit,” Elliott said. “The enormous downward pressure on prices seems to have worked its way through the system.” Still, a key component of the success of the online marketplaces has been the tools they provide, which give sellers and buyers information on pricing trends. And not all parts of the online market have been immune to the economic downturn; high-end antiquarian and rare book sales have suffered from the same lack of discretionary income affecting other book segments. “Collectors have become more cost conscious,” Blum said. Elliott noted, however, that Alibris had strong gains in its rare and collectible segment after it revamped that section on its Web site. At Half-Price, cooking titles have been in strong demand, along with young adult fiction. “People underestimate that section,” Thomas said.

Half-Price just opened its 103rd store last month and plans to open two more outlets by Memorial Day. With so many great real estate opportunities available, Doyle said, the challenge now is to not overexpand. After a failed experiment with online sales in the late 1990s, Half-Price has been using Amazon to sell online and is beginning to use the other online marketplaces. Since its launch, Half-Price has had a strong environmentalist bent, and Thomas believes the chain is now benefiting from heightened interest in the environment. “The green movement has helped used books become a little more acceptable,” Thomas said, adding that Half-Price alone has “kept millions and millions of books out of landfills.”

Even though the used book market is still enjoying a growth spurt, no one is complacent. “Our job is to keep demand growing faster than supply,” Elliott said.

'It Will Come to Me' by Emily Fox Gordon: a witty tale of academia

2009-03-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, March 29, 2009
By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Edward Nawotka is a Houston freelance writer.

At 56, Ruth Blau is "unplaceable, and hence invisible." Author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels, good enough to be hailed by "low-pH adjectives," Ruth has not published since the birth of her son Isaac, some 20 years earlier. These days she's exclusively identified as the wife of Ben Blau, professor of philosophy at the fictional Lola Dees Institute in Spangler, Texas, "a faculty wife desperate to impress."

Ruth narrates much of Houstonian Emily Fox Gordon's debut novel, It Will Come to Me, a brisk, witty chronicle of three weeks in the life of the Blaus as they deal with a series of small dramas: the arrival of a young new writer-in- residence at Lola Dees, the installation of a new university president, the replacement of Ben's highly efficient departmental secretary, and the promise of a reconciliation with Isaac, who suffers from mental illness and is living as a homeless man.

It Will Come to Me begs to be read as a romàn a clef or, at least, a book heavily informed by Fox Gordon's autobiography. The 60-something author teaches at Rice University (the obvious model for Lola Dees, as Houston is for Spangler) and wrote about her own treatment for mental problems in 2000's Mockingbird Years. Her second book, 2006's Are You Happy?, recounted her 1950s childhood among academics in Williamstown, Mass.

Fox Gordon understands the academic milieu intimately, and Ruth's pithy observations are memorable: Tenured professors are described as "marsupials, creatures with no natural enemies who could look forward to living out their days in absolute safety;" graduate students are alternately "good children" or "a zombie army" ready to find "new campuses in which to take root and propagate."

Of course, academics are easy targets – just look at any of the dozens of satires set at universities, from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim to Jane Smiley's Moo – and where Fox Gordon shines is in her serious depiction of the characters' concerns. Ruth and Ben are decidedly not caricatures, a flaw that plagues many academic satires. Ben's specialty in ethics wasn't chosen merely for its potential for irony: He is sincere about his job, thinking of virtue as something tangible, "not airy," but "meaty." Isaac's absence is not a metaphor of say, a lack of love in the Blaus' marriage, but a real problem.

The plot is another matter. It's too patchy, more a series of vignettes than a real story arc, and ends on such an unbelievable confluence of events that it would have been rejected by an undergraduate creative writing class. But the story itself will quickly be forgotten. What lingers is page after page of Fox Gordon's pithy, insightful observations about baby boomer angst and the (impossible) pursuit of academic happiness.

SIBA's Jewell Offering Free Book with Purchase

2009-03-27T07:24:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/26/2009 10:54:00 AM

Wanda Jewell, executive director of the Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance, has taken Barack Obama at his word and is doing her part to help increase traffic in her member stores entirely on her own. Dubbed the “Free Book Stimulus Plan,” the program aims to reward those who shop at SIBA stores by sending them a free book from Jewel’s personal library. All that is required is for anyone who purchases a book at a member store to fill out an online form, available at www.freebookstimulusplan.com and mail Jewel the receipt. She’ll in turn mail them a book from her personal library.

“If I hadn’t been working with SIBA for the past 20 years I wouldn’t have so many books to give away,” she said. Jewel will ship books anywhere in the contiguous 48 states. Initially, SIBA is paying for the postage, though Jewell plans to sell a signed first edition of John Irving’s The World According to Garp and other valuable volumes to fund the project, which is projected to last until her library is depleted.

Down Economy Pushes Up Remainders

2009-03-23T20:21:00.001-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/16/2009

I don't understand why it's not shoulder-to-shoulder in here,” said Paul Mann, co-owner of the Book Gallery, a bargain books chain with six locations throughout Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. He was standing amid the 500 or so tables piled high with bargain, remainder and hurt books at the Spring Book Show, held March 6–8 at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta. Mann was upbeat about the SBS. “Returns from Christmas are huge, and there's lots of great product to get jazzed about,” he explained. “With so much product coming in the warehouses, it's a buyer's market, since the companies have to move out old stock to make room for the new.”

So Mann was looking to score deals. Earlier this year, he purchased some five skids of books, 7,000–8,000 units, for which he paid a mere 12½ cents apiece, including shipping. “I held a '1 Day Sorting Sale' in which I left the books in the gaylords [boxes in which they were shipped], and priced every book marked $13.99 and lower for $1.99 and those above $14 for $2.99,” he said. “People got so excited they were diving into the gaylords face first. We sold about 1,500 books in the first 90 minutes, which is enough to cover the cost of all five skids. Everything we sold after that was profit.”

Mann isn't the only one experiencing a surge. “Bargain is up,” confirmed Jeffrey Press, president of World Publications Group of East Bridgewater, Mass., one of the largest remainder distributors. “The economy is bad and books are cheap entertainment. Things are so busy, we put in a permanent second shift at our warehouse.”

Yet the depressed economy isn't good for everyone. Smaller, hand-to-mouth operations are struggling and some have closed. “There were plenty of people we called to come whose phones were out of order,” said Larry May, director of the SBS. Some 850 people were registered for the event, a drop of 250 from 2008. “At the same time,” said May, “we still sold out the vendor space, had 15% new attendees and plenty of new sellers.”

Among notable new vendors was ToW Distribution, a graphic novel remainder house in Buford, Ga.; Parable from Franklin, Tenn.; a quartet from the U.K. (AB Books, 66 Books, PR Books and Columbia Marketing); and two university presses, the University of Alabama Press and the University of Tennessee Press. Daniel J.J. Ross, director of the University of Alabama Press, said the press has 100,000 books in overstock. “Previously, we would sell overstock direct, but came here as an experiment to see what kind of price we could get,” Ross said. He called the show “a learning experience” and observed that the sellers appeared to outnumber the buyers.

May estimated approximately 350 of those in attendance were buyers, including those from the big chains as well as discount outlets such as Citi Trends; largely absent were overseas buyers—currency devaluations prevented them from making the trip as they have in earlier years—and independent booksellers.

Among the issues being discussed at the show were publishers' plans to shrink lists, which could result in a tightening of the supply of remainders three to five years out. Most dismissed the buzz among publishers about trying to sell nonreturnable and higher sales of e-books as nonissues. All were following the saga of Borders, which should it fail would, in the words of one distributor, “dump tons of books” on the remainder shelves. (The Borders remainder buyer was at the show ordering books.)

“It's impossible to predict where things will go,” said May with a smile and a shrug. “This is the book business, after all.”

George Friedman's 'The Next 100 Years': unpredictable

2009-03-22T04:36:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Thanksgiving Day 2050: While most of America is "watching football and napping after digesting a massive meal," the Japanese launch moon-based missiles and destroy most of the United States' orbiting Battle Stars. This 21st-century Pearl Harbor will lead the world into war, pitting the U.S. — the globe's lone superpower — and its ally Poland against a coalition that includes Japan and a resurgent Turkey, which now controls most of the Middle East and commands an empire to rival that of the Ottomans.

"It will be a world war in the truest sense of the word, but given the technological advances in precision and speed, it won't be total war — societies trying to annihilate societies," writes 60-year-old-Austinite George Friedman in "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century." As such, total casualties of the fighting — which will be fought with hypersonic aircraft, space- based weaponry and armored, battery-powered foot soldiers — will cost perhaps 500,000 lives, just a few thousand of them American. It is, Friedman points out, a pittance compared with the 50 million who died in World War II.

The 21st-century world war is the centerpiece of Friedman's work of speculation and prediction. Examining a resurgent Russia under Putin, Friedman predicts that "Central Asia will be back in the Russian sphere of influence by 2010" and foresees a "rematch" of the cold war by 2020. The book ends with the U.S. on the verge of a conflict with Mexico as a result of mass immigration that has, over the long term, empowered our neighbor to the south and destabilized the U.S. from within. Along the way Friedman explains how Japan, Poland and Turkey become world powers and why so many things that seem important to us now — such as Islamic extremism and Chinese economic dynamism — will eventually fade from relevance.

"Some people have called me a hustler and suggested that a book like this is somehow frivolous," admits Friedman, from his cell phone while on book tour. "But this is a serious work that was written to make some complicated concepts accessible to a general audience. It is kind of the culmination of a life's work."

That work is now running Stratfor, a private intelligence company Friedman founded in Austin in 1996. Before that Friedman — who has a political science Ph.D. from Cornell University — spent two decades in academia, most recently at Louisiana State University, where he founded a precursor to Stratfor called the Center for Geopolitical Studies.

Like some of his theories, Friedman's choice of Austin as home for his business might seem counterintuitive. "You would think an intelligence organization would best be served by being in Washington, D.C.," he says. "But that is a city of gossip, It's easy to confuse the discussion about who is going to be promoted with making history. We wanted some distance from that in which to think. Austin has some advantages: UT has a superb library — which is essential to good intelligence — and a pool of bright, quirky people from which to recruit." He adds, "I hire a lot French medieval literature majors, people who have knowledge we don't have, see the world as we don't see it and are insatiable about learning new things. People who don't say 'That's impossible!'"

Friedman writes in "The Next 100 Years" that "Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination," adding "the changes that lead to the next era are always shockingly unexpected."

Of course, technically, a book such as this should be shelved as fiction, at least until it comes true. That said, even skeptics will find that the book's verifiable nonfiction — such as the history cited — is no less fresh when run through Friedman's mind. He offers, for example, an elegant disquisition on the unpredictability of history by moving decade through decade of the 20th century, explaining what the world looked like then and what happened a mere 10 years later. "In the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world,... the future seemed fixed," he begins. Of course, what soon followed was radically different.

Friedman's other major concern is something that is actually fixed: geography. "Geography is important, because it changes little," he says. "As a consequence, the same things happen over and over again. The frequency of wars — between France and Germany, for example — and their importance, are rooted in geographic forces. But that is the old civilization. The U.S. only emerged as the decisive global power after World War II and is still immature. The U.S.'s power is based on its Navy and ability to control both oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, which no other power has been able to do."

Friedman often compares the U.S.'s behavior to that of a teenager, which explains, for example, our actions post-9/11. "There is no question that American execution of the war in Iraq has been clumsy, graceless and in many ways unsophisticated. The U.S. was, indeed, an adolescent in its simplification of issues and in its use of power." He then adds the kicker: "But on a broader, more strategic level, that does not matter. So long as the Muslims are fighting each other, the United States has won its war."

This war, it seems, aims to prevent anyone from forming a coalition that offers a real challenge to the U.S. It is a strategy that will play itself out in the many small wars the U.S. is likely to find itself involved in during the next century — none of which we will necessarily want to "win." Ultimately, Friedman argues that the U.S., by virtue of its geography, population and technology, is likely to remain the world's primary decision maker. This message has found a welcome reception among readers, so much so that the book has become a surprise best-seller. It debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list in January and has remained on the list. According to Friedman's Austin-based literary agent, Jim Hornfischer, nearly 100,000 copies of the book are in print.

Perhaps the book serves as a palliative in this age of economic uncertainty.

On the subject of the current crisis, Friedman is sanguine. Take the current financial crisis, for example. "Look at 1972, 1984...and it goes from being an unprecedented disaster to cyclical. We bailed out Chrysler in the '70s, we bailed out savings and loans in the '80s, and we're bailing out banks today. In my lifetime the world has ended from a financial standpoint at least seven times," he notes. "The one thing Americans lack and need the most is perspective."

'Hiding Man' by Tracy Daugherty: Biography reveals Texas author Donald Barthelme to be a modern man of letters

2009-02-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, February 8, 2009
By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

No recent book about a contemporary writer has been more necessary, or welcome, than Tracy Daugherty's Hiding Man, the first comprehensive biography of the late Houstonian Donald Barthelme.Barthelme is credited as being among the great late-20th century fiction writers, and one of its few exemplary postmodernists, along with John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. In hundreds of short stories, most published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and '70s, he displayed a pyrotechnic literary technique that disoriented as often as it impressed readers.

These stories were collected in 10 volumes, starting with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and culminating in two best-of anthologies, Sixty Stories (1981) and Forty Stories (1984). There is a children's book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, Or the Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971), for which he won a National Book Award, and a quartet of novels, including Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975).

He had, in his time, "as much fame as a literary writer could expect in America," Daugherty writes. Today his reputation has waned, though he is credited with mentoring dozens of writers, many of whom studied with him at the University of Houston, where he taught from 1981 until his death from cancer in 1989.

As Daugherty skillfully explicates, Barthelme was born in Philadelphia but moved to Houston at age 2. He was educated in Houston Catholic schools (but graduated from Lamar High School), studied at U of H (never graduated) and reviewed movies for the old Houston Post. He was drafted into the Korean War (never fought), got serious about art (serving as a director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston) and wrote. He moved to New York in 1962 and only returned to Texas for the job at U of H, and only then as a part-timer.

That his fiction is not so well known now is largely a consequence of its difficulty: It is often somewhat absurd, typically devoid of plot, full of esoteric allusions to history, literature (Woyzeck, Husserl), current events and his life. In its time it was described as collage. Today, we would call it a mash-up. Whatever it is, it is not careless, something Daugherty spends a great deal of his book proving.

"He wanted to join the centuries-long literary conversation, not titillate thrill-seekers looking for a Book-of-the-Month selection," Daugherty writes.

Daugherty offers a coherent case for why Barthelme is important to American literature. He argues, "Not since Poe had anyone brought such ingenuity to the form." He does an exemplary job of connecting the man to both his era – this is a wonderful cultural history of Houston and New York in the latter half of the 20th century – and to his influences, which ranged from Barthelme's childhood copy of the Baltimore Catechism, which taught him that literature was not always blocks of prose, to Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot demonstrated to him how "philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on," according to Daugherty.

Daugherty outlines Barthelme's connoisseurship of city life, especially his fondness for long walks where "something ridiculous was bound to happen," as well as his dedication to women (he was married four times and had two daughters) and drink (Teacher's Scotch). He also deftly points out where the prose reflects the personal, connecting Barthelme's improvisational writing style to his hobby of jazz drumming, and the frequently dastardly father figures in the fiction to Barthelme's lifelong rebellion against his powerful father.

What one comes away with is a portrait of a thoroughly modern man of letters, one whose imagination was shaped by his environs and reading.

Perhaps the one important aspect that's missing from the book is proof that Barthelme was, in addition to being a great avant-garde writer, a great Texas writer. How so? Consider this abstract from The New Yorker of his story, "Porcupines at the University," one of his most accessible, published in April 1970.

"A herd of porcupines want to enroll at a university, or so thinks the Dean when he sees them approaching. The Dean doesn't want them because there are no facilities for four or five thousand porcupines. The porcupine wrangler, Griswold, wanted to drive the porcupines to the great porcupine canneries of the East, & make a lot of money. He also hoped to be a singer on the Ed Sullivan show and then at a Las Vegas night club. As they near the university, the herd is threatened by the Dean, who is ready to repel them with a Gatling gun. A deal is made and the herd is taken to New York. In the last scene the citizens in their cars are watching the porcupine herd on the Cross-Bronx Expressway."

The story is a hilarious satirical concoction, one that recasts the work of classic Texas writers, especially J. Frank Dobie, and his contemporaries, John Williams among them, as a Looney Tunes cartoon. (It's fun to imagine what he'd do with Cormac McCarthy's work.)

By calling his biography Hiding Man Daugherty is alluding to the fact that much of the workings of Barthelme's mind seems unknowable. So, his job as a biographer is, ultimately, to try and use the life as a skeleton key to the work, which he does admirably well. Still, writers will tell you that biographies are irrelevant without having read their original works. So find a copy of Sixty Stories or The Dead Father and start there. Then, once thoroughly enchanted, turn to Daugherty for guidance.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Hiding Man

A Biography of Donald Barthelme

Tracy Daugherty

(St. Martin's Press, $35)

Book Review: 'Germania' gets the history right, but misses on the made-up stuff

2009-02-08T08:13:00.000-08:00

Sunday, February 8, 2009

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

For three weeks following the death of Adolf Hitler, Allied-occupied Germany was left under political control of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the Nazi navy.

Dubbed the Flensburg Reich, for the northern German city where the administration was located, the short-lived government sought at first to persuade the Allies to team with the Germans to repel marauding Russians, and then, once evidence of the Holocaust became widespread, to show mercy.

Dallasite Brendan McNally uses this overlooked but fascinating episode of history as the basis for his debut novel, Germania – much of it written at the Starbucks on Lower Greenville. Germania is the name Hitler gave to the capital of his dreamt-of 1,000-year empire, a place of "salmon skies and buildings, of civic spaces, and a city that would be a thousand years of glory, a light upon nations."

Those words are spoken in the novel by Nazi architect Albert Speer. He, along with SS chief Heinrich Himmler, are the two key characters in the book. It shifts between the two men, first Speer as he tries to save what remains of German industry and Himmler as he dreams of becoming "King of Europe" while trying to negotiate a separate peace with Eisenhower, and later as they plot their escapes.

All the while the fates of the two men are caught up with those of an invented quartet of Jewish vaudeville performers called The Flying Magical Loerber Brothers. We meet them – Ziggy, Franzi, Manni and Sebastian – as the novel opens, performing acrobatic and magic tricks on a pre-war stage (and off-stage, killing Nazis), and again later, as each has a role to play in history: Manni as an assassin who cozies up to Speer, Ziggy as a Nazi U-boat captain loyal to Dönitz and the Navy, Sebastian as an operative with The Blood of Israel, and Franzi, a gay double-agent, working with both the Russians and the British, who becomes Himmler's masseuse and spiritual adviser.

Each Loerber Brother is also endowed with a psionic ability – Manni has the ability of mind control, Sebastian controls people's dreams, Ziggy is a telepath – which have, presumably, helped them survive as Jews in plain sight.

Unfortunately, this marriage of history and magic realism is awkward at best. McNally gets the history part right – the plot and characters as drawn from the record are, for the most part, wholly convincing – it's the made-up stuff that proves problematic. The brothers are too indistinct as individuals, particularly in scenes where more than one are present; the Nazis are the strongest presence, and history itself has already given us more than enough of these men.

Germania has antecedents in literature, most notably Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Michel Tournier's 1970 novel The Ogre, both of which offer magic realist takes on the Third Reich. But these are complex novels where moral ambiguity is threaded through the narrative, provocative enough to be polarizing.

McNally's novel isn't as lofty – Germania is intended more as entertainment than a philosophical or psychological study – and this is the problem. The topic with which he's dealing – the German Jews' relationship to the Holocaust and Nazis – may simply be far too real to ever be rendered as fanciful.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Germania

Brendan McNally

(Simon & Schuster, $26)

Jerusalem Book Fair on Track

2009-02-06T10:14:00.001-08:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 2/2/2009

After the recent fighting in Gaza, Americans planning to travel to the biennial Jerusalem Book Fair, taking place February 15–20, might be reconsidering their plans. The peace seems fragile, but fair director Yoel Mako said all events remain in place. “People need not worry,” said Mako. “I'm quite sure everything will be quite nice by the time of the fair. I would say very openly that even when there is fighting taking place in Gaza, life in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv is quite normal.”

He said the fighting has had “no effect whatsoever” on plans for the fair. “We have 30 writers coming from all over the world. All of the cultural programs are proceeding and there have been no cancellations.” Among those expected from the U.S. are some 50 people from the trade community, including those who participate in the fair's editorial and agent fellowship programs. In all, some 80,000 members of the public are also expected, primarily to shop for books. “The strength of the fair is the cultural programs and activities that connect international and Israeli writers,” said Mako. “Amos Oz, for example, is launching his new book. I'm quite sure that during the fair there will be discussion about the affairs of the region. In fact, we encourage it.”

This year the fair's top honor, the Jerusalem Prize, will be awarded to Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The prize is given to an author “for literary achievements in the field of freedom of the individual in society.”

Bryan Burrough's 'The Big Rich': gossipy, engrossing

2009-02-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

'Barbarians at the Gate' author's latest book examines the rise and fall of the great Texas oil men

By Edward Nawotka

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 01, 2009

Who do Texans have to thank for the Super Bowl, the rise of political conservatism, and our reputation as rootin'-tootin', Cadillac drivin', larger-than-life caricatures?

Easy answer: H. L. Hunt, Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, aka "The Big Four." These men are "quickly passing from headlines into history," laments Temple native Bryan Burrough, author of "The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes." "But they did more to cement the public perception of Texas and Texans than anything in our history."

Burrough knows a good story when he hears one: A special correspondent for Vanity Fair, he began his career with The Wall Street Journal in Houston and Dallas, and has authored or co-authored five books, including the blockbuster "Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco," which is now in its 22nd edition. Reached by phone at his home in New Jersey, it's immediately clear Burrough hasn't gone native. He speaks with a distinct Texas drawl and immediately pours on the charm. "As soon as my last child is off to college, I'm moving to Austin," he says, "It's the best city in America." He also points out that his wife is a former Statesman editor.

Despite Burrough's Texas roots, he didn't come up with the idea for "The Big Rich." In 2004, he'd just published "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34," (which, incidentally, will be released this summer as a movie starring Johnny Depp), and his editor suggested his next book cover Texas oil.

"I knew immediately how to do it. It had to be about the four families," says Burrough. "These men were the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gateses of their day. But at the same time, they were the original Beverly Hillbillies."

He continues, "Not one of these men graduated from college. They were the first shirtsleeve millionaires."

Though Burrough found no proof that "The Beverly Hillbillies" was based on any of the Texas oilmen, there was one show that was - "Dallas," which was loosely inspired by the querulous clan of H.L. Hunt.

Hunt, who hailed from Missouri, transformed himself from "a gentleman planter into a professional gambler and then, finally, at the age of thirty-five, into a successful oilman," writes Burrough. The year was 1924, when Hunt controlled about $7 million worth of oil. By the early 1950s he was a billionaire and considered, with the possible exception of Sid Richardson, the richest man in America.

In Burrough's depiction, Hunt is far more complicated than you might expect: A "strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind, a self-educated thinker who was convinced - absolutely convinced - that he was possessed of talents that bordered on the superhuman." He was also a covert bigamist, with three families, who became an influential backer of political conservatives and such a vocal critic of John F. Kennedy that he was suspected of orchestrating the president's assassination. (One of his sons, Lamar, dreamed up the Super Bowl. After seeing his daughter playing with a Super Ball, he thought it would be a good name for the first championship game in 1967 between the recently merged NFL and upstart AFL, which he helped to establish.)

Hunt was not alone in willingness to leverage wealth for political clout. Burrough recalls how, in the 1950s, Clint Murchison used his "personal retreat" - the Hotel Del Charro in La Jolla, Calif. - to curry favor with Joe McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, who liked it so much, he returned every summer from 1952 until his death in 1972.

"The oilmen's legacy is the type of Texas conservative that has been so successful in Washington in recent years," Burrough says. "George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Dick Armey ? I don't know how many of them would have existed today were it not for the money and influence of the oilmen back in the '40s and '50s."

Of course, with Barack Obama now in the Oval Office, things are starting to look different.

"Sure, you still have people like T. Boone Pickens who can get himself heard, " says Burrough, "but that only means he has the money to buy ads, not real influence."

Diminishing influence

Aside from politics, the other significant legacy of the oilmen is one of conspicuous consumption, something best embodied by the story of the Shamrock Hotel, Burrough's personal favorite tale in a book full of decadent tales.

"I was shocked there wasn't more written about it already," said Burrough. "It really deserves its own book."

The Shamrock Hotel was the dream of oilman Glenn McCarthy, a mustachioed, bourbon-swilling, fist-fighting Houstonian who got his start running gas stations, struck oil, and palled around with Howard Hughes and John Wayne. He served as the model for Jett Rink, the oilman in Edna Ferber's 1952 novel "Giant," later played by James Dean in the 1956 movie of the same name.

In the late 1940s, McCarthy embarked on his dream project, a hotel so lavish he hoped it would turn Houston into an A-list destination, and as a consequence make him "The King of Texas."

The Shamrock Hotel (the name was chosen through a newspaper contest) had 1,100 rooms, a 10,919-square-foot dining room, parking for 5,000 cars, the world's largest pool and a neon sign that could be seen from miles away. It cost $18 million, and the opening party, held on St. Patrick's Day, 1949, cost another $1.5 million. That event, recounted in detail by Burrough, was a star-studded affair; McCarthy chartered a train to bring in movie stars - Dorothy Lamour, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner and Edgar Bergen among them - from California. It was probably worthy of its place on the pantheon of great parties next to Truman Capote's "Black and White Ball."

Of course, like the power and influence of Texas oil itself, the party didn't last. Overextended, within five years McCarthy lost the Shamrock to his investors. Later converted into a Hilton, it remained open, much diminished, until June 1, 1987, when the first wrecking balls smashed into its façade.

"If I had to pick a date," says Burrough, "that would be when the era of the Big Rich came to its end"

Tellingly, what replaced the Shamrock was a parking lot for the burgeoning Houston Medical Center, which has become almost as synonymous with the city as oil. Of course, much of the Center's funding came from another of the Big Four, Roy Cullen.

Though the influence of Texas "oilionaires" might not be what it used to be, it's still an integral part of our economy and history, one Burrough believes is central to any Texan's identity.

"Sure, as a political and cultural animal, Texas never quite fulfilled its potential," says Burrough. "But people forget that when these people burst onto the national stage in 1950, Americans thought of millionaires as Vanderbilts and Astors, guys in distant mansions. Here, for the first time, were a bunch of ordinary Joes who came into an astonishing amount of money. We're so used to it now, with the Internet millionaires, but then it was a new thing. In fact, there were so many Texas millionaires and billionaires it began the whole process of those wealthiest Americans lists.

Adds Burrough, "Anyone who calls themselves a Texan has an obligation to know and remember them."

Domnitz To Step Down from ABA

2009-01-29T10:18:00.001-08:00

By Jim Milliot and Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/15/2009 1:30:00 PM

In a letter sent out this afternoon, Gayle Shanks, owner of Changing Hands Bookstore and president of the ABA, informed the membership that ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz will leave the association in July. Domnitz’s contract expires this month, but Shanks told PW that the association asked him to stay on to give them a chance to find a replacement “in a conscientious and timely way.” Domnitz has led ABA since 1997 when he succeeded Bernie Rath.

In her letter and comments to PW, Shanks said she believes Domnitz’s most important accomplishment during his tenure has been improving the communication between the ABA staff and the membership. By facilitating interaction among all types of booksellers, Domnitz helped “ABA become a cohesive group looking to continue independent bookselling in this country,” Shanks said.

Under Domnitz, ABA placed more emphasis on its educational programs, made the transition from its Book Sense marketing campaign to the new IndieBound and filed an antitrust lawsuit against Barnes & Noble and Borders that was settled in 2001. The association also sold its headquarters and property in Tarrytown, N.Y. and moved to smaller offices. Domnitz’s legacy, Shanks said, “will be strong booksellers who are well educated and have a desire to maintain their bookstores in their community on into the future.”

The ABA has formed a CEO Search Committee to find a successor to Domnitz. Shanks will chair the committee, and other members will include Michael Tucker from Books Inc. (San Francisco, CA), Steve Bercu from BookPeople (Austin, TX), Linda Ramsdell from The Galaxy Bookshop (Hardwick, VT), Lilla Weinberger from Readers' Books (Sonoma, CA), and Betsy Burton from The King's English (Salt Lake City, UT). ABA legal counsel, Deanne Ottaviano of Arent Fox LLP, will assist in the search. The first meeting of the committee will take place in Salt Lake City during the upcoming Winter Institute.

Book Festival Director Rallies to Save Atlanta Writing Programs

2009-01-29T10:13:00.001-08:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/26/2009 2:31:00 PM

When the Atlanta History Center, parent organization that runs the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, let go of 15 of their 74 staff, including 7 of the 8 staff of the Mitchell House, it effectively ended the institution’s creative writing programs, among the most prominent in the city, and put in doubt the future of its popular author reading series. But all was not lost: within three days the writing programs were reinstituted, this time under the auspices of Agnes Scott College. Dubbed Agnes Writes, classes begin in February and will be taught by novelist David Fulmer and memoirist Hollis Gillespie, among others. Summer writing camps for children and young adults are also on the schedule, with Julie Bookman, former director of the writing programs at the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, planned to direct.

Darren Wang, executive director, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival, organized the transition. “With everything that’s been happening with the writing community in Atlanta, there’s a real need to make this happen,” Wang told PW. “We were in a position to make this happen, so we did.”

"Agnes Scott College has a tremendous literary history," said Wang. "The college's annual Writers' Festival is nationally admired and has brought the likes of Julia Alvarez, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates to speak to metropolitan Atlanta's writers. I also knew, through working with Agnes Scott as a partner to the Decatur Book Festival, that the college moved nimbly and was quick to embrace new opportunities."

A Cautionary e-Book Tale

2009-01-29T10:11:00.001-08:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/13/2009 7:44:00 AM

On December 23 ScrollMotion released the first batch of its widely anticipated e-book apps for the iPhone, starting with titles such as Twilight and Eragon. Within 24 hours the company had pulled them from the iTunes store due to security issues.

“A flaw in the encryption came to our attention almost immediately,” said Calvin Baker, director of ScrollMotion’s e-book program. “Since security and DRM are among our highest priorities, we thought it important to take immediate action.”

Unfortunately, that means ScrollMotion and its partner companies, Hachette Book Group and Random House among them, lost out on the post-Christmas rush of iPhone and iTunes owners fillling their new gizmos with data. The apps reappeared this past weekend. As of Monday afternoon, the 14 titles are again for sale.
Matt Shatz, v-p of digital at Random House, told PW that the delay had no bearing on the publisher's plans to release some 20 books that will soon be available through iTunes via ScrollMotion (search under “Iceberg Reader”). Maja Thomas, v-p, Hachette Digital Media, confirmed that Hachette had a similar number of titles forthcoming on ScrollMotion.

“It’s very, very unlikely that anything would have happened,” said Baker about the experience, “but we thought it better to be overly cautious.” Better, as they say, to be safe than sorry.

Follett Ends Trade Store Experiment

2009-01-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/12/2009 12:13:00 PM

After nearly three years in business, Intellectual Property, a stand-alone trade bookstore operated by Follett in Austin, Texas, will close in March. The 6,000, sq-ft. bookstore opened in 2006 across from the campus of the University of Texas and exclusively sold trade books, academic titles, and sidelines, but no textbooks.

Initially, Follett discussed the possibility of using Intellectual Property and its branding as a prototype for future trade stores, though no subsequent locations were opened.

Follett was recruited by the University to open the store after a Barnes & Noble on the same street closed the previous year. The University paid Intellectual Property an annual subsidy of $75,000 for it to host events for UT professors and sell books on campus. The decision to close comes as the store’s lease comes up for renewal.“Unfortunately, foot traffic wasn’t what we expected it to be and we were never able to sell enough volume in that location,” said Follett spokesperson Elio DiStaola. “We struggled to make our sales goals.”

DiStaola admitted that the off-campus location may have been a factor – the University of Texas is some 40 acres in size. “As a company that manages 800 or so college stores, I can tell you there’s a big difference between being at the center of campus and not” He added, “There are so many place for people to buy books now and in this financial environment, it made no sense to keep this one open.”

The store currently employs eight people; manager, Chris Murray, is transferring across Austin to manage the Follett bookstore at Huston-Tillotson University.

Schaffner Press: Publishing as Improvisation

2009-01-26T09:05:00.000-08:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/26/2009

Tim Schaffner's hobby, jazz drumming, put him on a roundabout path to independent publishing. “I got involved with Artt Frank. He played with Chet Baker and has been my teacher and mentor,” said Schaffner. “We put together a book for jazz drummers—Essentials for the Be Bop Drummer [by Artt Frank and Pete Swan, 2005]. That led to a memoir by a jazz musician in L.A. who had been a convict at Folsom Prison for 10 years—Hope to Die [by Verdi Woodward, 2006]—and that led to The Snow Angel [by Michael Graham, 2006]; that was my first hardcover.”

Publishing is in Schaffner's blood. The son of a literary agent—whose clients included Ray Bradbury, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Beard—Tim took over his father's agency when his father died in 1983 and ran it until 1995, first in New York City and then in Tucson, Ariz., where he moved in 1990. After closing the agency, Schaffner taught high school English and English as a second language, and drummed.

Initially, Schaffner, now 48, founded his eponymous press to revive out-of-print titles. “That had always been my dream,” Schaffner said. Among his first books were Sisters on the Bridge of Fire (2002) by Debra Denker, a Central Asia travelogue that was originally published in 1993 by Burning Gate Press; Barbara Guest's 1994 Doubleday biography Herself Defined: H.D. and Her World, which Schaffner republished in 2003; and Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness by Edward Butscher, a Seabury Press hardcover in 1976 and a Schaffner Press paperback in 2004.

Schaffner signed on with IPG in 2005 for distribution. This, along with keeping print runs low—typically a few thousand copies—has enabled him to continue publishing while slowly building a higher profile. There have even been some critical and sales successes: the Plath bio and The Lost Childhood by Yehuda Nir, a memoir of life in Warsaw during WWII that Schaffner reprinted in 2007, have gone into second printings. Father Michael's Lottery by Johan Steyn, a fictional account of doctors battling AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa that Schaffner bought from KwaZulu Natal University Press, was blurbed by Ian McEwan and Margaret Drabble, and was a Book Sense notable book in January 2008.

The year 2009 will be the biggest year yet for the press, which has a handful of new titles scheduled for publication, including the just-released Dancing at the River's Edge by Alida Brill and Michael D. Lockshin, a dual memoir by a doctor and his patient documenting a chronic illness, and Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, a hip-hop–inspired mystery by Marc Blatte due in March. The book, slated for a 3,000-copy first printing in hardcover, is picking up buzz; the author—a Grammy Award–nominated songwriter—is already scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

The press's highest-profile book this year is likely to be One Ring Circus, an anthology of 25 years' of boxing journalism written by Katherine Dunn, author of the acclaimed novel Geek Love. The book, coming in April, is likely to attract some of Dunn's cultish fan base.

Serendipity again played a role in this acquisition: Dunn was introduced to Schaffner through a friend, the film critic D.K. Holm, who is working on a book about filmmaker Richard Linklater for Schaffner.

“I had the idea for a collection in the back of my mind, but hadn't put any work into it until I was introduced to Tim,” Dunn said. Her agent, Richard Pine at Inkwell Management, negotiated a modest contract for the book.

“He was understanding of the situation,” said Schaffner, “and in fact seemed quite pleased that someone had taken note of this side of her.”

So far, Dunn said, she is delighted to be working with a small press: “Tim is both editor and publisher, so there's no disconnect there like there can be with a larger house.” She added, “It's been educational and revealing to me about what's taken place in American publishing. Here's an example of an indie press taking up slack from the conglomerate publishers. Working with Tim has been wonderful.”

Other forthcoming Schaffner Press books include the aforementioned look at Richard Linklater, as well as bios of Ken Kesey and John D. MacDonald. And while the list is eclectic, it isn't quite as improvised as it appears: “If you look at my list, the underlying theme is social issues and the concerns of our society,” said Schaffner. “I'm interested in books that come from a person immersed in a world that don't necessarily tell a story in a chronological order, and also address something larger than the subject itself. I have several books under contract that reflect that.”

Great American Bargain Book Show Travels to Boston

2009-01-26T09:04:00.001-08:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2009 11:12:00 AM

This summer, the Great American Bargain Book Show (GABBS) will relocate from Atlanta to Boston, where it will be held in the Hynes Convention Center, August 21-22. It will be the first large-scale official remainder show in the Northeast.

The show originated in Nashville, Tenn. as the Onboard Remainder Christmas Show and lasted for five years before L.B. May and Associates, owners of the Spring Book Show, purchased the show in 1997, moved it to Atlanta, and gave it a new name. The show has traditionally positioned itself as an early opportunity for booksellers to stock up on remainders prior to the holidays and CIROBE.

“I think the timing is right for the move,” said co-owner Larry May in a statement. “Boston is the right city, too. We looked at a lot of different cities and several were suitable, but, for a number of reasons, Boston made the most sense. First, the Northeast region is full of independent bookstores and they are geographically concentrated in a much smaller area than those in the Southeast. Secondly, because of Boston’s proximity to metro New York, the show will be easily accessible to the big buyers and the internationals.”

The Boston-area is already home to two major remainder vendors: Strictly By-The-Book in Fall River, Mass. and World Publications, in Bridgewater, Mass.

John Strymish, buyer at the New England Mobil Book Fair in Newton Highlands, Mass., said although he believes he can negotiate a better deal by going direct to vendors than at shows, he was happy GABBS was traveling to Boston. “I would probably go to it because it was in town—depending on how much money I had and how scared I was to spend it.” He added, “Remainders are a huge part of our business and they are doing better right now than anything else in the store.”

Wiley Tests e-Texts in Texas

2009-01-21T09:51:00.001-08:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/19/2009

When Kevin Hegarty, v-p and CFO of the University of Texas at Austin, went looking for a publisher to supply e-textbooks for classes at the school, he was surprised by lack of enthusiasm. “We visited with publishers and they all said they were willing to pioneer on this, but the only one that came to the table with a serious deal was Wiley,” Hegarty said. “Of course, now, since the deal was announced, Pearson is chomping at the bit. McGraw-Hill is chomping at the bit.”

When classes start January 20, about 1,300 students for six different classes will be given Wiley e-textbooks—what Hegarty called “essentially enhanced PDFs.” UT has licensed the books to test how functional e-textbooks are for faculty and students. “The real question in my mind is whether the tools of digitization have progressed far enough that faculty will find it useful,” said Hegarty. He added, “As you might guess, the professors in math, engineering and accounting were the most interested.” A team of learning psychologists has been hired to track the experiment and assess its result.

Hegarty said Texas is paying $25 to $45 per book and negotiated roughly a 50% discount on full price of the textbooks. (The school also has the right to print any textbook at a cost of 1.5 cents per page for students who request a physical copy.) “There was just too much work going into this for a 10% discount,” he said. While he appreciates the cost savings, he thinks they could and should be reduced by as much as 70%–80% of current levels. If the e-book test is embraced, said Hegarty, the university might wrap the cost of the books into the class itself.

One critic of the plan is Michael Granof, chairman of the University Co-op, the University of Texas's textbook store, and a professor of accounting at the UT graduate schools of business and public policy. “There's no reason for a university to get involved with licensing,” he said. “If a publisher has an e-book available, the instructor can put the link to the book on the course Web site and the student can click the link and buy the book from the Co-op, just as they would for any other book they bought.”

He predicted that if the university takes over responsibility for supplying textbooks in digital form to students, it will undermine the viability of the bookstore. “The Co-op is a not-for-profit—meaning 100% of our profits go to the university,” said Granof.

Based on the Co-op's firsthand experience selling e-books, Granof believes he can predict the outcome of UT's experiment: in the 2008 fall semester, the Co-op sold a total of 55 e-books, though they were available for 198 courses taken by a total of 15,000 students.“E-books are definitely coming, but when they are going to get here, I'm not sure,” said Granof.

Ryan D'Agostino's 'Rich Like Them': revealing, banal

2009-01-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

An unconventional look at America's richest people pays a visit to Austin ritziest zip code

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Ryan D'Agostino's mother probably never told him that it was impolite to ask strangers about their money. A former writer for Money magazine and now an editor at Esquire, D'Agostino visited 20 of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the United States to canvas homeowners for their success stories. The resulting book, "Rich Like Them," is a grab bag of "how I made millions" and "save your pennies" stories from tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley's (94027 — the richest ZIP), country clubbers in Las Vegas (89109), Manhattanites (10021) and our own local moguls.

The Austin ZIP he visits is 78730 — which is roughly bounded by Capital of Texas Highway (Loop 360), RM 2222 and the Colorado River — and was, surprisingly, the only Texas entry on the list of the 100 wealthiest. (D'Agostino used 2005 stats. 78730 fell off the list in 2007.)

In all, D'Agostino visited 19 towns in 11 states, walked 60 miles, knocked on about 500 doors and conducted 50 interviews.

Sure, he could have simply phoned, like any other reporter. But, D'Agostino argues, "Walking a few miles through a town on a regular day tells you a lot about its rhythms, the cadence of its goings-on, its values, even its history. Knocking on strangers' doors reveals a town's fiber, its small glories, its rust and dents, its quiet spots."

Rust and dents? Not in these neighborhoods.

Anyone who has done any canvassing knows it has its challenges. Big houses tend to be on big lots, with plenty of security and homeowners who work hard and therefore often aren't home. (During my college years, while canvassing for a group that advocated turning weapons factories into manufacturers of domestic appliances, I spotted an enormous house with a BMW in the drive, meaning someone was home. It turned out to be the residence of the CEO of Raytheon. His wife gave me $5 and told me to "go to McDonalds and get a real job.") D'Agostino encounters grumpy housekeepers, a threatening dog in Westport, Conn. (06880), and daunting gates in Beverly Hills (90210, natch), which he circumvents by tailing a UPS man and slipping onto properties after him.

Those people that do talk, he reasons, are likely to be worthy of reading about, "Because close-minded, unadventurous, uninteresting people wouldn't invite a stranger into their homes and share their life stories with him." (No, but someone lonely might. Ask anyone who's ever delivered pizza.)

D'Agostino organizes the book thematically, into a half dozen sections, with titles ranging from "Open Your Eyes" and "Luck Doesn't Exist" to "The Economics of Obsession" and "The Myth of Risk." He even defines different character "types" — The Visionary, The "Lucky" One, The Worker Bee, The Connector and The Renegade — an echo of Malcolm Gladwell's triumvirate of The Salesman, The Connector and The Maven in "The Tipping Point." This suggests, at least to the casual browser, that D'Agostino possesses a serious business intelligence.

But compared with Gladwell, whose new book, "Outliers," also tries to distill a formula for success, D'Agostino sounds a bit too much like an overeager junior executive.

Maybe it's his willingness to trust in complete strangers, or the way he labels cars and houses with price tags or the simple fact that so much of the advice he echoes is clichéd, along the lines of "be driven by more than money," "work for yourself" and "learn from failure." It's all timeless, if a bit pedestrian. D'Agostino admits as much when he writes: "Not everyone who makes $1.6 million a year is Lao-tzu."

When D'Agostino talks to a fortysomething Dellionaire, a woman he dubs "The Dell Lady," who was one of the first 900 employees of the company, she credits being in the right place at the right time but doesn't call it a lucky break.

"Luck?" says The Dell Lady, "Luck is when you're at your desk until 4 a.m. every night, chasing deals and trying to come up with the next big thing, and a few years later you look up and your broker tells you you're worth a few million dollars."

Perhaps, but for every Dell there are tens of thousands of other companies staffed by dedicated workaholics that never turn their employees into early retirees.

Another Austinite, Mark Banta, who founded a successful medical services company in his 20s, tells D'Agostino that he worked 15- to 20-hour days to make himself a success.

Work hard. That's timeless, if a bit dull, as far as advice goes.

The Austinites depicted in the book come across as relatively modest about their success, something Banta confirms when he tells D'Agostino that the city has "a lot of seven-figure folks, and you also have a lot of eight-figure folks, too. You just wouldn't know it. They wear blue jeans and golf shirts." They are also welcoming. D'Agostino remarks in passing that Austin was where he had his highest degree of success getting good interviews — about 40 percent compared with an average of 10 percent elsewhere.

As one would expect of a book based on the premise of knocking on doors in expensive neighborhoods, much of the advice D'Agostino gets concerns success in the real estate market. Austinite Steve Wolford, whose occupation isn't disclosed but who seems to be some sort of real estate investor — it's a signal weakness of this book that D'Agostino doesn't always make such things clear — greets D'Agostino while barefoot and wearing "khaki shorts and a faded lavender T-shirt." He then invites D'Agostino into his 4,300-square-foot custom built house to take in the view from his back deck.

"This view — this is my insurance," Wolford says of the vista, which encompasses the downtown Austin skyline and Lake Austin and guarantees that the house will always be sellable.

"Insurance is a good thing, and Wolford was right: Someone would always want that view," writes D'Agostino in agreement — putting Wolford's statement in the same category of seemingly unimpeachable wisdom as statements from earlier in the book that people "will always want to live on the water" and "forever want to live in Westport, Connecticut."

Such pronouncements underscore the glaring, fatal flaw in "Rich Like Them": A fancy house is no barometer of wealth. Since the recent mortgage meltdown, it's even among the most suspicious assets: "jumbo" and "Alt-A" mortgages blew a lot of hot air into the housing bubble and look to be among the largest categories of defaults in 2009. People who claim to have made their money in real estate cannot necessarily be trusted.

Even so, there are a number of heartening cases in the book that illustrate how diligence, intuition and, yes, a bit of luck can pay off handsomely. As it turns out, D'Agostino's "general philosophy of success—oversimplified," arrived at after so many interviews, boils down to little more than common sense: "never slack[ing] off and periodically socking away untold piles of cash into your bank account."

Tenacity + compound interest = wealth. Now that's advice you can bank on

German Book Office's 10th Anniversary

2009-01-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

December was a busy month for the German Book Office in New York.

First, the organization celebrated its 10th anniversary with a lunch on December 5—unfortunately timed for Black Wednesday; guest of honor Random House CEO Markus Dohle sent his regrets. Eleven days later, it hosted its second “buzz panel” to promote new German-language titles to potential editors. The biannual event, which was inaugurated in May, drew 40 people to listen as translators and scouts pitched books at Deutsches Haus on the New York University campus. Finally, the GBO began serving as the official, rather than de facto, New York office for the Frankfurt Book Fair. Hannah Johnson is the new liaison assisting U.S. publishers with their arrangements for the annual fair.

The GBO, which is a public/private partnership supported by the German Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and the Frankfurt Book Fair, has been “instrumental in bringing hundreds of book titles to the attention of American publishers,” said Riky Stock, GBO New York's director since 2002. A recent example of a book published with the help of the GBO, Stock noted, is Fred Wander's novel The Seventh Well, released by W.W. Norton. Stock emphasized that the GBO does not sell rights, but assists with logistics and bringing attention to German authors who haven't hit the bestsellers list. “A popular writer like Cornelia Funke might not need our help, but there are plenty more who do,” Stock said. Over a calendar year, the GBO promotes as many as 40 fiction titles, 40 children's books and 80 nonfiction titles, which are divided into spring and fall lists and published as catalogues.

Looking forward, Stock said that GBO's attention is turning increasingly toward working with university presses, which have been especially receptive to publishing German nonfiction, and she cited recent sales to Stanford and Princeton University presses; Stanford has signed Violence as Worship by Hans G. Kippenberg, while Princeton has acquired Trust in Violence by Jan Philipp Reemtsma. In 2009 the GBO's 10th annual “editor's trip,” which takes a group of overseas editors to visit German publishers and editors, will focus on nonfiction books.

“People always say that Americans aren't interested in translated literature or books from foreign countries,” said Stock. “Our experience at the German Book Office has proven that not to be true. We wouldn't be here after 10 years if they weren't.”

Year in Review 2008: Literature -- from Texas

2008-12-28T12:15:00.000-08:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

The year 2008 should erase any lingering doubt about Texas' importance on the literary landscape. Texas writers hit best-seller lists, took home national awards and sparked international controversies.

On the business side, one of the largest new independent bookstores in the country opened for business in Plano.

And elsewhere, it was a good year for vampires – and a bad one to be an American looking for a Nobel Prize.

TOP 10 OF 2008

1 Texans win National Book Awards: The swells in New York City might have been shocked when two of the four National Book Awards went to Texans this past November – but we weren't. (After all, Texans have also won a trio of Pulitzer Prizes for books over the last three years). Thank you, Mark Doty, University of Houston professor and winner of the poetry prize for his collection, Fire to Fire, and Annette Gordon-Reed, the Livingston-born author who won in the nonfiction category for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. You did our state proud.
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2 Legacy Books opens: Sleek, modern and, at 23,000 square feet, huge by independent bookstore standards, Legacy Books opened just in time for the economy to start crumbling. Still, you have to see the new store in Plano for yourself: It boasts an 1,800-square-foot kids section, a kitchen for cooking demos, a cafe that offers beer and wine – and 110,000 books. North Texans now have another excuse to keep their spending local.

3 Stephenie Meyer bewitches: If you think 110,000 books sounds like a lot, it's nothing compared with the 7 million copies sold of Ms. Meyer's Twilight saga, about teenage Bella and her vampire boyfriend, Edward. It was a big year for the author, who turned 35 on Christmas Eve: She published her first adult novel, The Host, in May; the final Twilight volume, Breaking Dawn, in August; and saw the film version of Twilight land in theaters in December. A May event in Frisco attracted more than 1,000 fans.

4 Cormac McCarthy archives purchased by Texas State: Though he now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Cormac McCarthy allowed his literary archive to be purchased by the Southwest Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos. There, it will reside in perpetuity alongside the works of other notable Texans such as Willie Nelson. University President Denise Trauth called Mr. McCarthy's papers "the crown jewels of our literary treasury."

5 The Jewel of Medina controversy: Down the road in Austin, the University of Texas made headlines after Denise Spellberg, a UT professor of Islamic history, warned the publisher Random House that a novel it was about to publish might incite a violent reaction from Muslims. That book, The Jewel of Medina by one-time Texan Sherry Jones, fictionalized the life of a bride of the prophet Muhammad, portraying her in sexual situations. A witch hunt ensued, with Salman Rushdie and others accusing Ms. Spellberg and Random House of censorship. The book was eventually published by Beaufort Books, an indie press, and received mostly indifferent reviews.

6 Kathleen Kent's debut: Speaking of witch hunts, Dallas novelist Kathleen Kent used the Salem witch trials as the basis for her first novel, The Heretic's Daughter. The book, which is based on the life of Ms. Kent's distant relative Martha Carrier, one of the first women tried and hanged as a witch in Salem, was one of the most buzzed about books of the year and hit the New York Times extended hardcover fiction best-seller list.

7 Texas-size best-sellers: Dallas native Alice Schroeder's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, an 838-page bio of the investment tycoon, received an $8 million advance from its publisher Bantam, one it looks likely to earn out. Since it was published in September it has consistently stayed in the top 10 on best-seller lists. And on the fiction side of the list, former Austinite David Wroblewski's 576-page novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was already being heralded before Oprah Winfrey picked it as the 62nd selection for her Book Club in September.

8 Deceased authors win accolades: Two of the most talked about books of 2008 came from authors who didn't live long enough to relish their publishing success: Roberto Bolano's novel 2666, which is based in part on the story of the hundreds of young women murdered in Ciudad Juarez, sits atop many book critics' top 10 lists, despite his having died in 2003. Mary Ann Shaffer died in February, just six months shy of her debut novel about World War II, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, becoming a bookseller and book club favorite.

9 Nobel committee snubs American writers: It has been 15 years since an American, Toni Morrison, won a Nobel Prize for Literature, and it was clear this wasn't going to be our year either. Weeks before the Nobel was announced, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, said American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," adding "Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States." Unsurprisingly, the prize went to a European: Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Clezio.

10 Writer as president: Barack Obama is a great communicator. He's an especially good writer, having honed his skills as editor of Harvard Law Review. His two books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, were instrumental in his election to the presidency. It was through books – not television, not the Internet – that Mr. Obama introduced himself to millions of Americans, making him a literary story, not just a political one.

Book Review: 'A Great Idea at the Time' by Alex Beam

2008-12-24T09:50:00.001-08:00

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, December 21, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

From 1952 until the mid-1970s, some 1 million households bought sets of Britannica Great Books of the Western World, either through mail order or pushy door-to-door salesmen, "Britannica hucksters" promising "better living through reading."

The books, which cost hundreds of dollars, comprised 95 titles, starting with Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey and ending with Freud. They represented 443 works by 74 authors totaling 32,000 pages of 9-point, double-column type.

Ranging from household names (Aristotle, Plato, Dante and Chaucer) to those known only to specialists (William Harvey and Christian Huygens), the books still decorate many a living room (both my parents and in-laws still have sets), where they sit unloved and unread in their homely brown bindings with a candy colored stripe on the spine coordinated to an academic discipline. And for a time during that same period, reading the classics became almost faddish.

According to Alex Beam's breezy new history of the Great Books, A Great Idea at the Time, we have a pair of ambitious academics to thank for igniting so many autodidactic aspirations: Robert Hutchins, who became dean of Yale Law School at age 29, and Mortimer Adler, an assistant professor at Columbia University at age 26. Both ended up at the University of Chicago, Hutchins as president, where they helped install a curriculum based entirely on the Great Books. The experiment lasted just four years but persisted far longer in the form of the core curriculum.

Acolytes went on to establish a similar curriculum at St. John's College, which maintains campuses in Santa Fe and Annapolis, and where all four years continue to be spent committed to the Great Books.

(Adler had less luck selling the Great Books in Dallas, though. In 1952, he met with H.L. Hunt in hopes of persuading the legendary oilman to buy multiple copies of a special Founders Edition of the books at $500. Hunt balked at the offer. Twice. His reasoning: The set included Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto.)

Mr. Beam, a columnist at the Boston Globe, makes it clear early on just how unfashionable reading the Great Books is in this era of multicultural liberal education. He mocks the practice as middlebrow and marvels at what rubes Adler and Hutchins were for believing so earnestly in the promise of books to edify the masses.

Maybe he's just spent too much time in Beantown with all those professors, but Mr. Beam shows little sympathy for anyone involved in academics or with academic ambitions, period, and even sneers at those who unwittingly bought Adler's and Hutchins' pitch.

While I tend to agree with Mr. Beam that liberal arts education is oversold, his frequently flippant tone mars this otherwise fascinating book. If Mr. Beam should have learned any lesson from his subjects, it's that few people appreciate being lectured to by a know-it-all.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

A Great Idea

at the Time

The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife

of the Great Books

Alex Beam

(PublicAffairs, $24.95)

New iPhone E-book Apps from ScrollMotion

2008-12-23T09:20:00.001-08:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 12/23/2008 7:31:00 AM

ScrollMotion, a two year old iPhone application development company, has launched Iceberg, an e-book reader for the iPhone with titles from six publishers: Random House, Hachette, Penguin, Counterpoint, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Simon & Schuster.

“What makes the software different,” said ScrollMotion’s chief literary officer Calvin Baker, “is that each book is a self-contained app. You download the book, not a piece of software.” Iceberg mimics the natural reading experience, allowing the user to “flip” the page with a swipe of the finger and uses the iPhone and iTouch’s interface to allow for scrolling, shrinking and expanding text, bookmarking and note taking.

Among the first titles available are Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, Extras by Scott Westerfeld, Brisingr by Christopher Paolini, Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen, and When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale. Matt Shatz, v-p of digital at Random House, told PW, “We really like the ScrollMotion application and the guys behind it.” He said the difference ScrollMotion brings to iPhone e-book reading is their treatment of DRM, which is tied to Apple’s iTunes store. “The way ScrollMotion does it, they offer us a way to sell DRM protected books directly on the phone, which the other main readers out there do not yet do at this time.”

Like the Kindle, books can be downloaded wirelessly, though unlike the Kindle which sells most titles for $9.99 or less, prices for the Iceberg-formatted books are the same or more as retail list -- $27.50 for the Paolini, $23.95 for the Kneale, $12.99 for the Westerfeld ($2 more than the paperback). As of today, two dozen titles are available for download. Baker said he “anticipates 200 titles should be available within weeks.”

The company arrives on the e-book scene with a publishing pedigree. Josh Koppell, founder and chief creative officer of ScrollMotion, published a memoir Good/Grief with HarperPerennial and earlier launched a digital music packaging company called TuneBooks, which was adopted by the iTunes music store to display digital liner notes, credits, biographies and other ephemera. Baker has written three novels, including Dominion, published by Grove in 2006.

Texans well-represented in National Book Awards competition

2008-11-20T08:52:00.001-08:00

Texans well-represented in National Book Awards competition

12:00 AM CST on Wednesday, November 19, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Tonight's National Book Awards is the book world's equivalent of the Oscars.

The annual black-tie ceremony in New York City draws glitterati and literati alike. They come to ogle, to flirt and, at the popular cocktail party beforehand, to handicap the contenders for the four $10,000 prizes.

This year, 200 publishers submitted 1,258 books to compete for the awards honoring the year's best works of fiction, nonfiction, young people's literature and poetry. Of those, 20 finalists were selected, five in each category. What may surprise the bow-tied crowd is that four Texans grace the list.

Livingston-born Annette Gordon-Reed was shortlisted in the nonfiction category for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a group biography of one family of slaves owned by Thomas Jefferson. It covers Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, who became a lover and bore him children, as well as the rest of her family.

Ms. Gordon-Reed, now a professor at New York Law School, believes the book is especially relevant because of this year's election.

"It's amazing to contemplate that the president I write about held black people as slaves, and we will now inaugurate a black president," she said.

Recalling her segregated childhood in Conroe, Ms. Gordon-Reed said: "I can remember as a little girl going to separate waiting rooms at the Sadler Clinic and sitting in the balcony at the Crighton movie theater. I integrated our school district, which wasn't the easiest thing for a 6-year-old, but it gave me an early sense that blacks were on a journey of sorts, from worse to better, I hoped and still hope."

Kathi Appelt was born in Fort Bragg, N.C., came to Texas as a child and graduated from Houston's Spring Branch Senior High School and Texas A&M in College Station, where she still lives. The author of some 30 illustrated books for children, such as Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers and the beloved Bubba and Beau series, Ms. Appelt is a finalist in the young people's literature category for her first novel, The Underneath.

The book is the story of a lonely hound dog and a mother cat who come to depend on each other for survival in East Texas. She also weaves throughout the book a folk tale of a 10,000-year-old shape-shifting water moccasin – itself inspired by her interest in the Caddo Indians.

In addition to the vivid, rich characters, the landscape itself comes to life. "I just love the pine forest, the swamp – it's so mysterious," Ms. Appelt explained. "There's just the feeling of magicalness to it."

In a coincidence, poetry finalist Reginald Gibbons also graduated from Spring Branch Senior High. Now a professor of creative writing and classics at Northwestern University in Illinois, he is shortlisted for his 11th poetry collection, Creatures of a Day. Though he left the Long Star State at age 18, he acknowledged, "Texas has had a pervasive influence on my life – it is present in some way in each of my books." He also credits underappreciated Trinity-born writer William Goyen as "one of three or four writers who have been most important to me." (Mr. Gibbons serves as Goyen's literary executor.)

Mr. Gibbons was the first to publish the work of two other of this year's NBA-shortlisted authors, Chicago novelist Aleksander Hemon (fiction) and Patricia Smith (poetry), both while he was editor of the literary journal TriQuarterly from 1981 to 1997.

Houston, said Mr. Gibbons, is far more interesting to him today than when he was a child.

"There is so much more literary life there than when I was growing up in the '60s," he said, "a big part of which stems from the creative writing program at the University of Houston, which brings in many powerful writers."

Among those to whom Mr. Gibbons refers is Mark Doty, a New Yorker who spends half the year teaching at UH. Mr. Doty's eighth book of poetry, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems, is a finalist in the poetry category. The book covers some two decades and provides a kind of conversation between the younger self and older self. Mr. Doty couldn't be reached for comment.

Though the National Book Awards are a competition, all the finalists win in a way: Each gets a medal, and the attention alerts new readers who might not have noticed them before.

"It makes me feel that my work is very present at this moment in the U.S.," said Mr. Gibbons. "The country is so huge and so many thousands of books are published, that it's not often that happens."

That is reward in itself.

Two Indies for Big D

2008-11-17T15:21:00.001-08:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 11/17/2008

Dallas may pride itself on being the brashest city in the country, but for nearly three years it has lacked a large-scale independent bookstore. Earlier this month that changed, with the opening of the 24,000-sq.-ft. Legacy Books.

The store is situated in the north Dallas suburb of Plano, in a purpose-built space that boasts an 1,800-sq.-ft. kids section, a third-floor art book gallery, a kitchen for cooking demos, a cafe that offers beer and wine, a wi-fi bar with computer stations (so people with laptops don't clog the cafe)—and 110,000 books. Managing partner Teri Tanner is a former national and regional sales director with Borders and Barnes & Noble, who said she's been “dreaming of this store for 25 years.”

Though the economy is foundering, Tanner believes this to be as good a time as any to open a bookstore. “There's never a right time for anything,” she said. “One thing that makes me really hopeful is when I look at this from the perspective of it being a local store. People are becoming increasingly aware of buying local—whether because it keeps tax revenue in the community or there's a lower environmental impact. I think we can make a difference to this community.”

Tanner has recruited experienced bookselling staff from the area, including romance buyer Kathy Baker, formerly of Waldenbooks in Hurst, Tex., and the 1999 RWA Bookseller of the Year, and Jeremy Ellis, one-time event and marketing manager at Austin's BookPeople, who now serves in the same capacity at Legacy. Former Borders publicity director Ann Binkley has consulted on publicity. In all, the store has 33 employees.

Legacy's event schedule started off auspiciously, featuring designer Isaac Mizrahi presenting his new book, How to Have Style, in his only Texas appearance. Forthcoming events feature a mix of national and local favorites, including Adam Jones, author of Rose Bowl Dreams: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Football, and Willie Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski.

Tanner said that the book selection and product mix will change in response to customer reaction. “We've already broken out our very substantial religion section into different faiths,” she noted.

So far, the early response has been positive, with local media taking a keen interest. One thing that Legacy can count on: the locals have money to spend. “According to USA Today, Plano is one of the wealthiest communities in America,” said Tanner. “So at least we know we got the demographics right.”

Some 25 miles south, in the Bishop Arts District in Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhood, Jorge Alvarez and Gilbert Barrola have launched a more modest enterprise: Dicho's, a 1,300-sq.-ft. bookstore. This is the second branch of Dicho's. The original was founded in Pomona, Calif., in 2000 and relocated to Gainesville, Tex. (pop. 28,000), in 2006 when the duo moved. Now Alvarez and Barrola commute the 70 miles back and forth between the stores in Dallas and Gainesville—where the outpost of Dicho's is somewhat larger, at 3,000 square feet.

“We realized that running two bookstores is just something we couldn't do all by ourselves,” said Alvarez. “So we've hired three employees.” Alvarez, who at one time managed a Barnes & Noble bookstore at California State University of Los Angeles, described Dicho's (which without the apostrophe means “aphorisms” in Spanish) as a “nontraditional bookstore.”

“We also sell furniture, lamps and home décor, and we display the books as a series of vignettes,” he said. “For example, right now we're featuring Too Many Toys by David Shannon—we have it grouped with a bunch of vintage toys and a fire engine children can play on.” Children's books represent a large portion of the book stock; there's also a small branch of Dallas's Cretia's bakery in the back.

The Oak Cliff neighborhood is not typical of Dallas and, according to Alvarez, is home to a large constituency of gays, lesbians, Latinos and Democrats—“all groups we hope to cater to,” he said, noting that at some point he hopes to add Spanish-language titles to the store's mix.

They aren't the only ones to have realized the neighborhood had potential: Oak Cliff is the former location of Black Images Book Bazaar, which closed in December 2006.

Economic Downturn Shutters Dallas-area Indie

2008-11-07T09:16:00.001-08:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 11/7/2008 7:19:00 AM

David Norwood, owner of The Bookworm in Frisco, Tex. is closing his two-year old, 4,000 sq.-ft. bookstore immediately. “We were approaching the break even point, then the economy turned,” Norwood said. “The holiday season isn’t starting soon enough and we’re in too big of a hole.” Seven part-time employees will lose their jobs; Norwood plans to return to his former career in software development. “The return to the corporate world will be a welcome relief,” he said. “Running a bookstore is like having a double full-time job.”

On reflection, Norwood said has learned that he need not have opened such a large store. “We could have gotten by being a bit smaller, therefore paying less rent and utilities,” he said. “The bulk of the business was in relatively new releases, not bestsellers necessarily, and fans of particular authors who were content to let us special order for them. The amount of inventory we had here in here initially that didn’t sell just ended up sitting here tying up money. In the long run I thought maybe it would have been fine -- we had steady sales growth until the economic thing happened this year.”

The news of The Bookworm’s closing comes in the same week that Legacy Books, a 24,000 sq.-ft. indie, celebrates its grand opening in nearby Plano. “I’m encouraging all my customers to shop there,” said Norwood. “It’s opening in a rough economic climate and they are going to need all the help they can get.”

There’s a New Gang in Town: Austin’s Delacorte Dames and Dudes

2008-11-07T07:25:00.001-08:00

By Edward Nawotka, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/6/2008

Delacorte’s Austin authors:
(l. to r): Shana Burg, Margo Rabb, April Lurie, Varian Johnson and Jennifer Ziegler.

DDD—no, it’s not a heavy-duty new battery. It’s the acronym for an informal group of Austin, Tex., writers all published by Delacorte Press. “Delacorte Dames and Dudes was a little cumbersome to say,” says member Jennifer Ziegler (How Not to Be Popular, 2008), “so we shortened it.”

Other DDD members are April Lurie, author of The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine (2008), Margo Rabb, author of Cures for Heartbreak (2007), Shana Burg, author of A Thousand Never Evers (2008), and the latest member, Varian Johnson, whose novel Saving Maddie is forthcoming in 2010.

The writers realized they all had a publisher in common while attending meetings of the Austin Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. “That became a good excuse to get together,” says Ziegler.

Their first gathering took place June 10 at the Central Market grocery and has since moved to BookPeople, becoming a regular monthly fixture on the authors' calendars. Unlike other writing groups, the focus here is on professional development, rather than critiquing the work itself. “Most of the writers are already in a critique group,” says Ziegler, “This is more like a support group.”

The meetings have no formal agenda. “We talk about our very odd jobs.” says Ziegler. “It’s therapeutic, because other writers understand what you’re going through and can offer advice and encouragement.”

Ziegler says the group has shared information on speaking engagements—even recommending other members to interested parties when one was invited but not available. Later this month, DDD will carpool to San Antonio to attend the annual National Council of Teachers of English conference, and will even share hotel rooms.

Asked what would happen if someone in the group jumped to another publisher, Ziegler opted for plausible deniability: “Right now our main concern is figuring out how to initiate Varian,” she says.

Texas Book Festival's 13th is Still Lucky

2008-11-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

Originally appeared in Publishers Weekly, November 4, 2008

By Edward Nawotka

“Thank God for global warming,” said Claiborne Smith, literary director of the Texas Book Festival. Perfect 80 degree weather greeted this past weekend’s festival goers, who visited the Texas capitol in Austin for the 13th annual gathering. Despite the lack of a marquee headliner like Bill Clinton (2005) or Barack Obama (2006), both the number of attendees – typically 40,000 over two the two days – and quantity of book sales – which are handled by Barnes & Noble and routinely top $100,000 -- “should be about the same,” reported Smith. Over 190 authors participated.

Long-time Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda remarked: “On Saturday morning itself the Capitol Grounds looked like a carnival, and I had a standing room only crowd for my book Classics for Pleasure.” Rue Judd, publisher of Houston’s Bright Sky Press, said her sales were “better than ever before” and expected to sell all 12 cases of Mike Renfro’s Shine On a history of local favorite Shiner Beer. In the past Cinco Puntos Press has been a vocal critic of the Festival, accusing it having both high booth prices and exclusionary policies, but has since had a change of heart. “We brought five authors to the Festival,” said Cinco Puntos v-p John Byrd.

Unsurprisingly, considering the Festival’s proximity to the election, politics took center stage. Many of the largest venues were committed to authors discussing political themes, whether it was Jane Mayer outlining the shortcomings of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, Harvard professor John Stauffer describing echoes between our age and that of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, or Christopher Buckley offering updated inscriptions to go above the entrances of various government buildings (The Library of Congress: “Just Google it.” The Pentagon: “Make my day.”)

Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro, though not beloved by many Johnson loyalists, took home the Festival’s highest honor, a Bookend Award.

Smith noted that this year the Festival was forced to pay many authors travel expenses, that despite the fact that numerous publicists told Smith they were favoring festivals over book signings. “One thing that we as a festival can do is guarantee a good crowd for a writer,” said Smith. “which is not necessarily something a bookstore can do."

Book critic Michael Dirda champions reading for pleasure

2008-10-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

11:22 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 29, 2008
By EDWARD NAWOTKA/ Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com

The mid-20th-century Italian novelist Italo Calvino once asked: “What do reading and lovemaking have in common?” The answer is, of course, pleasure.

Longtime Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda concurs. The title of his latest book, Classics for Pleasure, says it all. It is his fifth collection of essays about books and reading, after all.

“I wanted to break open the canon in ways that surprise people, by including books like Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories or the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer,” Mr. Dirda says by phone from his home near Washington, D.C.

Mr. Dirda will be sharing his inclusive view of literature, and his gift for celebrating the pleasure of reading, with thousands of Texans at this weekend’s 13th annual Texas Book Festival taking place at the State Capitol in Austin.

He’s no stranger to such scenes, having been a regular presenter at the National Book Festival, which was co-founded by first lady Laura Bush in 2001 and is modeled on the Texas Book Festival, which the first lady also co-founded.

Mr. Dirda sees the rise in the number of book festivals as a positive trend in a culture said to be increasingly disinterested in books and reading.

“The country has a lot more readers than we realize,” says Mr. Dirda. “When I’ve gone to festivals, I’ve seen people from all walks of life, ages and backgrounds. There does seem to be a real enthusiasm for books that we sometimes forget about. What’s more, there often is a little something for everybody at such things, so it’s a great day out.”

Mr. Dirda’s own passion for books is infectious. The Pulitzer-winning critic’s latest book (Harcourt, $25) offers summaries of 90 titles, ranging from the accepted ancients, such as Plutarch and Ovid, to contemporaries Eudora Welty and André Malraux, as well as writers whose works may not be everybody’s idea of classics, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick and cartoonist Edward Gorey.

The most important thing about the book, says Mr. Dirda, “is that people realize this is not academic literary criticism — it’s a book of enthusiasms, books that are important to me and that I want to introduce to others.”

The book is so effective that, as one reads it, it’s all but impossible not to pitch it aside and rush out to purchase whatever title Mr. Dirda has just finished describing, be it Xavier de Maistre’s anti-travel book A Journey Around My Room (written in 1795 after he was confined to his quarters for 42 days as punishment for dueling) or the Icelandic Sagas or the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. That Mr. Dirda should be so high on medieval and Romantic literature, an area the majority of us will find obscure, is no surprise: It’s the field in which he holds a doctorate.

His eclectic interests might meet their match at the Austin event, which this year includes gay-themed young adult fiction, T. Boone Pickens in conversation with Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, a panel covering “Water Issues in Texas,” and a talk with Pulpwood Queen Kathy Patrick, the larger-than-life personality who runs Beauty and the Book, a bookstore-cum-hair salon in Jefferson, Texas.

Though it’s an election year, which means publishers have largely decided to hold back their biggest name authors until the media might pay attention again, there are still a number of not-to-be-missed authors on the roster, such as LBJ biographer Robert Caro, who is being honored with a Bookend Award from the organizers, and novelist Richard Price, who will be interviewed by Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch.

The only disappointment to Mr. Dirda is the absence, for the first time in many years, of Kinky Friedman.

“He’s someone I’m fond of and who I actually think of as being a Texas writer,” says Mr. Dirda. “Otherwise, I don’t think of a writer, Larry McMurtry for example, in that way. I tend to think more about the quality of their vision or their process.”

As for Mr. Dirda, he’s looking forward to catching up with fellow authors whom he admires, including Francine Prose, Christopher Buckley and Roy Blount Jr.

“Otherwise, I’m just the same as everyone,” he says. “I’m looking for discoveries. And hopefully, as is the case with my book, rediscoveries.”

Houston freelance writer Edward Nawotka, who served as programming and communications manager of the Texas Book Festival in 2004, will interview Mr. Dirda onstage at this year’s festival.

Fairgoers Raise $12,500 for Agent’s Memorial Fund

2008-10-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/27/2008 12:45:00 PM

At a charity raffle at the Frankfurt Book Fair, dozens of friends and colleagues of the late Gernert Company literary agent Tracy Walker Howell raised $12,500 to benefit the Tracy Walker Howell Memorial Fund. The money raised will go toward endowing a scholarship at Howell's alma mater, Middlebury College, for a student to study for a year at the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in Italy.

Howell, who served as a literary agent and director of foreign rights for The Gernert Company, died suddenly on February 8, 2006, age 42. She was widely known, in part, because of her role as manager of world publishing rights for John Grisham. Organizers of the raffle included Cecile Barendsma and Cullen Stanley, both of Janklow & Nesbit, and Hal Fessenden, v-p of subsidiary rights, Penguin USA. Nancy Wiese, v-p director of subsidiary rights at Grand Central, served as MC of the event. Among the prizes were several weeks in vacation homes spread across the globe, as well as jewelry, and a custom drawing by Matteo Pericolli. Among the winners were scout Virginia Marx, who won a week in the Liguria vacation house donated by Ullstein Heyne publisher Ulrich Genzler, and Maria B. Campbell, who took home a new Sony e-reader. A full list of prizes and winners, as well as further information about the Tracy Walker Howell Memorial Fund is online.

No One to Believe In: Unreliable narratives of the war on terror.

2008-10-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

Originally appeared in The Texas Observer

Ed Nawotka | October 17, 2008 | Books & the Culture

Austin literary agent James D. Hornfischer has represented a variety of military authors and written a pair of bestselling World War II naval histories, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and Ship of Ghosts. His experience tells him that books about war are published in four distinct phases.

The first phase is composed of books by journalists and other professionals sent to cover the war for newspapers or magazines. These are literally the first drafts of history.

The second wave often comes from officers and administrators—educated elites—who have celebrity cachet to cash in or are motivated to justify decisions questioned by first-wave journalists.

The third and most enduring phase chronicles major events from the viewpoint of small groups of soldiers or sailors. These books often deal with war’s aftermath and pain, and are written by the grunts, the ground-pounders, the trigger-pullers.

The fourth and final phase, Hornfischer says, is written by historians, who generally wait until military documents are declassified and filed with the National Archives before weighing in.

Why do we need so many versions of the same story?

Because truth in war, whether physical or moral, is contested terrain.

Apply Hornfischer’s theory to the so-called war on terror and we’re already well into phase three, on the cusp of phase four, and showing signs of the emergence of a new phase entirely.

Phase one included Evan Wright’s Generation Kill. Published in 2004, it chronicled the Rolling Stone embed’s time with a Marine reconnaissance unit as it made its way across Iraq during the initial invasion.

Phase two included apologias such as American Soldier by Gen. Tommy Franks and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s My Year in Iraq—books that tried to explain what had just gone wrong.

The transition to phase three started with combat narratives by Ivy League–educated officers, such as Andrew Exum’s This Man’s Army and Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away. Both men make much of their educations; Exum graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Fick from Dartmouth. Exum and Fick, only just removed from the start of the war, are less conflicted about their roles than Dallas resident Brandon Friedman, whose memoir, The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War (a book for which Hornfischer served as literary agent), describes how Friedman (another college-educated officer) had longed since childhood to fight but became demoralized after twice nearly dying in friendly-fire incidents.

It’s interesting to note that Fick is one of the soldiers featured in Wright’s Generation Kill, reinforcing the suggestion that later-phase war books often serve as correctives to earlier-phase titles.

One phase is effectively saying to the other: You cannot be relied upon to tell the whole truth.

Who, then, can be relied on to tell the truth?

Take, for example, Jessica Lynch, a West Virginia native who is on record saying she joined the Army to help pay for college. After her supply unit’s capture by Iraqis in March 2003 and her subsequent rescue, Lynch became a national hero. She appeared on the cover of People and struck a $1 million deal with the publisher Knopf for a book titled I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.

Despite the title, the book was actually written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Rick Bragg, who took half the advance. It was only with such help that the book reached bookstores by Veterans Day in November 2003, less than eight months after Lynch’s rescue.

Among the book’s biggest revelations was the assertion that Lynch had been raped while a prisoner—a claim that Bragg inserted, despite Lynch’s claim that she couldn’t remember the three-hour period during which the rape supposedly occurred. The claim has been countered by the doctor who treated Lynch following her rescue in Iraq, and largely discredited since.

Was the rape fact, fiction, or conjecture?

Cynics called its inclusion propaganda, but just as well to call it a sign of the times. Whether it’s James Frey lying about a prison term or Colin Powell lying to the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction, we live in an era of unreliable narrators.

Think of the phrase “the war on terror.” What does that mean, exactly?

Or the word “interrogation” with regard to “enemy combatants.” Isn’t that just a smokescreen for torturing prisoners of war?

Think of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Outrage may be a better word for it.

Various books have been written about Abu Ghraib, starting with Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story in The New Yorker in May 2004.

Thousands of news stories were filed. The soldiers involved were publicly pilloried, and the name and face of Lynndie England—the young Army private photographed holding a naked prisoner’s leash—became synonymous with American shame. England went to jail, as did some of her cohorts. Yes, there have been trials, but no one of any real authority has ever taken responsibility. No one above the rank of sergeant ever served time, and no one ever faced charges for war crimes, torture, or violations of the Geneva Conventions.

And like all tragedies of American life, including 9/11, Abu Ghraib is already fading away into memory.

Until last year, few authors had any kind of access to the soldiers who perpetrated the crimes at Abu Ghraib.

But in 2007, Tara McKelvey published Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. That book, according to Hornfischer’s theory, effectively started the fourth wave of books on the war on terror.

McKelvey doggedly tracked military documents and computer files supporting claims of abuse, such as one guard’s “wish list” of “alternative interrogation techniques,” including “phone book strikes” and “low-voltage electrocution.” Even more disturbing is McKelvey’s revelation that civilian contractors probably participated in the abuse, and one translator may have sodomized a male teenager.

Working from interviews with former detainees—many of whom express reluctance about sharing their stories—McKelvey served up a dozen case studies of abuse that went beyond what was shown in the infamous photographs. The dirty laundry list includes sophisticated forms of torture like stress positioning, “monstering” (deprivation of diet and sleep), and, McKelvey strongly suggests, rape and murder. The worst abuse, she reports, took place at makeshift short-term detention facilities such as gyms and trailers, where detainees were held for less than 14 days and then released without any record of their imprisonment.

She writes about videos of bored prison guards “Robotripping” (getting stoned on a mixture of Robitussin and Vivarin) and simulating sex with one another.

In addition, McKelvey tracked down many of the principals in the Abu Ghraib photos for interviews, and she was the first writer to interview England in person after the soldier’s trial and subsequent 36-month incarceration.

McKelvey’s book isn’t without flaws. She tries a bit too hard to ascribe overly simple sociological motives to the perpetrators, suggesting that the poverty-stricken home lives of some of the soldiers contributed the abuse.

For example, Lynndie England worked at a chicken-processing plant where animals were arguably abused (though, curiously, she quit in protest) and participated in amateur porn shoots before her tour of duty in Iraq—all of which, McKelvey asserts, not entirely convincingly, predisposed her to bad behavior at Abu Ghraib.

Unfortunately, with the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy, and the fact that the war is still being fought, it will be some years before a full picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib emerges. If and when one finally does, it is likely to have as many facets as a shattered mirror.

The latest example of the search for the truth of the Abu Ghraib story is Standard Operating Procedure, which takes two forms: a film by Errol Morris and a book written by Morris and Philip Gourevitch, each of which draws on the same source material: 200 hours of interviews with those who worked at Abu Ghraib, including five of the seven MPs indicted for abuse. Given the multiple lenses through which Morris and Gourevitch tell the soldiers’ stories, Standard Operating Procedure might be considered a phase-five book, a work that simultaneously synthesizes the narratives that came before it and casts doubt on their strict veracity.

The most important of these sources is Sabrina Harman, an aspiring forensic photographer who took many of the scandal’s most famous photos—Hooded Man, Leashed Man, the Naked Human Pyramid—including the most damning evidence of all: the photo of a dead Iraqi, killed by the C.I.A. during interrogation at the prison.

Harman appears in one notorious photo posing over the dead man, beaming a smile and offering a ridiculous “thumbs up” sign. (This photo was taken by reservist Charles Graner, the Svengali of the group and the man responsible for posing many of the photos, who fathered a child with Lynndie England and later married another MP from the group, Megan Ambuhl. Graner is notably absent from the film; he’s still serving a prison sentence for his role.)

Harman tries to explain why she looks so pleased in the picture: “I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hilla, and so whenever I would get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands. ... So any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just—I just picked it up from the kids. It’s just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo, you want to smile. It’s just, I guess, something I did.”

This sounds like a self-serving justification for a gesture that’s callous at best, evil at worst. As a viewer and reader, do we believe that she’s telling her truth, or is she just concocting an excuse? Morris uses a camera device called the Interrotron to conduct his interviews. The person being interviewed looks directly into the lens and so appears to be making eye contact with the viewer in what looks like a direct, human connection.

Reading Harman’s words on the page is one thing, but watching her say them in the film makes us want to believe her, to forgive her even. But can we?

“Every narrator is unreliable,” Morris told the Observer this year. “I’m a big fan of Vladimir Nabokov; he’s the king of the unreliable narrator. My favorite book by him is Pale Fire and the character of [Charles] Kinbote. And just like Kinbote, we’re all self-deceived. When someone recounts the past, whether it’s Kinbote or Lynndie England or Sabrina Harman, they are re-enacting their past in words, they are trying to recover the various pieces from the bric-a-brac of memory. To think for a moment that it’s an absolute description is a mistake.”

The very existence of two different pieces of work—a film and a book—with the same name and deriving from the same sources suggests competing versions of the truth. The book is not a movie tie-in version of the film, nor vice versa. While both are drawn from the same interviews, their tones differ significantly, not least in the fact that Morris’ film, unlike the book, offers dramatic “re-enactments” of the events at Abu Ghraib.

For his part, Gourevitch suggests that some events are so complex and inherently confusing that they might ultimately be unfathomable.

“There is a constant temptation,” he writes in Standard Operating Procedure, “when rendering an account of history, to distort reality by making too much sense of it.”

It’s tempting to think he’s referring to Morris. At the very least, he’s acknowledging the dangers of placing too much faith in any single interpretation of history.

If Hornfischer’s four-phase hierarchy presumes truth—or at least understanding—is ultimately attainable, Standard Operating Procedure’s phase-five bifurcation shows significantly different narratives unspooling from the same recent past.

And why shouldn’t there be doubt, of our leaders, our generals, even our soldiers? The Bush administration has sown these seeds with its own language, in which a “mission accomplished” is the start of America’s longest war, and a weapon of mass destruction is nothing but an aluminum tube.

Documents like I Am a Soldier Too, Monstering, and Standard Operating Procedure, imperfect as they are, might be the closest we can come to the disorienting confusion of this war, which is itself so vaguely defined, yet so incontrovertibly real, and which has already claimed so many victims—not the least of which is the very idea of truth itself.

Detailed Warren Buffett bio reveals man behind fortune

2008-10-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA
Oct. 10, 2008, 11:19AM

THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.
By Alice Schroeder.
Bantam, 960 pp. $35.

If you've looked at your 401(k) statement and started to fear that everyone in financial markets is either greedy, predatory or incompetent, do yourself a favor. Take $35 out of the mattress and buy a copy of Alice Schroeder's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. At a time like this, it's a real comfort: Buffet is living proof there's at least one wholly rational person managing money.

The Oracle of Omaha is one of the rare money men as well known on Main Street as on Wall Street. Actually, he could probably pass you on Main Street and you wouldn't notice. Despite his $50 billion-plus fortune, Buffett has rejected the Robb Report trappings of the ultra-rich. He drives himself to work (in a Lincoln Town Car), eats at McDonalds, drinks Coke and still lives in a modest house he bought in 1958. Yet, depending on who's counting, he's either the richest man in the country or second-richest, trailing only Bill Gates (a good friend and, according to Schroeder, a surrogate son).

Certainly, this part of the reputation is well-known. But what of the man behind the money?

That is what biographer Schroeder sets out to reveal. What she delivers is the portrait of a middle-American Midas with enough anxiety about parents to rival Hamlet's. Her tendency to psychologize is the one notable flaw in what is otherwise an excellent and highly enjoyable look at the business titan.

A native Texan and graduate of the University of Texas, Schroeder befriended Buffett while working for Morgan Stanley, where she covered Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, as an analyst. Blessed by Buffett to write the book, she was given access to his files, friends, family and, often, himself, and has stuffed the book with anecdotes.

While readers may want to get to the icy deal-making of Buffett's adult years rather than linger with boy Warren as he sells 5-cent packs of gum, Schroeder makes clear these early experiences provided the foundation for his mature investment philosophy.

A key moment occurred in 1941 when Warren, age 11, stumbled upon the concept of compounding in a library book called One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000.

"Compounding married the present to the future. If a dollar today was going to be worth 10 some years from now, then in his mind the two were the same," writes Schroeder, suggesting he was mentally leveraging his investments even as a prepubescent.

A year later he partnered with sister Doris to buy his first stock: three shares of Cities Service Preferred, a favorite of his father's, who had started his own stockbroking business in the midst of the Depression. Buffett bought at $38.25 and sold at $40, netting a $5 profit.

Soon after, the stock rocketed to $202 a share. "Warren learned three lessons and would call this episode one of the most important of his life," Schroeder writes. "One lesson was not to overly fixate on what he had paid for a stock. The second was not to rush unthinkingly to grab a small profit."

The last lesson was that losing someone else's money would upset them and that he shouldn't manage their money until he was confident in what he was doing. Warren, we're told throughout the book, avoids confrontation and likes to be liked.

This stance, Schroeder suggests, goes back to his parents, who were "notable for their lack of warmth." His father had a "Quaker-like personality." A zealous Republican, he eventually served in Congress. His mother was prone to explosions where she would tell her children they were "worthless, ungrateful, and selfish; and should feel ashamed."

As a consequence, Schroeder says, he has spent much of his life seeking approval from surrogate mothers. That latter ranged from his two wives to the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham to his steady bridge partner Sharon Osberg (with whom he plays on the Internet many nights).

Personal issues aside, the core of the book chronicles how Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a virtually worthless textile business into (as of 2004) a company with 172,000 employees, $64 billion in revenues, profits of $8 billion a year and (in 2006) a valuation of more than $200 billion.

Schroeder's focus is sharpest from the years 1999 to 2004, when she offers a detailed account of his thinking and decisions, both wise, such as his canny avoidance of the dot-com bubble, to mistaken, such as his purchase of Dexter Shoe Co., which he calls the worst acquisition he ever made.

Since so much drama of business is cerebral, it helps that Schroeder can get into his head, which she does by interspersing Buffett's direct quotes, in italicized blocks, into the narrative. It's a surprisingly effective device, one that provides a kind of meta-textual commentary to the work, though it does leave the impression that Buffett is looking over Schroeder's shoulder the whole time.

Buffett isn't especially quippy, and Schroeder has to work hard to smelt aphoristic business advice from the ore of her subject's life. What she comes away with is folksy and somewhat bland: Follow your own "Inner Scorecard" and not the crowd, look for the "cigar butts," stocks discarded by others but with just enough tobacco for one more puff.

Then there is the rather strained metaphor that gives the book its title:

"The snowball just happens if you're in the right kind of snow, and that's what happened with me. I don't just mean compounding money either. It's in terms of understanding the world and what kind of friends you accumulate. You get to select over time, and you've got to be the kind of person that the snow wants to attach itself to. You've got to be your own wet snow, in effect. You'd better be picking up snow as you go along, because you're not going to be getting back up to the top of the hill again. That's the way life works."

(But don't snowballs melt easily, especially in the midst of a market meltdown like the one we're in now? Not when they are like Buffett's — his metaphorical snowball must be the size of a small moon.)

If you're looking for advice about the current financial crisis, you won't find it here: The book all but ends in 2004 with the death of his first wife Susie from cancer, with just 23 pages devoted to 2004 to the present.

Perhaps the best thing to do is consider his comment at the time of the Enron debacle: "Cash and courage in a crisis is priceless." Watching Buffett's recent market moves, which include a $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs, you'd have to say he sees opportunity when others are trying to flee.

If Schroeder's book proves anything, it's that Buffett is one money man who follows his own advice.

Ike Dealt Heavy Blow To Texas Booksellers

2008-10-06T07:33:00.000-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/6/2008

When Hurricane Ike hit Galveston Island, Tex., a little after midnight September 13, Tim Thompson lost his livelihood. Midsummer Books, the 2,000-sq.-ft. bookstore Thompson had owned since 2004, was completely destroyed. “We had eight feet of water in the store,” Thompson said from his temporary home in Austin. “We left the day before and didn't have time to save anything other than the computer with the stock database.”

Thompson employed a manager and a part-timer, both of whom also evacuated. Though he estimates insurance should cover half of his losses, he will not reopen. “I agonized over the decision. But I was planning on moving the store next summer, anyway, and it's going to take the island months to get back to normal. Business would be terrible.”

He said he will move his family back to Galveston once it is habitable so his children can finish out their school year. After that, he doesn't yet know. As far as the store is concerned, he has had one inquiry about purchasing the name and goodwill, but isn't certain anything will come of it. “For now, Midsummer Books is history,” Thompson said. It was the island's only bookstore focused on new books. Earlier this summer, Hastings Entertainment closed an outlet on the island. Galveston Books, a used bookstore, remains, though it, too, was severely damaged.

Elsewhere in southern Texas, many bookstores were left without electricity, which disrupted business for a week or more. In Houston—where some people are still without electricity even three weeks after the storm—Brazos Bookstore was closed for 11 days and had water damage to a small section of the store. Manager Jane Moser canceled nine events, including one with A.J. Jacobs on September 11, the day before the storm. She estimates lost revenue to be as much as $50,000.

Down the street at Murder by the Book, manager McKenna Jordan and assistant manager David Thompson returned from their wedding in Scotland and Paris honeymoon to find water had seeped through the ceiling and soaked the carpet of the store. Power was out, and Thompson said they bought a generator, which allowed them to keep the store open, even though they had to choose between running the cash register or keeping the lights on. Two events had to be canceled—one with Margaret Cole (who, coincidentally, had her 2005 event at the store canceled because of Hurricane Rita) and another with Brad Meltzer. On generator power, the store still managed to host Don Winslow (who drew 30 people) and Austin writer Joe Domenici, who brought in 50. In all, the store's power outage lasted eight days. “We can't complain too much. We came off so much better than we could have,” Thompson said.

Further west in Houston, author David Ebershoff managed to make it to Blue Willow Bookshop on the day before Ike. “He was fantastic,” said owner Valerie Kohler. “Then we didn't have power for two days. Otherwise, things got back to normal relatively quickly.” The same went for Katy Budget Books. “We closed early the day of Ike and lost power for two days, canceling a pair of events,” manager Stacey Ward reported.

Of the more than a dozen chain booksellers in the region, all Barnes & Noble stores are open again. Borders closed some stores due to power outages. The last two to reopen were a Borders store in Houston (reopened September 25) and a Waldenbooks store in Baytown, Tex. (reopened September 26).

Dark doings in the land of the midnight sun

2008-09-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, September 28, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Think of Sweden, and what comes to mind? Ikea and ABBA? Bikini-clad bombshells? Meatballs?

How about dark secrets, sexual perversion and murder?

To those who read the country's best-selling detective novels, whether the classic 1960s Martin Beck novels of Maj. Sjowall and Per Walloo or the more recent Wallander mysteries by Henning Mankell, know the country is full of homicidal maniacs.

It is no different in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Mikael Blomkvist, a fortysomething Stockholm business journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine, is convicted of libeling rich industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. He's forced to take a strange but lucrative assignment from Wennerstrom's rival industrialist, octogenarian Henrik Vanger – to investigate the disappearance of Vanger's 16-year-old niece in 1966 in the remote northern town of Hedested.

There he discovers that the Vanger clan has enough criminal perversions in its history, the least of which is Nazism, to make the Addams Family look like the Brady Bunch.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander, the twentysomething tattooed girl of the title, works as an investigator at a private security company in Stockholm. A pro computer hacker, Salander chooses to engage the world primarily through the screen of her iBook and pushes away everyone who might get close to her. Why? It keeps her safe. Slim and standing less than 5 feet tall, she is, as one character describes her ominously, "the perfect victim."

It turns out she's far from the only one in the book.

Despite its crime-story trappings, solving the mystery isn't The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's primary purpose. Mr. Larsson was an activist journalist; before he died in 2004, he edited an anti-racist magazine. He uses the novel to issue a cultural critique of Sweden. And he has much to criticize, spinning numerous subplots touching on such things as journalistic ethics, corporate malfeasance, sexual sadism, religious fanaticism, familial loyalty, misogyny and the right to privacy, to name just a few.

Understanding the subtleties of these issue-oriented subplots may be lost on American readers. Just following the myriad foreign words, names and places ("She took the tunnelbana from Zinkensdamm to Ostermalmstorg and walked down towards Strandvagen," reads one typical passage) is challenging enough.

That said, the strain of mentally maneuvering through the foreign milieu is part of the pleasure of reading a translated book (especially translated detective novels), where their very foreignness adds an extra layer of intrigue to the plot.

As fine, complex and rewarding a novel as this may be, my main quibble is that Salander, who is secondary to Blomkvist, really should be the focus, since she is by far the most interesting and distinct of the characters.

I fear not, for this is the first in a trilogy that was already delivered to the publisher. In the next, I'm told, the tattooed girl gets the starring role.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

The Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

(Knopf, $24.95)

The very small world of Alexander McCall Smith

2008-09-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

The 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' series author explains why he focuses on everyday affairs and petty things

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Before the publication of Alexander McCall Smith's "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" novels, Gaborone, Botswana, wasn't exactly a magnet for tourists. The city served as a destination for executives from the diamond industry and a gateway for travelers heading to the safari camps of the Okavango Delta.

Today, by contrast, fans of the best-selling mystery series walk down the real Zebra Drive, where the fictional No. 1 Lady Detective, the "traditionally built African woman" Precious Ramotswe, lives; find the garage that inspired the fictional Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors; and quaff many cups of "red bush" tea.

If none of these references means anything to you, then perhaps you haven't stepped into a bookstore recently.

Alexander McCall Smith is among the most prolific and popular authors in print. A native of Zimbabwe who was educated in Scotland and later returned to Africa to help open a law school in Gaborone, he has published nine "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" novels, the latest of which to be published in the U.S., "The Miracle at Speedy Motors," came out in April. The books have been translated into more than 39 languages and sold 15 million copies around the world.

In addition, Smith has published five installments of the "Sunday Philosophers Club" series, including "The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday," which came out Tuesday, and three academic satires starring Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld. There are also five volumes of "44 Scotland Street," about the residents of an Edinburgh apartment building written as a daily serial for an Edinburgh newspaper, and yet another serial, "Corduroy Mansions," about a large house of people in London, which he began earlier this month. A thousand or so words of it are published each day in the online Daily Telegraph. If you want, you can hear it as a podcast voiced by Andrew Sachs, who played the Spanish waiter Manuel on "Fawlty Towers."

Smith's enormous output takes him about "an hour and a half each day," he says by phone from his hometown of Edinburgh as he prepared for a six city U.S. tour, which includes Austin as his final stop.

"I have no difficulty writing on the road — airports, hotels, anywhere really," he says, "though writing on tour can be quite a bother." Smith gets about 20 requests for appearances each day and, as a consequence, his life is mapped out some 18 months in advance. That Austin will have hosted him twice in the past three years (he was a featured speaker at the Texas Book Festival gala in 2005) is a privilege but no accident.

"I'm rather quite fond of Texas," he says. "I've done two teaching stints at SMU in Dallas, and I was there in 1998 when the first 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' book was published in the U.K. I had 200 copies of the first edition — of about 1,500 copies in print — flown over, and my colleagues threw a small book party for me."

When Smith returns to Austin on Thursday, he'll give a 50-minute talk titled "The Very Small Things in Life." It's a surprising topic for a man whose life as an attorney was occupied with the weighty subject of medical ethics.

"Books need not always concern themselves only with the large issues of life," he explains. "Not everything has to be 'War and Peace.' By focusing on the small things, everyday affairs and petty things, it allows for humor and the evocation of human sympathy."

This celebration of the ordinary is evident in Smith's novels, which focus on such practical matters as running a business or a household. Precious Ramotswe is a detective who specializes in the mysteries of the human heart, rather than solving crimes, as such. Most of her investigating is done in conversation over a cup of red-bush tea employing little more than intuition and common sense.

Perhaps as a result of his having honed his craft as the writer of children's books, true villains and, most notably, AIDS, which is a major problem in Botswana, are all but absent from his work.

"My books don't tend to be intensely realistic," he says by way of explanation, "They are more like fables."

Though he's often compared to Agatha Christie or P.G. Wodehouse, Smith would prefer comparison to Barbara Pym and E.F. Benson, prolific 20th-century British writers known for their charitable, if humorous, portraits of provincial and middle-class life.

Indeed, Smith's books tend to be sunny and optimistic, paced for leisurely Sunday afternoons on a porch swing (rather than, say, a James Patterson novel, which is best suited for the frenetic anxiety of air travel).

"I always strive to keep it simple, to get the essence of something," he says.

How well this translates to the screen is yet to be determined. HBO and the BBC are collaborating on an adaptation starring the American R&B singer Jill Scott. Smith is enthusiastic about the unlikely choice of a Grammy Award-winning Philadelphia pop star to play a Botswanan Motswana private detective: "She's perfect," he says. "Her accent, her body language. It's all perfect."

One thing is for certain. Once the show airs, sometime next year, Botswana can expect a wave of Americans who will flock to see Gaborone firsthand.

When they get there, they will find a place that is a bit more dusty, a bit more rundown, a bit more hopelessly dire than the one described in Smith's books. But they will also find a ray of hope: what must be the only new opera venue in sub-Saharan Africa. The No. 1 Ladies' Opera House opened this past June under Smith's direction, complete with a little white van and a coffee shop and restaurant where dishes are named after the characters from his books.

Anyone for a plate of Mma Makoutsi's pancakes with a pot of Mma Ramotswe's bush tea? Just four and a half pula, please.

MPIBA Brings Sexy Back to Bookselling

2008-09-26T19:35:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly,09/22/2008

At the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association regional trade show held this past weekend in Colorado Springs, the association’s booth featured canvas messenger bags for sale bearing the motto “Reading is Sexy.” It was the latest product introduced as part of a fundraising and awareness campaign for the organization. The bags, which feature the woman’s silhouette, stirred a minor frisson among some of female attendees.

MPIBA president Andy Nettell, co-owner of Arches Book Company in Moab, UT, told PW that he originally objected to the design, which was first printed on stickers. “I initially didn’t think it was appropriate,” he said, “Then we sold 250 stickers in a few months. I saw it was only women who were buying them – mostly librarians – who would pick them up by the stack. That sold me and I stopped worrying about the image.” Jennie Shortridge, author of the novel Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe, (NAL) was at the show to sign books. She told PW she felt “disappointed” when she saw it. “It strikes me as sexist and sends the wrong message,” she said. Still, the bags seemed to be generally popular with booksellers.

This year, the MPIBA was forced to move to Colorado Springs after the host hotel in Denver where it had been held the previous 24 years declined the booking. The change of venue, combined with the faltering economy, resulted in a substantial drop in bookstore attendance, the number falling from 102 last year to 65 stores this year. “It was the fewest we’ve ever had,” said MPIBA executive director Lisa Knudsen, who was herself celebrating her 20th anniversary with the organization. (Two Houston booksellers scheduled to attend – Valerie Koehler of Blue Willow Bookshop and Tamra Dore of Katy Budget Books – failed to make the trip as they were still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.)

The show also lost 25 exhibitor tables, according to Knudsen. “It was a result of consolidation and recession,” she said. The drop in show attendees does not, however, indicate a decline in membership. The association announced 22 new members last year, ranging from 24,000 sq.-ft. Legacy Books in Plano, Texas, due to open in November, to Fact and Fiction bookshop on the University of Montana campus in Missoula.

Among those opening new stores in the region is Joni Montover. She is building a 1,500 sq.-ft. general bookstore, on South Padre Island, Texas. Montover, a Denver accountant who has vacationed on the resort island, was confident that despite the downturn in the economy, this remains a good time to open a bookstore on South Padre. “More and more people are moving to South Padre as boomers retire,” she said, adding “the nearest bookstore is at least an hour’s drive away and with the gas prices so high people don’t want to drive so far for a book.”

Sue McBride, owner of Whistle-Stop Books and Gifts, a 1,900 sq.-ft. store in Douglas, WY also found a silver lining in the high price of gas. “Previously people might drive 45 minutes to Casper to do their shopping,” she said, “but now, they are staying put.”

All this should prove positive for the ABA as it continues t roll out its new IndieBound marketing program. Haven Stillwater, owner of The Bookhaven in Salida, CO – a town of 6,000 people – said that though her five-and-a-half year old store has been growing each year, “incrementally, not exponentially” the biggest challenge she faces remains “convincing locals and newcomers the value of buying locally.” She’s had the IndieBound branding on display in her store since it was announced at BEA. She called it “eyecatching” and remarked that it was “an easy-transition from BookSense.” Still, it was mostly tourists to her store who understood the concept. Though she expressed uncertainty about its future, she thinks it’s still “a great shot in the arm for booksellers.”

Vicki Burger, co-owner of Wind City Books in Casper, WY opened her bookstore on September 12, 2007. She said that since the economy in Wyoming is generally strong due to growth in the energy sector, business “has been good and we’re riding the boom.” She said she’d like to do more with IndieBound, especially since here strongest competition comes from a nearby Waldenbooks. “But since I work a 12-hour day as it is, I really don’t have the time,” she said. Arsen Kashkashian, buyer at the Boulder Bookshop in Boulder, CO, pointed out that for a store in a town such as Boulder or Austin, Texas which already have strong business alliances, “that concept is already out there,” and less relevant.

Looking ahead, Kashkashian echoed what many booksellers felt: With politics drawing media attention away from books and the economy taking a downswing, “It’s looking like a tough fall for booksellers,” he said.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest: Mexican enough

2008-09-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

'Around the Bloc' author belatedly discovers her Hispanic heritage

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, September 07, 2008

By the time she turned 30, Corpus Christi native Stephanie Elizondo Griest had traveled by bus to 42 states, lived in Russia and China and collected dozens more stamps in her passport. Yet she'd hardly set foot in Mexico.

"Growing up in South Texas, you only hear the worst things about Mexico," the University of Texas graduate says. "The perception is that it's totally dangerous, and I would have sooner hitchhiked through Kyrgyzstan than go to Mexico."

It was in the midst of her early travels that she had an awkward epiphany.

"I was in Cuba, meeting all these amazing people," she says, "and I realized I could barely communicate. There I was, a Mexican American, wishing that the Cubans would speak Russian."

That epiphany has blossomed into her latest book, "Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines."

Though Griest's mother was second-generation Mexican American, she never taught her daughter Spanish, fearing Griest would experience the same discrimination she had in her youth. Griest's father, a retired Navy jazz drummer from Kansas, is Anglo.

An early passage in "Mexican Enough" describes a moment of reckoning when, after Griest announced she "was Hispanic" on the first day of class at elementary school, a primer was passed around the room and the children were asked to read aloud:

That's when I realized the difference between the other students and me. Most of them spoke Spanish at home, so they stumbled over the strange English words, pronouncing yes like jess and chair like share. When my turn came to read, I sat up straight and said each word loud and clear. The teacher watched me curiously. After class ended, I told her that I wanted to be 'where the smart kids were.' She agreed and I joined the white class the following day.

For eight more years she stuck with being white. That is, until it was time to apply to college and her guidance counselor explained that she would get more scholarship money if she identified herself as Hispanic.

While a student at UT, Griest "flirted with a Chicana stage" during which she changed her "white-bread middle name," Ann, to her mother's maiden name, Elizondo — but never learned her mother's maiden tongue. She studied Russian and journalism instead. After graduating in 1997, she traveled through much of the former Soviet Union, China and Cuba, an experience chronicled in her first book, 2004's "Around the Bloc." (The book was the 2007 pick for Austin's annual Mayor's Book Club)

"Mexican Enough" picks up later, explaining how, on her 30th birthday, Griest decided to "Mexicanize" herself. She moved to the Mexican city of Querétaro and enrolled in a language school.

What follows is a nearly two-year journey of self-discovery during which Griest befriends gay activists, seeks out Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, lingers at the Laredo/Nuevo Laredo border to talk with Border Patrol agents and meets countless women abandoned by men who've immigrated to El Norte. She tracks down ancestors in the town of Cruillas, a place reportedly wiped off the map when its residents were hired in 1854 to work on the King Ranch in South Texas. (The story is untrue. However desolate, the town remains.)

The resulting conversations amount to a journey into the psyche of the country itself. Griest learns that Mexicans are as divided about their cultural inheritance — be it from the Aztecs, Mayans, Spanish and even Americans — as she is of her own.

"Because we are biracial by definition, cultural schizophrenia is practically encoded in our DNA," says Griest. "What I came to realize is that nobody feels Mexican enough. Even in Mexico, my gay friends don't feel macho."

Griest's mixed ethnicity has turned out to be an asset in her traveling lifestyle. "I have dark hair, caterpillar eyebrows and blue eyes," she explains, "The way I look is handy, because I fit in a lot of places. But where I fit in the best wasn't Mexico, it was Turkey."

Since completing her Mexican sojourn, which lasted through much of 2005 and 2006, Griest has been busy. In 2007 she published her second book, "100 Places Every Woman Should Go." Earlier this year, she spent a month in Mozambique working with the charity group Save the Children and a month in Barcelona happily ensconced at a writers retreat. The remainder of 2008 will be taken up with touring the U.S. and, in all likelihood, proselytizing about human rights issues in Mexico.

"I became very aware of the different issues in Mexico and see it as my role to talk about them with people," she explains.

Indeed, when we met to talk, Griest was about to give the keynote speech at a Hispanic women's conference in Houston. She planned to discuss how Mexican society unfairly treats gays and lesbians, prisoners, indigenous groups and laborers.

"I don't want to get up and point a finger at people," says Griest, "but I think people in the U.S. need to be more aware of how much they are responsible for what's going on in Mexico. I feel very strongly that NAFTA has systematically destroyed the Mexican economy, and while I'm not naïve — Mexico is very corrupt and has to take 50 percent of the blame — the other 50 percent of the blood is on the U.S.' hands."

She also wants to inspire people to visit Mexico firsthand and see the country for themselves, instead of being intimidated by rumor and conjecture.

"What traveling has taught me is that any place can be amazing," says Griest. "But I'm now convinced Mexico really does have the best of everything — the most dramatic landscapes, the tastiest food, the warmest people, the craziest stories. It has to be the best all-around place on Earth."

New Orleans Stores Still Closed; Area Stores Fare Better

2008-09-03T12:42:00.001-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 9/3/2008 9:00:00 AM

As bookstores in New Orleans slowly start to re-open after Hurricane Gustav, some booksellers along the Gulf Coast that were outside the immediate area affected by the storm reported a more mixed picture.

Russ Adams, owner of Bienville Books in Mobile, Ala., said that the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans meant more customers coming into the story as they fled the hurricane. Adams’ store experienced minor water damage in the attic due to the storm and lost some ceiling tiles.

Dale Julian, owner of Down Town Books in Apalachicola, Fla. echoed Adam’s observation that there were more customers with Louisiana accents coming into his store, though that was balanced out with a slight downturn in normal weekend traffic. “I think the Weather Channel scared people off,” he said. Though Julian sent his staff into “battle stations” – taking everything out of his windows and raising all stock up off the floor – there was no damage to his store from the storm.

As of Tuesday morning, many bookstores along the Gulf Coast in areas hit by the storm remained temporarily closed. Calls to booksellers in New Orleans were not answered, as the booksellers are likely still waiting for permission to reenter the city following the mandatory evacuation.

Borders reported having closed three Borders stores in Louisiana and another seven Waldenbooks outlets, as far east as Tallahassee and Key West, Fla. Most have reopened, or will reopen today.

The answering machine at the Barnes & Noble in Gulfport, Miss. indicated the store was closed on Tuesday, but would reopen Wednesday. A call to the Books-A-Million outlet in Biloxi was not answered yesterday.

Review: 'Alive live in Necropolis' by Doug Dorst

2008-09-03T09:23:00.001-07:00

Novelist wakes the dead only to bury them in subplots
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 31, 2008
By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

If Colma, Calif., didn't already exist, a novelist would have to make it up. A town of just 2 square miles on the outskirts of San Francisco, Colma has served as the de facto burial ground for San Francisco since the early 20th century. Its population is more than 2 million, though only 2,000 of them are living.

Doug Dorst, a professor of creative writing at St. Edward's University in Austin, has picked this nicely noirish locale for his first novel.

Alive in Necropolis starts, as a book about a city of graves must, with death: Wesley Featherstone, a 27-year vet of the police force, has a heart attack in his cruiser. Eight months later, Michael Mercer, 30-year-old slacker turned cop discovers another body, that of Jude, the teenage son of a famous movie director, bound, naked and stuffed headfirst into a tomb. The boy is barely alive but won't say what happened.

There is a connection, and the dead know what it is, but they too aren't talking. They have their own problems to contend with: Doc Barker, a criminal who died in 1939 while escaping from Alcatraz, and his gang are terrorizing other ghosts, robbing and humiliating them at knifepoint.

Soon, Mercer, who has befriended Featherstone's widow, inherits boxes of police reports chronicling Featherstone's encounters with these phantasms. Mercer begins to see how the worlds of the living and the living dead commingle.

On the surface, Alive in Necropolis has so much going for it, in particular the great setting and colorful characters. Yet Mr. Dorst is a restless storyteller, and the book caroms between being a police procedural, a ghost story, a coming-of-age tale and a horror novel. As such, it ends up delivering a little too much of everything, be it people, subplots or metaphors.

His incorporation of some of the historical personages buried in Colma, such as baseball player Lefty O'Doul, Lillie Coit who built San Francisco's Coit Tower, daredevil aviator Lincoln Beachey, as characters is an intriguing conceit, but they never quite – there's no other way to say it – come to life and their presence feels almost dutiful, as if research was done that couldn't be wasted.

Meanwhile, the living characters are reduced to types against which Mercer measures himself: They include Mercer's girlfriend Fiona, a 43-year-old ER nurse with a dying cat; his best cop buddy Toronto, a wisecracking lothario turned married man turned Zen practitioner; and a coterie of same-age San Francisco friends who nicely divide up into hipsters, careerists and homemakers.

By the end, it all reads like a grand existential metaphor, something about death in the midst of life and life in midst of death. While this may be a worthy philosophical point, it snuffs the vitality out of the novel.

This is one story that gets buried alive by the author's ambition to make the book more meaningful.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Alive in Necropolis

Doug Dorst

(Riverhead, $25.95)

Caribbean Booksellers Cope With Higher Fuel Costs

2008-09-02T20:28:00.001-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 9/1/2008

Even bookstores in paradise are not immune to the vagaries of the U.S. economy. Rising fuel prices have impacted bookstores as far away as the U.S. Virgin Islands, and store owners are coping with the higher costs in different ways.

Jonathan Gjessing, owner of Dockside Books on St. Thomas, still sells books at cover price, but doesn't know how long he'll be able to hold out before raising prices. “I'm just not sure where the economy is going to go from here,” he said. His power costs went up 50% in July and shipping costs are also rising, as freight companies pass along added expenses to customers.

Gjessing bought the 2,000-sq.-ft. bookstore in 1982, four years after it was opened. Though he is located next to the port where cruise ships dock at the island, tourists don't contribute much to his business. “Cruise ship passengers don't buy many books at all,” he said. “Two-thirds of my customers are locals and the other third are cruise ship crew.” English-language guides are popular, as are food and wine guides.

On the neighboring island of St. Croix, Kathy Bennett adds a dollar to the cover price of books for sale at her store, Undercover Books. “It just about covers my expenses,” she said. Bennett relies on a freight forwarder rather than the U.S. Postal Service to keep costs down. A former stockbroker, Bennett moved to St. Croix 27 years ago from New York City and opened her 1,600-sq.-ft. store in 2000. In addition to selling new books, she offers her own oil paintings for sale, as well as the work of other local artists. She, too, acknowledged that the rising price of power is a concern: “My electrical bill is way more than you would ever see in the States.”

A member of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, Bennett has been trying to persuade publishers to send writers to the Virgin Islands for tours—Jimmy Buffett is at the top of her wish list—but rising travel costs are not helping her cause. In addition, stocking books for events is tricky, since shipping back returns for unsold merchandise is costly. “We had two very popular events in the past couple years,” said Bennett. “One with Tina Louise, author of the children's book When I Grow Up, who is better known as Ginger from the TV show Gilligan's Island, and another with celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito.” Each event sold 200 copies, all the books that Bennett had ordered.

Elsewhere on St. Croix, at Treasures Attic Bookshop, Yolette Nicholson has avoided rising shipping costs for the most part because the bulk of her initial inventory came from a stock of some 40,000 used books she bought on eBay, which prompted her to open the store in 2004. “At the time, it cost me more to ship those books here than to buy them,” she said. Nicholson is still unpacking books from the shipment, but because she has built a steady used book business she only opens about two cartons per week. Nicholson does sell new titles—still at cover price—but only in genres where it's difficult to get used copies on the island, such as new bestsellers and manga.

On St. John, John Dickson, owner of the Papaya Cafe (formerly Books and Beans), adds 15% to the cover price. Dickson, a Florida transplant, bought the 500-sq.-ft. bookstore in January. He said that his customers—a mix of locals and tourists—are not surprised by the higher prices. “It's just a fact of life that everything costs more here,” he said.

'Rocky Mountain News' To Run Original Fiction

2008-08-29T10:01:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 8/27/2008 3:02:00 PM

As host for the Democratic National Convention, Denver is very much in the spotlight right now. The city is also celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary this year, an event that is being marked in an unusual fashion by the Rocky Mountain News: The paper has commissioned 11 short stories from local writers that they will publish each Tuesday starting next week.

Dubbed “A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150,” authors participating include Margaret Coel, Joanne Greenberg, Pam Houston, Connie Willis, Nick Arvin, Sandra Dallas, Manuel Ramos, Robert Greer, Arnold Grossman, Diane Mott Davidson and Laura Pritchett. The twelfth and final story will be chosen through a writing contest, offering $500 and publication in the paper for the best story depicting Denver of the future.

Judges for the contest include Rocky Mountain News staffers Sandra Dallas, books editor Patti Thorn, editor John Temple, as well as retired Tattered Cover bookseller Margaret Maupin, and publishing consultant Laurie Brock, who was responsible for originating the idea.

“I think there's a place in newspapers for fiction,” wrote Temple in an editorial in the paper. “It's commonly said that a newspaper is fresh in the morning and fish wrap by the evening. That's only partly true. If you visit a library and watch patrons scrolling through old newspapers on microfilm, a larger truth is revealed. Just as newspapers are a good way to find out what's going on in a city today, they also are a window to study what a community was like in years past.” The stories that make up “A Dozen on Denver,” Temple continued, “will reveal something about the forces that made this the city it is today. The winning entry will tell us what life in the Denver of tomorrow might be like.” At present, there are no plans to turn the stories into a book.

13 Ways of Looking at a Rights Deal

2008-08-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

This month's Franfurt Book Fair's newsletter includes profiles of 13 rights professionals -- all members fo the Fairs Rights Directors Advisory Board -- I helped compile. Most are enlightening and many, entertaining.

Mrs. Anne-Solange Noble, Foreign Rights Director, Gallimard (France)

My job for the last 22 years has been to promote Gallimard’s French authors abroad and to convince foreign publishers to translate them. I’m absolutely passionate about opening up new worlds to people. Being born and raised in Montreal made me bilingual. Then I lived in Mexico and learned Spanish as well. I happen to be trilingual, but I’m not criticizing people who don’t speak another language. Think about Roger Strauss at the American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He had so many Nobel Prizes on his list that he was in Sweden almost every year, yet he only spoke English. He was just incredibly open and internationally minded.

Mrs. Annette Beetz, International Sales Director, Gräfe und Unzer (Germany)

As a publisher of illustrated reference guides, we work with a multitude of publishers, projects, and people and I can truly say that I have never been bored during the eight years I’ve been in the job, not even one single day. Over this time, digital technology has made serving the needs of our clients much easier. It's much more convenient to make data (rather than film) accessible to a multitude of people in almost no time, and it permits the combination of text and images from a variety of titles into one new title that will exactly meet the client's needs. We have just begun to explore the many options of selling digital rights to a variety of customers, many of them not part of the publishing world but rather from the corporate world of big brands in the food and health industries.

Carole Blake, Literary Agent, Blake Friedmann Literary, TV and Film Agency Ltd. (UK)

I've been running the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency since I established it in 1977, having spent 14 years previously working for publishers. The advent of the digital world hasn’t changed my job that much at all: of course new rights means vigorous negotiation for the royalties etc but there is so little income stream from many of these new rights so far, so little else has changed. I haven't yet found an e-book reader that suits me - I want one that will take my manuscripts and allow me to edit on screen and am not going to buy one until they do. Social networking? Talking, having meetings, book fairs - that's real social networking. And that's what makes publishing work. Still, the biggest thrill for me since starting was being asked to record my life story -- verbally on tape -- for The British Library.

Diane Spivey, Rights & Contracts Director, Little, Brown Book Group (UK)

I started out when the big money and emphasis was on licensing paperback reprint rights which is almost unheard of today – then book clubs were the next big thing. In the UK, serial rights had a massive boom which has since faded now that the newspapers are losing advertising revenue, and now the emphasis (though sadly, not as yet the big income) is on digital rights such as ebooks. The disturbing downside, though, is a tendency for people (not just the general public but other book trade professionals) to assume that something transmitted or available digitally commands less value than the physical equivalent (ebooks v printed books; audio downloads v CDs). I was involved in a UK publishing initiative which brought together the Publishers Association, the Authors’ Agents Association and the Society of Authors to try to come up with contract guidelines and definitions of publishing terms that would work for the future. In the end we were not able to agree, but I think all parties found the exchange of views very informative, non-confrontational and a good basis for ongoing individual negotiations. So, success from failure, I guess you could say!

Riky Stock, Director, German Book Office New York (USA)

One of the GBO’s tasks is to establish personal contacts, as we strongly believe that book rights sell because of the true enthusiasm of a rights director or an editor. During the GBO’s 2006 editor’s trip, we were meeting with editors from Random House Germany when Martin Mittelmeier’s phone rang. Mittelmeier, an editor at the literary Luchterhand imprint, left the room only to return a few minutes later with a big smile on his face. His author, Saša Stanišić, had just been shortlisted for the German Book Prize. His excitement infected everyone, including Grove/Atlantic editor Lauren Wein. After the trip, she bought the rights to Stanišić’s debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Stanišić was then selected as a Writer-in-Residence at Deutsches Haus NYU and participated in the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival. The book is currently selling well and receiving positive reviews in the US.

Marcella Berger, VP, Director of Subsidiary Rights, Simon & Schuster (USA)

I’ve been with S&S for 32 years. Twenty years ago you dealt with ten countries, now you deal with 40 countries. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere all want the same books, and often those are American books. I’m always a little surprised at how informed publishers in, say Latvia, are about America. We may not buy a book by the prime minister of Germany, but everyone wanted Hillary Clinton's book Living History and rights sold sight unseen to the book in 33 countries. In recent years, people wonder why it’s still important to go to Frankfurt when you can do everything electronically. I will say things have become a little impersonal with all the email. I still feel the personal contact is important and the personal relationship serves you in good stead when you put books on submission or when problems arise. That’s why we all go to Frankfurt.

Lynette Owen, Copyright Director, Pearson Education Limited (UK)

I spend a significant amount of my personal time running training courses on copyright and licensing in the UK (for the industry and for publishing degree students) and abroad (for publishing professionals - most recently in Vietnam, Mexico, Argentina and Spain - for Catalan publishers in Barcelona). I would say that the most exciting aspects of my job are the ways in which my own company has developed and expanded into new areas over the years; the sheer range of travel I have been able to undertake in connection with my main job and for training purposes - often when the markets concerned were first opening up to licensing opportunities. Also, the amazing range of publishing people I have had the privilege of meeting in markets from the Baltics and the Balkans to Mongolia, China and Vietnam - people who have often had to combat difficult local circumstances in order to achieve their goals. I am happy if the training work undertaken by others and myself has enabled them to operate more confidently on a more level playing field.

Robert Baensch, President, Baensch International Group Limited (USA)

I’ve been involved with rights management since the beginning of my career at McGraw-Hill in 1974. For Frankfurt, I have been the program coordinator of the Rights Directors Meeting for many years. What’s been most interesting to me in the past decade is to see the development of all the former Soviet countries into their own cultural and intellectual publishing arenas. Slovenia for example used to be required to use Russian, but now they publish and read in their own language. I ran a publishing conference in Almati, Kazakhstan, and 66 publishers showed up for my seminars. What used to be viewed as insignificant and irrelevant has emerged into a viable micro market. For many authors being published into these markets, it’s not the money or commercial side that’s important – it’s that they were published in so many countries. When that happens, I hear things like “The edition of my book in Thai, in their script, was the most beautiful edition of all.”

Beatriz Coll, Literary Agent, RDC Agencia Literaria (Spain)

I primarily sell rights for our Spanish author's abroad, via a wonderful co-agents network, and sell rights on behalf of USA and UK houses/agencies for the Spanish and Portuguese language markets. I also sell for some German and Dutch, and one Thai house as well. Selling rights is unpredictable, but there is a rewarding feeling of having found, negotiated and closed a deal with the right house for the right author/work. Also, selling those little jewels that won't ever be mega-sellers a priori, but that have their home in the suitable house, is satisfying. My biggest success recently was selling Stephenie Meyer’s books for translation into Spanish.

Kerstin Schuster, Foreign Rights Director, S. Fischer (Germany)

As foreign rights manager at S. Fischer I am in charge of rights/license sales throughout the world for fiction and non-fiction titles published by S. Fischer, including a huge backlist with authors like Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. But the most wonderful day in my 15 years in publishing was the day when José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 - I used to work at the Ray-Güde Mertin agency at that time and we represented world rights to the author's works. Saramago was at the Frankfurt airport, about to leave and then came back to the Fair -- all his international publishers could celebrate this day with him. My most recent success has been the licensing of last year's German Book Prize winner Julia Franck's novel "Die Mittagsfrau" – we’ve sold it for 30 languages so far.

Carolyn Savarese, Group VP, Director International Sales & Marketing, Sub Rights, Perseus Book Group (USA)

I started at Perseus a decade ago and now oversee all matters regarding international sales, contacts, royalties and licensing rights. Most publishers try to keep licensing and sales apart because they see them as competitive, but I think it helps us serve the author better. I first came into this business after spending a year in Rome and then working in New York for Italy’s RAI -- I did the weather one night on television and booked appointments for the Cannes Film Festival, which I realized later was a good primer for Frankfurt. I somehow ended up at Mondadori's New York office, where my favorite part of the job -- and I’m dating myself now -- was distributing the telexes to the offices on our floor. It was like getting to read people’s mail every morning. The scout Maria Campbell was there and I was able to read what publishers around the world were saying about these great books – by John Updike, Umberto Eco – years before they would be published.

Irina Prokhorova, Editor, New Literary Observer (Russia)

I launched Russia’s first independent academic journal in 1992 -- the ‘New Literary Observer’ – something unthinkable in Soviet times. In 1995 I also started publishing books. We participate in all major international book fairs, Frankfurt in first place, selling and buying rights. Publishing is a kind of eternal adventure – in spite of all calculations and professional efficiency the only thing you can basically rely on choosing a book for publication is a dark intuition. This mystery of public reception and a game of chance you play with the text (and yourself) is the most exciting experience for a true publisher. My greatest success came last year when we published a special issue of NLO devoted to the close historical study of the single year of 1990 – the crucial though most oblique year in recent Russian history, where all the political and social changes of the late perestroika became irreversible and undeniable. We did it both in print and an electronic version, including a detailed day-by-day chronicle of the year with hyperlinks to various articles and discussions as well as biographies of the participants of those historical days, audio & visual material. To some extent, it is a realization of the French concept of ‘total history,’ meaning exhaustive description of historical events of a certain period.

Susanne Schettler, Senior Account Manager English-speaking world, Frankfurt Book Fair (Germany)

I head the team that is in charge of all our company's profit-making and non-profit activities involving the English-speaking world. That includes the organisation of Hall 8 and the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre at the Frankfurt Book Fair as well as German collective stands at book fairs in English-speaking countries, plus other projects. Coordination of the German Book Office New York, GBO, is also part of our team’s remit. Rights trade in all its aspects is of course one of the major concerns preoccupying the publishing world in “my” region, which is why it matters a great deal to me to be able to help in organising the annual Rights Directors Meetings. I have been a member of the advisory board since 2008 and I am very much looking forward to working together with the other board members.

Georgia Bookseller Raises $25,000 to Save Store

2008-08-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 8/18/2008 9:22:00 AM

Faced with a large chunk of debt, Wordsworth Books of Decatur, Ga. was in danger of closing earlier this month when it launched an aggressive fundraising campaign that culminated last Friday with an event featuring author Jack Pendarvis and his book Awesome (MacAdam/Cage). The two-week blitz enabled Wordsworth to raise nearly $25,000, taking itself out of immediate danger. “We came very close to our fundraising goal,” said owner Zachary Steele.

Steele’s August 4 e-mail blast generated lots of publicity in publishing circles and the store received a big boost when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a four-minute segment on August 11 outlining the store’s need. Contributions came from 18 states, as well as Canada and the U.K. Additional funds were provided by higher sales and some 40 new members signing up for the store’s loyalty program.

“The signs are out of the windows and I’m filled with hope, but there’s still a lot of work for me to do,” Steele said, indicating that the $25,000 still doesn’t erase the store’s total debt burden and in the coming months he will be seeking additional investors, including one willing to come in as a full business partner. “Still,” Steele said, “to have so many flood us with support, both financially and emotionally, has been a tremendous boon.”

Oooooh Mexico: Lida and Griest on Our Misunderstood Neighbor

2008-08-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

'First Stop in the New World' by David Lida and 'Mexican Enough' by Stephanie Elizondo Griest: Fresh takes on an old country

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 17, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

You'll be robbed, kidnapped and probably murdered; the traffic is at a constant 24-hour standstill; the air is so bad that breathing it is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day; you can't drink the water, the food will give you diarrhea ...

Those aren't slogans you're likely to see on any travel poster for Mexico City. Yet, it's what many Americans believe to be the truth: Mexico is just too dangerous to visit. Besides, isn't all the best stuff Mexico has to offer readily available in San Antonio?

Journalists David Lida and Stephanie Elizondo Griest disagree. The authors of a pair of new books (First Stop in the New World and Mexican Enough, respectively) challenge many of these hoary old clichés.

Mr. Lida, a former New Yorker who has lived nearly 20 years in D.F. (short for Distrito Federal and a nickname for Mexico City), offers his services as an opinionated Virgil through its labyrinthine streets. Reflecting the "improvised, ad-hoc nature of life in Mexico City," he caroms from the enthusiasm of the Chilangos (a mildly offensive slang term for residents of the capital) for the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Mexican national soccer team to the city's poor urban planning and, yes, appalling traffic.

Mr. Lida's method results in a mosaic of life in the city. Highlights of his book are his many brief portraits of the city's cosmopolitan denizens, such as a Brazilian model, a would-be porn mogul and a hip Englishman who opens a Tiki bar.

In Mexican Enough, Stephanie Elizondo Griest describes how on Dec. 30, 2004, she, too, moved to Mexico, motivated by a need to resolve her conflicted feelings about her mixed ethnicity (her mother is Mexican, her father is from Kansas). A Corpus Christi native who rarely visited Mexico, Ms. Griest's goal is to learn Spanish and "Mexicanize" herself.

The result is nearly two-year journey of self-discovery during which she befriends gay activists, seeks out Zapatista rebels in Chiapas and strikers in Oaxaca, and meets countless women abandoned by men who've emigrated to El Norte. She also tracks down ancestors in the town of Cruillas, a place reportedly wiped off the map when its residents were hired by Richard King in 1854 to work on the King Ranch in South Texas. (The story's untrue. However desolate, the town remains.)

Where Mr. Lida's and Ms. Griest's books cross paths is illustrative of their differences: Both describe Aztec re-enactors in Mexico City's Zocolo who offer ritual cleansing through incense. Mr. Lida is cynical about the promised limpia; Ms. Griest finds herself crouching down before them, "Breathing in the blue incense. Watching the Templo Mayor burst out of the pavement. Meditating history."

Discussing Lucha Libre, the carnival-like Mexican form of professional wrestling, Mr. Lida interprets it using the theories of Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz; Ms. Griest interviews Bulldog Quintero, a half-deaf, gray-haired luchador who flips through his photo albums and reminisces about his 40-year career.

Where Mr. Lida is breezy, urbane and maintains a journalistic distance, Ms. Griest is earnest and full of wonder, befriending many of her subjects. Mr. Lida can sound like a spoiled urbanite when he bemoans the lack of jazz venues in Mexico City, while Ms. Griest's exertions to cover the "big" issues (immigration, the oppression of the poor) occasionally feels dutiful. And while Mr. Lida's agenda is sociological – he ultimately wants us to see Mexico as an example of a 21st-century hypercity – it becomes a personal paean. Ms. Griest starts on a personal mission but veers into sociological study.

The biggest difference ultimately lies in how the writers perceive themselves: Mr. Lida considers himself a Chilango; Ms. Griest acknowledges she will "never be Mexican, not even if I moved there for the rest of my life."

Each view has its merits, and both books are insightful and entertaining. Read together, they offer a panoramic portrait of our beguiling neighbor, one that will have you dismissing those old, misleading platitudes.

Random House Cancels Novel About Muhammad's Wife, Sparks Controversy

2008-08-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

A University of Texas professor alerted Ballantine Books this spring that a novel it planned to publish about a wife of the Prophet Muhammad contained historical inaccuracies, and she said the book might spark violent protests.

Weeks later, Ballantine decided to cancel the book, which was scheduled to be published this week. Now the professor, Denise Spellberg, is at the center of a publishing controversy that has brought her a flood of hate mail.

In April, Spellberg, an associate professor in the Department of History and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, was asked by Ballantine, a division of Random House, to write a promotional blurb for a forthcoming historical novel, "The Jewel of Medina," by Sherry Jones. The book is based on the life of Muhammad's young wife Aisha.

Spellberg is an expert on Aisha; her 1994 scholarly work, "Politics, Gender, & the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A'isha bint Abi Bakr," was cited as a source by Jones on her Web site.

But Spellberg was appalled by Jones' book. "The characterization of Aisha as a sexualized being, swinging a sword around and who taught others to use a weapon, was an egregious abuse of her life," she told the American-Statesman. (Spellberg allowed a Statesman editor to sit in her office and skim the manuscript.)

Spellberg, coincidentally, has a contract with Random House to write a nonfiction book titled "Thomas Jefferson's Quran." On April 30, she called her editor and recommended that "The Jewel of Medina" not be published.

"Not just because of its potential to provoke violence," said Spellberg, who worried that a small minority of Muslims might respond violently to the book. "But also because, as a historian, I objected to the fact that it was a deliberately distorted view of an important female religious figure."

Spellberg also had her lawyer send a letter to Random House saying that she would sue the company if her name was used to promote the book.

"My fear was that the author would invoke my name or scholarly work as her explanation for the historical sources she claimed underpinned her novel," Spellberg said. "I wanted to protect my professional reputation — and my safety."

Jones, a journalist in Spokane, Wash., said that before Random House bought the novel and a sequel in 2007 for $100,000, it asked if there was "anything controversial" about the book. Jones recalled saying yes but said that "there wasn't anything in there that couldn't be found in one of the 29 nonfiction books I used for research."

On May 2, Jones learned that Random House was concerned that the book might offend Muslims. "I was told they wanted to delay publication until they checked with other scholars and some security people," she said.

By that point, the controversy had grown. The same day that Spellberg called Random House, she also phoned Shahed Amanullah, the Austin-based editor of altmuslim.com who has been a guest lecturer in her class.

"He edits a Web site dedicated to reasonable discourse about controversial topics in the American Muslim community, and I wanted to bring this book to his attention because it was likely to become a topic of conversation," Spellberg said. She denied, as has been reported elsewhere, that she called to "warn" him about the book. "Warning is not what I was trying to do."

Amanullah perceived the call otherwise, later describing her tone as "frantic." Spellberg admitted to being upset but said she was "breathless" because she was rushing to get to class at the time.

Amanullah,who does not support the cancellation of the book, subsequently sent out an e-mail about the conversation that was posted on at least one Web site for Muslims.

On May 21, Jones learned that Random House was canceling the book.

"I wanted to fight it, but Random House said they talked with three academics and had reviewed the security situation," Jones said. "They didn't give me specifics, other than to say their head of security said they shouldn't take the risk."

In a prepared statement, Random House said: "After sending out advance editions of the novel 'Jewel of Medina,' we received in response, from credible and unrelated sources, unsolicited cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.

"We felt an obligation to take these concerns very seriously. We consulted with security experts as well as with scholars of Islam, whom we asked to review the book and offer their assessments of potential reactions. We stand firmly by our responsibility to support our authors and the free discussion of ideas, even those that may be construed as offensive by some."

The news passed unnoticed by most until Aug. 6, when The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece, "You Still Can't Write About Muhammad," criticizing the book's cancellation. "The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world," wrote Asra Q. Nomani, an author who was also asked to write a blurb for "Jewel of Medina" and has since become a friend of Jones'.

Jones said she empathizes with Random House but said: "I do believe they would have published the book without (Spellberg's) phone call and a letter from her lawyer."

Spellberg sees her role differently. "Random House invited me into the publishing process," she said. "They are a big corporation, and they made the decision to cancel the book, not me."

Since The Wall Street Journal article appeared, Spellberg said, she has received hate mail and been pilloried online. "They are calling me an opponent of free speech, saying I am a supporter of Muslim extremists," she said.

Spellberg noted that she teaches Salman Rushdie's controversial novel "The Satanic Verses" — which in 1988 led the leader of Iran to issue a fatwa death order against Rushdie and sent him into hiding for several years — because it offers a sophisticated lesson to her students.

"While Rushdie covers much the same ground about Aisha as Jones does — suggesting even that she had a dalliance in the desert — the greater issue is that Rushdie questioned whether God spoke directly to the Prophet Muhammad," she said. "Rushdie can claim he was raising an existential, theological query, however impertinent. Jones' book is a mere burlesque."

Jones is now shopping "The Jewel of Medina" elsewhere. Publishers in Italy, Spain and Hungary have purchased rights, and she said her agent has received calls from interested parties.

As to the accusation that she has altered history to suit her fictional ends, Jones doesn't deny it. Her portrayal of Aisha as a sword fighter, for instance, has no basis in historical record. The same goes for her portrayal of Aisha's flirtation with another man: "With our bodies, we brushed each other lightly — my breasts to his chest. ... An aroma like musk rose from his body. My moan of pleasure surprised me, luxuriant as the purr of a cat stretching in the sunlight."

Jones said her bending of historical accounts is "minor" and is the province of a novelist.

"The sword Aisha wields is a metaphor for her strength," she said. "Aisha was a warrior in her own way, and just because the Hadith (the body of Islamic oral tradition) doesn't say she had a sword doesn't mean she couldn't have a sword. Is that a reason to kill the book because I put a sword in her hands? That's the fiction part."

"The question here really is about historical fiction — is it so expansive that anything goes, even if it isnot true?" Spellberg asked. "If a book discusses Judeo-Christian history, people know the difference. In this case, Jones' book only works by taking advantage of people's ignorance."

Spellberg cited the book's last page, in which Aisha is narrating: "My sword will serve you well in the jihad to come. Now I knew what Muhammad meant by 'an inner struggle.' On the very day of his death, jihad had already begun."

"It's incredibly inflammatory," Spellberg said. "At a time when many accept the stereotype that Muslims are violent because of their faith, the image of Aisha wielding a sword she never held in history would seem to promote that. If it's supposed to be a work of historical fiction, then shouldn't there be some history in it?"

Additional material from Statesman book editor Jeff Salamon.

Mississippi's Turnrow Books Seeks to Create an Experience.

2008-08-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 8/11/2008

Mississippi is a foreign culture,” says Jamie Kornegay, owner of Turnrow Book Company, located deep in the Mississippi delta in Greenwood. He is, technically speaking, a foreigner himself, having been born in Memphis in 1975. He was then raised over the border in Batesville, Miss., a 30-minutes drive from Oxford, home to Faulkner and numerous other literary lights. It's no surprise, then, that Kornegay, 33, was a reader from a young age, his favorite book Crime and Punishment.

After graduating with a journalism degree from Ole Miss, where he says he fell under the thrall of Southern author Barry Hannah, Kornegay stayed on the periphery of the book world, editing Oxford Town, the weekly indie arts supplement to the Oxford Eagle. As part of his job, Kornegay was responsible for interviewing visiting authors, something that brought him into contact with Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books. Journalism was “making him antsy,” so he says, “I quit and begged Richard for a job.” Kornegay's stint at Square Books started in 1998 and lasted seven years, a period that saw him move from bookseller to booking author events to overseeing marketing and advertising. He also helped produce Thacker Mountain Radio, a weekly variety arts radio show broadcast from Howorth's Off Square Books store.

All the while, Kornegay was working on his fiction and published stories in a trio of anthologies, including They Write Among Us (Jefferson Square Press, 2003) and volume two of Stories from the Blue Moon Café (2004). In 2005, Kornegay reached the point where he was “fully prepared to move on from the bookstore to commit to a life of poverty” as an author—and then Fred Carl found him. The founder of Viking Range, the manufacturer of pricey kitchen ranges and other appliances, Carl built his company in Greenwood and was helping to seed the city's downtown with new and revitalized businesses—a hotel, restaurants—to develop a tourist trade.

A mutual friend, Martha Foos, author of Screen Door and Sweet Tea (Clarkson Potter, 2008) introduced Kornegay to Carl and the idea for a bookstore was born. “My wife, Kelly, and I discussed it and decided, if we don't do this, we're going to spend our whole life wondering what if,” says Kornegay. So in August 2006, with Carl as a silent partner, the Turnrow Book Company opened in a renovated department store. The resulting 4,000-sq.-ft. bookstore is beautiful: a single, soaring room, decorated with chandeliers and Persian rugs, lined with books, while a second-floor mezzanine wraps the space.

“My philosophy of bookselling is still forming,” acknowledges Kornegay. While Turnrow is fundamentally a general interest store with a heavy dose of Southern literature, Kornegay says the store's selection continues to evolve. “We have grand ideas each week, then abandon them the next, but what we're really trying to do is create an experience,” he says. Kelly, who's worked as a graphic designer, “is now learning the bookselling business,” says Kornegay, “but that is complicated by the fact of our two young children”—a four-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy.

Turnrow has benefited from its proximity to both Square Books and Lemuria Books in Jackson, and the three stores now make a minicircuit for touring authors. In addition, since many of Greenwood's visitors are chefs or foodies in town to visit Viking, Kornegay has started a first editions club for signed cookbooks.

It was, in fact, an encounter with chef Alice Waters that helped inspire Kornegay to take up yet another career: farming. “Alice came through and got me really fired up about growing your own food,” he says. “So we helped get a farmers market started up in Greenwood. And I started growing stuff: tomatoes, cantaloupe, strawberries, herbs... and sometimes I tease Kelly that I'm going to let her run the bookstore and I'll become a gentleman farmer.” Kornegay adds—and one gets the sense he's talking as much about writing and bookselling as farming—“I'm still at the journeyman stage, figuring out how to do it all. It's a tough thing, and you can see how hard it is. Success is determined by weather, and the elements and nature always seem to be against you.”

Georgia Bookstore Asks for Cash to Relieve Debt

2008-08-05T13:32:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 8/5/2008 7:17:00 AM

Wordsmiths Books of Decatur, Ga., which opened in June 2007, has launched a “Save Our Bookstore” campaign to pay off debt. “Our rent and expenses in our initial location were higher than expected,” said owner Zachary Steele, “and we need to raise fifteen, twenty, twenty five thousand dollars, to begin paying off creditors.”

In March, Wordsmiths moved from what Steele calls “an off-the-beaten path” location to a space on the town’s main square where business has been much better. “As I said on our blog: We are not fighting declining sales, nor are we fighting customer apathy, or even a lagging book market,” Steele reiterated. “We are fighting only the debt created by starting in the wrong location and we want a chance to get back on our feet.” Steele also blames part of the store’s debt on “a recent big-name author event requiring a massive up-front investment that didn’t pan out.” He declined to reveal details.

On Monday, Steele sent out an e-mail asking well wishers to donate money through the store’s Web site. In addition, he launched a “Friends of Wordsmiths” loyalty program, offering discounts and other benefits, with tiers ranging from $10 to $500. Fundraising is expected to last through mid month and efforts should conclude with a fundraising event featuring notable authors and musicians, yet to be determined, on the weekend of August 15-17. “I want people to know that I’ve done everything possible before putting my hand out, which is something I didn’t want to do,” said Steele.

Teenage readers eagerly await latest from vampire saga

2008-08-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

Twilight fans celebrate release with their own Halloween
By EDWARD NAWOTKA Special To The Houston Chronicle
July 31, 2008, 6:33PM

If, driving in the wee hours this weekend, you spy in your headlights a vampire in a tuxedo accompanied by a teen in a prom dress, fear not. You're not hallucinating nor have you slipped into a time warp and landed on Halloween.

You're merely encountering one of the legions of teenage book lovers who will be lurking late into the night, marking the publication of Breaking Dawn, the fourth and presumably final installment in Stephenie Meyer's runaway best-selling Twilight Saga, which goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

Not familiar with Meyer? You're probably not a teenage girl or parent of one. Meyer's young-adult romances have become the most popular literary sensation since J.K. Rowling sent Harry Potter into his final battle with Voldemort last year.

The first three books in Meyer's quartet — Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse — tell the tale of two star-crossed lovers: high-school student Bella Swan and her boyfriend, Edward Cullen, a vampire. Jacob Black, Bella's closest friend, emerges as a rival for her affections. He happens to be a werewolf.

The first three books have sold 5.5 million copies across 28 countries. Earlier this year Time magazine picked the 35-year-old Meyer as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2008. In May she published her first novel for adults, The Host, now in its 11th week on the New York Times best-seller list. The movie adaptation of Twilight arrives in theaters in December.

Breaking Dawn (Little, Brown, $22.99) promises to reveal which of her suitors, Edward or Jacob, Bella will choose. With a 2.5 million first printing, it's expected to be the best-selling book of the year.

In a pattern established by the Harry Potter phenomenon, many Houston booksellers are throwing special parties tonight leading up to the 12:01 a.m. on-sale time. Starting at 10 p.m. the Bookstop/Alabama Theater is taking prom-style photographs for those who show up dressed as one of the characters, while at 9:30 p.m. the Borders on Kirby will host a debate about whether Bella should choose Edward or Jacob.

Barnes & Noble in The Woodlands is hosting a Vampire Masquerade Ball, while at the Barnes & Noble at Town & Country Village the party includes a trivia and costume contest. Both start at 10 p.m.

"We're expecting hundreds of people," said Katrya Pekarsky, community relations manager at the latter store.

Blue Willow Bookshop on Memorial in west Houston will treat fans to red velvet cupcakes and commemorative T-shirts, starting at 11:17 p.m. Valerie Kohler, Blue Willow's owner, said while teenage girls "overwhelmingly" make up the book's audience, many adult women "are dying to find out what happens next."

Julie Landreth, a 37-year-old mother living in the Heights, is one such adult reader. She was introduced to the books in June by the 18-year-old baby sitter who cares for her son. Soon she was hooked.

"I like them because I can remember how it was in high school when I had my crushes, the dilemmas of dating," she said.

Meyer's ascendancy as a literary superstar happened fast. She has said the story for Twilight came to her in a dream in 2003. Her sister encouraged her to write the dream. Nine literary agents rejected her manuscript before it was pulled from the slush pile at Writers House, the company that represents top-selling romance novelist Nora Roberts. Not long after, Meyer had a three-book deal worth $750,000.

As a Mormon and mother of three, Meyer has been vocal about her desire to keep the books wholesome. They're virtually devoid of sex, drugs, drinking and foul language. Even the monsters struggle to be good, with the vampires choosing to feast on bears and other woodland creatures instead of humans.

Carlee Eberly, 18, a baker at Crave Cupcakes in Uptown Park, appreciates that the books don't deliver typical horror-novel fare. "They're not what you expect. There's no blood dripping from their teeth, for example." She pre-ordered the book from Blue Willow two months ago and plans to go to the launch party with her older sister, 20, and two of her friends.

As to the question of Edward or Jacob, Eberly opts for Edward. "He was Bella's first love," she says. "Jacob is more of a friend."

Iris Cronin, 11, a sixth-grader at Memorial Middle School, prefers Jacob.

"The whole thing about Edward hounding Bella for her mortal soul bothers me," she said. "Human experiences are interesting because they have an end. If you're a vampire, you'd have to witness all the rise and fall of mankind."

Plus, she added, Jacob "has a really cool motorcycle."

That Cronin would have such a sophisticated opinion of the books comes as no surprise: Her father is Rice University professor Justin Cronin, an acclaimed novelist who is himself writing a much-anticipated trilogy of vampire-themed novels. The first in his series, The Passage, is due in stores next summer.

In May, Meyer read from The Host at Klein Forest High School, sponsored by the Barnes & Noble at Champions Village, and drew more than 1,000 fans.

Among those in attendance was Hannah Nerdin, 14, a ninth-grader at Morton Ranch High School in Katy. She said meeting Meyer in person left her "speechless." As a member of the Mormon church, she had to get her mother Stacy's approval first.

The elder Nerdin, 34, called the books so entertaining they are like "crack for the suburban housewife" but conceded she had "mixed feelings" about her daughter reading them.

"It's troubling to me how obsessive Bella gets about Edward," Nerdin said. "I wanted to make sure Hannah knew there was life beyond boys."

Nevertheless, Nerdin was happy to pre-order Breaking Dawn and expects to have it delivered from Amazon.com sometime on Saturday.

For her part, Hannah just hopes her mother lets her read it first: "It is," she said, her voice breathless with anticipation, "the one thing I've been looking forward to the most all summer long."

Breaking Dawn Delayed for E-book Readers

2008-08-01T10:27:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 7/31/2008 3:24:00 PM

Excitement has been building for weeks, leading to tonight's midnight release of Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, as retailers across the country prepare for midnight parties. But one segment of the market— e-book retailers—is less than pleased: Little, Brown has opted to delay the release of the e-book version of Breaking Dawn until 24 hours after the print edition goes on sale. The e-book will become available for download at 12:01 EST on Sunday, August 3. Retailers were informed on Wednesday.

The reason cited for the change was that LBBYR parent company Hachette Book Group USA was concerned retailers would not be able to stagger the release according to time zones, thus potentially enabling e-book buyers in Western time zones to begin read the book before the print edition goes on sale in the same time zone. A spokesperson for Hachette acknowledged the company changed the release date at the last minute, and said the publisher "will manage this type of situation more efficiently in the future. We apologize for any confusion or frustration this change may have caused."

Kurt Johnson, director of operations at e-book retailer Booksonboard.com, lamented the decision. “It’s an example of a publisher treating e-book retailers and readers as second-class citizens,” said Johnson. “We have many irate customers.” Booksonboard had been offering the book for pre-order and those customers will now be forced to wait an extra day.

A poster on the Amazon Kindle blog was even more direct: “The torture has been extended,” they wrote.

To Woof or Not to Woof? 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle' by David Wroblewski: Best-selling boy-and-his-dog story has parallels to 'Hamlet'

2008-07-21T05:18:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning New

There's something rotten in the state of Wisconsin.

David Wroblewski draws on disparate literary influences (Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, Kipling's The Jungle Book and most notably Shakespeare's Hamlet) for a family saga set in the early 1970s in rural Wisconsin. The result, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, is exemplary.

Fourteen-year-old Edgar is mute. Together with his father, Gar, and mother, Trudy, they breed "Sawtelle" dogs, precious, intelligent working animals, on their farm. Gar whelps the pups, Trudy (nee Gertrude) trains them and young Edgar names them with the help of a dictionary. Edgar's constant canine companion is Almondine, a creature who "simply worried whenever the boy was out of her sight," and becomes his guardian, of sorts.

The appearance of Edgar's uncle Claude (nee Claudius), following a 20-year absence, leads to the inevitable: murder most foul, strange and unnatural.

Subsequently, with Trudy in mourning, Edgar succumbs to anger, doubt and brooding and eventually absconds into the woods with a trio of dogs, all the while fomenting a plan to confront Claude.

That this book has become a national best-seller is no surprise; it is a about a boy and his dog, after all. (Marley & Me, anyone?) Yet it is not the most likely candidate for best-seller-dom: It is long (556 pages), leisurely (it takes more than 250 pages before parallels to Hamlet lock in place), it is set during an unfashionable period (the 1970s) in the middle of nowhere with a main character who is handicapped. So why has it resonated with so many readers?

The novel, as a form, is an old dog trying to learn a new trick. It has been struggling to find a way to entice an audience among people more accustomed to the short, addictive snippets of the Internet and the nonstop cacophony of television. What Mr. Wroblewski has done here with mute Edgar is produce a character that physically mirrors our own experience sitting in front of the television or the computer screen.

We can see and hear, but we can't talk back. Edgar can write and sign, as well as hear, but he cannot talk. We, like Edgar, are forced to be observers and thinkers, the perfect state for reading.

Theories aside, Mr. Wroblewski, a software designer who once lived in Austin, has done one verifiable thing: He's produced one of the most charming and absorbing novels this year, one in which even the digressions, about dog breeding or Midwestern electrical storms, prove interesting.

This is a book for long summer nights on the mythical porch swing to be read in the dying light. When you do read it, savor it, for treats like this are rare indeed.

Houston's Brazos Launches $1,000 Loyalty Program

2008-07-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2008 7:17:00 AM

In 2006, more than a dozen investors contributed a minimum of $10,000 each to purchase Houston’s Brazos Bookstore.

“Since then,” said manager Jane Moser, “I’ve had so many customers come up to me and say they would have liked to have been able to invest in the store themselves. Of course, we can’t do that now so we’re doing something different.”

This week Brazos introduced a new multi-level loyalty program. Dubbed “Friends of Brazos,” annual membership starts at the $50 “Manuscript Level,” which bestows an invitation to one private author event, an evening with publishers' sales reps previewing forthcoming titles, and 20% off any in stock title four times a year. Subsequent levels, including “Paperback Level” ($150) and Hardcover Level ($500), offer more private functions, such as author dinners, and additional discounts. Membership tops out at the “First Edition Level” which costs $1,000 and offers, in addition to other benefits, a ticket to the UP Experience (a day-long seminar held in Houston in February that features featuring 20 speakers and is modeled on the TED [Technology Enterntainment Design] conference). “We can’t compete nose to nose with the chains on discounts, so we’re doing something different,” said Moser.

Asked if customers might balk at the idea of a $1,000 loyalty membership, Moser acknowledged that it might seem like a lot, “until one realizes The First Edition level is actually a bargain, considering a ticket to the UP Experience alone costs $1,000.”

The intention is to boost revenue while simultaneously making customers, quite literally, more invested in shopping in the store. “It’s a tough business,” said Moser. “We think anyone who becomes a Friend of Brazos is getting a lot for their money. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

Bookazine's Book Buddies

2008-07-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/14/2008

If the Book Buddies had a theme song, it could be James Taylor's hit “You've Got a Friend.” The semi-formal group of booksellers organized by Ron Rice, sales manager of Bookazine, and Eileen Dengler, executive director of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, has so far convened twice at bookstores for a walk-through and store critique, followed by a lunch to talk through issues facing new booksellers and their stores.

“The group was formed with the idea of sharing concepts and techniques, as well as to foster friendships among booksellers and encourage a feeling of solidarity,” explained Rice. “It's important on a grassroots level for local booksellers to talk to each other.” Donna Fell, who took over ownership of Sparta Books in Sparta, N.J., last November, received the first Buddies visit in February. It was, said Fell, “perfect timing.”

“When I bought the store, the previous owner just handed me the keys and said, 'phone if you have any questions,' ” recalled Fell, “I was brand new to bookselling and owning my own business, so meeting the Book Buddies made me feel like I wasn't so crazy after all.”

One of the Buddies, Jason Rice, Bookazine buyer/sales rep, solicited publishers to provide marketing materials and posters on Fell's behalf. Others offered advice on everything from making best use of the ABA to how to host a story time for children. “It was the best experience I could have asked for,” Fell said.

The Book Buddies include booksellers, store owners and journalists, most of who work in the New York/Philadelphia/Washington, D.C., corridor. The second gathering of the Buddies took place June 13 at the recently opened Idlewild Books in New York City. Idlewild owner David Del Vecchio called the group “helpful and solution oriented,” and added, “We made numerous changes based on things they said, such as adding shelftalkers and some additional signage, and using smaller tables for displays.”

Rice intends to plan further Book Buddies outings in the future, though none are as yet scheduled. In addition, Rice would like to expand the program to other parts of the country, and has spoken with Wanda Jewell of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (where Rice is on the advisory council) about doing something further south.

Margo Sage-El, owner of Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, N.J., said what she most appreciates about her outings with the Book Buddies is the opportunity to pass along some of her own hard-earned wisdom: “When I first bought my bookstore, I worked in a vacuum, except for visits from publishers reps, who I would always bug for information about other stores. So my feeling about the Book Buddies is, if anyone can learn from my struggle, that's great.”

Betting, and winning, on indie publishing

2008-07-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

Clint Greenleaf & Meg La Borde

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 7/7/2008

You might call Clint Greenleaf, president and CEO of Greenleaf Book Group, a betting man. In March, he was sitting in the Fox News studio in Austin, Tex., serving as a commentator on the Fox Business Network's morning business roundup, when he saw his opportunity to win a longstanding wager. “A friend bet me when I started this gig that I would never be able to refer to Al Sharpton and the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in the same sentence on national TV,” says Greenleaf, a glint in his eye. He walks over to the iMac in his office and pulls up a clip of himself doing just that. (The son of a Ukrainian immigrant, Greenleaf speaks fluent Ukrainian.)

In fact, it was a bet that set him off on his current career. “I was 22, just out of college and working at Deloitte and Touche in Cleveland, when someone said to me, 'Clint, you don't seem so smart. How is it you're working as an accountant?' I told him, 'I dress the part: I wear a tie and shine my shoes.' 'Okay,' the guy says, 'if you're so smart, then why don't you write a book about it.' ”

The resulting self-published book, photocopied at a Kinko's, was Attention to Detail: A Gentleman's Guide to Professional Appearance and Conduct. Attention was eventually picked up by Adams Media, sold 12,000 copies and drew the attention of the Wall Street Journal. As a byproduct of finding distribution for the book, Greenleaf left accounting and opened his eponymous company in his parents' garage.

Meg La Borde was living in Austin working as a book publicist for Phenix & Phenix when Greenleaf phoned her about a book. When she asked Greenleaf what he did, he replied, “What do you need?”

“I had just gotten in some good self-published books that needed distribution, so I asked him if he did that,” she recalls. “I expected it would take months to set something up, and then he told me, '24 hours.' He called back in five hours to say it was all arranged through Ingram.”

Soon the two were collaborating on various projects, and lured by the youth and entrepreneurial spirit of Austin, Greenleaf decided to move operations from Cleveland to Texas in 2004. Today, Greenleaf Book Group employs 25 people—including La Borde, who serves as the company's chief operations officer—and is publishing 80–100 titles per year, using a collaborative model whereby the author pays for publication, and Greenleaf is responsible for production, distribution and marketing.

Greenleaf estimates revenue for 2008 will hit $8 million; in 2006, Inc. magazine listed Greenleaf among its 500 fastest-growing companies

The move to Austin has enabled the company to retain and attract talented staff. “We get résumés from people at big houses in New York begging to be hired just so they can move to Austin,” says Greenleaf. “It's the lifestyle we have here that's most appealing.”

Asked if he plans to write another book, Greenleaf demurs. Over the past year, he's been blogging about entrepreneurship for Inc.com. “I may turn that into another book at some point,” he says, admitting that he has other priorities, including his 14-month-old daughter, Suzie. (Greenleaf's wife is an attorney and not involved in the business).

At the moment, Greenleaf is focused on publishing other writers, and has lofty goals for his company. “I think we can reach $100 million per year,” he says. That's not stopping him from launching other businesses. His latest project is TreeNeutral.com, a company that helps publishing companies pay to plant new trees to replace those cut to produce paper for books. “We need to plant 20 to 60 to cover the print run for each new book we publish,” he says. “Starting this new company is the least thing I can do for my daughter.”

Larry McMurtry's 'Books': rambling, disorganized, dull

2008-07-08T15:01:00.000-07:00

The 'Lonesome Dove' author leads us through a disappointing tour of his life as a bookseller

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, July 06, 2008

In his new memoir "Books" — an account of his more than 50-year career as a "bookman" — Larry McMurtry states that "the antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture." To wit, I start thusly: In my 20s, I spent a summer working for an antiquarian book-seller. It was a prestigious place, just off Boston's posh Newbury Street, run by a married pair of blue-blood WASPs who hired their interns from Harvard and — in those pre-Internet times — researched the provenance of any book they didn't have immediate knowledge of by going down to the Boston Athenaeum, a members-only library dating back to 1807.

When I wasn't photocopying pages from yellowing Christie's auction catalogs to send to prospective clients, I was massaging conditioner into the cracked spines of old leatherbound books or carefully pulling a book from a high shelf for a customer to peruse while wearing the white gloves we provided for just such a purpose.

It was a heady experience for a book lover. The highlight of my time there was the day Umberto Eco, author of "The Name of the Rose," walked into the store, announcing, "I am Umberto Eco!" to no one in particular.

Of course, any sales job requires a propensity for fabrication, exaggeration and distraction. The owners of the store boasted that they were the dealer of record for the private library of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science Church, which was true. What they were less likely to mention was that the majority of the company's profit was made trading in Victorian erotica, much of it slip-cased in purple velvet, and providing throwaway books (Thomas Hardy was a favorite) to interior designers who would have the leather covers dyed to match the décor of a client's house.

Yes, there once was a time when antiquarian bookselling was a trade practiced by wizened men and women with vast repositories of rare knowledge and a list of people in their head eager to pay hefty sums for hard-to-find volumes.

Now, the Internet has rendered much of the mystery of antiquarian bookselling — the specifics of buying and pricing — an open secret, and the barrier to entry is low enough and knowledge of the value of books so general that nearly anyone who wants to get into the game can. There are still high-end dealers such as Glenn Horowitz, who has brokered recent acquisitions at the University of Texas' Ransom Center and Texas State University's Southwestern Writers Center, but if you want something less exclusive, all you need to do is log onto eBay or drive over to the Half-Price Books on North Lamar Boulevard.

These thoughts and memories came to mind when I picked up "Books." Like myself, McMurtry was introduced to antiquarian books when he was a student, albeit one at Rice University in the late 1950s. And while my experience as a "bookman" was brief, McMurtry has lived a dual life as book dealer and writer for nearly six decades.

The first book he acquired for his personal library was a "lovely two-volume nineteenth-century 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' in calf with morocco labels," for which, he dutifully reports, he paid $7.50 to Ted Brown, owner of Brown's Book Shop. That book formed the foundation of a personal library that now amounts to some 28,000 volumes — about the same number of books contained in a typical Barnes & Noble; it's merely a fraction of the 300,000 books he has on offer at Booked Up, his bookstore in Archer City, near Wichita Falls.

"Books: A Memoir" is what McMurtry describes as "a hasty account of my life in books" and amounts to a paean to the accumulation of those volumes. It offers sometimes detailed, sometimes vague and, yes, sometimes hasty recollections about the acquisition of everything from individual volumes to entire libraries — most of them from long-gone book dealers of yesteryear.

Like many of the bookshops it describes, it is rambling and disorganized. It is also inexcusably dull.

Here's a writer who in his long life has accumulated anecdotes in the same way he accumulates books — did you know that Thomas Pynchon lived near the Houston Ship Channel in the 1960s? — yet hasn't bothered to shape them into a narrative. He merely rambles like an old man on a porch swing with an endless supply of lemonade to keep him lubricated and lugubrious.

One random five-page stretch (pages 93-98) finds him ranging from Houston, where he worked in a now defunct store called The Bookman; to the story of how he got his first literary agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer; to the auction of the Washington, D.C., bookstore Lowdermilks; to the opening of Booked Up in Washington, D.C.; to a discussion of the impact of real estate prices on bookstores and why he moved Booked Up to Texas. All this, with a reference to writing the script for "The Last Picture Show" sandwiched in between.

"The writer who should have written a masterwork about the second-hand book trade was Anton Chekhov, the genius of small frustrations and little failures," McMurtry writes. It's an apt observation — Chekhov, primarily a short story writer, was a master of the wedding of compression and gravitas that the subject calls for. McMurtry, who has written just one short story in his entire life ("There Will Be Peace in Korea," published in the Texas Quarterly in 1964), simply isn't up to the task. He tries — this book's 259 pages are divided into 109 chapters — but the attempt comes across as, at best, episodic, and at worst, batty.

Part of the problem is that McMurtry has already written at some length about reading and bookselling elsewhere, especially in his highly regarded essay collection "Walter Benjamin and the Dairy Queen" — a fact he readily acknowledges. Sadly, "Books" is also consistent with his recent nonfiction books "The Colonel and Little Missie" and "Oh, What a Slaughter," much of which read as if he's cleared out his old filing cabinets and been given carte blanche by Simon & Schuster to publish what he finds there.

If you're really interested in McMurtry's books — that is, the ones he owns, not the ones he writes — you'd be better off making the pilgrimage to Booked Up, where you can see them for yourself. There's no substitute for shopping in a well-stocked antiquarian bookstore. The employees will, doubtless, be able to recommend a book to hold your interest this summer, even if this particular book isn't it. But take that trip now; if the litany of defunct bookstores that litters these pages is any indication, time is of the essence.

Texas writer Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly and is a nationally syndicated book critic.

Oxford’s Square Books Gets Campy

2008-07-02T06:58:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 7/1/2008 7:40:00 AM

Mississippi in mid-July isn’t at the top of most travelers' wish lists. For starters: it’s damn hot. Then there are the mosquitoes, some almost the size of hummingbirds.

But Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, is undaunted. When he saw he had six notable authors scheduled to read at the store in an eight-day span, July 10-17, he dubbed the week “Camp Square Books.”

Howorth, who also serves as Oxford's mayor, figured the top-notch roster of authors would be enough to entice book lovers to come and spend a few days and some of their discretionary income. He’s negotiated discounts with local hotels and restaurants to lure holiday makers.

Camp kicks off with an appearance by Julia Reed, followed by Jack Pendarvis, Martin Clark, Brett Lott and burgeoning bestseller David Wroblewski. The week culminates with Andre Dubus III.

“Even with gas at $4 gas, we hope get a lot of visitors from Memphis – which is only an hour away by car – and up from Jackson,” said David Swider, Square Books’ art director and publicist for the event.

“Campers” can pre-register online or at the store. Camp will start each day at 10 a.m. and feature different activities, including poetry lessons, a tour of Faulkner’s house Rowan Oak, and a visit to the literary archive at Ole Miss, where Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Medal resides. Author events begin at 5 p.m. and will be followed by socializing and drinking at the City Grocery restaurant.

All events will be free and, promises store manager Lyn Roberts, if not cool, then at least bug-free. “Since what we have planned mostly will be indoors, there won’t be any insects,” said Roberts.

SIBA Aims to Sell 100,001 Books

2008-06-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 6/27/2008 10:46:00 AM

Wanda Jewell wants to sell 100,001 copies of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s annual book prize winners between the time the prizes are announced at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend and the end of the year. “We’re going to have a publicity blitz for the nominees and winners prior to the awards, advertise afterwards, and put them in a center spread in the holiday catalog,” said Jewell.

The prize plan is the latest of SIBA’s efforts to reach out directly to consumers. The first of these was the launch last year of “Lady Bank’s Commonplace Book.” Edited by Nicki Leone, former manager of the now defunct Bristol Books in Wilmington, N.C., “Lady Banks” is a monthly e-mail newsletter that highlights new books through interviews and reviews, most of them derived from material that has already appeared on SIBA member Web sites and blogs.

It is sent to 3,000 consumers whose replied to a survey bound into the back of last SIBA holiday catalogs. In addition, 1,300 stores receive the newsletter, as do a further 2,000 people in the industry.

Now a year old, Jewell is looking to generate revenue from the newsletter through “Lady Banks’ Bookshelf” – a marketing program that advertises five individual books each month. For $300, authors and publishers can have a cover image of their book appear across all of SIBA’s marketing vehicles and link to a permanent page about the book on the site.

Jewell has also launched a separate advertising push under the rubric “Put Your Money Where Your South.” Starting in April, Jewell has been offering $1,000 package of banner advertising across SIBA’s various Web sites, e-mail blasts and newsletters for half price. “So far,” SIBA executive director Wanda Jewell reports, “we’ve had a dozen authors and a handful of small presses with one or two books take advantage.”

Lastly SIBA is expanding its “Authors Round the South” Web site, which lists author appearances at SIBA stores, to include listings of author availability and terms. Dubbed “STARS” – as in the Southern Touring Author Registry Service – the program will “be like a mini speaker’s bureau,” said Jewell. The plan is that anyone interested in booking an author for an event, such as a civic or school group, will need to arrange it through a SIBA member store. Initially, STARS will be free to authors, but “after a year should they wish to continue participating, they will be asked to become SIBA members,” said Jewell.

TV Documentary Chronicles Indies' Challenges

2008-06-16T12:51:00.001-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 6/16/2008

Paperback Dreams, a new documentary by San Francisco filmmaker Alex Beckstead, chronicles the history of Bay Area bookstores Cody's Books and Kepler's Books and Magazines, and in doing so, it offers a microcosm of the struggles faced by many independent booksellers over the past 50 years.

The film, which will run on PBS stations starting in November, begins with the opening of Kepler's near Stanford University in 1955, documents Andy Ross's purchase of Cody's in 1977 and follows the impact of the Internet age of the late 1990s. It ends with the closing of Cody's San Francisco location and a depiction of Kepler's ongoing struggles to remain open.

Ross, who now works as a literary agent, and Kepler's president Clark Kepler are featured in the film, along with Powell's bookstore owner Michael Powell, Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin and others.

A native of Salt Lake City, Beckstead grew up shopping at the King's English Bookshop, Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore and the now-defunct Waking Owl. After he moved to San Francisco, Beckstead became a fan of Kepler's and Cody's. “I worked in Menlo Park on documentaries and bought a lot of my books for research at Kepler's,” Beckstead said. “When I heard Kepler's was closing [briefly in 2005], I was shocked: it's in one of the most affluent, educated cities in America—just 15 minutes from Stanford University—and it made me realize that if an independent bookstore couldn't survive there, there must be a larger story.”

To research the film, Beckstead followed developments at the stores over the past years and interviewed dozens of insiders. Production wrapped last September. Funding came from the Independent Television Service, KQED Public Television and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with numerous donors. The total cost was approximately $300,000—half the typical budget for an hour-long PBS documentary.

Beckstead said his research revealed four elements essential to the survival of an independent bookstore:

Own your own building. “It's why Cody's moved off of Fourth Street; it's why Kepler's closed in 2005—a big hike in your lease can put you out of business.”
Hire experienced staff. “Bookstores that work have people that have been in the business for six, eight, 10, 20 years. That's a big part of why Green Apple Books and Moe's Books have survived in San Francisco.”
Sell used books. “There's an art to knowing how to buy and sell used books. The margins are good, but it is a deep pond to jump into.”
Figure out some way to sell books online. “Stores need to find a way to break their geographical boundaries. A corollary to that is to sell books outside your store—at school events, local film festivals. Kepler's has been really successful in that regard.”

“The bad news,” added Beckstead, “is if you haven't been doing these things for 10 to 15 years, it's not likely you'll catch up.”

Beckstead held a preview screening of Paperback Dreams for booksellers during BEA, and said he plans to work with bookstores to set up screenings of the documentary in their hometowns. “I want stores to use this film as a conversation starter and an opportunity to tell their community their own story.”

Beckstead also plans to launch a wiki on www.paperbackdreams.com that will offer tips on how stores can shoot their own videos. “The thing is, there are very few, if any, people who dislike an independent bookstore,” Beckstead said. “But they don't do a good job of getting their own story out. If anything, I hope this film makes people take a little more interest in the stores in their communities.”

Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway: A.E. Hotchner, Nathaniel Rich and Joyce Carol Oates

2008-06-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com

Ernest Hemingway's reputation as hunting- and fishing-obsessed outdoorsman, fond of both drink and women, makes it sound as if he would have been as at home in Texas as he was in Cuba or Key West.

The only problem would have been his inability to play football. As quoted by A.E. Hotchner in his new book The Good Life According to Hemingway, he admits "I was not good at football ... I couldn't figure out the plays. I used to look at my teammates' faces and guess who looked like they expected the ball." The Good Life, a compendium of stories and aphorisms, is one of a trio of new books offering a perspective on the writer's legacy.

Mr. Hotchner, 87, calls himself "The Last Man Standing" among Hemingway's old friends. He met Hemingway in 1948 and traveled extensively with the writer, adapting For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Nick Adams Stories for television. After Hemingway's death in 1961, he wrote three other books about the man nicknamed "Papa."

The words he collected here, Mr. Hotchner claims, don't appear in Hemingway's work, but are nevertheless familiar ("Courage is grace under pressure" is credited to him, for example, as is "Never mistake motion for action"). It's vintage stuff, with Hemingway talking about his writing, famous friends, explorations. Of course, vintage isn't always desirable. Take, for example, Hemingway's opinions of women. (You can look up the quotes on your own.)

Mr. Hotchner – "Call me Hotch," he says when I reach him by phone at home – says he compiled this book as one last attempt to "show off Hemingway's use of language and imagery" to a new generation of readers. "Hemingway kind of invented his own language and left out adjectives," Hotch explains.

Indeed, it is Hemingway's terse, unembellished writing rather than his mythic lifestyle that has had the strongest influence on American letters.

"I see more fiction submissions employing that type of plain style than any other," says Nathaniel Rich, senior editor at The Paris Review.

Mr. Rich used Hemingway's larger-than-life persona as a model for Constance Eakins, a fictional writer at the center of his new novel The Mayor's Tongue. A highly entertaining, erudite book, The Mayor's Tongue tells parallel stories that eventually dovetail. The first is about an old man lamenting the disappearance of his best friend. The second concerns a recent college grad who befriends Eakins' biographer (a figure who, coincidentally, sounds a bit like Mr. Hotchner) and finds himself compelled to search for the long lost Eakins in Italy.

Eakins is depicted as part monster, part man and all myth, the type of adventurer scribe largely absent from today's literary scene.

"The he-man writer no longer really exists today," Mr. Rich says by phone from his office in New York, "It's anachronistic and grotesque, though deeply appealing."

In Wild Nights, Joyce Carol Oates offers her own portrait of Hemingway, albeit one taken from the very end of his life as he contemplates suicide. The story, titled "Papa at Ketchum, 1961" is one of five fictional accounts of the deaths of other writers, which include Poe, Twain, Dickinson and Henry James.

Here, Ms. Oates takes the opposite tack of Mr. Hotchner and Mr. Rich, depicting the writer, Papa in this case, as entirely diminished, "a sick broken-down old drunk with quivering eyelids, palsied hands, swollen ankles and feet" and no sexual capacity.

She imagines Hemingway as a bitter misogynist who, she asserts, would have murdered his fourth wife, Mary (here called "the woman"), along with killing himself. It's a powerful, if merciless, and original portrait. It also stands in almost direct contrast to Mr. Hotchner's treatment.

Which you prefer ultimately depends on how you choose to remember Hemingway. He was, it seems, many things to many people. Of all these, perhaps Mr. Rich's doppelgänger, one hewn entirely from imagination, is the closest we might ever get to the truth.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

Three questions with Emily Giffin

2008-06-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

Emily Giffin, whose Love the One You're With sits at No 3. on the New York Times Bestseller list, was in Texas this past week. Here's some of what she had to say about her new book and life as a bestselling author (including a great anecdote with a surprise ending about dining with an Texas NBA legend):

What is the new novel about?

The one that got away. It's about the conflict between following your bliss and being loyal to those you already have in your life. In the book, Ellen, 33, a photographer in New York City, has been married only three months when she runs into an old flame who makes her question her decision. She has an emotional journey. I had this happen so early in her marriage because I didn't children to complicate things -- they change the whole emotional landscape. I actually think the first year of marriage is the hardest and is filled with analysis.

In the novel the protagonist moves from New York to Atlanta, where you live. Do you require the story to have autobiographical element as a catalyst that gets you to start writing?

A few years ago, I moved from London to Atlanta, so that is similar. And while my books are not autobiographical, I do like to have something to help me identify with the characters in the books. In Something Borrowed, my first novel, the main character is turning 30 and I was turning 30 as I wrote it. In the second book, Something Blue, we have little in common other than the fact we both lived in London. In Baby Proof - well, I had twin boys the time... But with this book, no I've never had second thoughts.

What is the most surprising thing to happen to you since you've become a bestselling author?

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Dando, came to a reading I gave in Philadelphia. She still had a class photo of ours which I'd sent to her to say "you're my favorite teacher." Another time, I was having lunch with former Houston Rockets basketball player Ralph Sampson, who is a family friend. All through lunch there were these two attractive women who kept looking over at our table. Ralph is 7'4" and is used to a lot of attention. The women started walking over and I said to him, "You must get this all the time." Then they stopped at our table, leaned over and said, "Are you Emily Giffin?" Now that surprised both of us.

James Bond Gets a Retro Makeover

2008-05-28T04:38:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

He is, for many, the archetype of the secret agent: debonair, blithe, sexy, deadly. His Sobranie cigarettes and Walther PPK handgun are iconic.

But even though half the people on the planet are said to have seen a James Bond film, he didn't start off as the fabrication of Hollywood, but as a literary concoction, spawned from the imagination of author Ian Fleming.

Born 100 years ago today, Fleming penned a score of Bond novels, starting with Casino Royale in 1953, and two books of Bond short stories. Since his death in 1964, nearly two dozen additional novels starring 007 have been penned by a trio of authors: John Gardner, Charlie Higson and Midland's Raymond Benson.

Add to this list Sebastian Faulks, whose new Bond novel, Devil May Care, arrives in bookstores today.

Mr. Faulks was a curious choice by the Fleming estate to take up the Bond baton. Unlike his predecessors, he was known as a writer of cerebral literary fiction and nonfiction, rather than thrillers. His best-known work, 1993's Birdsong (3 million copies sold worldwide), examined the horror of World War I; his 2001 novel Green Dolphin Street was set during Kennedy-era Cold War, with a worldly newspaperman as his hero.

It is to the year 1967, the year after Fleming's last book – Octopussy – was published, that Mr. Faulks returns Bond.

Rather than plopping him into a conventional cloak-and-dagger setting, Mr. Faulks sets him amid the nascent hippie scene. On returning to London from a sabbatical that has taken him to Paris and Rome, Moneypenny informs him that M has – Gasp! – taken up yoga. Bond is forced to learn deep-breathing exercises.

Not only has the world changed, so has Bond: When, early on in the book, Bond is invited up to share a nightcap with a seductive woman in her hotel room, he – Gasp! Choke! – turns her down, at least initially. (She is one-half of a set of twins, after all.)

Fortunately, the villains are no different. Bond faces off against Dr. Julius Gorner, a Lithuanian mad scientist with the literal hand of a gorilla, and his sidekick, a Vietnamese assassin memorably named Chagrin (the French word for "pain" or "grief," we are told). Gorner stokes a deep resentment of the "stuck-up" and "xenophobic" English derived from not fitting in while he was at Oxford: "He hated England because he felt it had laughed at him, and he decided to devote his life to destroying it." The trail takes Bond from London to Paris to Tehran and beyond.

Though it takes nearly half of the short novel (just 270 pages) to build to much action, the payoff is eventually worth it as Bond, Gorner and associates leave a trail of mayhem across a small swath of the globe.

While some of this sounds as if it skirts the edge of parody (A man with a gorilla hand! Twins with only a small strawberry birthmark on an upper thigh to distinguish them!), it is dutifully close to echoing Fleming's own plotting and prose. In particular, Mr. Faulks does an excellent job of mimicking Fleming's obsessions, from Bond's bathing habits – scalding hot shower, followed by a blast of cold – to his cataloging of food, clothes and exotic women. Fans will revel at the familiar references to his earlier adventures.

In much the same way Sean Connery is to many people the original and best movie Bond, Fleming too is the best and original. Though Devil May Care is no literary landmark – Mr. Faulks said it took him only six weeks to write – it comes commendably close to the original and, provided you know what to expect, provides some real, retro pleasure.

Edward Nawotka is a freelance writer in Houston.

A Chain Grows in Dubai

2008-05-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 5/26/2008

“Americans are just waking up to the opportunity to sell books here,” said Isobel Abulhoul, founder and owner of Magrudy's, a chain of eight mostly English-language bookstores headquartered in Dubai. “We order stock from both the U.K. and America, and fly in books five days a week.”

Magrudy's was founded in 1975 as a toy store, but quickly changed focus to selling books and has since expanded to include seven stores in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi, as well as several book kiosks. Three more stores are slated to open this year, two in Al Ain and another in Dubai. (Al Ain, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are all part of the United Arab Emirates.)

Shopping in a Magrudy's is virtually indistinguishable from shopping at a chain or large indie bookstore in the U.S. or the U.K., with English-language titles accounting for 90% of its inventory. It has a similar look and feel to U.S. stores, as well as many of the common trappings, including loyalty programs and information booths. The most obvious difference is a prominent section of titles in Arabic.

The most popular English-language categories, reports Abulhoul, are fiction, mind/body/spirit, business and management, and books that teach Arabic. Perhaps the biggest attraction for the English-speaking community is the significant selection of children's books. “Kids were always treated as second-class citizens at stores here in the U.A.E., so catering to them and to parents is a big part of our business,” Abulhoul said.

Magrudy's frequently purchases both U.K. and U.S. editions of the same books. While customers from the U.K. “inevitably prefer books from the U.K.,” Abulhoul said that many of her international customers were educated in the U.S. and tend to buy U.S. editions. The lack of customs duty in the U.A.E. means her biggest expense is shipping, which she maintained is not passed along to the customer. “I sell books at the U.K. or U.S. price and right now, the U.S. prices are much more competitive,” she explained.

Magrudy's sees only two or three American sales reps per year, if any. “Americans are losing out by not trying to take advantage of this,” says Abulhoul. “Every time I want to shift a big order of books from the U.K. to U.S. edition, I get a call from the U.K. publisher or distributor undercutting the U.S. price. They are much more aggressive.”

Abulhoul believes some reticence on the part of Americans in doing business with the U.A.E. stems from a concern about censorship, since all books imported into the U.A.E. must be approved by the government. “Yes, it is something we have to put up with,” she said. “But approval is often had in a day or two, and embargoed books can be looked at early.” Books about Islam or Middle East politics are likely to be delayed longer, and religion books not about Islam and books with overt sexual content are likely to be blocked entirely. She's also had trouble getting entire series of Japanese manga past the censor.

Though a growing number of educated expats are moving to the country—Dubai's population is expected to reach 1.8 million by 2010, with 50,000 to 75,000 of them white-collar expats—Magrudy's has only recently begun to see competition from international booksellers. Borders opened a 16,000-sq.-ft. franchise store in 2006, adding a second, 1,200-sq.-ft. satellite store last year.

Increasingly, the U.A.E. is attracting attention for its many new cultural and literary programs. The newest addition is the Emirates Airlines International Festival of Literature. Scheduled to run annually, the first will be held February 26–March 1, 2009, and Abulhoul is one of the organizers. She said about two dozen authors have committed to attend, including Frank McCourt and Karin Slaughter. “We want 60 authors in all,” she said. The airline has committed title sponsorship for three years.

Rick Riordan is on the verge of something big

2008-05-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA
For the Houston Chronicle

In April, children's book publisher Scholastic, the company that brought Harry Potter to America, flew San Antonio author Rick Riordan to Bologna, Italy. There, Riordan's job was to help explain The 39 Clues — a forthcoming multiplatform series for children incorporating books, collectible cards, video games and $100,000 in prize money — to international publishing executives.

The 39 Clues is important to Scholastic since it represents the publisher's first serious attempt to replicate Harry Potter sales. Riordan (with a long "i," like "fire") was hired to write The Maze of Bones, the first in the 10-book series, and to create the overall storyline.
An affable 43-year-old who stays in touch with his sons while he travels by joining them online to play World of Warcraft, Riordan is already a proven star in children's book world and appears to be the right man for the job.

So far, the storyline remains a mystery, although it does involve a Da Vinci Code-like conspiracy linking famous figures from history. Riordan is no help: "I don't want to jump the gun and talk about it just yet," he said by phone last week between appearances in New Jersey and New York.

He's on the road to promote the The Battle of the Labyrinth, the fourth novel in his best-selling series Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Chronicling the adventures of contemporary teenagers who happen to be the children of Greek gods, the series debuted in 2005 with The Lightning Thief and has continued one book per year. In all, the first three titles have sold 1.6 million copies in 15 countries.

"Last year there was kind of an explosion of awareness among kids," Riordan said. "Part of that was Al Roker picking The Lightning Thief for his book club on the Today Show, but a lot of it was word of mouth."

The Battle of the Labyrinth, released in a cool 1 million first printing, is on pace to outsell in its first week what 2007's The Titan's Curse sold in its first three months.
Despite his success, Riordan has done little to change his life other than leave his job as a middle-school teacher at St. Mary's Hall in San Antonio.

"I still live in the same house and drive the same car," he said. "My philosophy is that my life is already complicated enough, and I don't want it to translate to my private life."
Riordan really hasn't left school behind. A significant part of his time is spent visiting bookstores and schools. The school visits allow him not only to promote his books but also to "test out (his) jokes."

Among his frequent destinations, perhaps because of its relative proximity to home, is Houston.
"It seems like I'm there every two weeks," Riordan said. "The kids in Houston have been very receptive and appreciative."

Riordan's local fans include 12-year-old David Cremins, a sixth-grader at Memorial Middle School.

"It's really interesting how he uses ancient Greek myths and history and turns it into modern-day scenarios and battles," said Cremins, who checked out The Battle of the Labyrinth from Houston Public Library last Friday and finished the next day. "I've read all four now, and it's definitely one of my favorite series."

Cremins estimates that half of the 30 kids in his sixth-grade class are fans, many of them boys. Riordan's ability to appeal to pre-teen boys — a demographic frequently identified as "reluctant readers" — is especially unusual.

One reason may be the personal element the author has injected into the books. While Percy may be a son of Poseidon, he also has dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. So does one of Riordan's two sons.

"My son was in second grade when he was diagnosed. At the time he was only interested in Greek mythology, so when I ran out of the original stories, he told me to make one up."
For nearly a decade before Percy came along, Riordan was known for his mystery novels featuring San Antonio private investigator Tres Navarre. The series, which debuted in 1997 and includes seven books, are, he warns on his Web site, "grown-up mysteries with R-rated content."

Though Riordan won numerous industry awards for the mysteries, he found his calling in writing for a younger audience.

"I was always a storyteller in the classroom, and my students would ask me why I wasn't writing for children," he said. "It took me a long time to figure out that they were right."
The Tres Navarre series, along with the Percy Jackson series, will end next year, Riordan said. But Percy will live on in movies, starting with the Thanksgiving 2009 release of The Lightning Thief. Chris Columbus, the man who directed the first two Harry Potter movies, is adapting it for the screen.

In 2010 Riordan will begin a new series based on Camp Half-Blood, a New Jersey summer camp for demi-gods depicted in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, all but ensuring he'll be a regular on the road and a frequent visitor to our town.
At some point he might even find time to visit Greece.

"The closest I've ever gotten is Malta, where it is rumored the Cave of Calypso is supposed to be," he said. "I would like to go."

Dubai-based Translation Project Promises More Arabic Books

2008-05-14T16:09:00.001-07:00

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/17/2008 12:45:00 PM

Last year the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) of the United Arab Emirates launched “Kalima,” a project to translate books into Arabic; its stated aim was to translate 100 works. Late last month, the ruler of Dubai, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, upped the ante: His eponymous foundation launched a similar project, albeit one that aims to translate 365 books in its first year – or, in other words, one per day.

Dubbed “Tarjem” (meaning “translation” in Arabic) the project’s stated goal is to “develop the level of information transfer from knowledge-producing countries, especially in North America, Scandinavian countries, and East Asia;” to this end, fully half the titles translated are expected to be business and management books, with the remainder divided among literature, history and sciences. The Foundation already offers grants to writers and supports a one hour-long radio book show, launched earlier this month in Dubai.

Unlike Kalima, which empanelled a group of scholars and literary to select a list of suitable titles, Tarjem is asking authors to submit books for consideration. According to its Web site, the organization is seeking through its various projects to lay “the foundations of a pan-Arab literary renaissance.”

Creatures of the night captivate young readers of Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' series

2008-05-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Which do you prefer: the vampire or the werewolf? If the question sounds strange to you, you're probably not a teenage girl, or the parent of one.

Those in the know understand there's a rivalry between vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black for the affection of the all-too-human Bella Swan.

Still lost? We're talking about the protagonists of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series of young adult novels, which include Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse. These steamy books by a Phoenix mother of three have sold 5.5 million copies across 28 countries.

Time knows who she is: Last month, it named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2008 and asked whether she's "the new J.K. Rowling."

And local fans know who she is: More than 350 were in line at 7 a.m. Tuesday at Stonebriar Centre in Frisco to get their hands on her new book The Host, which would entitle them to one of 1,000 tickets for her appearance May 10 at Centennial High School in Frisco. (Sorry, it's sold out.)

Ms. Meyer, speaking via phone after a reading at Minnesota's Mall of America earlier this week, notes that her phenomenal success still feels a bit "dreamlike."

It suits. Ms. Meyer says the original idea for Edward and Bella came to her in a dream in 2003. Her sister encouraged her to submit it to publishers. A year later, after being rejected by nine agents, the book was plucked from the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts at Writers House, the literary agency responsible for Nora Roberts and Neil Gaiman, among others.

Four years on, she now has her own personal publicist and is enjoying assisting with the filming of the movie version of Twilight, due in theaters Dec. 12. Oh, and then there's the millions of fans.

Walking into the auditorium at Centennial High School will still bring jitters, she says. "I'm kind of shy, so a big crowd of people is kind of my worst nightmare." She says the hardest part is walking down the hall and hearing them screaming for her.

"Then you get to the stage and look at the fans' faces," she says. "Seeing all the kindness coming toward you makes everything easier."

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The Host, a sci-fi tale about alien body snatchers, is billed as Ms. Meyer's first book for adults. But it doesn't stray far from the formula that made the Twilight series so successful, echoing the story line of a woman whose affection is divided, and dishing up plenty of romance without (much to the relief of millions of parents) sex.

Once bitten by the books, Ms. Meyer's fans tend to become obsessed. Among them are Chandler Nash, 15, Tori Randall, 14, and Ally Kiger, 14, all of Arlington. They comprise the the Bella Cullen Project, a Twilight tribute band.

Their MySpace songs, including "Sexy Vampire," have been downloaded a quarter of a million times. (Sample lyric: "Stephenie Meyer's the queen of all vampires/ How does she make this stuff up? She's got to be some form of genius/ with Twilight she's hit the jackpot.")

On the all-important vampire-werewolf question, Chandler says "she's undeniably a Jacob" person, Tori is "equally divided," while Ally equivocates, saying "it depends on the day."

Alicia Norton, 25, of Flower Mound, is on the side of the vampires. "The vampires are the good guys, the moral ones," she explains. "Werewolves are not."

Ms. Norton was part of a cadre of friends affiliated with the Grapevine-Grand Prairie-based Web site www.twilightseriestheories.com who camped out overnight at the Stonebriar Centre Barnes & Noble to be first in line for tickets Tuesday. The store's community relations director, Debra Stapleton, says such dedication is not unusual among the author's fans.

"She's only visiting 11 cities this tour; we have people flying in from as far away as Virginia and Georgia to see her," says Ms. Stapleton.

While The Host may be riling up her fans, it is only building further anticipation for the final installment in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, scheduled for publication Aug. 2.

"That will be a real event," says Diane Roback, children's book editor of Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine of the book business. She cites the fact that the book will get midnight launch parties and a 2.5-million-copy first printing (compared with 500,000 copies of The Host).

Which means: It may be time to make up your mind on that vampire-werewolf question. You're likely to be hearing it again soon.