What Was that Book I Heard on the Radio; Some Select Links to Lake Effect and Kathleen Dunn.

It's December 23, which can often be our biggest non-event day of the year, and I'm focused on just a few things, like getting several key titles up to one hundred sold for the year, and hand-selling enough titles to get them on our bestseller list. We're out of a number of the hot titles but certainly not everything. The key is that if you're checking stock on our website, don't assume that we have something; it could well be on hold for someone else. There's a good chance we're getting more All the Light We Cannot See tomorrow (yes, December 24) and I don't think they are all accounted for by special orders, so if you have desperately trying to hunt one down, call us (yes, call, don't email)and you can get on the waiting list. Meanwhile, here are some links to book-related pieces that you couldn't remember you heard on public radio.

Our FOB Jenny Benjamin reads her poem East Wood.

There's not a separate segment pulled out, but Anson Williams also appeared for his book, Singing to a Bulldog: From "Happy Days" to Hollywood Director, and the Unlikely Mentor Who Got Me There.

Craig K. Collins offers a memoir through guns in Thunder in the Mountains: A Portrait of American Gun Culture.And over on Lake Effect, Kathleen Dunn talked to Stephen Hargareten about prevention strategies for reducing gun violence.

Bret Anthony Johnston talks about his novel, Remember Me Like This. The paperback releases on February 3, 2015 with special Reader's Circle features.

And here is a piece on Mike McCabe's Blue Jeans in High Places. Little Creek/Kristin Mitchell is a contract publisher in Madison that generally doesn't index on Ingram, which is the feeder for most independent bookstore websites.

Kathleen Dunn talked to Vinh Chung, who wrote, with Tim Downs, his memoir, Where the Wind Leads: A Refugee Family's Miraculous Story of Loss, Rescue, and Redemption. I think this is a reairing.

Allen Guelzo is the editor of this Life Magazine project, Lincoln: An Intimate Portrait, also on Kathleen Dunn. We generally don't stock most of these Time/Life books. This reminds me a bit of the British book that used the Smithsonian brand I mentioned earlier this fall. Life Magazine? Yes, I know the book is using their archives, but it's still an odd brand to feature.

Lindsay Mark Lewis, a former fundraiser for the Democratic Party and the co-author of Political Mercenaries: The Inside Story of How Fundraisers Allowed Billionaires to Take Over Politics, talks to Dunn about how the super-wealthy shackle political candidates not only by injecting millions of dollars into elections, but also by sucking up their time that could be spent governing

Oh, and Matt Bai appeared on Dunn's show on December 11 to talk about All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, which I've written about on Boswell and Books.  I'll have to go back and listen to that one; I also had a lot of questions.

Don't forget, we open at 9 am today (12/23) and tomorrow (12/24) and we close early on December 24 (5 pm, not six, alas) and December 31 (5 pm). We're open New Year's Day from 10 am to 5 pm.