Son of Poseidon Gaining Strength

By Edward Nawotka

Originally appeared in Publishers Weekly, 4/23/2007

As booksellers await the seventh and final Harry Potter title, due in July,another promising fantasy series has quietly gained traction among young readers and booksellers. It has even attracted Hollywood and an award-winning Potter film director. The third installment of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, titled The Titan's Curse, is due from Hyperion next month, with a 150,000-copy first printing.

Riordan's first book in the series, 2005's The Lightning Thief, has sold 275,000 hardcover and paperback copies combined; his second, The Sea of Monsters, which sold more than 100,000 copies in hardcover, has just been released in paperback. Last week Variety announced that Chris Columbus—who has directed two Harry Potter films—has signed on to direct and produce The Lightning Thief.

Percy Jackson is a wisecracking dyslexic boy with ADHD who also happens to be the son of Poseidon; in a modern-day setting, he finds himself caught up in stories from Greek mythology. Booksellers are keen on Riordan's approach, complimenting not only his use of classic story lines but the contemporizing twist of having the hero be learning impaired.

At Wellesley Booksmith in Wellesley, Mass., children's buyer Alison Morris reports The Lightning Thief sold 128 copies in hardcover and 525 in paperback, and was the bestselling title at her store last year. “And Sea of Monsters was our third bestselling title, behind Lemony Snicket.” Smith has ordered 400 copies of the new book for a launch party.

She says that the books are especially appealing to reluctant readers, particularly boys. “The action takes off on the first page,” she said. “Riordan takes the old familiar stories, which have gore, action and romance, and makes them work in a contemporary setting.” Morris added that the books' sympathetic portrayal of Percy's dyslexia and ADHD helps some readers identify with the characters more easily.

BookPeople in Austin, Tex., got behind the books very early, and has moved more than 500 copies of The Lightning Thief in hardcover and some 1,200 paperbacks. Last year the store promoted the hardcover of The Sea of Monsters, and has sold more than 800 copies thus far. They've ordered 500 copies of The Titan's Curse for their own May 1 party.

Riordan's sales at BookPeople can largely be attributed to Topher Bradfield, the store's children's outreach coordinator, who in 2006 was inspired to create “Camp Half-Blood,” a summer camp based on Riordan's series.

BookPeople plans three more Camp Half-Blood sessions this summer, each with different mythological underpinnings, including Labors of Heracles, the Lyre of Orpheus, and Theseus and the Minotaur. “We've got 80% of the kids from last year coming back,” said Bradfield. Hyperion Books for Children is providing $6,000 to help cover the cost of the camps and pay for one student from a disadvantaged school district to attend each of the camps for free.

Bradfield's Camp Half-Blood idea caught the attention of Diane Capriola, owner of Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Ga. She has been working with Bradfield to devise her own Camp Half-Blood to take place this summer. “Parents like the idea of a literary camp because it is educational,” Capriola says. “Kids like it because it doesn't seem educational.”

Scott Meyer, owner of Merritt Bookstore in Millbrook, N.Y., said he only recently discovered the series—after a sales rep sent him copies on tape. “I came late to the books,” said Meyer, “but once I heard them I immediately knew I wanted to handsell them in the store. We're always looking for the next Harry Potter, and this is a very good series to promote in that vein.”

Nancy Gallt, Riordan's agent, says she always knew Riordan's books might bear comparison to those about the boy wizard. But she sees one distinct advantage her author has over J.K. Rowling: “Rick is writing them faster—one per year—which means his readers won't grow up faster than the characters in the book.”

With the total number of Percy Jackson books set at five, that means Riordan's fans will be able to read their final installment in spring 2009. After that? “We're already talking about prequels and spin-offs,” Gallt says. “Rick has tons of ideas.”

Abu Dhabi Book Fair Bridges East and West

By Edward Nawotka

Originally appeared in Publishers Weekly, 4/23/2007

After a reorganization and relocation, the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, held March 31–April 7 in the United Arab Emirates, attracted large crowds and exhibitors from 46 countries—in addition to raising a few Western eyebrows over the number of pirated editions on display. A total of 406 publishers from 46 countries participated at the revamped book fair and organizers estimated some 400,000 people attended, mostly locals there to browse the 600,000 books on display.

Now in its 17th year, the fair took on a radical new look after partnering with the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, moving from outdoor tents in the city center to a shiny new multibillion-dollar exhibition center on the fringe of town. Some Arabic-language publishers grumbled about the imposition of German "efficiency" on the fair, finding the higher fees (up from $45 to $150–$300 per booth) and new antiseptic environs less accommodating than the traditional souk-like atmosphere of previous years.

Scholastic was the only U.S. publisher to have a booth, though translated editions of books by a wide variety of American and European authors were on display—many of them in pirated editions.

Cecile Barendsma, a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, roamed the show floor purchasing pirated editions of her agency's authors. She explained that piracy was as much the result of competition as an outright disregard for the law. "I think the Arabic-language market is professionalizing, but it's not fully realized yet. Not all countries have signed the Berne Convention [for international copyright protection]," she said. "[Law-abiding publishers] are up against competitors who don't live by the law. If the author or topic is hot, another publisher will put out an unauthorized edition."

Mohamed Hashem, publisher of Egypt's influential Dar Merit Publishing House and winner of the Association of American Publishers' 2006 Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award, agreed, but also placed some blame on Western publishers. "I suppose my typical print run of 2,000 copies is not appealing to [rights holders]," he said, complaining that American book publishers "rarely return my calls or e-mails."

While the Arabic market may be difficult, Barendsma said it still has "strong potential" and is expanding. And she noted that the Abu Dhabi Fair has another up side: "It was a wonderful opportunity to meet colleagues and editors from Southeast Asia, China, Pakistan and India, something that is more difficult at fairs like Frankfurt or London."

Walls tumbling down: Jonathan Lethem satire blurs the lines of artistic ownership

By EDWARD NAWOTKA

YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET
By Jonathan Lethem.
Doubleday, 224 pp. $24.95.p>

The February issue of Harper's Magazine featured an article by novelist Jonathan Lethem titled "The Ecstasy of Influence," in which he issues a manifesto calling for "open source" culture, based on the share-and-share-alike underpinnings of jazz and the Internet.

He suggests that the very idea of "intellectual property" is preposterous and proposes that art is better suited to a "gift culture" in which creators freely borrow from others works. "Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master," he writes. "That is to say most artists are converted to art by art itself. ... Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos."

On his Web site, Lethem has been putting his theory into practice by offering the rights to a handful of his own short stories for a dollar. It's a program he calls "the Promiscuous Materials Project." In addition, he's running a contest to give away the film rights to his new novel You Don't Love Me Yet so long as the winner agrees to return the rights to the public domain after five years. The new novel itself explores questions of proprietary ownership via a Los Angeles rock band coping with stardom.

First, let's introduce the band. Lucinda, bassist, answers phones for a faux "complaint line" that's part of a performance art experiment run by a former lover. Lead singer Matthew has kidnapped a kangaroo from the zoo where he works and is hiding it in his small apartment. Denise, the drummer, is relegated to a dead-end day job at a porn emporium. Bedwin, the band's reclusive muse and guitarist, rarely ventures into daylight and instead spends his days compulsively watching Fritz Lang's Human Desire on his VCR looking for discrete visual clues.

As the novel opens, Lucinda and Matthew have just broken up, threatening to break up the band, which is already struggling to produce a playlist that goes beyond the five clichéd songs the four have already written and played to death.

What initially appears to be a fanciful tale of slacker sex and introspection — the kind of quirky setup seen in a dozen indie comedies — quickly becomes something deeper: a critique of artistic inspiration and ambition.

After Lucinda begins a mystifying phone relationship with a man she calls "the Complainer," a talker with beguiling tales of romantic misadventures, the band's fortune changes. The stories serve as the raw material for a series of new songs — Dirty Yellow Chair, Secret From Yourself and Monster Eyes, the last a likely hit that also provides the band with a name.

The band is invited to play at a highbrow happening. Dubbed "Aparty," it has a farcical twist: The band is expected to play silently while headphone-wearing party goers dance to their Walkmans (it is the early '90s, thus no iPods). Aparty — apart, a party, get it?

Fortunately, the organizer's absurd plans are thwarted, and Monster Eyes plays a full-volume set, one that leads to its big break: a chance to showcase its talent on the absurdly named Fancher Autumnbreast's radio show, a local music kingmaker who has launched numerous careers and appears based on the real-life Nic Harcourt, a famous DJ on Los Angeles' KCRW.

But here's the dilemma: The songs technically don't belong to the band, since they originated with the Complainer's calls. Carl — Lucinda discovers the Complainer's real name after impulsively becoming his lover — is upset and demands to become part of the band, which throws the quartet into disarray.

This somewhat absurdist plot is Lethem's way of illustrating his theory that art is not created in a vacuum, that it does not arise sui generis from its creator.

Besides embodying an agenda, the novel offers real pleasure, particularly in the witty way Lethem depicts the milieu of the L.A. art/rock scene: a gaggle of aging record producers are "unyouthful men in youthful clothes"; a local alternative weekly is titled "The Echo Park Annoyance"; perhaps best of all, he proffers a number of clever, hipster coinages, such as "Astronaut Food" as a metaphor for the meager sustenance one gets from an unfulfilling relationship. In this lovely sentence he describes a middle-aged man's body hair: "His hair, white at his throat, darkened below the curve of his stomach, as though night's setting had recorded itself across the field of his body."

The book's jacket may feature a stern-looking Lethem posing with a guitar — the very picture of artistic ennui — and promise "a romantic farce." But this slick, entertaining novel offers a relationship with the writer and his characters far more satisfying and serious than mere "Astronaut Food."

Mark Doty's 'Dog Years'

The latest chapter in Mark Doty's ongoing autobiography focuses on his love for his canine companions

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, April 15, 2007

Among the hundreds of poignant images to come out of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy was a photo of a dog swimming through the floodwaters, most likely searching for its lost family. Undoubtedly, its owners were just as distraught by the separation.

As Mark Doty writes in his new memoir, "Dog Years," "One of the unspoken truths of American life is how deeply people grieve over the animals who live and die with them, how real that emptiness is, how profound the silence is these creatures leave in their wake."

"Dog Years" spans a decade of Doty's life, one filled with many deaths, including those of his lover Wally from AIDS in 1994; an acquaintance on Sept. 11, 2001; and, most central to this book, his beloved dogs Beau, an energetic golden retriever, and Arden, a loving black lab.

A peripatetic writing instructor, Doty takes his dogs with him to numerous locales — Vermont, Iowa, New York, Provincetown, Mass., and Houston (where he now teaches half the year at the University of Houston). The canines explore each landscape with their noses to the ground and as much, if not more, enthusiasm than their owner.

Anyone who has read any of Doty's seven books of poetry and three previous volumes of prose knows that he has long dwelled on the "always present" specter of death: "peeking out of the pocket, down in the socket of the bone, the shadow in the photograph, the fleck in the iris of a living eye." His 1996 memoir, "Heaven's Coast," offered a vivid and moving diary of Wally's battle with AIDS. "Dog Years" serves as a companion piece to that volume, one that documents every detail of his affection for his dogs and their eventual demise: Beau, at age seven, from kidney disease, and Arden, at 16, from old age.

Beau, who was introduced to Wally just a month before Wally's death, was intended as a new companion who would comfort him in the bed he was confined to. Arden, whom the couple had raised since a puppy, had become too fat to jump on the bed after eating so much of the hospital-cooked bacon that Wally was surreptitiously feeding to him. Beau ultimately serves his purpose, providing one of Doty's enduring memories of his lover — that of Wally fighting his crippling disease to lay a trembling hand on Beau's flank.

After Wally's death, Beau and Arden become Doty's primary companions, reminding him to pay attention to the quotidian demands of life — walking, eating and sleeping. Later, a new partner, Paul, makes the family a foursome again.

Doty is a capital "L" literary writer who separates his chapters of narrative with brief "Entr'acte" — short meditations on topics such as dog names and photographs, grave sites, time and God. These observations alternate between pithy — "The saddest dogs in the shelter are the ones without any names" and downright sententious: "Sometimes I think the place where God is not is time; that is the particular character of the mortal adventure, to be bound in time, and thus to arrive, inevitably, at the desolation of limit."

In short, "Dog Years" isn't "Marley and Me" — John Grogan's saccharine 2006 best-seller that was loved and loathed in equal numbers by dog owners. For starters, it's unlikely Grogan would ever consider comparing the smell of a dog to the richly scented rooms described in Joris-Karl Huysman's 1903 novel "Against Nature."

Doty challenges time-worn clichés about pets, asking, for example, "Does everyone truly want a baby, or a baby substitute? The idea seems reductive. But the truth within it is that we are charmed by certain kinds of limitation: the dog's dependence, like that of the little child, engages rather than repels. There is a certain pathos in the fact that they cannot speak to us, that they can be so fully present without entirely communicating."

"Dog Years" is itself something of a personal challenge for Doty. He strives to match, in prose, his poetry's ability to communicate the paradoxical emotions in our lives, such as simultaneous feelings of love and despair. Doty's touchstone is Emily Dickinson, whom he calls "the great teacher of contradiction," and her verse serves as a kind of refrain throughout. But, he realizes, there are moments poetry itself fails: In January 2001, near the sixth anniversary of Wally's death, Doty experiences what he calls "the worst moment of my life" when he suddenly feels an urge to drown himself by diving off the Staten Island Ferry. He relents after looking down at Beau and, he writes, "something in me breaks." He continues, "The purpose of poetry, it has been said, is to bring more of the unsayable into the world of speech, but poetry fails me in my attempt to evoke that moment."

Unsurprisingly, there are moments when Doty still finds poetry to be a reliable medium of expression. Doty's most acclaimed book, 1993's "My Alexandria," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, opens with a poem titled "Destruction." It describes the razing of an old building in New England, where "Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, /atomized plaster billowing." A similar image resurfaces here when Doty describes the tumbling of the first of the World Trade Center towers, which he watches, as it happens, on a computer in the New York Public Library: "One of the twin images on the screen begins, it seems, to consume itself, from the top down, the smoke billowing out only a little before it is sucked down into the great earthward rush and road. Well, no road, on the computer screen: a silent, shimmy column of smoke climbs down itself, in a few seconds time."

When Doty returns to his apartment later that day, it is Arden whom he seeks solace from, as much as Paul. Arden, too, is affected by the tragedy: he can smell the acrid scent of the fire for many months thereafter.

The passage is key to Doty's overall message: Animals are not divorced from the greatest events of our lives, as we are not from theirs. We share life and death equally, but it is our duty alone to try to understand the meaning of it — they're just dogs, after all.

Despite occasional lapses into highfalutin' aphoristic moralizing, "Dog Years" delivers an eloquent meditation on the symbiotic relationship between humans and their dogs, one that is likely to provoke owners to view their dogs less as pets and more like partners. As Doty writes, dogs are blessed with "a fixity of devotion, a deep reliability" — something only the truly fortunate can expect from their human companions.

Third Spring Book Show Blossoms

More aggressive advertising and a partnership with the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance helped boost bookseller attendance 18%, to approximately 650, at the third annual Spring Book Show, held March 23–25 in Atlanta. SBS director Larry May said he was encouraged that the new initiatives had helped lift the turnout this year.

The most dramatic change was the addition of educational seminars, held in conjunction with SIBA. "I primarily came to the show to attend the SIBA education panels," said Elizabeth Grant-Gibson, co-owner of Windows a Bookshop in Monroe, La., "but after perusing what was offered on the show floor, I decided to spend about $2,000 on books from AMS and Daedalus Books. We don't carry remainders, but I thought I'd get my feet wet. I'll definitely be back next year."

Joining independent booksellers on the floor were buyers from the national chain stores. Joey Middendorf, used product manager from Hastings Entertainment, said, "I did just as much business there, if not more, as I did in CIROBE. I had more time—I think the selection was a little better, and the vendors had exactly what I was looking for. I was charged with looking for bargain software and DVDs, and it was nice to see some of those there as well."

There were 130 exhibitors at this year's SBS. Buyers from both indies and chains were noticeable around the Advanced Marketing Services booth, which appeared to be having a fire sale of titles from AMS imprints not acquired by Baker & Taylor. John Weber, a buyer for remaninder dealer US Media Partners, was struck by some other fallout from the demise of AMS—a number of former distribution clients of PGW were at SBS. "Maybe some small and mid-size publishers are finally catching on to the idea that you can recoup 60%–80% of the manufacturing cost of your unsold books by selling hurts and remainders—something the majors understand very well," Weber said.

Perhaps as a result of SBS's Southern location, Christian vendors reported strong sales. Barry Baird, executive director of Bargain Books at Thomas Nelson, said, "This show was bigger in terms of orders and dollar amounts than this past CIROBE, and CIROBE was good. We've been going to the Spring Book Show since it started, and this was the best one yet."

Baird indicated that some of his top customers this year were not "mom-and-pop" bookstores, but rather nontraditional outlets. He said that general retailers, such as the bargain clothing store chain Ross Dress for Less and City Trends, a chain with 300 stores that cater to the African-American urban market, have been purchasing larger and larger quantities of books.

In addition to the educational panels, SBS held a two-day writing conference concurrent with the trade show. While about 70 aspiring writers attended the conference, some vendors complained that the competing events caused slow periods on the floor.

One of the busiest people at the show was Larry May, whose company L.B. May and Associates recently purchased Nashville's five-year-old Onboard Remainder Book Show. May was signing up vendors and attendees for the revamped, as-yet-unnamed event, which last year drew only 100 attendees. May had already registered more than 200 attendees and sold 300 tables for this year's show, set for August 10–12 at the Georgia World Congress Center, the same venue as the Spring Book Show.

Larry Brown's Last, Unfinished Country Epic

A Miracle of Catfish

By Larry Brown

ALGONQUIN BOOKS; 455 PAGES; $24.95

Reviewed by Edward Nawotka, from the San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 2007

---

The famed Ole Miss journalism Professor Jere Hoar was once asked in an interview, "Why, exactly, does Oxford produce so many writers?" The northern Mississippi town has fostered writers as diverse as John Grisham, Tom Franklin and William Gay, and of course, William Faulkner, now immortalized in bronze on the town square. Hoar replied that when growing up as a child in Oxford, "You saw writers walking down the street every day and grow up thinking that it's a normal thing, wanting to be a writer, the sort of job anybody can do."

Larry Brown was no different. The ex-Marine spent 16 years as an Oxford firefighter before dedicating himself to writing full time. When Brown died of a heart attack at age 53 in November 2004, he'd just delivered the bulk of his sixth novel, "A Miracle of Catfish," to his publisher. In an essay that introduces the book, Brown's friend and fellow Oxford resident Barry Hannah describes Brown as a "late bloomer" who hectored him at the local bar with story after story, some "so bad" Hannah would duck out the back of the bar when he "saw him coming down the walk with the inevitable manila envelope." Brown did improve: In total, he delivered five powerful novels (including "Dirty Work" and "Joe"), a pair of affecting memoirs ("On Fire" and "Billy Ray's Farm"), two story collections, and this unfinished final manuscript.

Sadly, since "A Miracle of Catfish" was left unfinished, it is impossible to ultimately judge. The publisher, who offers ellipses to indicate cuts to the text, provides a single page of notes Brown outlined for the final chapters of what is already a sprawling country epic. As it stands, the book chronicles a year in the life of a small community outside Oxford in the year 2004-2005, beginning with septuagenarian Cortez Sharpe bulldozing the white oaks from his property to make way for a new catfish pond -- an event Brown notes in a syntax that could just as easily have come from the pen of Faulkner:

"The soft earth that had lain hidden beneath rotted leaf mold for millenniums was torn up and printed with dozer tracks and shown to the unflinching sun, where it lay curled and cracked and began to dry and flake and be clambered upon by red fire ants," writes Brown.

Sharpe himself is the most vividly drawn of the large cast of locals, which includes his wife, a stroke victim who sits idle in a wheelchair watching endless infomercials on TV, waiting to die; a young neighbor boy named Jimmy who disturbs Shape's idyll with a noisy red go-kart; and Jimmy's father (who is known solely by that moniker), a factory worker, who, when not drinking beer, is watching hunting videos and worrying over the state of his '55 Chevy and newly pregnant mistress. Sharpe's daughter, a plus-size lingerie model, lives in Atlanta with a painter suffering from Tourette's syndrome who speaks in rhyming vulgarities, whom Sharpe refers to exclusively as the "damn retard."

It may sound as if Brown is indulging in the horny, smoky, trailer-trashy cliches of Southern-fried fiction, but Brown is better than that, and generates tremendous pathos for his people, rendering them far more human than mere caricatures. He's equally adept at incorporating infrequent and surprising picaresque elements, especially in the form of anthropomorphized animals, such as a pair of crows that talk in African American patois, and a behemoth catfish named Ursula who shares Sharpe's pond with 3,000 far smaller catfish.

Eventually, Sharpe teaches Jimmy to fish, an act that begins to close the circle of the generations and the community, but soon thereafter, the story abruptly ends.

Since there can be no resolution to the action -- which includes a number of accidental deaths and pregnancies, as well as a murder -- the cursory plot is ultimately incidental to the vivid, if lengthy depictions of the everyday obsessions of the locals: hunting, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and mulling their lot in life.

Knowing from the start that the book is unfinished -- lacking a roof, so to speak -- means the reader can only take pleasure from being lashed by the elemental energy of Brown's imagination, rather than ever fully inhabiting it.

Ultimately, the experience of reading this finely wrought but unrealized novel is not unlike the satisfaction fishing on a hot, sunny day offers: One sits in a daze, halfheartedly in anticipation of those little tugs on the end of the line that awake you to consciousness. And even if you don't return home with a single catch or a new trophy to mount on the wall, you still believe that your time was well spent.

Review of Matthew Sharpe's 'Jamestown'

Matthew Sharpe's 'Jamestown'

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 18, 2007

For reasons that are too obvious to belabor, over the past five years storytellers have become obsessed with the apocalypse. Think of Cormac McCarthy's haunting "The Road," the stunning film adaptation of P.D. James' "Children of Men" and television series such as "Jericho," "Heroes" and "Lost." The common thread among these stories is that each features a group of refugees trying to recover some semblance of their old lives.

Add to this list Matthew Sharpe's "Jamestown," a gonzo re-imagining of the founding of the famous Virginia colony. Sharpe moves the story from 1607 to a post-apocalyptic near future in which the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan are engaged in a war that has left New York besotted with ninja-like assassins.

After watching the Chrysler building tumble into ruin, a coterie of Sun Tzu-toting business executives representing the "Manhattan Company" set forth along Interstate 95 ("whoever controls I-95 controls the world," we're told) in an armored bus for Virginia, where they hope to find food and oil for their war machine. Soon, the would-be colonists/occupiers encounter the "spectacularly ugly" natives, all marked with "an unnaturally reddish hue."

A key element of Sharpe's beguiling, but ultimately baffling, satire is to refashion historical figures into contemporary caricatures. Jamestown's leader, John Smith, has become Jack Smith, a mechanic responsible for maintaining the bus; Algonquian chief Powhatan is recast as a lethargic, fat patriarch; Pocahontas (nicknamed "Poke a Huntress," among other, bawdier names), becomes a gabby, sex-starved "irreverent scamp"; her husband, the tobacco farmer John Rolfe, is reimagined as the book's narrator, Johnny Rolfe, the Manhattan Company's designated "communications officer" who is recording the events on his PDA. New to the story is Powhatan's right-hand man, a psychiatrist named Sidney Feingold (sometimes referred to as "Sit Knee Find Gold").

For the most part, Sharpe hews to what details are known from the historical record. Nearly half of the original Jamestown colonists were self-described "gentlemen" who knew little about surviving in the wilderness. Centuries later, the suit-wearing refugees are no different, derided by the natives as a "pack of weaklings" without "a single skill to live beyond their fortress town up north."

This inability to cope with their new circumstances has transformed the men into brawlers who, spurred by even a moment's frustration, turn on each other with knives drawn. As Rolfe writes early on: "Some great, quaint pre-annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, whereas I've seen a lot more thesis, antithesis, steak knife, bread knife."

A number of historical events are recreated here, the most mythological of which is the saving of Capt. John Smith from execution by Pocahontas. (In Sharpe's version, Smith is to be beaten to death with baseball bats.) But Sharpe's true agenda lies in recasting language and storytelling itself.

While typing her journal on her own PDA, Pocahontas explains why she is recounting her story in English, instead of her native "secret" language: "I feel like if I were to lie or dissemble in English you would know right away because every English sentence goes by so slowly that you have this time to examine it and decide if it's true." Sharpe's prose demands such close attention: "Jamestown" is narrated through a trippy barrage of different forms, including snatches of pop songs, vulgar frat-boy limericks and, in particular, a hilarious and bizarre exchange of instant messages between Pocahontas (whose online name is CORNLUVR) and Rolfe (GREASYBOY).

It's all quite entertaining, but will baffle anyone hoping for a more conventional narrative (not to mention anyone unfamiliar with the history of the real Jamestown colony). If Sharpe's exuberant prose has any literary forebear it's Samuel Beckett, especially the early satirical novel "Murphy," which revels in wordplay, literary pastiche and also stars a sexually charged heroine. In fact, Sharpe even offers an exchange of dialogue between two voices described as "A Couple of Fops" that sounds like a reworked riff from "Waiting for Godot":

'How did we get here?'

'By bus.'

'No, I mean how did we get to the end of the world.'

'By bus.'

'I mean metaphysically.'

'By bus.'

'Do you ever wonder what did it, finally, what killed civ?'

'What's civ?'

'Civilization.'

'You have a nickname for civilization?'

'We were close before it died.'

"Jamestown" is a sui generis work of the imagination, but, like much of Beckett's work, it often feels cold in its cleverness. At one point, Pocahontas breaks the fourth wall to explain that she has a "secret name" that, if uttered, will kill the reader — the very model of the sort of postmodern game Sharpe enjoys playing with his readers.

It's also unclear whom we're supposed to sympathize with here — the ill-mannered settlers come to a bad end or the naïve natives who are transformed for the worse by exposure to the nefarious Manhattanites. Perhaps it's best to root for the lovers Pocahontas and Rolfe, who in their gleeful IM exchanges offer a glimmer of hope that love might persevere in the face of annihilation.

Despite his literary curlicues, Sharpe's rather complicated novel boils down to the old saw about what happens to those who ignore history — a point, perhaps, too obvious to repeat.

L.B. May Purchases Nashville Remainder Show

by Edward Nawotka, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 3/14/2007

L.B. May and Associates, owners of the Spring Book Show in Atlanta, has purchased Nashville's five-year-old Onboard Remainder Book Show from founder Larry Austin for an undisclosed sum. "We purchased the show because we felt we had economies of scale to do it right and it offered us an opportunity to enter into a new market," explained Larry May, president of L.B. May and Associates.

The show will be relocated to Atlanta, where it will take place from August 10-12 at the Georgia World Congress Center, the same location as the Spring Book Show set for later this month. Both shows focus on the sale of remainders, though the summer show will add sidelines. The summer show is also likely to be 20% smaller than the Spring Book Show, reducing the number of tables available to vendors from 530 to 430.

The still-to-be named show will take place a few months before the big CIROBE event. "A lot of retailers and vendors feel CIROBE is just too late in the season to get books into stores for Christmas," said May. "The Onboard Remainder Show was originally called the Onboard Remainder Christmas Show, specifically so people knew they could come in and get their product in time for Christmas. With this second show, we aim to sell to booksellers who want to get their bargain stock in time for the holiday shopping season."

May is inviting interested parties to suggest names for the relaunched event. The winning name will be selected by May and the new event will be christened on the first day of the show. The individual who submits the winning name will receive a grand prize that includes air fare, hotel accommodations, dinner and a skid of books. Three runners-up will be given a free skid of books.

Abu Dhabi Tries to Put Its Book Fair on the Map

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, 3/12/2007

Now in its 17th year, the Abu Dhabi Book Fair is undergoing a radical transformation, via a new, six-month old partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair. The event, which takes place in the capital of the United Arab Emirates from March 31 through April 7, aims to help establish new relationships between Arab and Western publishers, authors and agents. For the most part, book publishing in the Arab world is a fractured and unregulated industry, with no central distribution, little copyright enforcement and limited retail outlets. "By partnering with Frankfurt," said Abu Dhabi Book Fair director Jumaa Abdulla Al Qubaisi, "we saw an opportunity to try and professionalize publishing in the region."

In previous years, the Abu Dhabi Book Fair—which is run by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage—was an opportunity for local residents to purchase books from around the Arab world, primarily from publishers from Egypt and Lebanon, many of which were not available through local bookstores or online. Approximately 200,000 people visited the fair last year and 350 publishers exhibited books.

This year, the venue has moved from outdoor tents, which offered approximately 10,000 feet of space, to a wing of the new multibillion-dollar Abu Dhabi Exhibition Center, which offers some 40,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space. The additional space allows the fair to dedicate a special section to children's books, as well as provide room for new exhibits covering production and distribution. But the revamped fair is struggling to attract Western publishers in its first year. About 12 small European publishers had registered to exhibit at press time, and no American houses had committed to attend. For his part, Al Qubaisi has tempered his expectations. He told PW, "We partnered with Frankfurt because they are most organized, recognized and professional brand in the business. We have a lot to learn from them. This year we are just getting experience."

The partnership with Frankfurt has yielded a new slate of professional seminars, covering such publishing practices as marketing, public relations and rights acquisition. There are also panels on "Tolerance as a Pre-Condition for Peace" and "Fundamentalism and Terrorism." Among the Americans speaking at the fair will be Rick Vanzura, president of Borders Group International, who will discuss Borders's franchise deal with Dubai-based Al Maya Group to open stores in the UAE.

As in previous years, books will also be for sale. Al Qubaisi emphasized that the fair will be open to all types of publications, save those that "discriminate, are pornographic or foment conflict in the region."

Central to the fair's new agenda is the launch of the Sheik Zayed's Book Awards. The new book award program, named for the late president of the United Arab Emirates, offers eight awards in categories ranging from children's books to best technology in the field of culture, and all carry a $200,000 cash prize. A ninth category, for "person of the year in the field of culture," offers a $270,000 prize. Any work published in the Arabic language and/or a translation from or to Arabic that was published within the last two years is eligible.

Mohamed A. Al Shehhi, a project coordinator for the fair, said he hopes the event will be one part of a larger effort to raise the standing of reading in the Arab world. "Traditionally, leisure book reading has not had as significant a role in Arab culture as religious scholarship, poetry and even reading newspapers. Through the book fair, we hope to help that change," Al Shehhi said. He added, "Ultimately, Abu Dhabi aims to be a safe haven for arts and culture in the Middle East and become a gateway for the West to the region. The Book Fair is an important part of that larger goal."

Georgia: Bookselling in the Peach State

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, 3/5/2007

Georgia boasts 188 bookstores, including 68 chain stores, with the heaviest concentration in Atlanta, the state's largest city and one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States. There, a coterie of dynamic specialty booksellers—including the feminist Charis Books & More, gay Outright Bookstore and children's bookseller Little Shop of Stories—thrive amid the burgeoning chains, which include some 22 Borders and Waldenbooks stores (out of 31 total in the state), as well as five B&Ns and B. Daltons (out of a total of 21, with a new B&N store expected to open in Newnan, Ga. shortly).

Marlene Zeiler, owner of Atlanta's Tall Tales Book Shop, said her 28-year-old 3,000-sq.-ft. general bookstore caters to a "sophisticated" readership that includes employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Emory University. "Some people in other parts of the country may think we Georgians are dumb, but they're wrong," said the former New Yorker.

All this growth and prosperity has its downside. "Bookselling in Atlanta has definitely become more challenging. Atlanta is now so big and with so much happening, it's hard for a bookstore to get noticed," said Frank Reiss, owner of A Cappella Books, which started in 1989 as an antiquarian bookstore, but has transitioned to offering new and used titles from its location in the hip Five Points district.

Likewise, Doug Robinson, owner of nearby Eagle Eye Books, said growth at the four-year-old store has been "modest" if not "flat," and it is primarily the store's Web business that continues to grow, as students are more and more comfortable ordering books online.

The competitive environment in Atlanta has had the greatest impact on the home-grown Chapter 11 bookstore chain, which at its peak had 16 stores and was lauded in the Wall Street Journal as a model independent bookseller. The chain has since fallen into bankruptcy and been reduced to three locations.

Outside of the metro area, the concentration of stores is less dense, but the market no less interesting, said Tom Murphy, v-p of book reps George Scheer Associates. "Though it's true Atlanta has some wonderful bookstores, the real action for me is now in the more rural corners of the state," said Murphy, who has been selling academic and small trade press books, including those from the University of Georgia Press, for 18 years. He pointed out that stores such as Cowan's Book Nook in East Ellijay (est. population in 2005: 706), which is in the mountains near the Tennessee border, and Hattie's Books in Brunswick along the southeast coast, are in out-of-the-way locales isolated from competition and have readers hungry for regional titles.

Leigh Baumann, owner of Jekyll Books at the Old Infirmary on Jekyll Island, one of the Sea Islands, agreed. "We do have a strong regional bias in our book selection," she said. "There's a sense of history here—it's where Vanderbilt, Pulitzer and Morgan had their summer homes and remains a high-end tourist destination—so people who come here want to read about the history and local community." She cited the novels of the late Georgia author Eugenia Price, as well as titles on ecology, birding and the store's self-published Golf Lovers Guide to Jekyll Island as big sellers.

Jeannie Young, manager of G.J. Ford bookshop on St. Simons Island, agreed that her store's temperate island locale is a boon. The wealth of the year-round residents—which include celebrities and athletes, such as golfer Davis Love III—ensures a consistent trade in hardcover books. Tourists are also important customers, and Young sends her store's newsletter to residents in 40 states who continue to order books throughout the year. "I feel very fortunate," said Young. "We continue to grow year after year."

Florida: Bookstores in the Sunshine State

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, 2/26/2007

In the literary world, Florida may be best known for having produced its own indigenous genre—the Wacky Florida Mystery. Purveyors, including Carl Hiaasen, Bob Morris and Tim Dorsey, are big sellers up and down the state. "Those authors—especially Hiaasen— easily draw hundreds to every reading," said Crystal Chancellor, district marketing manager for Borders Bookstores in south Florida. "But that's not all that sells," she added. "Florida is so diverse that you might have one store in which Jewish-interest and health books sell especially well, and another just a few miles down the road where the customers are primarily Spanish-speaking and interested in high-quality literature."

With 284 bookstores, Floridians have plenty of choice: the Sunshine State has the fourth-largest number of bookstores of any state in the country, behind only California, Texas and New York. Of the major bookselling chains, Borders has the greatest saturation, with 66 stores. The breadth of bookstores is as varied as the geography, which ranges from the beachy southern end of the peninsula and the hurricane-prone eastern seaboard to the Georgia border and the balmy panhandle.

Books & Books is Florida's best-known independent bookseller; it's celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Owner Mitchell Kaplan, a former president of the ABA, said that for many years he fought the stereotype that due to the weather, the residents of the Sunshine State wouldn't be interested in reading.

"Florida has traditionally been a place where there was a strong market for indies," he said. "When the superstores expanded into the state, there were initially a lot of closings. But smaller niche stores have begun to spring up." For his part, Kaplan has built a minichain with three locations: Coral Gables, Miami Beach and the upscale Bal Harbour mall.

"When we first opened, Miami was going through a rough period. But we've seen the city remake itself," said Kaplan, who pointed out that half of his sales are to bilingual Spanish/English readers.

Kaplan told PW that his idea of a successful bookstore was shaped by Haslam's Book Store in St. Petersburg on the Gulf coast. Founded in 1933 during the Depression, Haslam's remains the largest independent in the state. It offers 100,000 new titles, as well as several hundred thousand used books, in a 20,000-sq.-ft. setting. Co-owner Ray Hinst, the third generation of the family to run Haslam's (his son is a manager there), said that the "size of the store is the biggest statement we can make." It stays true to its "olde-timey" roots: no mailing list, no sidelines, and it's not open evenings.

In contrast, the Book Mark in Atlantic Beach in the northeast corner of the state is a mere 1,500 sq. ft. The store opened in 1990; Rona Brinlee purchased it in 1995. She said that her location serves three distinct types of clientele: locals, snowbirds who come for a few months and tourists. The combination, said Brinlee, means that her business isn't as susceptible to seasonality or weather. Brinlee is regularly interviewed by tastemaker NPR to recommend books.

Its Own Brand of Southern

Another misconception about Florida that needs correcting: "It's not really the South," says Leslie Reiner at Inkwood Books in Tampa. "Stereotypical Southern books like the Sweet Potato Queens don't work for us. Our customers pretty much read what the nation is reading."

Tom Rider, co-owner of Goerings Book Store in Gainesville in the panhandle, concurs. "We're not quite as empty-headed as we might seem," he said.

Located just a mile down the road from the U. of Florida, Goerings is both a 5,000-sq.-ft. trade bookstore and a separate textbook store. Rider said Gainesville has been experiencing significant growth in recent years, like many larger cities in the South. As a consequence, the chains saw an opportunity; two Books-a-Millions, a Borders and a Barnes & Noble are all nearby.

The boom in population also creates unique challenges: "Since we're still chopping down trees and plowing fields for suburban tract developments," explained Rider, "our customers continue to move further away from us. That means that a location you picked 10 years ago might not be as good, and you need to reassess constantly. Now that's a problem that we in Florida have that others around the country don't."

A punishing road to wisdom: Review of US Guys by Charlie LeDuff

Reporter pursues male psyche through fights, football, Burning Man event

By EDWARD NAWOTKA

US GUYS: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
By Charlie LeDuff.
Penguin Press, 242 pp. $25.95.

Is there something ominous and seething in the soul of the American man? Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff thinks so.

In his new book US Guys LeDuff adopts the mantle of George Plimpton and throws himself into a variety of dangerous situations: He joins a fight club in Oakland; cruises the dirt streets of the neo-hippie Burning Man festival in the nude; worships with snake-handling Christians in Tennessee; participates in a gay rodeo in Oklahoma City; follows around a wisecracking Detroit homicide detective; and joins an arena football team. In the end you come away with the distinct feeling all is not well in Middle America.

LeDuff bucks the stereotype of the media-elite journalist as someone out of touch with the real America. The journalist's job, he writes, is to be "someplace you are not supposed to be, asking questions that no decent person would, things that would make your mother ashamed." His first book, a collection of Times columns titled Work and Other Sins, dealt with the denizens of New York City bars and back alleys. As a consequence, he's an old-school, rough-and-ready reporter, in the mold of Jimmy Breslin.

The media machinery these days favoring images over ink, it quickly subsumed someone so sui generis as LeDuff. This second book was born of LeDuff's experience filming a Discovery cable TV series called Only in America. The show ran for 10 episodes (it's still showing in reruns) and featured nearly all the stories in US Guys.

But anyone who watches the series will find stark differences in the presentation. While the series is marred by a breezy "gee whiz, look at all the freaky things I'm doing" tone, US Guys is more provocative, cerebral and, frankly, self-loathing. LeDuff is really using America as a mirror in which to measure himself.

And he's not satisfied with what he sees. When he joins a traveling circus of immigrant performers from Russia, Venezuela and Mexico, he's trained to be a clown. "I am, of course, already a clown," LeDuff writes. "A stupid man who hides behind his outrageousness. A scared, stupid little man who would rather people laugh at what he does than at who he is."

Elsewhere, he is preoccupied with provoking others to beat him up. At the "Nouveau Nihilist" Burning Man festival in Nevada, LeDuff tries to provoke the drug-fueled crowd of 40,000 nude, sunburned hipsters by throwing eggs at their giant neon-lit Burning Man effigy, which he sneers at as an "ephemeral piece of 'highly conceptual art' " worshipped "as though it equaled the Acropolis."

In the most memorable episode in the book LeDuff pals around with fight-club members, a gang dubbed the Rats. The club consists of 30 members and eight prospects, ages 21 to 38, and includes "not your run-of-the-mill misanthropes and boneheads. But former Marines, sharpshooters, mechanics, car salesmen, doctors of philosophy, missionaries, bureaucrats, government agents, fine painters, cardsharps," all "physically fit, wild and on the edge of insanity." LeDuff calls them "the most complete-incomplete men there are."

Their parties involve a punk band, bottles of whiskey and a boxing ring in which they beat each other black and blue, much as in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club (later turned into a film starring Brad Pitt).

To prove his mettle, LeDuff challenges Big Mike, a 330-pound dreadlocked 29-year-old psychology student at UC Berkeley. Big Mike is the only African-American member of the Rats, a man LeDuff views as the embodiment of the "black bogeyman."

The 30-something LeDuff is a slender 160 pounds, smokes, has soft hands and is fond of wearing a foppish black suede vest. (Later in the book he will go to New York and try and fail to become a model.) Before the bout, onlookers mock him as "Oscar Wilde the faggot." One sullen Rats member says, "I hope he kills you."

But by the very act of sacrificing himself in the ring, taking his punches and having the guts to ignore his fear, LeDuff wins over the mob, which cheers for him even as he's getting bloodied: "The little man! The primordial. This is the meaning of fight club and riding on the edge and fire and explosions. The exhilaration of life," LeDuff exclaims.

Less punishing is his stint as a member of the Amarillo Dusters Arena 2 football team. The players, who earn a paltry $200 per game, are motivated by dreams of making the big time. Most will fail. Surely this is a metaphor for broken dreams, but in Amarillo he also finds the racial divide between the black players and white players telling. While the white players have the advantage of their skin color when re-entering the job market, the black players, though admittedly "physically superior," have far dimmer prospects.

So why does LeDuff risk so much in the service of his journalism? As he tells a snake-handling Christian: "Well, I don't like the place we're headed, you know? Fat, stupid, scared and [masturbating] to porno."

Taken as a whole, it's hard not to feel that American men have lost their central place in the culture and as a consequence have demeaned themselves. LeDuff sees the possibility of redemption, and self-transformation in fomenting the American man's anger. The danger, of course, is that this energy, so often manifesting itself in violence, will consume itself and leave behind nothing but ashes and a hollow shell of humanity.

Reading US Guys is like taking a brisk slap in the face from someone who's demanding you slap him back. It's not pleasant, but it will give you a sense of how you measure up. And it does leave a sting.

Wal-Mart Dominates Arkansas Bookselling Scene

Arkansas

By Edward Nawotka

From Publishers Weekly, January 22 issue

If you’re looking for proof that the apotheosis of big box retailers has had a detrimental effect on independent bookstores, look no further than the state of Arkansas. With just one bookstore for every 70,589 residents, Arkansas--the 33^rd most populous state with a total of 2.8 million residents--has the fewest number of bookstores per person of any state in the country. There are less than 20 general independent bookstores, many of them small. One, Enterprise Books in DeWitt is a mere 250 sq. ft.

Wal-Mart, which is headquartered in Bentonville, has 92 outlets in Arkansas alone and dominates the retailing scene on its home turf. As a consequence, the chains have been careful not to overreach: Barnes & Noble and Borders have five outlets each, while Books-A-Million has just four. Hastings, has the most of all, with eleven locations.

Though Wal-Mart doesn’t offer an especially broad selection of titles--the average Wal-Mart stocks a few small sections of bestselling hardcovers along with a lengthy rack of mass market paperbacks--almost all its books are substantially discounted. The stores also carry Christian titles, a smattering of remainders, and in some markets, a dedicated African-American books section. The largest Wal-Marts, dubbed Supercenters, stock twice as many hardcovers and an expanded section of trade paperbacks.

John Robichaux, co-owner of Treasure House Books in Harrision, Ark. told PW, “Wal-Mart is a pervasive part of our society, a way of life. But they cut into the core of our business and take away a steady base of our income.”

Robichaux says his strategy for coping is to “stock what Wal-Mart does not,” such as Manga and focus on backlist titles and special orders. He says his 3,000 sq.-ft. store depends in part on tourist traffic driving through to Branson, Missouri, 40 miles north.

Arkansas’ best-known independent bookstore is That Bookstore in Blytheville, opened by Mary Gay Shipley in 1976. Shipley’s enormous energy is renowned throughout bookselling circles. Her store has managed to persevere despite a rural, out-of-the way location and thin local customer base in a large part due to her extensive author series, which gets a big boost by Arkansas native John Grisham, who routinely makes That Bookstore in Blytheville his first stop on any book tour.

When Madison Avenue advertising executive, Maryalice Hurst moved to Arkansas and wanted to open a bookstore, she found a mentor in Shipley. “Mary Gay is an island, a rock,” Hurst told PW. “In her community she’s an economic landmark and she’s certainly a landmark in bookselling. Without her I would have never opened the store.” Hurst's store, in Conway, Ark, is modeled on Shipley's to such an extent that she adopted the name: It is called That Bookstore at Mountebanq Place.

For her part, Hurst says that her business is barely surviving five-and-a-half years after opening on September 1, 2001. One of the obstacles she’s encountered is trying to convince wary locals that it’s okay to buy a book from a "Yankee." In a telling episode, fundamentalist Christian customers objected to having the Koran and the Talmud shelved alongside the Bible in the religion section. Hurst responded by moved the Islamic and Jewish texts to a new shelf Hurst labeled "Philosophy and Ethics.”

Many of the bookstores in Arkansas surveyed by PW seemed to be just hanging on. At Paper Chase Bookstore in Batesville, Ark, owner Mayfan Thomas admitted that “The last three or four years, there’s been a decline in business.” She added, “There are a lot of good readers here, though we only have 9,000 residents. I just hope it’s cyclical.”

In the state biggest city, the capitol of Little Rock, which has a population just shy of 900,000 in the metropolitan area, three independents persist. These are Tyler & Tyler Booksellers, a small store in North Little Rock that specializes in Southern topics, and a pair of started by Rod Lorenzen--WordsWorth Books & Co., which he opened in 1974 and ran until 1986 before selling, and Lorenzen & Co. Booksellers, founded in 1990.

WordsWorth remains Arkansas’ poshest independent. Co-manager David Cockroft describes WordsWorth’s clientele as “upscale and country-clubbish,” the very type of folks who can keep a carriage trade bookstore humming. In contrast, Lorenzen & Co. caters to the thrifty, stocking 90% used books and only 10% new books.

Novelist and short story writer Kevin Brockmeier, a native of Little Rock, lived for a time across the street from Lorenzen & Co. He tells PW he frequented the store so much he “was often mistaken as an employee.” While Brockmeier says he “loves” shopping at the independents, “The real action here is down at the Barnes & Noble. It’s where people will go to socialize.”

Despite the obvious challenges of relative poverty (Arkansas ranks 50th among the states in per capita personal income according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis) and preponderance of big box retailers, brave booksellers keep trying. Cottage Bookstore of Melbourne, a 750 sq.-ft. store opened in November 2005, and Nightbird Books opened in Fayetteville in March 2006.

Lorenzen, whose experience spans 32-years, sums up the state of Arkansas bookselling most succinctly: “We rank about last in everything good and first in everything bad,” he tells PW. “When I started, in the mid 70s, there may have been five or six bookstores in the state. Now, there are just a few more. This is not a state that has a population that can really support a lot of bookstores -- it never has been.”

States Literary Sons & Daughters:

John Grisham, Ellen Gilchrist, Donald Harrington, Bill Clinton

James D. Hornfischer's 'Ship of Ghosts'

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, December 24, 2006

Pearl Harbor, Annapolis . . . Austin? It might seem an unlikely roll call, but landlocked Central Texas has a proud place in the annals of U.S. Navy history, now documented in local writer Jim Hornfischer's "Ship of Ghosts."

The book, Hornfischer's second, offers a harrowing account of the sinking of the USS Houston by the Japanese in 1942. It also tells the little-known story of "The Lost Battalion," a detachment of Texas National Guard artillerymen from Camp Mabry taken prisoner at the same time. Hornfischer recounts in thrilling detail how the Texans and the survivors of the Houston endured 3 1/2 years as prisoners of war and participated in the building of the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an event romanticized by the David Lean movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

"Finding a story like this was the last thing on my mind when I moved to Austin in 1993," says Hornfischer. "But it turns out I landed at ground zero, so to speak. Not only is Fredericksburg the birthplace of Chester Nimitz and home to the National Museum of the Pacific War, but the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry has a room dedicated to the Burma-Thailand railway that covers the fate of the Lost Battalion and the men of the Houston." (Nimitz was the U.S. and Allied forces commander in chief in the Pacific during World War II.)

Hornfischer has a keen ear and eye for a good war narrative. His first book, "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors," told the story of a World War II battle in which a small U.S. fleet faced down a far larger Japanese force in a 2 1/2-hour slugfest. It won the 2004 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature and has been added to the syllabus of the Navy's Professional Reading program. Hornfischer, who also works as a literary agent, was responsible for getting James Bradley and Ron Powers' mega-bestseller "Flags of our Fathers" into print and selling it to DreamWorks. (The Clint Eastwood-directed film adaptation was released in October.)

Hornfischer first heard about the Houston from his client James L. Haley, who had researched the events for one of his histories of Texas. "He turned me on to the dramatic possibilities of the story," says Hornfischer.

As it turned out, he didn't have far to travel for research. In addition to the resources at Camp Mabry, Ronald Marcello at the University of North Texas has been compiling testimonies from survivors for many years. Val Poss, the president of the USS Houston Survivors Association, lives up the road in Round Rock. She and Otto Schwarz — a hero of the book, who died in August — collected numerous artifacts, videotaped interviews and taped oral histories.

"These people have dedicated much of their lives to honoring the memory of the crew of the Houston and the Lost Battalion, and I am in their debt," Hornfischer says.

Prior to the war, the Houston — which had been commissioned after the residents of Houston campaigned to have a ship named in their honor — had been a favorite of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the ship for four long trips. The president became an honorary member of the crew; he participated in the raucous hazing sailors undergo when crossing the equator for the first time and demonstrated his common touch by inviting enlisted men on fishing trips.

After hostilities broke out, Roosevelt's war plan left the Houston to fend for itself. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Houston was patrolling the waters between the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Philippines. After a handful of dangerous skirmishes, it was torn apart by the Japanese Navy shortly after midnight March 1, 1942.

From the moment the Houston sinks, the book's human drama escalates. Only 368 of the more than 1,000 crewmen lived to make it to Java, where they were imprisoned by the Japanese. A few days later, their fate became entwined with that of 534 artillerymen from Camp Mabry who had also been taken prisoner. When the Guardsmen first appeared in the camp, they made it clear where their loyalties lay. The sailors greeted them heartily with: "Hey, Yanks!," but were quickly corrected. "We're not Yanks," replied the Guardsmen. "We're Texans."

The two groups had more in common than you might think. The sailors were mostly farm boys, a breed deemed "most desirable material" by the pre-war Navy. The Texans hailed largely from small rural towns and shared similar values with the sailors. "These guys were the pre-war enlistees who were not motivated to go in as revenge for Pearl Harbor," explains Hornfischer. "There was a different dynamic at work. A lot of these guys joined the military as an adjunct to the New Deal, or to escape a broken home. For example, one sailor in the book, Howard Charles, joined to get away from his SOB stepfather in Kansas."

The two units were shipped to Singapore and Burma, where they were forced into slave labor, enduring lice infestation, 20-foot pythons, rotten rice, dysentery and cholera. Hornfischer says the privation the men endured was so brutal he "struggled to make the book readable, so someone would want to keep turning the pages."

He focuses on the captives' efforts to undermine the railroad, not, as "Bridge on the River Kwai" would have you believe, to build a viable railroad out of a misdirected form of pride. "That movie either amuses or enrages the veterans," says Hornfischer, "One vet told me, 'Those guys were in the Hilton compared to what we had.' The movie succeeds on its own terms, but those terms are very different from history."

In one telling real-life episode, prisoners Howard Charles and Frank King snuck out of their hut, stole a pair of wire cutters and sabotaged a railroad flatcar loaded with rails. The next morning, when the engineers started the locomotive, the heavy rails slid loose, impaling a handful of Japanese who were riding in the caboose. The Americans behaved "like special forces operatives — starving, brutalized special forces operatives — working behind enemy lines, doing what they could on instinct and guts," writes Hornfischer. "They seized their opportunities in the theater of combat operations just as any soldier, sailor or Marine would do."

Despite the Americans' rebellious nature, just two prisoners managed to escape the camps before the rest were freed at the end of the war. In all, 77 crew members from the Houston and 87 from the Lost Battalion died in Japanese captivity.

Hornfischer says it's an honor to tell the tale of these heroic souls in detail for the first time. He also sees the book as a corrective to a popular misconception about the soldiers who fought in World War II. "Some people talk about the Greatest Generation as an aspect of character that crystallized mysteriously in this generation. But when you look at the Houston, you realize these guys came out of the Depression and the 'Hungry '30s.' You can see rather clearly that deprivation provided an unlikely preparation for this ordeal. The Navy didn't prepare them. Life did."

In 2006, Starbucks Adds Buzz to the Book Biz

Starbucks Adds Buzz to the Book Biz

Books and coffee have gone together since long before the chains got hooked on Starbucks. So it made sense when, in August, Starbucks' entertainment division, lead by Ken Lombard, announced that it would begin selling a small number of titles in its 5,400 stores, starting with Mitch Albom's For One More Day.

The move unsettled some booksellers, who were none too happy to see yet another nonbook retailer join the ranks of their competition. But for publishers, getting a book in front of the coffee merchant's 44 million caffeinated customers each week represented a huge opportunity. Even better—Starbucks bought the book nonreturnable. And Starbucks has proved an able bookseller, selling some 70,000 copies of the book since October 3.

When Lombard told PW Daily (Oct. 26) that the next title to be featured at Starbucks is expected to be a debut novel by an unknown writer, he signaled the company's willingness to go beyond brand-name authors like Albom. Considering the typical print run for first novels, just getting a reasonable number of books into every Starbucks outlet would require the publisher to boost the initial run. The retailer won't say whether it plans to continue buying nonreturnable. If it decides to negotiate more traditional terms, the risk of such a printing would fall mainly on the publisher, who could get hit with big returns if an unknown novelist fails to catch coffee-drinkers' attention the way Albom has.

Will publishers be willing to take such a risk? Almost surely, considering the potential payoff. Even if the demands prove too much for some, Starbucks won't lack for options—Lombard says the company "likes the idea of co-publishing" and is setting up a program.

He's already hinting that Starbucks may know how to move books better than the competition. "There's so much dysfunction in entertainment retailing at the moment. With the relationship our baristas have with our customers, we get instant feedback on a product. We have almost an inverted model: finding products to fit our customers, not customers to fit our products," Lombard says.

BookPeople's Camps for Kids

Last June, Austin's BookPeople hosted an innovative program: Camp Half-Blood. The week-long day camp for children, inspired by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, took its name from the "half-bloods," the children of Gods and humans who populate the novels. A total of 55 kids attended from such far-flung states as New York, Colorado and Iowa, and even Greece, and inquiries came from England and Japan.

The event was such a success that its organizer, BookPeople's children's outreach coordinator Topher Bradfield, is now planning eight more. The first, based on The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, is scheduled for December 26–31. Camp Spiderwick will be followed in 2007 by camps based on Half-Moon Investigations by Eoin Colfer (March), Abarat by Clive Barker (August), the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix (October), the Charlie Bone books by Jenny Nimmo (November), Babymouse by Jennifer and Matt Holm, and Bone by Jeff Smith (both December). And Camp Half-Blood will return for another run in the summer.

Each camp accepts a maximum of 50 children, with five additional slots reserved for scholarship students sponsored by the bookstore. The cost is $325 per camper.

Although Bradford calls his invention a "literary" camp, the event stresses action. Last summer's festivities included a theatrical "claiming" ceremony (complete with colored smoke, sound effects and stage lighting), simulated chariot racing and Spartan warrior training.

BookPeople owner Steve Bercu explained to PW that Camp Half-Blood was "the test" to whether the idea would be well received and if they could pull it off. "It was and we did," said Bercu. "Then we immediately looked to see what could be done along the same lines."

While last June's Camp Half- Blood managed a $600 profit, Bercu emphasized that the priority of the camps is not to make money. "As much as I'd like to be profitable on every one of these, it's not essential," he said. "I'm more interested in the concept and seeing this have an impact on our potential future customers."

Bercu (PW's Bookseller of the Year in 2005) noted that the passion and involvement of the staff and community was impressive. Hyperion, Riordan's publisher, supplied T-shirts and banners, BookPeople staff sewed costumes and painted sets, and various teachers and parents volunteered to be counselors. After the camp ended, Bradfield said the store was flooded with letters from campers and their parents praising the event.

Though no U.S. booksellers have contacted BookPeople about running a similar camp, interest ran extremely high when Bradfield described the program at the Association of Booksellers for Children's annual meeting at BEA in June. And it has inspired Toni Davis, an employee at the Cornwall branch of the U.K. bookseller Ottakars (recently taken over by Waterstones) to approach Riordan's British publisher, Penguin, about the possibility.

Davis recently traveled to the U.S. to meet with Bradfield and author Rick Riordan during the Texas Book Festival. As a special honor to Davis, who is battling ovarian cancer, Bradfield arranged for some of the children who attended last year's Camp Half-Blood to hold a "claiming" ceremony for her.

Riordan, who told PW he wishes he could "clone" Bradfield and Davis, has dedicated the third book in the series, The Curse of the Titans, to them.

Bradfield continues to drum up enthusiasm for the Percy Jackson books during his weekly visits to schools in the Austin area, where he runs fairs and meets with groups of students to talk about new books. In all, BookPeople has sold more than 1,400 copies of The Lightning Thief,the first Percy Jackson title, and nearly 500 of its followup, The Sea of Monsters. "Prior to the camp, we saw a small boost in sales," said Bradford, "but after—as the kids who went started talking about it to their friends—we saw a bigger bump. Having an excited kid talking about a book is the best form of advertising."

Starbucks Selection Process Raises Eyebrows

Starbucks Selection Process Raises Eyebrows
by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/30/2006

Mitch Albom's novel For One More Day has been a big hit at Starbucks, selling 45,000 copies since it became available at the stores on October 3. The company also confirmed it is looking at extending sales of the book through the holiday season and is talking to several publishers about a second title to go on sale in early 2007. William Morris Agency is acting as a consultant to Starbucks to scout books and negotiate terms on the new deal.

But William Morris's relationship with Starbucks, and the entire selection process, has caused some grumbling among rival agencies as well as at some retailers. Several agents who spoke with PW questioned William Morris's role in scouting books, suggesting a "conflict of interest" existed in having WMA representing both authors and a retailer simultaneously.

"If Starbucks wanted a scout, why didn't they hire one?" asked one agent. "They are having an opportunity to see manuscripts early, which gives them leverage in the long run. As of now, Starbucks hasn't picked a William Morris author to sell, but who is to say they won't favor their own clients in the future?"

Another agent, who claims familiarity with an ongoing negotiation with Starbucks, expressed concern about the terms WMA was requesting for a particular title, going so far as to call the deal "abusive." According to this agent, WMA asked for deeper-than-industry-standard discounts and a two-week window of exclusivity in which to be the sole retailer for a new title. Through a spokesperson, Starbucks strenuously denied asking for a special discount, but did acknowledge requesting two-week exclusivity, a request the company evenually dropped.

Bob Miller, president of Hyperion, said that his company had dealt directly with Ken Lombard, head of Starbucks's entertainment division, when negotiating terms for Albom's For One More Day and that WMA was not involved.

Starbucks said that everything WMA does on Starbucks's behalf is done with the coffee company's approval. The spokesperson expressed satisfaction with the work the agency is doing on the chain's behalf, and in particular, praised the "passion and intelligence" of agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, who is working on the project. Lombard called Starbucks's relationship with WMA "very much a collaborative effort," in which all books under consideration are also vetted by many of his division's 65 partners (Starbucks's preferred term for its employees).

Mostly, agents seemed concerned about their authors developing any kind of relationship with WMA. "Knowledge is power, and the more they know about my authors, the more it worries me," said one.

On the other hand, Starbucks appears willing to take risks and is asking publishers to follow its lead. The company has confirmed that the second book it will sell in its stores is likely to be a debut novel by an unknown writer—a far cry from the near sure-thing Albom's novel represents. This would likely require a publisher to commit to a far larger initial print run on a debut novel than usual. With Starbucks's thousands of locations, it is likely a publisher would need to commit to a print run in the tens of thousands to satisfy demand and maintain a reasonable level of stock in each store. It's a heady risk to take on a first-time novelist, albeit one who will be exposed to 40 million Starbucks caffeinated customers each week.

Starbucks Succeeds with Albom; Second Book Planned

Starbucks Succeeds with Albom; Second Book Planned
by Edward Nawotka, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/26/2006

Starbucks has sold 45,000 copies of Mitch Albom's novel For One More Day (Hyperion) since it went on sale at the chain October 3, a week after the book reached bookstores. The figure accounts for roughly 12% of a total of 391,000 copies sold, as tabulated by Nielsen BookScan. (BookScan, which added Starbucks to its file the week it began selling For One More Day, represents about 70% of total book sales).

Ken Lombard, head of Starbucks' entertainment division, said, "So far, it's been a great success."Initially, the merchandising of Albom's book was planned to end on November 6, though Lombard said that the company is "going to take a look at that" and may consider extending sales of the book through the holiday season.

Bob Miller, president of Hyperion Books, said that Starbucks has recently reordered. So far, Hyperion has four million copies of For One More Day in print. Miller added that sales of the title “are running week against week 150% over [Albom’s] The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which sold six million copies."

Starbucks has planned several promotions around For One More Day, including eight appearances at Starbucks stores and today's nationwide "Book Break," discussion groups at 25 Starbucks locations.

Albom, who works as a sportswriter and radio host in Detroit, has committed to a total of 74 events to promote the book. So far, with the Detroit Tigers playing in the World Series, he has been forced to cancel yesterday's appearance at a Joseph-Beth bookstore in Nashville. Albom also plans to conduct a final driving tour to bookstores in Michigan in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

PW has also learned that Starbucks is on the verge of signing a deal to sell a second title in their stores. The next book is expected to be a novel by a first-time novelist. William Morris Agency, which scouts books for Starbucks and negotiates terms on its behalf, is said to be in discussion with a variety of publishers, though Farrar, Straus & Giroux has been mentioned several times as the likely publisher.

Obama Wows Crowd at Texas Book Festival

Obama Wows Crowd at Texas Book Festival

Perfect weather blessed this past weekend's Texas Book Festival at the State Capitol in Austin, where Barak Obama set a record for book sales at the event. According to Barnes & Noble, Obama sold more than 1,000 copies of his political manifesto, "The Audacity of Hope,'' beating past record holders Bill Clinton and local favorite Barbara Bush.

Obama, who signed 365 copies before heading off to a meeting with Democratic movers and shakers at the Driskill Hotel, opened this years Festival at a ceremony that honored Austin writer Louis Sachar and Texas Monthly magazine for their contributions to Texas letters. The enthusiastic audience that gathered in the Texas State Capitol House chamber to hear Obama speak greeted the junior Senator from Illinois with wild cheering and a standing ovation, suggesting that he has a willing base of supporters in Austin should he run for President in 2008.

Also on hand for the weekend were Gore Vidal, touring for his new memoir "tk," condemned the Bush administration in front of an audience of well-heeled guests at the annual Gala, part of the fundraising the Festival does for Texas public libraries. Thriller writer Alan Furst, attracted more than two hundred to his presentation at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where his archives are housed alongside with those of Julian Barnes and Norman Mailer. Notables, including Richard Ford, Irish novelist Colm Toibin, Amy Sedaris also drew enthusiastic audiences, but were rivaled by Texas favorites including Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, whose new book, "Vice: Dick Cheney and the Highjacking of the American Presidency" drew a capacity crowd.

Cheney took body blows elsewhere in the weekend as well, when Vidal and New York Times columnist Marueen Dowd took to attacking the VP during an interview with Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, referring to the VP as "our S&M vice president" and "Bush's Iago" respectively.

A little bit of New York publishing glamour also descended on Texas, with a handful of editors in attendance, including Ann Close, senior editor at Knopf, who publishes four Austin writers: National Book Award finalist Larry Wright, Steve Harrigan, Greg Curtis, and Sarah Bird, who was all smiles after Close told her she was publishing Bird's next novel. Dave Patterson, senior editor at Holt, told PW Daily he was impressed. "It's amazing who they have," said Patterson. "It's easily got to be one of the best events I've seen."

Elsewhere, Jay McInerney, promoting his collection of wine columns, tk, left a few Austinites smirking after sniffing a plastic cup of wine handed to him at a barbecue.

In the exhibition tents, a representative from Sony gathered the curious to his booth showing off the company's attractive new e-book reader, perhaps giving a glimpse of what the future of books might look like to the denizens of the tech happy town and one of the last remaining Democratic strongholds in this deep red state.

The Shore Thing; Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land'

Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land'

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, October 29, 2006

ichard Ford's "The Lay of the Land," his third novel to feature the New Jersey real estate agent Frank Bascombe, should come with a warning attached: "For Mature Audiences Only." No, this is not a book filled with perverse sex or gag-inducing gore. Instead, this is an autumnal book, a late-middle aged bildungsroman, in which a man confronts the end of his options. The book opens with Bascombe mulling over a newspaper story describing a murder-suicide at a Texas nursing school in which a disgruntled student asks his teacher, "Are you ready to meet your maker?" The remainder of the novel is Ford's attempt to answer that question on Bascombe's behalf.

When Bascombe was introduced in 1986's "The Sportswriter," it was Easter weekend 1983, and he was 38 years old, divorced and living in the bland middle-class enclave of Haddam, N.J. His life as a modestly successful writer unraveled after the death of his teenage son Ralph, a subsequent divorce and a flight to Florida. The book, along with his book of short stories, "Rock Springs," published a year later, established Ford's national reputation.

It's ironic that Ford's writing about New Jersey has made him famous. The locale with which Ford is most often associated is New Orleans, where he and his wife lived for many years. (The couple now live in a post-Katrina exile in Maine.) Ford's Southern connection is evident in his writing style, which is as laconic as the muddy Mississippi, and similar to that of his Gulf Coast compatriots Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. In Ford's books the action arrives only intermittently, between extensive bouts of self-reflection, and is delivered in long, meandering internal monologues — a style he's employed in all three Bascombe novels.

By the time "Independence Day" appeared in 1995, Bascombe was back in Haddam, selling real estate and trying to connect with his son Paul, a surly 15-year-old, by taking him to visit the basketball and baseball Halls of Fame over the 1988 Fourth of July weekend. Bascombe had started dating Sally (who will become his second wife) and entered what he calls his "Existence Period," characterized by his efforts to make good on the present and amend for the past, without risking too much. That novel's emotional pragmatism resonated with readers and critics alike, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, the first novel to take both prizes in the same year.

Over three decades, Bascombe has evolved into Ford's American Everyman, the equivalent of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. Through him readers experience the travails of the striving, emotionally befuddled American middle class. He could easily be mistaken for a doppelganger of Ford himself: Like Ford, Bascombe hails from Mississippi, was educated in Michigan (Bascombe graduated from the University of Michigan, Ford from Michigan State), is a fiction writer (Bascombe has published a book of short stories) and is a former sportswriter. The major difference is that Bascombe traded writing for real estate after interviewing a crippled football player (a pivotal event in "The Sportswriter"), while Ford has gone on to publish six novels, two collections of novellas and a story collection.

Bascombe's choice of occupation is not as radical as you might think. In "The Lay of the Land," he makes a connection between these two professions: "Realtors share a basic industry with novelists, who make up important stuff from life-run rampant just by choosing, changing and telling." He adds, "Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist's deal and probably not as hard to do well."

In the new book, Bascombe has relocated to Sea-Clift, a new-money enclave on the Jersey shore, where his real-estate business is booming. The year is 2000 and Bascombe, 55, has literally become radioactive — he's walking around with 100 irradiated titanium pellets embedded in his prostate to treat cancer. It's the week before Thanksgiving, which he intends to celebrate with "the usual holiday morbidities" and a $2,000 Thanksgiving feast catered by Eat No Evil, an organic, cruelty-free food company. Joining him are his daughter Clarissa, a Harvard grad and part-time lesbian living with him as a surrogate nurse and spiritual counselor, and Paul, who sports a mullet and a "beardstash," writes greeting cards for Hallmark in Kansas City and plans to bury a time capsule in Bascombe's yard. In lieu of his second wife Sally, who has abandoned him to be with her first husband, Bascombe is considering inviting his first wife, Ann, who is seeking reconciliation.

Meanwhile, in the background is the hanging chad controversy that subsumed the 2000 presidential election. Bascombe, who has always been good company as a narrator and is adept at evoking a person's entire character in a few words, sums up the candidates as follows: Bush is the "knucklehead," Al Gore is the "stiff" and Ralph Nader is simply dubbed "Nadir."

Materially speaking, this guy should probably be a Republican, but emotionally, he remains a Democrat — that is to say, he's a mess (at least under the current administration). The cause of his consternation is not just cancer or politics, but what Frank calls the transition into his "Permanent Period." This is marked by the constant feeling of being "off-shore, waiting for the extra beat" — the realization that he could die — and the lingering sense that if you "never did one damn substantial thing in your life, good or otherwise, and never would, and if you did, it wouldn't matter a mouse fart."

As in the previous novels, Bascombe's tart voice allows Ford to illuminate Bascombe's thoughts on family, women, aging and work — the plainspoken stuff of life — in an entertaining way. When his Americanized Tibetan partner, who has taken the unlikely name of Mike Mahoney, offers to buy out Bascombe's half of the business to give him time to travel, Bascombe dismisses this proposal as "Buddhist crappolio."

Elsewhere, pondering his legacy, his "Forever Concept," he thinks:

I realized I could die and no one would remember me for anything. "Oh, that guy. Frank, uh. Yeah. Hmm. . . ." That was me. Not that I wanted to blaze my initials forever into history's oak. I just wanted that when I was no more, someone would say my name (my children, my ex-wife?) and someone else could then say, "Right. That Bascombe, he was always damn blank;" or, "Ole Frank, he really liked to blank." Or, worst case, "Jesus Christ, that Bascombe, I'm glad to see the end of his sorry blank." These blanks would all be human traits I knew about and others did too, and that I got credit for, even if they weren't heroic or particularly essential.

These existential, stream-of-consciousness musings are a welcome return to his previous form. But all too often in "The Lay of the Land," Ford turns Bascombe's attention to real estate issues, treating the reader to pointless disquisitions on mortgages, demographic shifts and New Jersey shoreline property valuations. It may be an accurate reflection of a real estate agent's daydreams, but it's ultimately a bore, bereft of much metaphorical power.

Ford has attempted to temper the book's dark undertone by punctuating the plot with a quirky series of spectacular events, including a terrorist hospital bombing for which Frank becomes a suspect and the unexpected appearance of Revolutionary War re-enactors at an elderly friend's funeral. He also burdens the book with oddball, unexplainable characters, such as Paul's girlfriend, an Amazon who lost her hand in a land mine accident in Texas. To top it off, the novel's denouement features machine guns.

In the previous Bascombe novels, the lack of external drama felt like the authentic day-to-day stupor of white, middle class suburbia. By contrast, "The Lay of the Land" feels more like a Janet Evanovich novel. Bascombe is left gaping at the random weirdness around him with little more comment than "Life's interesting."

It's as if Ford was trying too hard to be simultaneously profound and entertaining. The result is an overstuffed book that could have benefited from more of the "choosing, changing and telling" that even the failed writer Frank Bascombe realizes is essential to the novelist's job.

Reviewing the State of Book Review Coverage

Reviewing the State of Book Review Coverage
With financial pressures mounting, will newspapers cut space?
by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 10/9/2006

The departure in September of Dallas Morning News book columnist Jerome Weeks and books editor Charles Ealy—two of 111 reporters who took voluntary buyouts from the paper—has brought the state of book reviewing in traditional media back into the spotlight.

Initially believing that no replacement would be named for Ealy, AAP president Pat Schroeder sent a letter to DMN editor Bob Mong expressing her "dismay and disappointment" with the situation. Schroeder was only slightly mollified to learn from Mong that an interim books editor had been named and that the paper will continue with book coverage comparable to what it has done in the past. The DMN typically devotes three pages to books each Sunday, and reviews business books on its business pages.

In her letter to Mong, Schroeder wrote, "...severely curtailing book coverage or eliminating it altogether, newspapers not only fail the communities they serve, they defeat their own interests in regaining those elusive and essential advertising dollars." But Mong told PW that advertising "does not sustain the paper's book coverage," though he added, "I'd love to make a presentation to publishers with our advertising people. I could talk about the benefits of reaching our readers both in the paper and online." He indicated that the paper has noted a "strong demand" for book coverage from its readers, who are generally affluent and educated.

For her part, Schroeder said, "I'm always amazed they say you don't see enough ads—but I don't see too many ads for sports teams. It's been a nagging concern for the last couple of years. We talked about it at our recent board meeting—people said, 'this is horrendous'—the real question is what to do." As a first step, Schroeder asked the AAP's Trade Committee, chaired by Hyperion Books president Bob Miller, to explore ways to facilitate more book coverage in newspapers and other media.

With newspapers under increasing financial pressure, however, is it reasonable to expect them to give extensive coverage to an industry where they get relatively little support? Among the remaining Sunday review sections, only the New York Times Book Review receives a significant number of ads. The Washington Post Book World has seen very little publisher support throughout its history. "It's been a real problem," said Book World editor Marie Arana. The situation is much the same at the San Francisco Chronicle, where, said editor Phil Bronstein, the section gets few ads. "It gets harder and harder to justify something that has no ad support," said Bronstein. "We continue to do it because we think it is important to the cultural community of the Bay Area."

The importance of books to the culture remains the driving force behind the Post's commitment to its 16-page Sunday review. Arana noted that longtime Post publisher Katharine Graham was adamant that "in a city as important as this and in an enterprise as important to knowledge and education as the publication of books, that the Washington Post would have a full-sized, dedicated book review section." Although ads are up slightly at Book World, they don't come close to underwriting the section. "It's not that we're steaming ahead happily without the ads, but it's what we have to do because the New York publishers have not been supportive for papers around the country. They basically support their hometown paper, the New York Times," said Arana.

Books remain an integral part of the Los Angeles Times, a paper that has generated its own headlines recently about its future within the media empire of the Tribune Company. "In a funny way, the publishing industry's terrible neglect of the L.A. Times Book Review was actually good preparation for this era for us," said Tim Rutten, associate features editor. "We learned a long time ago that if we are going to do a book review, we couldn't count on publishers' ads, because they don't advertise on the West Coast."

The Chronicle's Bronstein believes that if publishers supported its section, "it would send a very good signal that they believe in their product." Since the Bay Area is an extraordinary book community, he said, the paper intends to cover books "for as long as we can." How long will that be? "I just don't know in this environment," said Bronstein.