Schlei in the Shepherd on Outstanding Obreht, Event Wrap Ups, New Postcards, and More on the Tee Shirts

How's this for a rave for The Tiger's Wife?

"It is with a strong mastery of storytelling that Obreht has truly earned her stripes. The Tiger's Wife is richly textured with intersecting themes: the Balkan wars and their effects on new generations in Eastern Europe, the ways myth can displace reason, sense of duty in family and occupation, and the tradition of using allegory to impart life lessons."

Read more from Boswellian alumna Rebecca Schlei's review in the current Shepherd Express.

Speaking of Earth Day, how many of you are chiding me for not tieing in our event with Chasing Chiles author Kurt Michael Friese to Earth Day celebrations (which was yesterday)?  We had a nice turnout, partly due to the help of Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast, but with Friese's strong message, we could have done better than our 24 attendees (26 if you include the author and myself, as some bookstores do). We discussed how bookstore attendance can be all over the map.  (Other bookstores are now exclaiming, "he's complaining about 25 people?  Is he nuts?")

Just to continue our wrap up theme, we had a wonderful event with Tripp Evans, the Grant Wood historian, on Thursday.  We had 50 folks*, thanks to the effors of Joseph Pabst, Will Fellows, and the Cream City Foundation and sales were good.  No surprise, the book is not cheap ($37.50) but it is a spectacular piece of production.  Congrats to Knopf.

And congrats to Evans, who last week was awarded the Marfield Prize for writing about the arts.  Marfield will be reading at the Arts Club of Washington DC on May 11.  Let me tell you, based on the wonderful feedback we had on his talk, I declare attendance mandatory to all book and art lovers within 50 miles.  And just so I continue my "why didn't I think of that?" moments, I could have called this Iowa Week, as both Grant Wood and Kurt Michael Friese are grounded in the Hawkeye State.

Hey, isn't this supposed to be the gift post?  Well, the big news was the arrival of our new tee shirts.  We sold an unprecedented six tee shirts in one day yesterday, four of our artist tee and two of Heather Maroon Boswell.  I know six doesn't seem like a lot to you, but if you're a bookstore (or a retailer not working a tourist strip or a festival), you'll know otherwise.

Here is a photo of Jocelyn and Stacie wearing the new "The book was better" tee.  This is one in a series of shots--I call this pose "I can't believe we're wearing the same tee shirt."  The series also includes "disturbingly happy" and "photo shoot for a mid-priced department store chain."  That one disappeared from the camera, so maybe Stacie didn't like it.  I'm sad to tell her that I kept a copy on my laptop and it's carefully hidden.  Before I use it, I'll find out if she deleted it on purpose.

Yesterday both Stacie and I were wearing our new Kpolly "The Book was Better Tees" and yes, a customer came up to me at the end of the evening and said, "Is that a Kristopher Pollard?" I have never before felt at the cutting edge of anything.

We've gotten a lot of good stuff in recently, but I guess I should limit my shout out to our new Milwaukee postcards.  I never quite located the supplier for tourist postcards, and I'm sort of glad about it, since my memories about them are not spectacular.  Instead, we sourced some classic vintage postcards, including landmarks existing (the Central Library, the Gas building, the Riverside Theater, City Hall) and legendary (County Stadium, the Chicago Northwestern train depot, a functional Pabst brewery).  #1 in sales so far is "Greetings from Milwaukee."  I expect we'll be reordering that one soon.

*In the grand dreams of Mr. Pabst and myself, we imagined 75-100 attendees, but while I applaud thinking big, I know that our attendance was above the expectations of the publisher and author and everybody was very happy.  And for sales, we are now officially #1 for the book on Above the Treeline.  And some of you know what that means!

Opera, Painting, Chile Peppers, Fantasy, Plus a Birthday Surprise--What a Week!

After a few days of break, we've got a solid lineup of events for the rest of the week, starting with our final Florentine Opera Insight for the 2010-2011 season on Wednesday, April 20 at 7 pm.  It's a lush double bill, featuring two of the most important baroque works, John Blow's Venus and Adonis paired with Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

I can't emphasize how wonderful these performances are. Corliss Phillabaum's talks are humorous and insightful, the Studio performances are both grand and accessible, and if your thinking this will take as long as a Ring cycle, you're wrong.  It's packed into an hour of opera goodness. While the performances attract a lot of opera fans, I'd also recommend the Florentine Opera Insights for folks who think they are culturally well-rounded, but in fact have a hole in their resume. The opera will be performed May 13 through 22. More on their website.

Our commitment to the fine and performing arts continues on Thursday, April 21 with an appearance from R. Tripp Evans, acclaimed author of Grant Wood, the recent biography that sheds new light on the artist known for American Gothic. Behind his carefully cultivated facade was a very different persona, a gay man struggling with his identity.  Art Winslow in the Chicago Tribune gave the biography five stars.  And look, even The Onion's AV Club is a fan.  This is a big deal, so let's get out and show our support.  And thanks to the Cream City Foundation and the Joseph Pabst infrastructure fund and also Will Fellows for making this possible.

On Friday, we're teaming up with Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast to welcome Kurt Michael Friese, chef/owner of Iowa City's Devotay, who together with Gary Paul Nabhan and Kraig Kraft, collaborated on Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail.  This environmental and culinary travelogue explores the regional wonderfulness and numerous varieties of chile peppers, and what environmental change is doing to their diversity and distribution.  

Want to read more?  The New York Times profiled Gary Paul Nabhan in their April 7 issue.  And Aram Bakshian, Jr. reviewed Chasing Chiles in the Wall Street Journal.

Saturday April 23 at 2 pm, we're honored to be the launch event for Bradley Beaulieu's epic fantasy series, The Winds of Khalakovo.  Civil war breaks out in a society that is part Cyrillic, part shaman.  Publishers Weekly praised it's poetic prose while Library Journal lauded its strong characters and tense plot.  Our buyer Jason read The Winds of Khalakovo and loved it.  I'm hoping we'll have a post devoted to the book up on The Boswellians this week.  I can't say it's there yet.

Alas, I can't tell you about our Patricia Wells event today as it sold out.  And yesterday?  I was lured out to a surprise party at Sugar Maple in Bay View.  People asked if I suspected and I did not, until the last minute when I was on the phone with my sister Claudia and she was not finished telling me something and I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I have to go.  I think I'm heading to a surprise party.  There was disagreement as to whether I should have walked into the room while I was on the phone, but in the end, I thought it was better to not be distracted.  Thanks to everyone at Boswell (rumor has it, particularly Stacie) who helped put it together.  And we were particularly impressed with Anne's delicious card though it was also interesting that Kay (a customer) told me that the wine they brought had been developed by Bob (another customer and coincidentally, her husband) while at Gallo. 

And the good thing was, I got to scope out space for out our event on Thursday, June 2nd for Algonquin authors David Anthony (Something for Nothing), Josh Wilker (Cardboard Gods) and Pete Nelson (I thought You Were Dead).  Details to come!

Last of the Rep Nights (for 2010 at Last), #4 in Mequon, Part One, the Random House Folk

One of the nice things about renting a car is that I can get to Next Chapter on Sundays. Alas, the two ways to get there by bus (one of which involves walking three miles) simply don't work. Of course I could have hitched a ride with Jason or Carl, but then they'd have to drive me home. Hey, Carl doesn't live that far from me. Notice the way even temporarily owning a car makes you use gasoline extravagantly. Next thing you know I'll be driving to Indiana because it's the only place I can find my favorite brand of toilet tissue.

It's the last rep night of 2010, and we put together a nice lineup for the booksellers from Boswell and Next Chapter. I felt bad for the folks who did not attend, as the reps were quite generous. Unlike the other rep nights, where I left with a handful of books, this time I had an honest-to-goodness pile. I promise to make the most of them, starting with this blog.

The food was from Panera, and Dave was particularly nice by asking them to leave off the mayo and mustard on premade sandwiches. Isn't he great?

First up was Tim of Random House kids. I wondered what dystopian novel he'd be pushing. It turned out to be Museum of Thieves, by Lian Tanner. It's a series set in the City of Jewel, a repressive society that protects young people for their own good, using a silver chain to imprison them in the Museum of Dunt. The chain is usually cut during Separation Day, but then something goes wrong, and Goldie must cut hers herself. It's set for a slightly younger age group and doesn't look quite as violent. The series might be called "Keepers."

Tim's favorite novel was Rob Buyea's Because of Mr. Terupt, the story of a school seen through the eyes of several students, and the teacher that changes their lives...only to be stricken by a terrible accident caused by one of them. The book was brought to Random House by John Irving, and seems to have that sort of feel about it, at least in Tim's description.

Tim had a lot of nice picture books, but I was immediately drawn to Snowbots, a story by Aaron Reynolds about how robot children got to play on snow day. The kid-bots make snowballs with their chainsaw hands and drink cocoa with axle grease.

And the book I took was Melissa Duke Mooney's The ABCs of Rock, an alphabet book of rock posters. Hey, with everyone buying Keith Richard's Life, it seems like a perfect companion for their kids, or a collectible for adults. It goes AC/DC, David Bowie, Clash, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello...yes, the book sometimes uses first names and sometimes last.

Our new Random House Green rep (covering the Knopf Doubleday group and assorted distribution lines) just moved to Minneapolis from Nashville so this was sort of our first time officially working with him, but since he won rep of the year (at Penguin) the same year Schwartz won bookstore of the year, he should have been pretty familiar, at least by reputation. And of course, he has a great selection of books.

There were a lot of picks that were quite familiar, and yet great suggestions for customers, like The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (known inhouse as TZT), One Day, and the new translatoin of Doctor Zhivago*. There was the Ephron (I Remember Nothing) and the Conroy (My Reading Life) and the Bryson (At Home). But I still got some good ideas for new reads.

Jason (rep, not buyer) was strong on Dogfight, a Love Story, by Matt Burgess, a first novel set in Queens about a drug dealer trying to go straight. As it was set in Jackson Heights, where I caught the 7 line while I lived in Elmhurst in the 1980s, I thought it would be fun to spot local color, though I personally never went to any dogfights (Honest, PETA).

I thought Lee Sandlin's Wicked River, a historical adventure about the Mississippi River of the 19th century, might be good for that adventure reader. It was surprising to learn that the author lived in Chicago, as it would have been a cheap date for him to read at one of the Milwaukee stores. Maybe they thought we were too far from the Mississippi. After all, we're on the side of Wisconsin that flows into Lake Michigan.

I immediately thought of a couple of customers who would enjoy Grant Wood, the story of the iconic artist of the Great Plains, who camouflaged his homosexuality with a folksy persona, who only found some personal peace on his trips to Paris. But I thought Cedar Rapids was the Paris of Iowa. R. Tripp Evans is an art historian at Wheaton College, just outside Chicago. Oh, don't tell me these things!

Nice job, particularly for a newbie. Oh, I know he's not a newbie. There's my tunnel vision acting up again. Next up: our last two reps of the year, and daresay I say we saved the best for last?

*For some reason, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation does not come up easily on our website's search engine. This is the second time I had this problem. Use the link.