Following the Trail of the Bastille--From Picking up Bonnie Jo Campbell at Cathedral Square to Boswell's Paris Table to Tomorrow's Bicycle Race.

As this is Bastille Days weekend, I have to avoid different parts of downtown with a car than I do when there are other festivals. I had agreed to pick up Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River, and bring her to Boswell for a coffee/stock signing.

Campbell has won Milwaukee hearts wherever she's gone, from the AWP conference (where she met Stacie) to Winter Institute (where she met Jason).  The Journal Sentinel had a wonderful review of her new novel (read it here) from Mike Fischer, and perhaps there will be more publicity to come. Once Upon a River is a modern Huckleberry Finn (didn't I just say that about The Borrower), focusing on 16-year-old Margo Crane, who makes her way out of small-town Michigan after a series of tragedies.  One reader (shall not be named) called it a potential main selection for the NRA Book Club. 

Until now, I had only conversed with Campbell by email, but at coffee (along with Stacie), we had a good chance to talk about the new novel, men who say they are better writers than women, women who say they write like men, and teens who might read like adults.  Ideas were bouncing every which way--it was great fun.  Shane and Sharon have both finished the new novel, and I expect there will be more Boswellians to follow. In fact, we had one of Campbell's novels signed for ex-Boswellian Sarah.

I decided not to include any of Campbell's direct quotes, mostly because I would then want to show her the piece first and I really want to get today's blog out. Just one piece of advice to writers--stop cutting off the sex scenes before they start.  I told her if I wrote fiction, I would cut off the sex scene a day before it started.  No I didn't, but I thought it.

My mind is bouncing around from all the interesting things I heard, and I highly recommend you see Campbell as she makes her way around the country.  Here are few upcoming event dates:

July 16 - 17 Iowa Festival of the Book, Saturday reading and Sunday morning panel
July 19 - (Tuesday) 7:00 pm Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor, MI, reading.
July 21 - (Thurs) - Great Lakes Books Reading 2-4pm, Big Rapids, MI

July 21 - 7 pm reading, Schuler Books & Music , 2660 28th Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI

July 23 - (Saturday) 2-4pm, Literary Life Bookstore, Grand Rapids, MI, meet and greet
July 28 - 7:30 pm (Thursday) Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue, Denver, reading
July 29 - 4-6 Bookworm meet and greet, Edwards, CO.

And on it goes!

After maneuvering the Bastille Days traffic to drive Campbell back downtown, I returned to Boswell where we have our own Bastille celebration, but one of a reading sort. It just seems that our Paris table can't sell down.  Here are some titles that are selling particularly well.

Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes, by Elizabeth Bard. In Paris for a weekend, Bard sat down for lunch with a Frenchmen and never went home again.  Speaking of which, did anyone hear Jean Feraca's interview with Elaine Sciolino for her book, La Seduction?

French Leave, by Anna Gavalda. More like a novella, three siblings flee a dull family wedding to visit their brother, pondering the bonds of memory and the pull of the past.

A House in France, by Gully Wells.  This memoir by the features editor of Conde Nast Traveler recalls her life in the early 1960s with her mother, a journalist and socialite.

French Lessons, by Ellen Sussman. A novel of three students who explore Paris with their tutor, learning a bit about life in the process. Jason said Melissa said this one was very, very sad, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Come to think of it, I think Melissa has read all these books.

And what else do you think of when you think of France?  Perhaps the Tour de France?  Well, we've got a lot of that too.  Downer bike race #2 is going on all day tomorrow, Saturday, July 16.  Park south and west of us.

A Summery Kind of Tuesday Brings New Boswell's Best--Thrillers and Vacation Reads, and One Piece of Art-Film Style Counterprogramming.

Tuesday has beeen de facto new release day in the bookstore for a number of years now.  There are exceptions.  The Penguin Group has two kinds of on-sale, a hard on-sale date of Tuesday, where you will definitely get the books on time to sell, and a soft on-sale date for lesser titles of Thursday, where you might not get the books on time, but if you get them early, you can't put them out. And James Patterson always likes to go on-sale on a Monday, giving him one extra day of sales on the bestseller lists. I don't think any other high-profile author does this.

So it's not surprising that Tuesday is the day we update our Boswell Best titles, the new books (99% of them hardcovers) that we feature up front and give some extra discount umph too.  Not A-word style just about at cost but sometimes below, which is actually illegal in Wisconsin, but 20%, enough to feel like you are getting a decent deal. 

It turns out that half my booksellers know Bonnie Jo Campbell from something or other.  Jason met her at GLIBA, a regional conference of east-midwestern booksellers, while Stacie spent time with her at AWP, the conference of folks in writing programs. Her novel Once Upon a River (Norton) follows up an acclaimed short story collection shortlisted for the National Book Award. It follows a 16-year-old-girl, as Publishers Weekly notes "who is, in rapid succession, abandoned by her mother, raped by her uncle, and witness to the shooting death of her father." Early reads are great--it's said to be Daniel Woodrell-y. And Next Chapter in Mequon is hosting Campbell on Wednesday, July 13. (Boswell: $25.95, Our price through at least next Monday: $20.76)

You might be wondering why Tom Clancy did not have a book out in years and then has two within six months. At first I thought maybe he'd been working on two books and happened to finish them both together. It turns out that Against all Enemies is more along the lines of his paperback collaborations, where Clancy provides the brand and perhaps some concept, and another writer does the execution.  This time the writer is Peter Telep and the hero is Max Moore. (Publisher: $28.95, Boswell: $23.16)

We've tried to make some headway with thrillers (for example, by having a thriller case, an attempt to sell the writers without marquee names) but between 1) the price competition and 2) our mystery and thriller customers responding to reviews and interviews more than brands, this is not the kind of book we'll do particularly well with.  I would pretty much wager that we will sell less copies of this than we did of Graham Moore's, The Sherlockian, a well-reviewed novel from last winter about tracking down Arthur Conan Doyle's missing journal.  Last week it even hit our bestseller list.

There is a long tradition of novels set in the Maine of vacation retreats, and J. Courtney Sullivan follows up Commencement with the novel Maine (Knopf), the story of four women in the Kelleher family retreating from their everyday lives, but not from the drama of family. Of course folks in the midwest don't think of Maine the way Northeasters do, though my ex-bookseller colleague Jean used to vacation in Vacationland and eventually morved there. I was chatting with our rep Jason about this, and wondered if, with the advent of ebooks a substantial format, they couldn't have had five or six versions of the book, each slightly rewritten. One could be Napa, another Hilton Head, and maybe we could have Door County.  Apparently Knopf isn't ready for that. Now who's the visionary? (Publisher: $25.95, Boswell: $20.76)

As I was compiling this, I asked Jason, what's with the new Jeffery Deaver? He reminded me that Carte Blanche (Simon and Schuster) is the new agent 007 novel, a re-imagining of the spy as you've never seen him before (dressed like cowboy, perhaps?) Here's a take-out from the Evening Standard review: "The most impressive feature of Carte Blanche is the ingenuity of the breathless, blood-thirsty plot. A master of misdirection, Deaver manufactures more surprises than anyone flogging an old warhorse can be expected to produce." My favorite thing about Deaver is his first name. Along with Rachael Ray and Stephenie Meyer, it's often spelled wrong. (Publisher: $26.99, Boswell, $21.59).

We've stoped changing all the prices every week in our website database, but be assured that if you order the book from us while it is featured as a Boswell's Best title, we will give you the 20% discount. And while I know the books are higher elsewhere, why not give a poor indie dog a bone once in a while. Speaking of dogs, we lost our old dog dish, but it was easily replaced and our doggie water is now outside the shop on nice days.