"In Between Days" by Andrew Porter

Reviewed by Edward Nawotka for the Dallas Morning News (September 2012)

It is the mid-2000s and the Hardings of Houston — a white, upper-middle-class Texas family — are sent reeling when their daughter, Chloe, returns home after being kicked out of her East Coast college trailed by a felonious scandal, detectives and an Indian-American boyfriend intent on fleeing with her across the border.

This isn’t the Hardings’ only trouble. Family patriarch Elson, a fading-star minimalist architect, is sliding into booze and boorishness after his divorce from his wife of 25 years, Cadence, who is alone and psychologically unmoored in a big house in Montrose. Meanwhile, their eldest child, Richard, a recent Rice graduate and poet, fights the urge to take himself seriously by submitting to the “anesthetizing freedom” of the gay party scene.

When Chloe suddenly disappears, each tries to rally to her aid, but they make a series of decisions that, “clouded by love,” only exacerbate the situation to the point where it remains uncertain whether they can ever fully recover.

This is Andrew Porter’s first novel and, as a portrait of a modern American nuclear family in crisis, it is a deft one. He weaves in the full tapestry of contemporary life and its complications: male menopause, desperate housewives, extended adolescence and race relations in post-9/11 America.

That Porter, author of the acclaimed collection of short stories The Theory of Light and Matter and a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, set his book in Houston is all but immaterial to the plot. It is placeholder of sorts — one could not, as James Joyce was fond of saying of Ulysses, navigate the city by its pages — and it could have easily been replaced by any large American metropolis. And this is a shame, since to put it frankly, Houston, America’s fourth-largest city, has rarely been exploited by fiction writers. True-crime writers? Yes, but not by novelists.

At one point Chloe notes, “To them,” referring to her friends at college, “Houston represented big hair and cowboy hats and conservative politics” (which sounds much more like the clichés about Dallas-Fort Worth than Houston, actually), but to her it was a “magical place.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t come across in the pages of the book.

That said, the fact that Houston serves as such a bland backdrop may be intentional. The characters take the foreground and they, Porter seems to be saying, are much like us — or at least the type of reader looking to pay good money for a mildly suspenseful novel about well-off, well-meaning, mostly white people in crisis.

Porter’s characters serve as tropes for things that have defined the middle class: work as identity, education as opportunity, marriage as an institution. Each character is challenged, in the same way that those societal foundations are being challenged. And in this way, the novel is an accurate reflection of our larger (reading) society as it stands today.

That and, well, a certain segment of Texans — who as we all know really are not so dissimilar from people everywhere else.

Edward Nawotka is the editor-in-chief of Publishingperspectives.com.

books@dallasnews.com

In Between Days

Andrew Porter

(Knopf, $24.95)

An Unforgettable War 

by Ed Nawotka (Texas Observer)

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Published on: Monday, September 24, 2012

For nearly a decade publishers have been filling bookstores with tomes about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. First came those from the embedded journalists; then the officers and politicians who led the wars, whether in Washington or on the battlefield; then the survivors, snipers, SEALS and soldiers with Silver Stars. These books will be quickly forgotten. Save for a few non-fiction titles about war, the books that linger longest are those by writers who transformed the events of the day with their imaginations.

Poets in particular have proven expert at capturing the emotion and terror of war. Think of Whitman writing about the Civil War, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon on the trenches of World War I, Auden and Eliot on the horror of World War II. Regarding our recent wars, one thinks of Brian Turner's 2005 volume Here, Bullet, a visceral manifestation, in poetry no less, of the life of a modern soldier.

Now we have The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, an Iraq war veteran and Michener Fellow in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. Powers' novel relays the story of two Virginia boys—21-year-old Pvt. Bartle and 18-year-old Pvt. Murphy—from basic training at Fort Dix to the battlegrounds of Al Tafar, Iraq, and its stateside aftermath. Murphy ("Murph") never returns after a horrifying tragedy.

In Powers' depiction of military life in and out of war, he punctuates Wordsworthian passages of poetic stream-of-consciousness about nature and human nature with Hemingwayesque observations. (A vaporized body is described as "a perfect bloody angel made of dust.")

But what does it say about war today? Well, war is a "morbid geometry," and this novel delivers a close approximation of the mental anguish and loss that war inflicts on the sensitive and the barbaric alike. The Yellow Birds reads like one man's raw version of the truth, and you feel not only for, but with Pvt. Bartle. This does not make for easy or particularly enjoyable reading, but it is full of passionate intensity. Exactly what might give this particular book about war a chance to last.

Ed Nawotka is the Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives.com, a trade journal for the international book business. He lives in Houston.

Book review: 'The Possessed' by Elif Batuman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book review: 'Happy' by Alex Lemon

Dallas Morning News, Sunday, January 10, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

books@dallasnews.com

2009 Year in Review from the Dallas Morning News

By EDWARD NAWOTKA / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

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

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

Herewith, our top 10 literary events of 2009:

AP Photo

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Seth Grahame Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MPIBA Gets Boost from Guns, Tourists, Hype

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kidder spoke by phone from his home in Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you describe the clinic Deo started?

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dallas to host 4 days of 'Twilight'

12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, July 29, 2009

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

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

Expect lots of screaming – of a good kind.

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

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

Meet the cast

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

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

Online groundswell

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

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

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

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

A few guys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, June 21, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

books@dallasnews.com

Driving Like Crazy

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

P.J. O'Rourke

(Atlantic Monthly, $24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E-publisher Stay Thirsty Lures Veteran Writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book review: 'Guts' by Robert Nylen

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Edward Nawotka is a Houston freelance writer.

books@dallasnews.com

Guts

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

Robert Nylen 

(Random House, $25)

Change Makers: Joyce Meskis

Tattered Cover owner adds new role with Denver Publishing Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profile Name: Joyce Meskis Age: 67 Company: Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver; University of Denver Publishing Institute Title: Co-owner; Director First job: working “semester rush” at Purdue's bookstore. Publishing in the future: a work in progress, as it incorporates new techologies with the continuing demands and challenges of the marketplace.

Keeping the Mailer Spirit Alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 3, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carmichael's Bookstore: Bookseller of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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