Creatures of the night captivate young readers of Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' series

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Which do you prefer: the vampire or the werewolf? If the question sounds strange to you, you're probably not a teenage girl, or the parent of one.

Those in the know understand there's a rivalry between vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black for the affection of the all-too-human Bella Swan.

Still lost? We're talking about the protagonists of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series of young adult novels, which include Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse. These steamy books by a Phoenix mother of three have sold 5.5 million copies across 28 countries.

Time knows who she is: Last month, it named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2008 and asked whether she's "the new J.K. Rowling."

And local fans know who she is: More than 350 were in line at 7 a.m. Tuesday at Stonebriar Centre in Frisco to get their hands on her new book The Host, which would entitle them to one of 1,000 tickets for her appearance May 10 at Centennial High School in Frisco. (Sorry, it's sold out.)

Ms. Meyer, speaking via phone after a reading at Minnesota's Mall of America earlier this week, notes that her phenomenal success still feels a bit "dreamlike."

It suits. Ms. Meyer says the original idea for Edward and Bella came to her in a dream in 2003. Her sister encouraged her to submit it to publishers. A year later, after being rejected by nine agents, the book was plucked from the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts at Writers House, the literary agency responsible for Nora Roberts and Neil Gaiman, among others.

Four years on, she now has her own personal publicist and is enjoying assisting with the filming of the movie version of Twilight, due in theaters Dec. 12. Oh, and then there's the millions of fans.

Walking into the auditorium at Centennial High School will still bring jitters, she says. "I'm kind of shy, so a big crowd of people is kind of my worst nightmare." She says the hardest part is walking down the hall and hearing them screaming for her.

"Then you get to the stage and look at the fans' faces," she says. "Seeing all the kindness coming toward you makes everything easier."

Also Online

Blog: Texas Pages

The Host, a sci-fi tale about alien body snatchers, is billed as Ms. Meyer's first book for adults. But it doesn't stray far from the formula that made the Twilight series so successful, echoing the story line of a woman whose affection is divided, and dishing up plenty of romance without (much to the relief of millions of parents) sex.

Once bitten by the books, Ms. Meyer's fans tend to become obsessed. Among them are Chandler Nash, 15, Tori Randall, 14, and Ally Kiger, 14, all of Arlington. They comprise the the Bella Cullen Project, a Twilight tribute band.

Their MySpace songs, including "Sexy Vampire," have been downloaded a quarter of a million times. (Sample lyric: "Stephenie Meyer's the queen of all vampires/ How does she make this stuff up? She's got to be some form of genius/ with Twilight she's hit the jackpot.")

On the all-important vampire-werewolf question, Chandler says "she's undeniably a Jacob" person, Tori is "equally divided," while Ally equivocates, saying "it depends on the day."

Alicia Norton, 25, of Flower Mound, is on the side of the vampires. "The vampires are the good guys, the moral ones," she explains. "Werewolves are not."

Ms. Norton was part of a cadre of friends affiliated with the Grapevine-Grand Prairie-based Web site www.twilightseriestheories.com who camped out overnight at the Stonebriar Centre Barnes & Noble to be first in line for tickets Tuesday. The store's community relations director, Debra Stapleton, says such dedication is not unusual among the author's fans.

"She's only visiting 11 cities this tour; we have people flying in from as far away as Virginia and Georgia to see her," says Ms. Stapleton.

While The Host may be riling up her fans, it is only building further anticipation for the final installment in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, scheduled for publication Aug. 2.

"That will be a real event," says Diane Roback, children's book editor of Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine of the book business. She cites the fact that the book will get midnight launch parties and a 2.5-million-copy first printing (compared with 500,000 copies of The Host).

Which means: It may be time to make up your mind on that vampire-werewolf question. You're likely to be hearing it again soon.

Race Relations in Black and White: Mat Johnson's Incognegro

From the Houston Chronicle -- May 4, 2008

By Edward Nawokta

Texans might recall that in 1959 Dallas journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and traveled through Louisiana and Mississippi for six weeks, passing himself off as an African-American. His resulting book, Black Like Me, reminded America of the racism then endemic in South.

Griffin wasn't the first journalist to conceive of passing for the sake of a story. From 1918 to 1928, NAACP activist Walter White went undercover to investigate lynchings and race riots across the country.

Though African-American, White had blond hair and blue eyes, which gave him the appearance of a Caucasian. He used that to gain the confidence of racist mobs who boasted to him about their crimes — accounts he then published in the New York papers.

His mission was risky, and White had a few close calls of his own when his identity came to light.

White's heroic acts inspired Mat Johnson's latest project, the graphic novel Incognegro (art by Warren Pleece, published by Vertigo, a division of DC Comics). Johnson is a recent addition to the faculty of University of Houston's Creative Writing Program.

Incognegro tells the story of the fictional Zane Pinchback, an intrepid reporter for the New Holland Herald, who, in the mold of White, travels undercover through the South to report on lynchings.

When the book begins, Zane is back in Harlem, angling for a job as managing editor of the paper.

Then he learns of yet another lynching about to take place, in Tupelo, Miss.

A black man is accused of murdering a white woman, and what compels Zane to risk his life once again is news that the man scheduled to hang is Zane's own darker-skinned brother.

If this sounds like the setup for a preachy history lesson, fear not.

Johnson has used this historical material as the basis for a classic noir crime story, one that includes satisfying doses of deceit, moral ambiguity and plenty of R-rated violence.

Along the way, Zane will face down the Klan, greed, ignorance and a family of separatist hillbillies fomenting a religious race war.

Johnson, who moved to Houston from New York in 2007, is best known as a conventional fiction writer.

The author of two novels, Drop (2000) and Hunting in Harlem (2004), as well as the novella The Great Negro Plot (2007), he turned to writing graphic novels in 2005, with a short run of comics starring Papa Midnite, a character developed from the Hellblazer series.

"I've been preparing to write this particular story all my life," Johnson said in a recent interview. Like Zane, he's often taken for a Caucasian. "I grew up looking very European — my father is Irish and my mother is black — so I've been fascinated with those who've had similar experiences in the past." Johnson so closely identified with the main character that Vertigo photographed him to use as the cover image.

Johnson delights in the challenge of writing graphic novels. "You have to ask yourself odd questions," he said, "such as how do I structure the story so that all the big 'reveals' — key events — appear on even-numbered pages, so a reader sees them only after turning a page."

A novel, he said, is much more fluid; with comics "you're fitting the story into the form."

Increasingly, authors are using the graphic format to reinterpret nonfiction storylines. Recent years have seen graphic versions of the Sept. 11 Commission report and biographies of Ronald Reagan and Malcolm X.

As it happens, the Incognegro character and the graphic novel form, which is most often associated with superhero characters, are perfectly matched.

The pen name "Incognegro" is essentially a superhero's alias: "I don't wear a mask like Zorro or a cape like the Shadow, but I don a disguise nonetheless," says Zane while straightening his hair and tie before setting off for Tupelo.

In the black-and-white panel drawings by Pleece, a UK artist, African-American and white characters are not shaded differently to indicate race.

Yet through efficient visual shorthand (hair and clothing styles) the novel manages to comment on both racial and class differences.

"It's interesting to consider the different ways people look at the literary stuff and the graphic stuff," Johnson said. "People expect literary stuff to be smart and sophisticated, but not necessarily a good read, while the graphic novel is supposed to be a good read but not smart and sophisticated.

"In recent years, graphic novels have been gaining respect. Jonathan Lethem has a graphic novel out. Michael Chabon published The Escapist, which came out of his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The thing I like most about graphic-novel readers is they are really passionate."

In the future, Johnson said he's likely to juggle conventional fiction, graphic novels, teaching and raising his family — he's brought a wife and three children with him to Houston.

And somewhat to his surprise, he'll be making a home here in Texas.

"Before I moved, I was teaching at Bard College in upstate New York and wasn't at all certain I was going to like Houston. I heard it was hot and there wasn't much of a literary scene. But there's a lot more here than I initially thought — writers and artists especially. It's affordable to live."

And he added, "The people here are genuinely nice."

'Incognegro' gets graphic with crime noir

By EDWARD NAWOTKA
Special to the Journal Sentinel

Posted: April 12, 2008

Incognegro. By Mat Johnson. DC/Vertigo. $19.99.

In 1959 Dallas journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and traveled through Louisiana and Mississippi, passing himself off as an African-American for six weeks. His resulting 1961 book, "Black Like Me," reminded America of racism that was then endemic to the South.

Griffin wasn't the first journalist to conceive of the idea of passing oneself off as a member of a different race for the sake of the story.

From 1918-'28 NAACP activist Walter White went undercover to investigate lynchings and race riots across the country.

Though African-American, White's blond hair and blue eyes gave him the appearance of a Caucasian, a trait he used to gain the confidence of racist mobs who boasted to him about their crimes - accounts he then published in the New York papers. His mission was risky and White had a few close calls of his own when his identity came to light.

White's heroic acts became the inspiration for author Mat Johnson's latest project, the graphic novel "Incognegro," published by Vertigo (a division of DC Comics).

"Incognegro" tells the story of the fictional Zane Pinchback, an intrepid reporter for the New Holland Herald who in the mold of White, travels undercover through the South to report on lynchings.

When the book begins, Zane is back in Harlem, angling for a job as managing editor of the paper, when he learns of yet another lynching about to take place in Tupelo, Miss. A black man is accused of murdering a white woman, and what compels Zane to risk his life once again is the news that the man scheduled to hang for the crime is Zane's own darker-skinned brother.

If this sounds like the set-up for a preachy history lesson, fear not. Instead, Johnson has used this historical material as the basis for a classic noir crime story, one that includes satisfying doses of deceit, moral ambiguity and plenty of R-rated violence. Along the way, Zane will face down the Klan, a family of separatist hillbillies fomenting a religious race war, and simple-minded ignorance and greed.

Johnson is best known as a prose writer. The author of two novels, "Drop" (2000) and "Hunting in Harlem" (2004), as well as the novella, "The Great Negro Plot" (2007), he's also no novice at penning graphic novels, having already published a short run of comics starring Papa Midnite, a character developed from the Hellblazer series, in 1995.

Referring to Incognegro, Johnson remarks, "I've been preparing to write this particular story all my life." Like Zane, he is often confused for being Caucasian.

"I grew up looking very European - my father is Irish and my mother is black - so I've been fascinated with those who've had similar experiences in the past." He so closely identified with the main character that Vertigo took a portrait of Johnson for the cover photo.

As it happens, the Incognegro character and the graphic novel form - which is most often associated with superhero characters - are perfectly matched. In the panel drawings, done in black and white by UK artist Warren Pleece, the African-American and Caucasian characters are not shaded differently to indicate race. The drawings still manage, through efficient visual shorthand (hair and clothing styles), to comment on racial and, in particular, class difference - something that would require long, descriptive prose passages to convey in a conventional novel.

PW's Bookstore of the Year: Vroman's of Pasadena, CA

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/28/2008

It's 9:30 a.m. on a Monday morning in April, and Olive Kemp is shopping at Vroman's Bookstore—PW's Bookseller of the Year—just as she has done nearly every day since she was a little girl. “She's such a regular that on her 90th birthday, we bought her a cake,” says Vroman's COO and president, Allison Hill, during a tour of the store.

At 90, Kemp is just 24 years younger than Vroman's, which was founded on November 14, 1894, by Adam Clark Vroman, five blocks from its current location on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, Calif. Today, Vroman's consists of three operations, all in Pasadena: the main store, a second satellite store, as well as Vroman's Fine Writing, Gifts and Stationery, which is separated from the main store by an independent movie theater.

It turns out that having multiple generations shop at Vroman's is a regular occurrence: “Just last Saturday we had a woman come to have us print her wedding invitations and told us her mother and grandmother had ordered them from us,” says Dolores Bauer, manager of Vroman's Fine Writing, Gifts, and Stationery.

During the Monday morning staff meeting, promotional director Jennifer Ramos begins running through the number of people that attended events the previous week, including 400 for Isabelle Allende and 160 for L.A. crime writer Joseph Wambaugh.

“Los Angeles is often discounted as 'movieland,' ” says Ramos, “but after working both here and at Book Soup [in West Hollywood], I can tell you that we have an amazing book culture here and wonderful local writers.” (Sometimes the twain shall meet: Vroman's was the bookstore featured in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin.)

A reading with the local-born author Jeff Gordinier, author of X Saves the World, brought in 85 people, 35 of whom heard about the reading on MeetUp.com. “We'll have to find out how to hook into that [MeetUp] more,” says Hill, instructing a member of the staff to look into it. The store already has a significant Web presence, including a traditional online store, a blog, and sites on Facebook.com and MySpace.com—where Vroman's is identified as a 101-year-old male (the maximum allowed).

Hill came to Vroman's four years ago after stints at Simon & Schuster, the Boston location of Waterstone's, and Book Soup. Her role is to oversee the general operation of the store and provide big picture, blue sky administration, according to majority shareholder Joel Sheldon.

“I think the management team we have in place now is positioned to make us more profitable than ever,” says Sheldon—a third-generation owner who served as Vroman's president from 1978 until last July, when Hill took over.

“I've seen a lot of changes since I started working in the store as a child,” he said. “There have been three cycles of how people shop—including mail order and the Internet—and three different cycles of media—from newspapers to television to the Internet. I tell people you have to embrace change, or else it will run you over.”

Profit and change are words you hear repeated over and over again at Vroman's. Hill reports that the company had $13.5 million in sales and achieved a 3.74% profit in 2007.

Changes have been made throughout the store to try and maximize profit. Just over 18 months ago, management implemented “license plate receiving”—a program in which wholesalers Ingram, Baker & Taylor and Partners/West indicate the contents of shipments via a bar code on the side of box.

“It expedites the process of getting books to the sales floor,” says Hill, “which is a big help, especially during the Christmas rush.”

Some changes directly affect the bottom line, such as the $50,000 in co-op the store received last year for magazine and greeting card displays. (Hill plans to add even more magazine display space to the store's sidewalk “newsstand” to take further advantage of such opportunities.)

Other changes are apparent to the naked eye, such as removal of much of the fixed shelving in favor of of the more versatile slatwall displays. “I'm obsessed with slatwall,” admits Hill, who mentions it at least a dozen times during the tour. “It's more flexible and makes for better displays, and is much better than having a bunch of titles on a shelf spine out.” One consequence of the change is that with fewer titles Vroman's was able to drop its investment in inventory from $2.2 million to $2.1 million in 2007.

“It was risky in terms of the loss of linear feet of shelving,” says Hill, “but was a strategic move away from traditional bookselling assumptions.”

Hill's emphasis on displays resulted in the appointment of Anne Edkins as the store's “visual merchandiser,” empowered to use every available surface—from end caps to bathroom walls—to promote the sale of books.

Unlike many stores, Vroman's has three different entrances and each takes on a different character. One of two front doors is focused on literature and enters into the fiction section; the other door—closest to the next-door independent movie theater—is the “hip” entrance and opens onto a display called “The Edge,” which features a mix of graphic novels and self-identified hipster books. The rear, main entrance, closest to parking, offers a display of family-friendly titles and is focused on female customers.

As indicated by surveys, about 75% of Vroman's customers are women, evidenced by the vast number of handbags and totes on display throughout the store—from reproduction PanAm flight bags to computer sleeves and purses.

Some 30% of the store's annual sales comes from nonbook items. Vroman's has produced its own line of Pasadena Pride souvenirs, including mugs and T-shirts, and is considering self-publishing a visual history of the area. In 1994, on its centenary, the store published Vroman's of Pasadena: A Century of Books, 1894–1994 by Jane Apostol, which shows that nonbook items—in particular cameras and photographic supplies—have been an important part of the store's product mix since its earliest days. (A.C. Vroman, the founder, was an avid photographer of Native American culture.)

Until the 1970s, the store was considered the largest bookstore west of the Mississippi. In 1915 it boasted a selection of 30,000 books, and today it has 85,000 titles across all three locations. Head book buyer Marie du Vaure has been with the store for six years and hails from Aix en Provence, France. “I strive to make it so that anyone walking in can find his or herself, and go beyond,” says du Vaure. “When I bring in more elaborate texts in gastronomy or I buy overlooked and more obscure titles in foreign literature, it is my hope that they fit with the overall effect and purpose of the store. Here, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The same philosophy holds true in the store's commitment to its employees: in 1916, just three months before A.C. Vroman died, the store was incorporated and divided between Allan David Sheldon (Joel Sheldon's grandfather) and two others. Today, some members of management are also shareholders. Hill, as well as Clark Mason, Vroman's controller and CFO, are both invested and part of the succession plans. In addition, full- and part-time staff—129 in all—are offered a share of the profits. In 2006–2007 this amounted to $80,000, and a similar amount is expected to be divvied up this year as well.

The local community also benefits from the store's success: the “Vroman's Gives Back” program returns 1% of a customer's sales to a charity of their choosing. To date, the store has donated $441,000 to 22 different local nonprofits.

“It all adds up to a simple business philosophy: do good business and do good in the world,” says Hill. “It's kind of a mantra for us and something we make sure to be conscious of each and every day.”

Nebula Awards puts Austin and Texas writers at center of science fiction world

12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, April 24, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com


People always judge science- fiction writing by its worst examples," says author Joe R. Lansdale. "Sci-fi is more respected than when I was a kid – when it was considered that old hokey stuff. People are beginning to appreciate what a unique genre it is and what an interesting pocket universe we have here in Texas."

That universe will get some international attention this weekend as the 2008 Nebula Awards are presented in Austin. Mr. Lansdale, a prolific author of mystery, horror, comics and sci-fi works, often set around his hometown of Nacogdoches, will serve as toastmaster.

The Nebulas are one of science fiction's top honors, dating to 1965, when Frank Herbert won the inaugural best novel prize for Dune. Winners are chosen by members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Sci-fi's other top awards, the Hugos, are voted on by fans. "The Nebulas are essentially like the Oscars, while the Hugos are like the People's Choice Awards," said Jayme Lynn Blaschke, a communications officer at Texas State University who also serves as the Nebulas' publicist.

Texas is home to 71 members of the writers group. "That makes it third only to California and New York," says Betsy Mitchell, the editor-in-chief of sci-fi publisher Del Rey books.

Ms. Mitchell will be on hand to honor the 68-year old British-born (and part-time Austinite) Michael Moorcock as a grand master. Another Texan, 78-year-old Ardath Mayhar of Chireno, author of some 60 books of fiction and poetry, will be deemed author emeritus.

Other luminaries expected to attend the Saturday night awards ceremony are Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, whose The Yiddish Policeman's Union is nominated for best novel, and Bruce Sterling (a part-time Austinite), whose story "Kiosk" is shortlisted in the novelette category, as is "Memorare" by another one-time Texan, Gene Wolfe.

A preponderance of the state's science-fiction writers live in or around the capital, and for good reason: Austin is both home to the state's longest-running sci-fi fan convention, ArmadilloCon, founded in 1979, and longest-running sci-fi writers group, the Turkey City Writers' Workshop, started by University of Texas anthropology professor Chad Oliver in the 1970s.

Looming over the history of Texas science-fiction and fantasy writing is the figure of Robert E. Howard, who was born in Peaster in 1906 and created the character Conan the Barbarian. Today, a roll call of the state's sci-fi and fantasy writers runs the gamut from established elders, such as the prolific Neal Barrett Jr., author of some 50 works, to incognito best-sellers, such as Round Rock resident Aaron Allston, who has penned a series of popular Star Wars novels.

The state is also home to a number of emerging voices, such as Chris Roberson, novelist and publisher of MonkeyBrain Books – a press dedicated to science-fiction, fantasy and genre nonfiction studies.

Surprisingly, as easily as one can lay claim to being a Texas writer, the science-fiction writers – perhaps because their books often take place in purely imagined settings – are reluctant to characterize themselves as such.

"If there is any unifying characteristic," says author Elizabeth Moon, author of the acclaimed "Vatta's War" series of space operas, "I'd say that Texas writers are independent, willing to risk someone's disapproval to write what they want." The diversity here "encourages flexibility of mind and attitudes" and offers writers space "to allow for contemplation," she says.

Maybe those endless miles of Texas horizon and sky are just the thing to inspire a writer to imagine life in the vast emptiness of outer space.

Or, says Mr. Landsdale, it's something even simpler: "Isolation," he says, in all its cultural, social and geographic relevance. "It makes you entertain yourself. It makes you creative."

Navy Sets Sail With E-book Deal

by Ed Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/21/2008

With the men and women of the armed forces constantly being shuffled from place to place, it can be difficult for them to bring along a personal library. In the past, publishers have produced pocket-sized editions of bestselling works, but today, e-books may provide the best solution.

EChapterOne.com, an online bookstore started in April 2007 by retired Army Brig. Gen. R.W. “Bill” Crossley, has contracted to become the first supplier of e-books to the Navy Exchange Service Command’s e-commerce site, www.navy-nex.com, which launched earlier this year and serves an estimated 750,000 active duty and reserve navy and Marine Corps personnel and their families. Karen Connery, director of merchandising for the e-commerce Navy Exchange Service Command, said the use of e-books will add to the availability of titles sailors can read and make it more convenient for them to get a book.

Based in Marietta, Ga., eChapterOne.com offers some 80,000 e-book titles in Adobe, Palm and Microsoft formats, with free downloadable first chapters for many titles. The company also has agreements to sell e-books through Delta-Sky magazine’s e-commerce site and through FatPort, a Canadian WiFi provider, as well as its own Web store.

Crossley, a former chief of staff for Gen. Colin Powell, negotiated a deal in which the navy gets a 10% discount on eChapterOne’s regular prices as well as additional discounts for titles on the Navy Professional Reading program.

Crossley has his sights set on selling e-books to the army as well. “If it works for sailors, I think there’s no reason it wouldn’t work just as well for soldiers,” said Crossley.

Idlewild Opens in New York

by Ed Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/21/2008

This week New York City gets a new bookshop: Idlewild Books, a 1,000-sq.-ft. travel bookstore will open on W. 19th Street near Fifth Avenue. The name echoes the original name of JFK Airport and, said proprietor David Del Vecchio, “idle and wild are nicely associated with travel.”

Del Vecchio spent the last six years as a press officer with the United Nations—a job that frequently sent him to destinations like Angola and the Sudan. He was inspired to open a new store while hunting for books for his own travels.

“I was in a chain bookstore and realized I would have to go to five different sections to get what I needed—a travel guide, a map, a language book, a novel,” he noted. “At Idlewild, everything will be shelved by country, and in the case of the United States, by state—that way people will be able to browse according to the place of their interest.”

Del Vecchio emphasized that he believes literature about a country—be it a novel or a political biography—can be just as useful as a guidebook. His product mix will be at least 40% armchair travel titles: “Guidebooks you really can buy almost anywhere,” he explained, “but books on politics and culture are often much harder to find. Our section on Turkey might have guides, maps, a history of the Blue Mosque, a biography of Ataturk, and novels by Pamuk and others.” Graham Greene’s novels won’t be shelved in the U.K. section, said Del Vecchio, but in Cuba and Mexico, where the books are set. Sidelines will include the requisite travel bags and eye masks, as well as “curated” items from international artisans.

In preparation for opening the store, Del Vecchio took Donna Paz’s bookselling class and interned at Get Lost bookstore in San Francisco and at New York City’s Three Lives. He quit his job at the U.N. and will run the store himself, along with an assistant manager.

While many travel bookstores have closed in the post-9/11 era, Del Vecchio is confident he can make his concept work—even with sky-high gas prices and the crashing dollar curtailing many travel plans.

“New York is very diverse, and there are people here from all over the world who are interested in other places,” he said. “Travel and reading have been a big part of my life, and I know there are others out there like me. Of course, running a bookstore means you won’t have time to travel or read—that is the irony, but it’s one I’m happy to live with.”

Houston’s Domy Books Expands to Austin

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 4/18/2008 9:00:00 AM

Houston’s Domy Books, which celebrated its second anniversary on April 1, is opening a second location, in Austin, Tex., later this month. Located in a former convenience store on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Interstate 35, the new 1,800-sq.-ft. branch is nearly identical in size to the original location. Like its namesake, it will offer a selection of art books, graphic novels, magazines, literature and quirky sidelines.

The Houston location of Domy (which Russian slang for “home”) was originally opened as an art gallery in 1992, and converted to a bookstore in 2006 when owner Dan Fergus realized that contemporary art translated much faster to books than it did to the gallery or museum world. “An artist can put out a monograph of their work very quickly, while it might take years or a lifetime to get a show in a given city,” he said.

Domy offers no distinct sections and the products are mixed together to create “dialogue.” The space in Houston provides a venue for community events, from this month’s “Indie Press Book Festival” to readings and shows by local artists. The Austin branch will serve as a dual art gallery/bookstore; the launch event for the Austin store will feature Brooklyn publisher Dan Nadel presenting his newest titles from PictureBox Books.

“Austin should be a good fit for us,” said Fergus, adding, “Our greatest success so far as a bookstore is that we haven’t lost money—which is the sort of success we hope to repeat.”

Bonk's' Mary Roach talks about sex

Author explores the sometimes 'icky' world of erectile dysfunction and photoplethysmography.

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, April 13, 2008

Did you know that the University of Texas is at the forefront of research into vaginal photoplethysmography? Do you have any idea what that means? Mary Roach's new book explains.

"Bonk" surveys the history of sex research, from Leonardo da Vinci's "coition" drawings to the famous Dr. Kinsey and Masters and Johnson studies to present-day scientists working to cure erectile dysfunction.

Roach, it should be known up front, is no sanctimonious science writer. Her previous two efforts, "Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers," and "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife," were notable for their irreverence. Not that Roach ever belittles her topic — she merely manages to find humor where others would never think to look. She's also restrained enough to consign the really outrageous — and sometimes icky — factoids to the footnotes. (Hint: Read the footnotes!)

In advance of her Monday appearance in Austin, Roach spoke with us by phone from her home in Oakland, Calif.

Austin American-Statesman: After reading your book, everything starts to sound euphemistic and oddly sexual. So, I'm curious: Is the mysterious 'Woody' to whom the book is dedicated a real person or a euphemism?

Roach:No, it's my husband's real nickname. His name is Ed, but his whole family calls him "Woody." Funny, isn't it?

You spent some time in Austin researching your book. What did you find here?

Cyndi Meston — she runs the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Texas, where she studies the relationship between psychology and sex.

So what is vaginal photoplethysmography?

It's a tool to measure a woman's sexual response. Sex researchers are heavily reliant on multisyllabic phrases to mask what they are actually studying. In today's climate, it is more and more a problem getting funding. There are conservative groups who do Internet searches for the word "sexual" and when the research pops up, they put a spotlight on it and suggest that funding should not be funded. Scientists will say physical instead of sexual ...

It seems like the golden age of sex research was the '60s and 1970s. What changed?

That was the pioneering era. Two things happened. First, as discoveries were made, there was less and less to figure out. Then, when AIDS came along, sex research became very directed toward trying to get a handle on HIV and shifted toward studies of risk taking and sexual motivation.

You repeat throughout the book that there is a perception that sex researchers are perverts. Did you ever find an instance of a scientist being turned on by his or her own work?

Well, they are human, but I only ever heard of one instance in all my research of alleged impropriety. When you think of all the other professionals whose careers are ended because of sexual impropriety — dentists, psychiatrists — it's quite amazing. Pomeroy, a colleague of Kinsey, wrote a book about his years at Kinsey institute. He said that not once was there an issue — I wonder if he doesn't protest too much. It's hard to imagine someone wouldn't be affected by what they're doing.

You even volunteered to become the subject of a study at one point.

Yes, my husband, Woody, and I participated in a study ... It's all in the book.

The last chapter in your book cites a Masters and Johnson study that suggests homosexuals are better than heterosexuals at sex. Does that strike you as controversial?

First, that study is over 30 years old. Second, the most important thing in improving sex is to talk about it. Heteros have made a good deal of progress in talking about sex, but as a group, homosexuals were more at ease with everything about sex.

After so much research into sex, do you have a favorite tip you can share?

I'm an advocate of more laughter in the bedroom. If the guy has a "failure of erective performance," you just have to find a way to laugh it off before it becomes a serious problem. People should read my book in bed. (Pause.) I'm not just saying this to sell more books. OK, maybe I am, but you never know; it might help.

Our Digital Future – Rights, Contracts and Business Models

The following paper is scheduled to appear in the academic journal “Publishing Research Quarterly,” Volume 24, Number 2, published by Springer.

Our Digital Future – Rights, Contracts and Business Models

By Edward Nawotka

When in September 2007 Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos announced his intention to retire at the end of this year, he told the Associated Press, “the digital option - electronic books, print-on-demand and any other application of digital content, are extremely positive ramifications for our business and that in the next decade that's what executives should be focusing their energy on." To many people, it was Romanos who first demonstrated the retail viability of the ebook when in 2000 when he encouraged Stephen King to release a 66-page novella entitled Riding the Bullet as a $1.99 download. It proved an unparalleled success, selling 500,000 copies in just a few days.

Eight years later, ebooks and print-on-demand titles remain less than 1% of the market. Nevertheless, Romanos’ successor at S&S, Carolyn Reidy has said she too believes the future of the book is digital: “I have it in my mind that a new kind of digital book will come out, for a new generation used to reading on the screen from day one and writing on the screen from day one," Reidy said. "You'll have different designs, different artwork, different jackets. Electronic publishing is not just selling and marketing books online; those are the first steps."

Yet, without the right business models in place and – especially the right contracts -- digital publishing can’t progress. Rights managers and agents know this above all, a topic that was addressed at 21st International Rights Directors Meeting of the Frankfurt Book Fair last October.

Get the Rights Right and the Money will Follow

The opening speaker of the session, Evan Schnittmann of Oxford University Press in the US outlined some of most common business models currently being employed for the use of online content. Echoing Reidy’s assertion, he suggested that while sales and marketing and sales departments were eager to strike up promotional deals, Schnittmann believes ‘rights departments need to be running these things’ because of the risks involved.

That’s not to say once a company has policies and the proper infrastructure – including useable electronic databases and warehouses -- in place, they shouldn’t take full advantage of the opportunities. Lucy Vanderbilt of HarperCollins UK, offered a variety of examples where HarperCollins had licensed book content for online use, including serializations of graphic novels and reviews from film guides. She identified her own company’s early commitment to converting many of it’s publications to a digital format and its building a (costly) digital warehouse as an asset that can now be mined. Vanderbilt’s advice can be summarized thusly: `Don’t underestimate the value of your material.’ Copyright protection is key, as is the need to keep contracts non-exclusive and limited to a distinct period of time.

The sentiment was echoed by speaker Maja Thomas of Hachette Group USA, who encouraged publishers to resist the urge to offer large discounts for digital content. Digital audio books are proliferating thanks to the emergence of new ‘hybrid digital’ players such as Iofi and Playaway – which offer individual audio books in their own players, as well as companies like Audible.com which took downloadable audiobooks to a mass market audience by selling them on Apple’s iTunes (Amazon.com bought Audible.com for $300 million in stock in January 2008). The US audio market was now worth approximately one billion US dollars – with 14% of coming from digital downloads. Libraries are the biggest customers in the US, accounting for 32% of all sales. In light of these opportunities, publishers should resist selling their audio content on the cheap. ‘Go on out there and put a leash on that bear!’ she proclaimed.

Annette Beetz of German nonfiction publisher Grafe und Unzer Verlag says the business may very well come to you. She said that more often than not – as much as 80% of the time – her company is approached for digital rights from their material, in particular from companies looking to bolster their online content. When approached, it’s best to ask a few key questions: Can the customer track sales? How long will the contract last? What other opportunities can come from this deal? Perhaps the most important question of all is -- Do we as a company actually own the rights?

Franciska Hildebrandt of Campus Verlag emphasized that getting the language right, particularly between companies that need to translate documents back and forth, can be a tricky enterprise.

Negotiating digital rights is an evolving area, with many grey areas.

When Is Out of Print, Out of Print?

In early 2007, Simon and Schuster demonstrated its confidence in the digital future and rattled the supply chain in the process when it told literary agents that it would no longer agree to contracts that stipulated a minimum number of units must be sold or else rights would revert back to an author. This clause of contracts, they argued, was rendered moot by “current high quality and accessibility of print on demand titles” which meant a book was available, albeit in a digital form, in perpetuity.

After an outcry by the US Author’s Guild, S&S eventually relented and returned to traditional language in its contracts. Literary agent Simon Lipskar, for one, was ameliorated by the decision. “This is not about being confrontational or being obstructionist,” he explained. “I just believe that there needs to be the idea implicit in the contract that selling copies – and continuing to sell copies – is a requirement.”

The US’s largest publisher, Random House, agrees as well. When asked about Random House’s policies, spokesperson Stuart Applebaum replied: “Random House has always maintained a policy that in order to keep a work in print our titles have to be readily available in a format that is accessible to the general public, whether that be in a traditional book format or in an electronic form. If a title is not selling an acceptable number of copies in any format we will not warehouse those rights in perpetuity.”

Is Google a Friend and Foe?

But traditional bound book publishers are not forging the future alone and agents are likely to find themselves in conversation with a coterie of new digital publishers – ones named Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com. Each is aggressively pursuing their own agenda.

Google and Microsoft are building massive virtual libraries of scanned books. Under its Google Book Search program, Google claims to have signed up “more than 10,000 publishers” and have already scanned “more than a million books,” according to spokesperson Jennifer Parsons. In addition, Google is relying on 27 library partners – including those at Harvard and Oxford University -- to supply books for scanning.

The company has come into conflict with a handful of publishers including McGraw Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley & Sons, as well as the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, all of whom have filed lawsuits claiming Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement. Google is defending itself by saying it will only display fragments of copyrighted material – specifically “two or three short quotations of text around their search term” -- and is thus making the information available under the concept of “fair use.”

Allan Adler, vp for legal and government affairs for the AAP, says that the lawsuits (each is individual, though filed in the same court) are entering its second year and remain in the “discovery” phase, in which each side is still acquiring information from the other.

Microsoft own scanning project, entitled Live Books Search, delivers material much in the same ways as Google. The main difference, claims Microsoft’s Cliff Guren, whose title is director of Publisher Evangelism, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, is that the company is only scanning books for which it has garnered explicit permission to do so, either with an author or a publisher. “You have to strike a balance between copyright and usability,” said Guren, who added, “In particular, we’re very flexible in our effort to accommodate publishers in terms of how much of a book they want to make available to users.”

Should Consumers Be Able to Buy Books By the Chapter?

Amazon’s 2005 purchases of print-on-demand company BookSurge and ebook publisher Mobipocket are also starting to spawn new programs at the e-retailer, including an online self-publishing service called Books on Demand begun in August 2007. Somewhat more controversial is the company’s announced plans to make single chapters available for purchase – a business model analogous to downloadable music, which allows customers to buy individual songs instead of forcing them to purchase entire records.

Whether customers will want to cherry pick chapters from books remains unknown, but as far it concerns authors, agent Brian DeFiore wonders how authors will be compensated for such sales. “Right now, that type of transaction is not addressed in a typical contract with a publisher – and we don’t have contracts with retailers,” he said. “Serialization rights might give us an idea of how something like this might work, but it is an entirely new territory.”

Waiting for the iPod of Books

Nevertheless, DeFiore is anxious to see the advent of widespread digital distribution, and in particular an iPod-like device for ebooks that would prove popular with the customers. “Not only would it save the forests,” said DiFiore, “it would save the 35-40% return rate of books that get published and go unsold.”

In addition, it would pose a serious challenge the dominance of bookstores in distributing books. Amazon.com, which has already radically reshaped the retailing landscape, made a massive splash in tk with the launch of the Kindle e-reading device.

Malle Vallik, Director Digital Content & Interactivity for Harlequin Books, -- a company whose entire front list is available as ebooks – saw an early prototype of the device and said she “impressed.” Other dedicated devices on the market include the Sony E-reader (which is delivering an updated device for the holiday shopping season) and the iLiad from iRex Technologies. Industry watchers are also waiting to see whether Apple’s iPhone and its high resolution screen will prove a viable ebook reader. HarperCollins has experimented with the device and has posted a web site that allows iPhone users to view a variety different titles online, while Zinio.com – a distributor of digital magazines – is also offering a coterie of magazines for free to iPhone users. In the UK, a company called iCue offers what it calls “m-books,” which are downloadable to mobile phones via SMS (short message service); in Asia, and Japan in particular, novels are being written exclusively to be read on cell phones.

Nick Bogaty, who spent five years as the executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (before taking over direct digital publishing business development for Adobe Systems in September 2007), believes that the widespread adoption of ebooks will not be dependent on a the delivery of single paradigm-shifting device, but on software. “People want to read their ebooks on numerous devices, from cellphones to laptops.” The September decision by members of the ISPF to adopt the OPS 2.0 e-book specification and the “.epub” file format as an official industry standard format should go a long way toward ebook cross compatibility across devices.

According to the IDPF, in 2006, publishers sold some $22 million worth of ebooks in the U.S., numbers which the organization expects top $30 million or more this year. In Asia, where laptops and cellphones are more sophisticated that in the US or Europe, the numbers are much more significant. The Digital Content Association of Japan estimating sales of e-books topping $126 million in 2006, with $58 million of that coming from sales from mobile phones – an increase of some 331% from the previous year.

“The numbers are growing very fast,” said Bogaty, “but they are growing from nothing. Give it another five years and it will be a real business.”

DC Commuters to Get Free Book Excerpts

By Edward Nawotka
Publishers Weekly, 4/8/2008

Starting May 5, Washington D.C. commuters will find “Bit o’ Lit” thrust into their hands as they make the long trek down those long escalators into the Metro. The new twice-monthly free magazine is expected to offer 32 pages of book excerpts, as well as reviews of films adapted from books, local literary listings and brief author profiles. “Bit-O-Lit” will be published every other Monday in a minimum first printing of 20,000 copies.

The inaugural issue will feature selections from National Book award nominee, Sold by Patricia McCormick (Hyperion Books for Children), two thrillers -- Rubicon by Lawrence Alexander (Morrow) and The Last Oracle by James Rollins (Morrow), and DC-centric The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Presidential Power by Gene Healy (Cato Institute).

“Commuters are the ideal audience for this kind of thing,” said the publisher, Shannon MacDonald. “It’s one of the few times you can capture a reader’s full attention and a great way to expose them to new works.”

In addition to hawkers at Metro stops, Bit o’ Lit will be distributed via news kiosks and local bookstores. The magazine supported by advertising and publishers pay to place excerpts on a cost-per-page basis. A mock-up can be found online at http://www.bit-o-lit.com/

Recession Fuels Sales at Spring Book Show

By Edward Nawotka

Despite a last minute change of venue the Spring Book Show held in Atlanta this past weekend suffered few consequences and proceeded smoothly. Larry May, director of the Show, scrambled to move the remainder fair from its former home in the World Congress Center after learning it had been significantly damaged by tornados late last month. Fortunately the Atlanta Hilton – where most of the attendees were staying – was able to accommodate the group.

“We only lost about five tables of display space,” he says, “any negative impact of the change has been very marginal.”

Yes, the aisles were a bit tighter and the show was now spread out over three levels of the hotel, but everyone seemed more comfortable in the Hilton than the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center.

“I prefer it here,” said Darlene Carter, a sales representative with wholesaler Maximus Books. “The show was overwhelmed by the size of the conference center. It’s nice to have everything in one place together and not have to walk for 15 minutes to buy a cup of coffee.”

Barry Baird, executive director remainders and bargain books at Thomas Nelson, concurred. “Being here in the basement is more like CIROBE – more intimate and intense. It has a bazaar like feel that I like and feel is better suited to selling.”

The recession appears to have made bargain books even more attractive to booksellers and buyers, many of whom were bolstering their orders.

Sally Brewster, owner of Park Road Books in Charlotte, NC and president of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, explained: “Books of all kinds become a bargain during a recession -- $100 in books doesn’t look so bad, when compared with say, a trip to Puerto Rico.”

Philip Rafshoon, owner of Outwrite Bookstore in Atlanta, told PW he was surprised by how much high quality GLBT material among the remainder dealers. “I bought more than I thought I would,” he said, adding “I will be having a sidewalk sale for weeks.”

Deborah Hastings, publisher of Federal St. Press, credits the recession with increasingly interest in her affordable line of dictionaries and

“People are always looking for quality content at a value price,” said Hastings, who has differentiated her dictionaries by adding bright, bold graphics to the covers. “They appeal to consumers who favor higher and design, such as those shoppers at nontraditional booksellers like Target,” she said.

While Hastings felt consolidation resulted in fewer retailers, wholesalers, distributors at the show than she’d seen in past years, she pointed out that numerous foreign buyers were on hand, as well as a conspicuous number of Internet-only booksellers.

“The low cost of remainders allows them to take on a substantial amount of stock, with lower capital investment,” explained Larry May. “They can put together a complete inventory at relatively low cost.”

John Shableski, sales manager of Diamond Book, a graphic novel distribution company selling remainders for the first time at the show, was the most effusive of all in his praise.

“Larry May is a visionary,” said Shableski. “He saw the potential in graphic novel remainders early and jumped on it.” Granted, Shableski’s enthusiasm may have something to do with the fact that Diamond’s graphic novels proved to be among the hottest commodities all weekend: A rumor spread that Shableski sold Diamond’s entire stock of remainders in only a few hours.

Review: Life Class by Pat Barker -- A different side of WWI

A different side of WWI
British novelist looks at war through the eyes of artists

By EDWARD NAWOTKA

LIFE CLASS.
By Pat Barker.
Doubleday, 320 pp. $23.95.

In the United States, World War I may be a mere chapter in the history books, but in the United Kingdom it is still part of everyday life. Vast monuments in nearly every town recount the names of the dead, and on Nov. 11 each year — the day the armistice was called in 1918 — people still pin red-paper poppies to their lapels in remembrance. It should come as no surprise that the Great War still commands the attention of many British novelists. Chief among these is Pat Barker.

In the 1990s Barker penned a series about the war that included Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995). They were an alternative to the "blood, mud and poppies" school of World War I writing. Instead of bogging down in the grim mayhem of the trenches, they spent more time in their characters' heads, examining their fragile psyches and emotions.

These novels were also notable for the way they translated the experiences of real-life figures into fiction. For example, Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, a well-known neurologist and anthropologist, as well as poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, take star turns in Regeneration, a book largely about efforts to heal the shell-shocked.

Barker's trilogy was widely praised for focusing on little-examined aspects of the war such as homosexuality in the military and the role of women. Some critics derided the books as revisionist exercises that cast late-20th-century values onto early 20th-century men. But the debate seemed to be settled in favor of Barker when The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize in 1995.

She returns to the Great War in Life Class, a novel that's supposedly the start of another trilogy, this time examining the conflict from the perspective of painters. So far at least, the series looks far less promising.

Life Class focuses on a pair of students at London's Slade School of Art in 1914, on the eve of the war: Paul Tarrant, a working-class man who has used the last bit of his inheritance to pursue his calling as an artist, and Elinor Brooke, the woman he loves, a fellow student and privileged daughter of a surgeon. Kit Neville, a Slade student who has gone on to win acclaim for his work, forms the third leg in a shaky love triangle that eventually collapses when both Paul and Kit volunteer to serve as front-line ambulance drivers for the Red Cross.

What Barker has done is graft two novels together in service of one big metaphor. In the first half of the book, Paul and Elinor are consumed with the innocent activities of youth. They spend their days fretting about their work, drinking in the Café Royal, strolling beneath the blued-out streetlights and having affairs, all to little consequence. In the second half, Paul experiences the war firsthand and makes the transition from naiveté to knowledge. All the while Paul and Elinor debate the merits of art during wartime. The overall effect is to render Life Class a rather dull, discursive book.

Though these characters are supposed to be "A" artists, they are strangely dispassionate. At the start of the novel, Paul's stern life-drawing teacher — in a scene-stealing cameo by real-life artist Henry Tonks — criticizes Paul for a lack of feeling in his drawing of a nude woman. Later, when Paul is serving as a triage nurse in France and aiding in amputations, he writes to Elinor that the war has left him feeling as though he's "inside a rubber glove that covers all of you, not just your hands." That may be how war leaves him feeling. It describes as well the feeling one is left with after reading this novel.

Barker is said to be working on a sequel featuring Tonks, who had an interesting life story. A surgeon who became an artist, Tonks left teaching at Slade to do a series of 69 portraits of disfigured soldiers returned from the war, documenting their progression through reconstructive surgery. Now that's a book I look forward to reading.

Murder by the Book's Dynamic Duo

McKenna Jordan & David Thompson

Booksellers will tie knot, buy store

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/24/2008

Talk about being married to your job: on September 6, when McKenna Jordan, 26, and David Thompson, 36, say “I do” at the Dryburgh Abbey in Scotland, they will cement a bond that already has them spending most days and nights together. Jordan and Thompson are manager and assistant manager, respectively, of mystery bookstore Murder by the Book in Houston, Tex., where they regularly cohost some 150 author events a year. And on January 1, 2009, they will take over as co-owners of the bookstore. “Technically,” says Thompson, “McKenna is the one buying the store, so I’ll be working for her.”

Thompson still maintains a 14-year edge in experience, having started work in the store in 1989 as a shelf stocker. By January 2003, when Jordan walked through the door as a four-hour-a week part-timer, Thompson was already the assistant manager, responsible for the store’s Web site and its quarterly literary magazine, the Dead Beat.

A professional violinist, then working toward a master’s degree in music performance, Jordan had first intended to get a job at a store that sold music and books, and applied at a Barnes & Noble, where she was rejected for being “overqualified.” Now she’ll soon own one of B&N’s few serious local competitors.

Opened in 1980 by Martha Farrington, Murder by the Book today offers some 25,000 new and used hardcovers, paperbacks, first editions and collectibles. Its longevity can be attributed to its specialization, expert selection and, in part, to its location in a high-rent residential district that isolates it from chain competition. While the nearest competitor, Brazos Bookstore, is just a block away, their stock has little overlap.

Farrington, who will retire at the end of this year, says she’d been looking for someone on staff to buy the store for many years. “When McKenna came to the store, I saw that she was the right person,” says Farrington. “For her age, she can handle a lot. I’m not worried about them so much as I’m worried about the future of the book business. I just hope they are able to carry on in the same mode.”

Jordan, who declined to discuss details of the pending purchase, is optimistic: “Three or four years ago, we seemed to have reached our growth potential, but last year we had a 9% increase in sales.” The jump is the direct result of more aggressive hand-selling, in particular of backlist titles (often in a series) that the store was able to turn into bestsellers. In just one example from 2007, Murder by the Book sold 200 copies of Cara Black’s 2000 novel Murder in the Marais; since 2005, they’ve sold more than 1,000 copies of Marne Davis Kellogg’s Brilliant.

Once she’s owner, Jordan says that she’ll consider a few changes, such as refreshing the signage, adding more children’s titles and installing a shopping cart on the Web site, but nothing radical. She says her ultimate goal is to enable Thompson to dedicate himself full-time to Busted Flush Press, a publishing company Thompson founded in 2005 that publishes mystery anthologies and reprints sold in Murder and distributed to other store as well.

As the two move forward, one thing remains certain: books will continue to dominate nearly every aspect of the couple’s life. Even their pet Papillon, Jack Reacher, can’t escape. He is, after all, named for the assassin/hero of Lee Child’s series of thrillers. One can only imagine what they might name a first child.

Profile Names: David Thompson and McKenna Jordan Company: Murder by the Book Ages: 36, 26 Hometown: Houston, Tex. Education: (Thompson) High School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice; (Jordan) University of Houston How long in current job: (Thompson) 18 years; (Jordan) 5 years Previous Job: (Thompson) Department store children’s clothing and lingerie salesman; (Jordan) Gap salesperson and miscellaneous retail Dream job: To transport Murder by the Book to Manhattan and not have to pay Manhattan rents Passionate about: Promoting authors who are both good writers and good people

Kate Torgovnick looks at competitive cheerleading in 'Cheer'

SPORTS: Kate Torgovnick looks at the competitive side of cheerleading

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, March 16, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com

It's not just Texans who are obsessed with cheerleading. Turn on the television, and you'll see cheerleaders starring in Friday Night Lights and Heroes; they are the villains of countless teen movies, and increasingly, shown in competition on ESPN 2 and Fox Sports Net. It was only a matter of time before someone in New York commissioned a serious book about the subject. Kate Torgovnick's Cheer! is just such a book.

KATHERINE STREETER/Special Contributor

Focusing on competitive collegiate cheerleading, in which a team of cheerleaders performs an orchestrated two-minute routine of acrobatic stunts, Ms. Torgovnick embeds herself with three squads: the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks, from Nacogdoches, Texas; the Southern University Jaguars from Baton Rouge; and the All-Girl team from the University of Memphis. She offers a year-in-the-life of each, as they face their unique challenges.

The Lumberjacks, four time reigning national champs in their division, return to discover they will start the season with a new coach, one who'd graduated from SFA just two years earlier. The Jaguars, an African-American team known for their flashy moves, are cash poor and can't afford to travel to top-tier competitions. In Memphis, the All-Girls team struggles to win respect from their school, which limits them to cheering for women's basketball and volleyball.

It may come as no surprise that the shining star of the book hails from the Dallas area: The "uber-blonde" Sierra, from Arlington, is a veteran cheerleader who has won eight national titles at various levels and is expected to be the linchpin of this year's team at SFA. Unfortunately, Sierra also proves accident prone, breaking her hand in a fluke accident and later fracturing her skull.

The risk of injury is significant – of the 104 women athletes paralyzed or killed in high school or college sports over the last 23 years, over half have resulted from cheerleading. (One boyfriend shows his ignorance when he asks, after his cheerleader girlfriend complains about a sore wrist, "Did you clap too hard?") The rate of injury is just one of the arresting "secret life of cheerleaders" facts Ms. Torgovnick serves up, which also includes widespread drug and steroid abuse and eating disorders.

Ms. Torgovnick avoids traps that have snared far more experienced authors writing about college and sports: She doesn't sensationalize things (not dwelling on the clichéd, fetishistic sexualization of cheerleaders, for instance), nor does she wax philosophical (this is not Updike on golf), or pass judgment (she's no Tom Wolfe depicting college kids in I Am Charlotte Simmons). Just 27 when she researched the book, Ms. Togovnick is still young enough to genuinely empathize with these student-athletes. They let her share their meals, participate in a few heart-to-hearts and eavesdrop on gossip. The result is an engaging voyeuristic narrative that suggests these college cheerleaders are as close to real-life superheroes as exist.

Ms. Torgovnick's greatest contribution is the way she handles the sport's peculiar diction, explaining the differences between the "flyers," "tumblers," and "bases" who make up the teams, and elaborating on the subtleties of the various stunts, including the "scorpion," "standing back tuck," "liberty," "rewind" and "awesome." It's more than enough to persuade any doubter of cheerleading's validity as a sport, if not its artistry.

Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly. He lives in Houston and blogs at www.edwardn.com.

Cheer!

Three Teams on a Quest for College Cheerleading's Ultimate Prize

Kate Torgovnick

(Touchstone, $24.95)

New Orleans Booksellers Rebound

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 2/25/2008

Mardi Gras is a slow time for book sales,” admitted Tom Lowenburg, co-owner of Octavia Books in New Orleans, reflecting on a lackluster week earlier in February. “We saw a lot of our customers out on the street, but they're more interested in catching beads than buying books. So this year, we just closed up and gave our employees the day off.”

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the traditional Mardi Gras celebration has been downplayed, as organizers worried that parades and parties were in poor taste. But this year, festivities were back in full swing—and though the population of the city as a whole is down by a third from its pre-storm levels, having lost 150,000 of 450,000 people, and the bellwether restaurant business is down by an estimated 40%, bookselling has bounced back.

Donna Allen, for one, represents the new confidence post-Katrina. A former librarian and history teacher, Allen started working at the Maple Street Book Shop in 2006. Now she owns it, having bought it from Rhonda Faust last April.

“I feel people are more aware than ever of supporting local businesses especially in New Orleans, where it really matters,” said Allen. “Last year was our best year in the history of the store, and sales were up some 15% to 20%.”

Ted O'Brien, bookseller at the Garden District Book Shop, concurred. “Sales have been progressively better,” he said, adding, “It's nice to see the tourists come back... and not just the disaster tourists.”

In the years following Katrina, bookstores relied on sales to locals who were replenishing their libraries and got a big bump from the tremendous interest in Katrina-related tomes. “Now,” said Lowenburg of Octavia, “things seem to be back to normal.” He too reports that his store is experiencing year-on-year growth.

In all, Katrina led to the closing of three independent bookstores: Beaucoup Books and two locations of the Afro-American Book Stop; another, Kaboom Books, relocated to Houston.
DeVille Books in the Central Business District was completely flooded by Katrina, but reopened in December 2005. The store is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and is moving this month from a dark side street to a new storefront close to Canal Street, which borders the western edge of the French Quarter. The move will give the store greater access to tourist traffic.

“It's been an uphill battle since Katrina,” said Winter Randall, who took over as manager of the store in June 2006, “but we think the new location will be the missing piece and will help revive our name and reputation.”

The biggest vote of confidence in the New Orleans bookselling scene came when Borders announced it will open a new 24,000-sq-ft. store in the Garden District at the end of 2008, making it the first chain bookstore to open in the city center since BookStar closed a 12,000-square-foot store in the French Quarter in 2003. The new superstore will occupy the former Bultman Funeral Home on St. Charles Avenue, a historic landmark, having hosted funerals for Confederate president Jefferson Davis, actress Jayne Mansfield and Stan Rice, the husband of novelist Ann Rice, among others.

“I won't say we're not concerned,” said Lowenburg of Octavia, which along with the Garden District Book Shop and Maple Street Book Shop, will be close to the new Borders store. Instead of waiting to see what the impact on their sales might be, the indies already have a plan: under the auspices of the New Orleans Gulf South Book Sellers Association, they hope to launch a “buy local” awareness campaign once the chain opens.

“We're not going to try to smear Borders,” said DeVille's Randall. “Instead, we'll point out how great we indies are, and how much money we return back to the community, which is the most important thing of all.”

The Future Is Now for Borders

New concept store uses technology to enhance retail experience

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 2/18/2008

Online, it's called a “mash-up”—when two different genres of music or video are spliced together to form a distinct but familiar creation. Last week, Borders Group unveiled its new concept store—a 28,900-sq.-ft. bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich.—that convincingly bridges the online world and the real one.

Development of the new concept began immediately after George Jones replaced Greg Josefowicz as CEO in 2006. “When I started, I knew we needed to do something that would differentiate us from the competition,” said Jones during a recent tour of the Ann Arbor outlet. The store's proximity to the company's headquarters means it will serve as a kind of petri dish for new ideas, with close oversight from company executives.

Inside, the first thing customers are likely to notice is a 15-foot-high lighted tower encased in LCD screens, with the words “Go digital” prominently displayed. Dubbed “The Digital Center,” this 650-sq.-ft. store-within-a-store offers seven computer terminals at which customers can burn music CDs; download music, audiobooks and e-books (currently only into Sony Readers via Sony's e-connect Web site); and print photos. Self-service is an option, though specially trained staff will be on hand to help. While much of this is not entirely new—many retailers have been offering to burn custom CDs for some time—Borders intends to make the process accessible to older, non–tech-savvy customers.

What appears more radical is the way in which the company is bringing previously Web-only activities into the real world. Customers will be able to order personalized Our Name in History books for $39.95, via a partnership with Ancestry.com; photo books through Shutterfly.com; and even self-publishing kits through LuLu.com. These are being sold alongside Sony Readers, Sansa music players, headphones, digital cameras and even solar chargers. The section will be staffed not with booksellers but with “specialists” who will also help ensure the computers continue to run smoothly.

Computer kiosks are not limited to the Digital Center; they are sprinkled throughout the store, and all will be able to search Borders's soon-to-be-relaunched online store. The new Borders.com is scheduled to go live this quarter.

LCD TVs are also prevalent throughout the new store, running loops of author interviews, concerts and featurettes, many of which are produced by Borders and filmed at its flagship store elsewhere in Ann Arbor.

A number of sections have been transformed into self-contained “Destinations”—stores-within-a-store—as well. “It's not 'category management,' ” said Jones, referring to the discarded merchandising philosophy instituted by Josefowicz, “but something better.”

Travel, cooking and wellness books have been grouped together in a large, airy “Lifestyle” section in the middle of the sales floor. These new “Destinations” each offer a computer kiosk and video screen showing Borders programming as well as many sidelines and related items.

For example, in the travel section, Lonely Planet videos play on the LCD, while the Web kiosk allows customers to customize a vacation, recommends suitable guide books and even allows buyers to book their travel, via a partnership with Sidestep.com. In the cooking area, customers can print out individual recipes to “test run” cookbooks and watch cooking segments featuring Food Network chefs and other personalities.

Additional highlights include a redesigned 1,800-sq.-ft. children's section that boasts a 90-foot mural by the Australian artist Colin Thompson and an expanded selection of graphic novels. A dedicated events area includes hardwired AV equipment and a stage that folds down on a “Murphy bed”–style hinge from the wall. The store also features the first retail implementation of Margaret Atwood's Long Pen, which enables virtual signings.

Approximately two-thirds of the store looks refreshed, with new curving fixtures and brighter signage, while the remaining third—mostly offering books in the standard fiction and nonfiction categories—is indistinguishable from a conventional Borders store. And while Jones said additional seats had been installed in the store, seating was still limited.

Jones said that the new concept should be rolled out across the chain over the next three years, with 14 new concept stores being built this year in cities around the country, from New Orleans to Las Vegas. The new stores will stock 170,000 book, CD and DVD titles, with only a slight shift toward additional nonbook items. Jones emphasized that the cost of building such a store was only “marginally higher” than current build-out costs. “While we remain at our core booksellers, we realized that what we really are to people is a headquarters for knowledge and entertainment,” he said. “We wanted to come up with a number of compelling reasons for customers to bypass our competition that also sells books and come to us. We think we've done just that.”

Powell’s to Expand Flagship in 2010, Absorb Technical Store

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2008 8:00:00 AM

Starting January 2010, Powell's Books in Portland, Ore. will begin construction to add some 10,000 sq. ft. of retail space to its existing flagship location, Powell’s City of Books, and incorporate the 7,000 sq.-ft. of inventory from Powell’s Technical Books, effectively closing the freestanding store, which operates just two blocks from the flagship.

“We don’t see it as closing a store, since we’re incorporating the inventory into our store and it will be given a dedicated room” said Powell’s CEO for strategic development, Miriam Sontz.

The additional retail space will likely be utilized to expand City of Book’s children’s section, which currently occupies some 5,000 sq.-ft. of 75,000 sq.-ft. flagship store.

Sontz said that the store “may decide to add even more retail space, but no decision has been finalized.” Any expansion, which is likely to take the form of adding additional stories to the existing building, will have to be approved by the city.

“We made the announcement so far in advance,” said Sontz, “in part because we wanted to spend 2008 talking to our staff and surrounding community about what they want to add to the store. This is an opportunity for change. Then in 2009, hopefully we can approve the plans and in 2010 start construction.”

Everyday Ghosts: Joshilyn Jackson's suburban gothics

by Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 1/21/2008

All Southerners believe in ghosts,” says Joshilyn Jackson, whose third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, out this March from Grand Central, opens with a middle-of-the-night visit from the ghost of a teenage girl. The novel's protagonist, Laurel Hamilton, is used to haunting (her dead uncle appears regularly), but this ghost is unfamiliar and leads Laurel to the dead body of Laurel's teenage daughter's friend, Molly, floating in the pool. The ensuing story could be called “Suburban Gothic,” filled with both real and spectral figures coming to haunt her gated community in Pensacola, Fla.

Jackson, 39, began her writing career after years of struggling as an actress in regional theater; both her previous novels, Gods in Alabama (Warner Books, 2005) and Between, Georgia (Warner Books, 2007), were #1 Book Sense picks, making Jackson the first author to have back-to-back top picks. Gods has more than 200,000 copies in print; Between, Georgia, 150,000.

Still, the Georgia author's renown as a novelist remains primarily Southern. Jackson lives in Powder Springs, Ga., with her husband and two children, 10-year-old Sam (named for Samuel Beckett) and five year-old Maisey (named for the Henry James novel What Maisie Knew). But Grand Central Publishing believes The Girl Who Stopped Swimming will be her breakout book, banking on the gated suburban setting resonating with readers across the country. The plan is a 75,000 first printing, with two more novels contracted for.

In person, Jackson exudes the charisma of a stage actress, with a speaking voice that won her a PW Listen Up award for the audiobook version of Between, Georgia. Acting also surfaces in the character of Thalia, Laurel's loose-cannon older sister in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, who runs a black boxtheater in Birmingham, Ala. After Laurel finds the dead girl in her pool, she turns to Thalia for help.

“Laurel and Thalia is that virgin/whore thing that all Southern girls have,” she says, admitting that her “strong sense of decorum” was difficult to overcome early on. “Now I've learned to set a character on fire and see what happens.”

Though there are literal ghosts in Jackson's latest novel, she acknowedges that: “The real ghost in the book is poverty,” adding that it's a very personal topic to her.

Jackson's maternal grandmother grew up in a town very much like the fictional DeLop in Girl. “The book,” says Jackson, “was an effort to empathize with the grandmother with whom I have not spoken in 20 years. My grandmother was a sharecropper. I remember driving through the town with her when I was a child and her saying things like 'that's my corn, those are my trees, that's my house.' But none of it was hers—she just felt the way she did because of the work she put into that land.” Living in such grinding poverty left her grandmother obsessed with social propriety, but emotionally aloof.

In the novel, Laurel's mother—who is obsessed with propriety—is a stand-in for Jackson's grandmother. DeLop represents the shameful past Laurel is trying to outrun—she never lets her husband, Dave, or daughter, Shelby, visit it—but she inadvertently invites the past into her life in the form of Bet, an at-risk teenage girl from DeLop who starts as Shelby's pen pal and ends up as a house guest.

In the same way that her family's history has been injected into her fiction, Jackson has started taking elements from her fiction and turning them into reality. To mark the publication of Between, Georgia, Jackson took a totem that appears in the book—a statue of a little fox—and gave versions of it as gifts to bookstores where she toured. This time, she commissioned a quilt based on a design that Laurel, a fabric artist herself, is working on in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. That quilt, called The Bride, will accompany Jackson when she sets off on her 17-city book tour, which for the first time will extend beyond the South to include cities from San Francisco to Albany, N.Y.

“I guess I always wished, as a little girl, that I could reach into books and pull things out of them,” says Jackson, “Now, I can.” The thing she couldn't conjure through her writing, though, was a real ghost. “I'm probably too much of a pragmatist to see ghosts,” she says. “But I do believe in quantum physics and the idea that there is not lost energy—just energy that reconfigures itself. Who hasn't walked into a room at one time or another and felt the hairs rise on the back of their neck?”

'Fight': A blow-by-blow guide to unarmed combat

SPORTS: Eugene Robinson's ode to 'fistic arts' gets it all down in black and blue

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, January 20, 2008

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
books@dallasnews.com

Eugene Robinson doesn't sound like the kind of guy that someone (a scrawny book critic, for example) would want to annoy. Standing 6-foot-1 and weighing 200-plus pounds, Mr. Robinson is a bundle of muscle and sinew. He boxed at the Boy's Club in Brooklyn and has since dedicated himself to the study of kenpo karate, muay thai (a form of kickboxing) and mixed martial arts (MMA). He is, he admits at the start of his new book Fight, a "fightaholic." OK, so I'll be careful what I say ...

Fight is Mr. Robinson's paean to what he calls the "fistic arts" and is replete with page after page of color photos of tattooed, bloodied men locked in some form of battle. Within you'll find a compendium of trivia, lists, advice and anecdotage about all forms of unarmed combat, from barroom brawls to boxing. He offers seven pages explaining different "grappling holds," offers advice on how to win a knife fight (first rule: Expect to get cut), as well as the mathematical formula for calculating the force of a punch.

If all this sounds like vulgar machismo to you, you're probably not one of the millions of viewers who tune into the many hours of television each week that features hand-to-hand combat, from the masked wrestlers of lucha libre to Discovery Channel's Fight Quest to Spike TV's popular Ultimate Fighting Championship.

John McCain once derided MMA as "human cockfighting," but in recent years it has become, if not entirely respectable, then at least mainstream. Even Mark Cuban has jumped on the bandwagon and, since September, has offered a weekly MMA chat show on his HDNet TV network.

Mr. Cuban should take note: Mr. Robinson might make a good host. The core of his book is a series of interviews with various fighters. The best known is boxer Evander Holyfield, who muses on having his ear bitten in a fight by Mike Tyson. Elsewhere, Mr. Robinson channels George Plimpton and entices some of the best brawlers in the business to beat him up.

Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson is such an enthusiast, he forgets that many of his readers may not be as devoted to the scene as he his, and his bravado risks alienating the uninitiated.

That is a shame, for there are some moments of intriguing journalism here, such as Mr. Robinson's conversations with a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who discusses how to survive a brawl in a 5-by-7-foot prison cell; the barroom bouncer who offers advice on how to take down a bigger opponent (get him down on the floor where his size isn't such an advantage); and an amateur fighter who inadvertently killed a man in a street altercation.

Needless to say pacifists should avoid opening the book. But most anyone else with a curiosity about this growing subculture – and let's hope for the sake of civilization that it stays a subculture – will be rewarded with a new knowledge of how to give and take and the professionals who do so for a living.

A conversation with 'Sacred Games' author Vikram Chandra

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, January 20, 2008

Itseems unlikely that the avant-garde short story writer Donald Barthelme would have had such a profound influence on Indian novelist Vikram Chandra. Barthelme was a master of the miniature: His stories are terse, focusing on the intimate details of a tiny cast of characters. Chandra, by contrast, is a maximalist, who in two novels — 1995's 600-page "Red Earth and Pouring Rain" and last year's 950-page "Sacred Games" — has tried to capture the sweep and drama of life in colonial and contemporary India.

When Barthelme died of a heart attack in 1989, Chandra says he "felt it terribly personally." The two had met when Chandra enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, where Barthelme taught.

"It took us awhile to understand each other," says Chandra by phone from his home in Berkeley, Calif. "But it's precisely that kind of detailed attention that you could see in his stories that was valuable to me. Watching him read the story was an education: the keenness with which he could spot a word out of place or alter the effect of a sentence by moving a comma or cutting a phrase was revelatory." Barthelme's death meant Chandra had lost a mentor.

Chandra lived off-and-on in Houston from 1988 until 1995, writing and working part-time as a computer consultant. (The Houston Zoo was one client.) Texas, he says, was a comfortable place to live as an aspiring writer. "In New York, literary life is very hierarchical, but in Houston, even as a graduate student, the scene was very accessible." But the Bayou City wasn't big enough to contain him: When "Red Earth and Pouring Rain" was published in 1995 and honored with a Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Published Book, Chandra was lured away to take a teaching position at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Today, he teaches at the University of California.

"Red Earth" hinges on the storytelling of Sanjay Parasher, a 19th-century poet and revolutionary who has been reincarnated as a monkey in present-day India. After getting shot by a college student home from America, Parasher the monkey, in a direct echo of "One Thousand and One Nights," is granted amnesty from death by the gods so long as he continues to peck out stories from his various lives on a manual typewriter. In this way, Chandra is able to recount a broad swath of the history of 18th- and 19th-century Mughal India. Chandra interweaves these tales with the story of the college student's road trip across the U.S., thus also delivering a gimlet-eyed critique of late-20th-century American culture as well.

Chandra's second novel, "Sacred Games," just out in paperback — and named a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist on Monday — is even more ambitious and cacophonous. Its cast numbers in the dozens and the plot is nearly impossible to summarize succinctly. Suffice to say it views the roiling past half-century of Indian history through the prism of two very different men, police inspector Sartaj Singh and devout gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. On the surface it is a traditional detective thriller and, at nearly 1,000 pages, something of a commitment. But it rewards the reader's effort, giving a visceral sense of the city of Mumbai, a place where everybody has a price (or a price on their head).

Chandra, who splits his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, spent nearly seven years researching and writing "Sacred Games," including trailing a local crime reporter, setting up meetings with real-life bad guys and otherwise nosing around Jambli Mohalla, the dangerous locality that Mumbai newspapers refer to as the "Palermo of India."

Chandra says he chose a detective as the hero of his book "because a detective can move across all layers of society." In addition, the detective novel is itself "a particularly mobile form and anywhere you go you will find it." It's "globalized," so to speak, and provided Chandra with a way of delivering a portrait of life in Bombay (Chandra's preferred name for Mumbai) to a large, international audience.

While some novelists, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, go so far as to purge their novels of local flavor to facilitate understanding and translation into other languages, Chandra balks at the very idea. His characters themselves flit in and out of various languages, from Hindi to Marathi to Urdu, as well as slang from the streets of Mumbai.

"In the book, some of the language that is used is so slangy and specific to Bombay that even people in another part of India wouldn't understand what was being said," says Chandra.

Fortunately, in Chandra's hands, context often provides the meaning. Also, there's a 16-page glossary.

"Sacred Games" is very much a novel appropriate to this moment in time, when Americans are keenly curious about India. "When I first came to the U.S. in the 1980s the stories were all about India being a place of mysticism," says Chandra. "In the last 10 years it's been about outsourcing and the revival of the economy.

"This has been interesting to watch from (American) shores, but I worry that it has been slipping into phobia. I want people to know India is a place where people have been living their lives and doing business for thousands of years and doing rather well with it. At least some new knowledge can come from the fear."