Friday Short Post--Our New Art Wall Exhibit! J. Shimon and J. Lindemann's Photographs from Michael Perry's Visiting Tom (And Perry is Himself Visiting on August 24, 7 pm).

We're thrilled to have an exhibit of J. Shimon and J. Lindemann's photographs connected with Michael Perry's Visiting Tom: A Man, A Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace. The new book comes out August 21, and our event is Friday, August 24, 7 pm.

This past Wednesday, Shimon and Lindemann hung the photos that open the chapters of the new book. Also present was Debra Brehmer of the Portrait Society Gallery, who will have a new exhibit of the artists' work in September. They did a beautiful job, but as I'm not a photographer, I couldn't eliminate the glare.  Plus I took the photo slanty.

The photos are mesmerizing, and yes, they are for sale too. Prints are $200 unframed, $275 framed. As in all exhibitions, we'll mark the print when it is sold, and they'll be available to take home at the end of the showing. We have a copy of each unframed print to take home for instant photo satisfaction. I am a little overwhelmed that we are in the company of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and West Bend's Museum of Wisconsin Art. This is pretty amazing.*

I'm hoping that by sometime this weekend (I'm working closing shift Friday and Saturday this weekend) I'll have the protocol set for booksellers to make the transaction. And I'll have a longer post about Michael Perry, Tom Hartwig, and the new book closer to the on-sale date.

And how appropriate to post today, as its Gallery Night. The Portrait Society Gallery is hosting a closing reception from 6 to 9 pm (and open again from 1 to 5 pm tomorrow), and it's your last chance to visit before Debra Brehmer temporarily closes for deconstruction and rebuilding. That's why the theme of the current exhibits are Destruction, Re-configuration, and Growth. Plus there's a Secret Gallery. The Gallery is at 227 E. Buffalo, Fifth Floor.

*And there's nothing like going out on a high note, regarding our Art Wall. We're expecting to give up this alcove to Starbucks, who desperately needs more seating. One day I'll figure out a new space for an art wall, but it will never be the same. I'll miss you, Arty!

Our New Friend Comic Thriller Writer Lou Berney Stops by to Sign Stock.

Just because we don't have any events for a few days doesn't mean we aren't meeting interesting authors. Today Lou Berney was in to sign stock of Whiplash River before having a scheduled talk/signing at Mystery One on Prospect.

It's my thought that it's worthwhile for publishers to send authors in for stock signings, but sometimes publishers have too large a requirement to make the stop worthwhile. I now have publicists who ask for ten books minimum before they will schedule a stop. I'm sort of surprised because isn't it in the author's best interest to meet booksellers? Shouldn't we be the ones asking for something, as we are filling down time in the author's schedule, as well as the obvious event snub, as the author is clearly appearing elsewhere?

But we do bring in some copies for the author to sign if we think it's a good fit, and in Berney's case, we could immediately imagine booksellers who'd want to read his books, and customers we could sell them to. His two novels have gotten some great reviews, and his vibe is Elmore Leonardy, crime, but not quite traditional mysteries. And bad guys yes, but there are good bad guys and bad bad guys.

In the new novel (the two are related but the second is clearly not a sequel to Gutshot Straight, per the author), Shake Bouchon, formerly getaway driver for the Armenian mob in L.A., is now running a restaurant in Belize. He's not escaped entirely, being still the target of several hit men, as well as an FBI officer who wants him to rat out his former cohorts.

You get the picture. Marcus Sakey writes ""Slick, sleek, and wildly entertaining, Whiplash River is pure pleasure. I'm a snob for prose, and these words sing, managing to be at once lean and evocative, confident and wry. Lou Berney is that kind of annoyingly skilled stylist who makes everything look easy."

So Berney came by and I introduced him to some booksellers and made him give the elevator pitch. And I'm paraphrasing here, but he replied, "I've done Hollywood and I know I need to be ready for this, but..." Oh, we dragged it out of him. Hey, we make our visiting authors work! 

As someone who's both an avid reader and traveling to a lot of stores, Berney was up for a little chat about our favorite bookstores. We both oohed and ahhed about Elliot Bay and Powell's of course, and then tried to exchange tips on some lesser knowns. Berney wondered why I haven't been to Magers and Quinn yet. I confess that I don't think I've been to MSP since Baxter's closed, and that is really dating me. No, that's not true, but it has been a long time.

I asked what's going on in Oklahoma City, Berney's current home. I've been to Oklahoma once, but only Tulsa. The indie of note there is Full Circle Bookstore, at Penn Place. It's got a nice ambience, a cafe, events, and storytimes with Miss Julie. I learned that you abbreviate Oklahoma City "OKC." I like that!

I Love, Love, Love The Collective. Now All I Have to Do is Convince More People of its Charms.

A few days ago I was chatting with one regular. Our conversation veered between events and reading. Folks who read the blog are well aware that I try to read as many event books as I can, and I’m lucky to enough to be backed up by a group of booksellers that are also up for reading event books. And then there are the events that we book in part because of good reads. We’ve already got two enthusiasts for the new novels from Peter Geye (The Lighthouse Road), Emma Straub (Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures) and Michael Ennis (The Malice of Fortune), all appearing this fall. And all authors for whom we hope our enthusiasm will translate into your enthusiasm. We're adding them to our upcoming events page faster than ever so that you can mark your calendar earlier.

But then our friend asked, “Which do you like the best?” and I had to admit that my favorite book of late is not one for which we have an event. It’s Don Lee’s The Collective, which I’ve written about already in several contexts. It was included on my NPR spring roundup, and I noted some similarities to Joe Meno’s Office Girl, in that it looked at how art and identity can become intertwined. I also may have noted (or maybe not—I realize now that I haven’t written a post completely devoted to Lee’s newest novel) that Lee had the chance to ride the wave of rebirth of the college novel, following home runs from Chad Harbach and Jeffrey Eugenides last year.

Oh, and believe me, I tried to have an event. I hoped that with the book being partly set at Macalester, Lee might go back and read in St. Paul, particularly as Common Ground just moved just off campus to be Macalester's unofficial official bookstore. Hey, once you're in Minnesota, how much is it to add Wisconsin? After all, a percentage of the folks I deal with in New York might be convinced that Milwaukee is St. Paul's sister city, if I could just keep them away from a map. But it was not to be.

Don Lee is one of those novelists (remember that essay about Sheila Kohler and Diana Abu-Jaber) who tries to stretch with each novel, and yet his varied works are thematically connected. That push and pull of cultural identity, that simultaneous desire to embrace one’s heritage (in Lee’s case a specific Korean or broader Asian-American) tends to follow Lee from work to work. But by embracing it, I don’t mean that he ever considered what Samuel Park did, and re-imagine the Korea of his earlier generations. (And on aside note, Park doesn’t want to repeat either; his next novel is likely to be set elsewhere). I see some other connections to Lee’s previous novel, the much-beloved (at least by me) Wrack and Ruin. The relationship that our narrator Eric has with Joshua, the writer whose death is possibly suicide, possibly accident, is not too different from that of the brothers in the earlier story. And while the new novel is hardly the comic romp of his previous work, it is still infused with the humor that winds through all of Lee’s work.

So this is what happens for all novels that I like, not just the ones for which there are events. I start doing searches. Will the hits for title-author-review be newspapers or blogs or most disappointingly, just various online retail store listings? I knew that Lee had gotten some love in Entertainment Weekly, calling it “a heartbreaking, sexy, and frequently funny story about fractured friendships.” An A-? I’ll gladly take it. Yes, it gets to the point, and I’m sure many readers can identify with this, that I take these reviews as personally as if I wrote them. Oh, how my heart died when both the daily and Sunday New York Times Book Review ripped Chris Cleave. He notes that he’s not invited to the literary party in London. Oh, I think in New York they didn’t just disinvite you, they threw red wine on you and tossed you out the door. Sigh. But I digress.

So what’s next as I search the reviews? Oh, here’s an NPR piece. Uh oh, it’s my piece. That doesn’t count.

And then I find John Freeman’s review in the Boston Globe. Freeman is the editor of Granta and former NBCC president. One should know that Lee once edited Ploughshares, but I don’t care to figure out who is logrolling. The review is glorious; Freeman totally gets it, and even his awareness of some of the novel's warts (to which I applied Compound W and made light of) are smartly targeted.

“The Collective threads a perfect line between the theoretical dogfights of the classroom and the actual dogfight of experience. Half of what you learn in college, after all, is discovering what you don’t already yet have experience to fully know. One of the pleasures of college life, and writing workshops, is the notion of there being safety in numbers, that if there is suffering to be done, it will be done collectively. The Collective reveals what a fallacy this idea is, especially when experience constantly has to be doubly refracted, as it is for Lee’s characters: once against the theories that frame cultural identity, and then again through the filter of Asian American identity itself.” (Note to Eugene, my copyright lawyer friend—did I quote too much here?)

Yes, yes, that’s what’s the genius of the college novel! You learn the theory, preferably in a vaccum, and that watch that theory play out in real life. Of course, sometimes the two parts of the novel are sequential, and other times (like in Harbach) they are played out simultaneously by different characters.

Now all I need are three hundred papers around the country to pick up this review. I am formally requesting that the book not be reviewed by daily New York Times. I’m afraid of what either Michiko Kakutani or Janet Maslin would do to it. There aren't really regular reviewers as such in the New York Times Book Review, but I think this could be a hit with Liesl Schillinger. I think either Ron Charles or Louis Bayard in the Washington Post would like it. Or of course Mameve Medwed. I think she’d like it, especially as it’s partly set in Cambridge. Look at me, I'm trying to hand-sell to book reviewers.

Now here’s hoping it gets a nice Indie Next review from a fellow bookseller. Uh oh.

And now, to do a better job of selling it. And just to toot this hardcover's horn and give a shout-out to W. W. Norton, this book is sufficiently heavy. Good paper!

Boswell Best Focus on Kids' Novels--Land of Stories, Shadow and Bone, Seraphina.

There sure are a lot of interesting kids’ novels on Boswell’s Best this week. I don't think about kids' books as much in the summer because our kids' events are so closely tied to schools. There was a time years ago when most children’s book releases came with one shipment in spring and another in fall. But now it’s a 12-months-a-year business and we are only the better for it.

One of the books with the biggest buzz has been Chris Colfer’s The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell (Little, Brown). The premise is that Alex and Conner are given a treasured fairytale book by their grandmother, and that book is probably treasured because it sends them into the Land of Stories, where Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella married the three Charming brothers, and Goldilocks is a wanted fugitive. Playing with these fairytales is of course big fun for writers (Jodi Picoult and her daughter Samantha van Leer are also fans of the concept, as well as our pal Michael Buckley) because it’s all public domain. You can’t play with Disney characters without the corporation’s approval—you can thank our government for indefinitely extending copyright laws for that. Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today has a good time with Colfer’s book (yes, it’s Kurt Hummel from Glee), but wishes it had been slightly shorter. I think this is the function of the smaller-than-normal trim; it almost reminds me of the old Big Little Books.

Veronica Roth’s Insurgent, a series that several Boswellians have enjoyed, is still on the Best, but you folks all know about that. Folks who enjoyed Divergent and its sequel might go for Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo (Henry Holt) . Orphaned Alina Starkov is drafted into the army with her friend Mal, sent on a dangerous mission into The Fold, and then, when the convoy is attacked, is trained to become a Grisha. If you don’t read kids’ fantasy (let alone, adult fantasy), you’re kind of not understanding the basics of the genre—the chosen one is a plain sort with a power previously unknown. Then you add a lot of exotic sounding descriptions that play upon some sort of mythology (once again, public domain). But Bardugo has what many other kids’ fantasy books dream about at night, great reviews including a full writeup by Laini Taylor in The New York Times Book Review. As she notes about the lush setup, which draws upon Russian mythology: “Bardugo’s setup is shiver-inducing, of the delicious variety. This is what fantasy is for: letting us slip into the skin of characters grappling with great power and the destinies that come with it.”

Boswellian Pam is crazy for Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina (Random House) , joining the chorus that includes Christopher Paolini (“beautiful written”) and Tamora Pierce (“I love this book.”) Here’s her take: “For forty years, an uneasy peace has existed between humans and dragons, who can contract themselves into human form, often to work as scholars in the world of Goredd. Seraphina, a gifted musician just hired as assistant to the court music master, has a secret that could doom both her and her father. She tries to keep a low profile but, is drawn into the investigation of the murder of a royal prince that looks suspiciously like a dragon-like attack. Because she has a dragon teacher, her knowledge of dragons is useful to Krigs, Captain of the Guard. She falls in love with him even though he is engaged to the Princess of the Realm, Seraphina’s student and also friend. I loved this book. The characters were complex and the world was original and richly developed. I have read a lot of fantasy books with dragons but, this one has a very unusual twist. Hopefully this author will write more novels in the future and I look forward to eagerly devouring them.”

I’ll also direct you to Random House’s website, where they show the four starred advance reviews, from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. Is that a chorus, or what? All three titles are 20% off through at least next Monday, including website orders.

What's Going on This Week at Boswell? St. Sukie de la Croix, Gregg Shapiro, Nick Weber.

Tuesday, July 24, 7 pm, at Boswell
St. Sukie de la Croix, author of Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall, and Gregg Shapiro, author of GREGG SHAPIRO: 77.

Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix offers a colorful and vibrant record of LGBT Chicago, from the Civil War to the 1960s. Joining him will be fellow Chicago journalist and poet, Gregg Shapiro, with a new collection of autobiographical poems.

More on their website.

Wednesday, July 25, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Nick Weber, author of The Circus That Ran Away with a Jesuit Priest.

Armed with a graduate degree in drama and another in sacred theology, and backed by the California Province of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit priest Nick Weber's Royal Lichenstein Circus crisscrossed the United States for 22 years. Now in Milwaukee as a layperson and leader of a popular Shakespeare program, Weber tells how spiritual seeking merged with three-ring entertainment for two decades.

Yesterday's Cue section in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel focused on wire service reviews, so we don't have any JSonline links, but arts editor Jim Higgins wrote a thoughtful roundup of literary reactions to the tragic shooting at the Aurora movie complex last weekend, including thoughts from Deborah Blum and Dave Cullen.

Sunday Post--What Sold at Boswell for the Week Ending July 21, 2012.

I spent Sunday at the Chicago gift show, and while I was tempted to take my laptop, I realized that 1) it would be very heavy and 2) I would likely at least one of my precious hours working on the blog, when I should be finding ornaments, lunch bags, and that vendor with the wooden trees from Germany that we had in 2010. So now it's pretty late and I can't remember why we sold anything.

Hardcover fiction:
1. Gold, by Chris Cleave
2. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
3. Fallen Angel, by Daniel Silva
4. Canada, by Richard Ford
5. Redshirts, by John Scalzi

Gone Girl is on fire, with all the enthusiasm she generated before publication translating into amazing word of mouth building on great reviews. Now Tana French's fourth novel, Broken Harbor, just got a rave in the New York Times too, and she was sort of one of our Flynn comparisons. We'll see if they are battling it out next week.

Hardcover nonfiction:
1. Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss
2. The Good Food Revolution, by Will Allen
3. Bushville Wins, by John Klima
4. The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz
5. The Passage of Power, by Robert Caro

I guess when it comes to this category, boys rule this week. Jason spotted Will Allen at the Fox Point farmers market last Saturday, and we also noticed he did a two-hour signing at B&N. I suspect more is to come. We were also remiss in noting that Klima wound up signing at the Milwuakee County Historical Society last week. Hope interested parties caught the notice in the Shepherd Express.

Paperback fiction:
1. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James
2. Pryme Knumber, by Matt Flynn
3. The Devil all the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock
4. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
5. Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

Nice to see a pop at Chris Cleave's event for Incendiary. The London Telegraph noted: "The eloquence of Cleave’s heroine is equal to the atrocity that claims her family. She is by turns funny, sad, flawed, sympathetic, both damaged and indomitable, and triumphantly convincing." We have signed copies.

Paperback nonfiction:
1. Clemente, by David Maraniss
2. F for Effort, by Richard Benson
3. When Pride Still Mattered, by David Maraniss
4. Rome 1960, by David Maraniss
5. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

Can this possibly be a true answer from a high school test?
Q: Fossil fuels are usually associated with which major type of rock?
A: Classic rock
I suspect some of our customers could do their own version of F for Effort, the sequel to F in Exams.

Books for kids:
1. All the World, by Liz Garton Scanlon
2. Think Big, by Liz Garton Scanlon
3. Noodle and Lou, by Liz Garton Scanlon
4. A Sock is a Pocket for Your Toes, by Liz Garton Scanlon
5. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

Guess what we did this weekend? Yes, Liz Garton Scanlon led a picture book workshop for SCBWI. It pays to join! I only came in at the tail end, but learned some interesting details on what I writer can do to have the best kids' book possible. Her new picture book, Think Big, is sort of a wish book for kids on unleashing creativity. Vanessa Brantley Newton's illustrations mesh well with Scalon's rhymes to help us travel into a world of art, music, theater, and craft. Did I mention that as a child, I was obsessed with potter's wheels? I learned in college that it's harder than it looks. We have signed copies of both Think Big and Noodle and Lou, the next best thing to their having been a public component to the program.

Saturday Gift Post--The Return of Owls.

When I am putting together gift displays, I try not to repeat myself, but it turns out that trends move slower than I expected. For every breath of octopus freshness, there's sock monkey redux.

And so it started with owls when Benjamin offered a leather owl bank. And then we started buying Kikkerland, and I fell in love with their owl corkscrew. And the luggage tags were working pretty well (one of the more popular items on the rubber duck table) so I had to try the owls of that too.

So this gave us the opportunity to flip some display tables around. Anne said that she no sooner finished setting the owl table than someone came and bought three items off it. And what makes me the most happy is that we once again have a logical place to display Sam and the Firefly.

Four Fabulously Original Trade Papebacks on Our Front Tables from Indie Publishers.

So I was wandering around the store today and noticed that there were a whole bunch of paperbacks up front that I didn't really recognize. I hadn't really remembered seeing them in hardcover, and that's because, as I confirmed with Jason, they are all paperback originals. This was yesterday's future of publishing, before ebooks were tomorrow's future of publishing. But of course yesterday's tomorrow is today, which is as good a reason as any to call these books to your attention.

Nancy Huston has a new novel? Who knew? I really enjoyed Fault Lines several years ago. The new novel, Infrared (Black Cat/Grove Press) which came out in France in 2010, is about Rena Greenblatt, a successful photographer who has overcome both a troubled childhood and twice as many failed marriages, who takes a holiday in Florence with her father and stepmother. The banal family holiday is juxtaposed, both with accounts from her lover covering race riots in Paris, and her own first-person intimate confessions. Did I get those details write? Starred review from Publishers Weekly and France Soir called it “an intense and sensual novel.”

Jason, on the other hand, read the last Nathan Larson novel, The Dewey Decimal System, and seemed quite excited by The Nervous System (Akashic), which Ken Bruen praised as “sheer magic and delirious joy” on the book jacket. Our hero, the eponymous Dewey Decimal, is living in post-apocalyptic New York City, where he attempts to make order of the New York Public Library. He’s also a vet, has OCD, and he freelances as muscle for corrupt politicians and various underworlders The new novel finds Dewey attempting to clean up the loose ends of the first book (including a killing, which I probably shouldn’t give away if you are still planning to read it). Laura Lippman pines over the perfect prose, “as tweaked and jumpy and memorable as the man known as Dewey Decimal.” To her taste, she’s more of a Library of Congress girl.

Misfit, by Adam Braver (Tin House) shows Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dress on its jacket and that might be a clue that this novel is about the last weekend of her life, spent at the Cal Neva lodge, Frank Sinatra’s resort. Braver’s fascinated with this line of inspiration, having previously penned November 22, 1963 (Kennedy) and Divine Sarah (Bernhardt), more last moments of the stars--I see a boxed set someday. Dan Chaon notes “Adam Braver has a wonderfully rich imagination and his grasp of historical characters and settings is both deep and natural. I would gladly read anything he writes.” while Ann Beattie offers that this “amazing” novel is about “identity, privacy, and intimacy that both exposes and conceals its subject.” From my short browsing of the Misfit, it called to mind Lily Tuck, but I have no idea if that bears out.
Children in Reindeer Woods (Open Letter) is translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith. I am very excited to try to get all the accents correct. The author is Kristín Ómarsdóttir (perhaps best known in Iceland as a playwright, where she won the prestigious Griman award) has written a story about young Billie, whose temporary home turns out to be in a war zone. Paratroopers kill everyone in the home and then turn on each other, and Billie is forced to live with Rafael, a solider turned farmer. Shane, where are you? I think this author is channeling Jesse Ball. From Kirkus: “This is the first of Icelandic author Ómarsdottir's novels to appear in English, and it shouldn't be the last. Somewhere in the reader's mind, Catch-22 echoes faintly.”