What's Selling This Week, January 8-14? Being That I am Tabulating This Remotely, There Were a Few Surprises for Me Too.

Greetings from Atlanta! It's good to know that we still sold a few books while I've been gone.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. American Dervish, by Ayad Akhtar
2. Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George
3. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James
4. The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
5. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

In Believing the Lie, the new Thomas Lynley mystery from Elizabeth George, a wealthy businessman asks for a more thorough investigation of the mysterious death of his nephew, which has been ruled accidental. I don't think so!

Our rescheduled Ayad Akhtar event went very smoothly. Now I can start worrying about David Finch (Tuesday), Hannah Pittard/Patrick Somerville (Thursday, January 19), and Adam Johnson (January 23).

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Townie, by Andre Dubus III
2. Van Gogh, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
3. Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
4. The Obamas, by Jody Kantor
5. Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank

What's going on with that sales pop for Townie, being that the event with Andre Dubus III is not until February 17? This is for our in-store book discussion on Monday, February 6. Though the paperback will be out in time for folks who want to wait, we're discounting the hardcover 20% until then so that folks who want to can get an early start on the book.

The Obamas doesn't sound particularly salacious--just the case of a modern working couple who had to revert to a more old-fashioned marriage paradism as that is pretty much still required for a president. It will be interesting to see if when we get a female president, her husband (yes, I'm making many assumptions here) leaves his job.

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
2. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes
3. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell
4. The Fallback Plan, by Leigh Stein
5. Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, by John Le Carre

Lauren Beukes's sales pop is also due to an upcoming book club discussion. The in-store science fiction group is meeting to discuss Zoo City on Monday, February 13, 7 pm. The novel is said to be an interesting take on the urban fantasy genre, set in a reimagined Johannesburg.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
2. Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff
3. Gimbels Has It!, by Michael J. Lisicky
4. Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism, by Ralph Nader
5. Your True Home, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Nader's new book has been on and off our bestseller list since it came out late last year, but now that the gift sales are out of the way, it's ranking is a bit higher. It's sort of a progressive answer to the (are they more conservative or libertarian?) anti-big government books that periodically hit a nerve.

We're kind of surprised at the background color change for the paperback edition of Bossypants. I am all for yellow books, but this one seems a bit off. Just for the record, it is rather trendy of late. Here's a collection of yellow bestsellers in the house.

And now you can answer that question, "Is this book yellower than a duck or not quite as yellow?"

Books for Kids:
1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
2. The Fault in our Stars, by John Green
3. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
4. I am a Bunny, by Ole Rissom/Richard Scarry
5. Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox/Helen Oxenbury

The Fault in our Stars is about a cancer patient who falls in love at a support group. Booklist called it " Booklist called it his "best and most ambitious novel to date" and you may have heard that he signed every copy of the first printing, a big first printing.

Saturday Gift Post--A Day at the Atlanta Gift Show

One of the tricks of writing a blog post about a gift show is that I couldn't figure out whether it was considered ok to take pictures. At least one vendor we carry had a no-picture policy, but with the others, who knows?

In the end, I decided it was more important for me to carry my notebook and a pen and write down the vendors and items that interested me; that left no third hand free for a camera.

I'm feeling a bit lost after my first day at the show. There are a ton of vendors here, and needless to say, most aren't appropriate for the bookstore. However, I am sure there are gems in here and it's up to me to find them. The problems with bringing in vendors run the gamut, but these are the most frequent issues that prevent me from

--opening order too high

--item count too high (in other words, you need to buy 12 of something and we'd be lucky to sell 6)

--display issues. Where do you put this stuff where it seems like a natural part of the bookstore?

Today I'm looking at trends and trying to spot items that might work together. Tonight I'm hoping to review spring titles in our electronic catalogs and see if the book and gift trends converge anywhere. I will say this--remember our six-month display of French stuff? Well I had my choice of metal Eiffel Tower stands. I must have counted 20 models in various booths.

Our Top Paperback Fiction Titles for 2011, Compiled by Jason

I had no idea if we would take off, but the snow stopped by morning, making our odds better. After doing a bit of shoveling, I headed for the airport. Our plane took off right on time. Here's the view from my window in downtown Atlanta.

My, this isn't a particularly interesting blog post. So here are our top 25 fiction paperbacks* for 2011. The only things we excluded were orders that were totally from one bulk sale. If we had multiple bulk sales on the other hand...

1. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
2. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
3. Imperfect Birds, by Anne Lamott
4. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
5. Tinkers, by Paul Harding
6. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
7. Room, by Emma Donoghue
8. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

9. The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer

10. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson

11. The All of It, by Jeannette Haien
12. Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
13. Montana 1948, by Larry Watson
14. The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano
15. The Slap, by Christos Tsiolokas
16. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell
17. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

18. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

19. The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

20. Separate Kingdom, by Valerie Laken

21. The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson
22. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
23. The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
24. Sarah's Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay
25. The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow

Thanks, Jason! Now I have a few more interesting blog posts that nonetheless don't require a lot of thought.

*Yes, this includes mass markets. But there are no contemporary mass markets on our list.

The Snow Comes Down Steadily, We Buy Books for Our This American Offsite, An Email Newsletter Goes Out.

Needless to say, I have spent every waking minute wondering if we did the right thing by moving Ayad Akhtar's event to Friday (January 13, that's tomorrow) for American Dervish. Amie came back from an appointment noting she was stuck on a freeway for an hour behind an accident. The first snow of the year is always pretty tough. Right now I'm feeling like I did the right thing as I wish the steady accumulation in our alley.

Today I spent the day working on all sorts of projects. We're selling some This American Life books at the Ira Glass evening at the Pabst Theater on February 4. There's not book signing or anything--it just seemed like an interesting thing to do. We also picked up several other talks around town, plus we're working on our first book fair. It's funny that Glass doesn't really have any books, just that New Kings of Nonfiction anthology. You'd think there'd be a lot of ideas floating in his head.

If you want to get tickets to his show, here's the link.

I'm planning to go to a gift show tomorrow of all things. Do you think my flight will take off? I'm not sure... With the Akhtar, I'm sort of hoping it is cancelled and I can reschedule for Saturday.

We did get another email newsletter out yesterday.  One error. Much as we try to match day and date, occasionally something slips up. Our event at Sugar Maple on Thursday, January 19 with Patrick Somerville and Hannah Pittard had the wrong date listed once. We're hoping to get another newsletter out next Tuesday--meanwhile, everything is correct on our signs and blog and Facebook and website.

Want to read our email? Here it is.

We Can't Always Get Out of the Way of Storms, but Since in This Case We Could, Ayad Akhtar is now Appearing on Friday, January 13, 7 pm, at Boswell.

One always takes a risk in Milwaukee with winter events. And that's not just true about Milwaukee--don't forget that the East Coast got clobbered with a giant storm this past October. Snow happens, and for the most part, we deal with it.

But Ayad Akhtar's evening at Boswell for American Dervish is not just any event. It's his hometown launch. While we know that the weather forecasters tend to emphasize the worst, it's evening rush hour that's expected to be the messiest, in terms of wind and visibility. And I don't want to be panicking about friends and family on the road.

The good news is that we're able to move this event to Friday, January 13, 7 pm, when the storm should be over. You can laugh along with me when it turns out we only get one inch.

Still can't make it? We can get a first edition copy signed for you.

Laugh Along with David Finch as He Chronicles The Journal of Best Practices at Boswell on Tuesday, January 17.

I would love to say I discovered David Finch's humorous take on Asperger's in his original New York Times Magazine essay, "Somewhere Inside, a Path to Empathy," but I must admit I am a consistent but sometimes spotty reader of the Sunday paper. Instead it was the reading room at the Great Lakes booksellers fall trade show where I fell for his charms. That's why I am particularly excited that Finch will be speaking at Boswell on Tuesday, January 17, at 7 pm.

He was talking about his semi-professional (or was it semi-amateur) diagnosis of Asperger's by his wife, a speech therapist, after giving him a battery of questions. The entire room was laughing along with Finch's descriptions of his behavior, his coping mechanisms. We definitely weren't laughing at David, but with him, as he described his behaviors, his coping methods, his take on others and himself. He made his diagnosis real and understandable to everyone in the audience.

What we learn from his new memoir, The Journal of Best Practices, is that this journey to coping has involved a lot of learned behavior. One particularly intriguing strategy that Finch had taken was to assume characters, or as he notes, "versions of myself that are optimized for the social environment at hand. Conversations must be scripted, facial expressions rehearsed, personalities summoned."

Much of the story is about learning to be in a relationship with others, particularly Finch's wife Kristen. And there is a lot of learning going on. Getting the kids ready for school for example. Not that easy.

I thought this book was great and yes, wrote a rec for the Indie Next list for January*, but ever since I read a take on The Journal of Best Practices from Mel, one of our new booksellers, anything I write pales in comparison. So I think the best thing to do is link you over to her "Of Horses and High Speed" essay in her personal blog, Nefarious Fiddlesticks, and let you read it for yourself.

I can assure you that this event on Tuesday, January 17, 7 pm, is going to be both insightful and entertaining. Hope to see you there.

*Here's my write-up for the American Booksellers Asosociation Indie Next list. you can read about the rest of the January picks here:
The Journal of Best Practices, by David Finch.
“After five years of a struggling marriage, Finch’s wife, Kris, made a breakthrough guess — her husband had Asperger syndrome. The Journal of Best Practices is David Finch’s well-documented attempt to go beyond his previous efforts at fitting in and to actually learn to do things like listen, empathize, and ‘go with the flow.’ Finch still doesn’t like flying in a plane or unsolicited wetness, but the results of his determination are not just meaningful to his family, but also an enlightening, endearing, and amusing chronicle for the rest of us.”

Escaping from New York, Ethiopia, Marriages, Truth, Life...a Book Club Discussion About Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air

A young man works in a refugee settlement center. His job? To rewrite the stories of the wannabe immigrants so that they were more likely to be granted asylum.

His name is Jonas Woldemariam.

"Where are you from?," people would ask.

"Peoria," he would reply.

Mengestu's second novel, How to Read the Air (French edition pictured above, being as the author lives in France, hardcover to the left), is another twist in the traditional immigrant story. It's about a group of people who rewrite their present to make sense of their past.

Mengestu weaves three narratives, one of Jonas's courtship and later estrangement from his wife Angela. The second is of the journey of Yosef and Mariam, the parents of Jonas,  but not from Ethiopia to the United States, but from Peoria to Nashville. And then there is the saga of Yoself's escape from Ethiopia through Sudan that Jonas tells his students at the school where he teaches.

But there are clues that all of these stories, just like the ones that Jonas embellishes for the asylum center, might not be true.

Our in-store lit group met to discuss How to Read the Air (UK edition below right), and had a polite but not always on-the-same-page discussion about storytelling, fiction, truth, and asylum centers. I started out with a few misleading truths of my own--that we would meet on January 2 (postponed) and that the book was at least partly about Ethiopia. It turned out that even Yosef's story begins on the border of the Sudan. Mengestu's point seems to be "don't make assumptions about me," but C. noted that even reviewers sometimes misled their readers about how much Addis you were really getting.

Reading a bit of Mengestu's own story, he grew up with fellow students upset that he didn't fit their mold. To whites, he was black. To other blacks, he didn't speak right, didn't look right, had the wrong kind of name. These are themes we've come across before, most notably in The Girl Who Fell from The Sky. We wondered how often this happens in real life, an actual confrontation of this sort, wherein G. noted that this happened to her a number of times in life. Why aren't you whatever?

Or to rephrase the assumption statement, "Don't put me in a box," as C2 noted. The box imagery seemed to be prevalent in the story, culminating in the storage box that Jonas claims Yosef was placed in for his immigrant voyage. I saw the story with a parallel action motif, of escape. Everyone in Mengestu's story is escaping from something--another country, marriage, expections, one's past, New York. A recurring joke that Jonas's wife Angela likes to tell involves all the ways her father left the family.

If there was any sort of consensus in the conversation about How to Read the Air (the American paperback at left), it seemed to be a dislike or at least a lack of understanding about Angela. She's an African American woman who has overcome a tough past to be a New York lawyer. She's at a second-rate firm, but she's got a game plan to get ahead, only Jonas isn't with the program. I sort of sympathized with her more than others--and felt that Jonas never really made the attempt to understand her. This is compared with Jonas's father Yosef, who despite physically abusing his wife, got some sort of sympathy from the story Jonas told to his class about his escape, and this sympathy passed on to our readers. I was surprised by this.

Storytelling accomplishes a lot. It passes on knowledge. It creates relationships. But one thing we don't always think about is that storytelling is a balm for the truth.

For example, I think the fiercest debate was whether Yosef's story was true, false, or true with embellishment. It's my thought that there are hints throughout the narrative that the story is false.

Others disagreed, but at least in this case, I'm the one telling the story.

***

Our next in-store lit discussion is Monday, February 6, 7 pm. We're talking about Andre Dubus III's memoir Townie. Speaking of father-and-son narratives, this is about Dubus's upbringing in a hardscrabble mill town with a single mom, estranged until young adulthood from his acclaimed short story writer father. Hope I got that correct--I no longer trust my descriptions.

Townie should be coming in paperback any minute, or if you'd like to buy the hardcover from us, we're keeping it priced at 20% off until the paperback arrives.

And then on Monday, March 5, we'll discuss Karen Russell's Swamplandia. You knew it had to happen...

Poet, Prose Stylist, and Perhaps Puppeteer Pops into Boswell This Wednesday, January 11.

"I just enjoy this tute! Thanks for expressing so many great suggestions along with us almost all! I like your talent pertaining to materials. Our god Thank you you!"

It's so heartwarming to see how well my posts go over with readers, particularly ones linking comments to gold-buying and other get-rich quick websites.  I can't imagine how all you folks will respond to today's blog, reminding folks of a week of another interesting event this week at Boswell.

I think we've covered Ayad Akhtar pretty well (Thursday, January 12, 7 pm, for those hiding under a rock), but we've got another fine author this week, Leigh Stein, whose first novel from Melville House, The Fallback Plan, will be featured this Wednesday, January 11, 7 pm.

Stein's novel covers the life after college territory of many a first novel (they are somtimes called slacker lit-we've got at least one more event this winter from an author whose novel veers this territory), but does so in a particularly exuberant and wry manner. Esther is home with a drama degree, not quite ready to give up on an acting career. A babysitting opportunity comes up (or rather, is thrust at her), and really, is there any choice in the matter?

Is Esther's lethargy really boredom or is it closer to depression? Is it a good idea to be hanging around with her old pal Pickle and his devastatingly handsome friend Jack? And could this new nanny-esque role be just the jolt Esther needs for a jumpstart into adulthood?

Now that I think about it, the nanny is even more of a modern icon that has been featured in many a Boswell event. Though we never hosted the authors of The Nanny Diaries, works from Lorrie Moore, Lori Tharps, and Mona Simpson have looked at the nanny, the nannied, and the nanny needer from just about every angle. I saw one advance reviewer compare Stein to Ms. Moore. Another, at Booklist, saw The Fallback Plan as a modern interpretation of Judy Blume's Are You There God, It's Me Margaret. Hey, Chuck Palahniuk just took a turn at that. Maybe we'll start moving the Blume young adult books again. We sell her middle-grade work more successfully.

And hey, here's a Gary Shteyngart quote: "Beautiful, funny, thrilling and true."

Here's the Journal Sentinel's event post. I mention this because Mr. Higgins let me know that the arts posts on Tap--reviews and interviews and such, do not count towards your article minimum for subscribing. They continue to be free! Thanks for clearing that up.

Did I mention that Stein is a triple threat? In addition to her fiction writing and blogging, Stein's first book of poetry will  also come out later in 2012. It's called Dispatches from the Future and it's been compared to Ada Limón and Tao Lin. Stein has received an Amy award from the magazine Poets and Writers. Have us hold a copy for you when it comes out in June.

Stein's poetry possesses the same cheekiness as her fiction, only perhaps taken to another level. Here's a video from her 2010 blog, Poets and Puppets:

leigh stein from Leigh Stein on Vimeo.

So isn't it fair for me to call Stein a puppeteer? I've got video proof.

And finally, since I'm throwing in everything but the kitchen sink here, here's a list of the 33 books Stein read in 2011. See where you overlap. And perhaps see you this Wednesday, January 11, at Boswell.

And to close, perhaps we'll get a lovely comment such as this from one of our many readers, with a side business in selling prepaid phone cards: "Well this is good info for me. Thanks for sharing this!"