Dwyane Wade Signing Tickets on Sale Today.

After a lot of exciting meetings, conversations, complications, and the like, we're pleased to announce that tickets have gone on sale for a signing with Dwyane Wade, Miami Heat guard and Marqutte alum, for his book A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger than Basketball. The memoir goes on sale September 4. Our signing, co-sponsored by Marquette University, is on Tuesday, September 11, 1 pm.

The signing is at Marquette University's Al McGuire Center. There are no walkups. You can get tickets at the Brown Paper Tickets site. Great idea, Stacie! And while I'm giving out thanks, I'm very grateful to Jim at the Marquette University Athletic Department Spirit Shop for all his help.

Because we want to make as many people happy in the small allotment of time that we have with the author, there are restrictions. No personalization, no memorabilia, no books brought from home, and no posed photographs. We are currently limited to 500 tickets.

I got a little panicky as we sold a lot of tickets in the first hour. The last thing I want is for our regular customers not to get a chance to go. So the email newsletter went out today, and the blog will follow, reposted to Facebook and Twitter.

The Tuesday After Book Club Post--What Did We Think of The Buddha in the Attic?

In 2002, Julie Otsuka’s first novel, When the Emperor was Divine came out. It was a spare novel, told through the eyes of a never named family, which told with their experience in the Japanese internment camps. For some reason, I always connect this book with our kids' buyer Amie, as she was a huge fan of the novel, and continues to be (it's still often on her staff rec shelf).

The new novel is just as spare, and mentions lots of names this time, but its format is just as unconventional. The in-store lit group was excited to read a short book for once, though the savvy ones successfully guessed that I would follow it up with something long (see below). We met yesterday evening to discuss our responses to The Buddha in the Attic.

The format of the book is first-person plural. While one can look back to Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” for inspiration, and the second coming in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, I was able to think of a few more titles had come out more recently—Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, by Dean Bakopoulos and The Fates Will Find Their Way, by Hannah Pittard.

In Otsuka’s case, it worked to good effect, for most of us. The story was like an amoeba, telling a group narrative, while morphing to note individually stories, sometimes for just a line, with at most a paragraph. Otsuka's line is hypnotic,and as C. noted, you can see the author's background as an artist in the work, in the intricacy of the construction.

And then it was revealed. It didn’t work for N. Beautiful, yes. A novel? For her, no. Is there a plotline? But without a character or characters to follow, it just didn’t connect to one of our readers. I noted that having more poetry than I’ve read since leaving high school, it seemed like this book could have easily been labeled a poem, or a cycle of poems. But we all know that this change of category would have cut potential sales from 200,000 to 2,000. Not likely to happen.

For the most part, the rest of us disagreed, though I was on N.’s side for one point. Towards the end of the book, the voice changes. Otsuka switches the first person plural narrative from one amorphous group to another. I wondered if this was not one “we” too many. How would The Buddha in the Attic read if this coda had not used the device?

Needless to say, we didn’t spend an hour talking about structure. R. and M. both wondered how true the stories were. We were quite aware of the long list of references in the acknowledgements, but this was a novel, after all, and there was no need to hew closely to the facts of the researched lives. Only one problem—you know that folks will read this, even academics, and interpret these stories as facts, so it’s probably not a bad idea to make too much up.

Coincidentally I had just heard academic Leslie Bow on Wisconsin Public Radio's University of the Air discuss her book, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South. One of the interesting things about her interview actually gave more weight to Otsuka’s unique structure. Alas, the book is a net-priced textbook, so don’t expect to find this at your local bookstore.

Bow constantly answered questions generalizing about the Asian American experience in the South. She’d have one example and that was the way it was. I thought more effective was the way that Otsuka told a group experience, but then was able to highlight the differences in the stories. One major difference was that Bow noted that in the segregated South, the Asians were often confused about whether to be categorized as “white” or “colored”, and while they themselves thought they were colored, more often than not, the society was willing to group them with white.

Not so in Otsuka’s narrative, where the Japanese were not allowed to eat at certain restaurants, and had to see movies in the section for African Americans. Sorry folks, I’m not using the term that was used. I wondered what explained the difference between Asians in the South and the West? We suspected that this was a question of relative numbers, but I’ll leave the answer to the historians.

I would say that aside from N.’s reservations, The Buddha in the Attic went over quite well, with several of us passionate devotees—two attendees had read it twice. J. loved it. S. loved it. C. loved it. C2 noted that she is not one to dwell on structure, and she enjoyed it as a good story. And as for N., she agreed, as did we all, that having a less-than-stellar read on a book can often make the conversation afterwards more interesting and spirited.

Here are our upcoming discussions. Feel free to attend:
Tuesday, September 4, 2012, 7 pm (date changed to avoid Labor Day):
West of Here, by Jonathan Evison.

Monday, October 1, 7 pm:
Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin.

Monday, November 5, 7pm:
Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles.

Weekly Event Post--Lev Grossman and Michael Poore at Boswell Tomorrow, August 7, 7 pm.

We only have one event this week, but what an event! We are pleased to host Lev Grossman and Michael Poore together tomorrow, Tuesday, August 7, 2012.

Lev Grossman is the author of The Magicians and its sequel, The Magician King. Jim Higgins in a Journal Sentinel blog post directs folks to a good interview at the AVClub with Todd VanDerWerff. As noted, Grossman is also the book editor at Time magazine, and is the author of another novel, Codex, which also had a great bookseller rec in the Schwartz days.

There's also a video of Grossman being interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer of Omnivoracious.


If you haven't decided whether or not to read this series, let alone come to the event, here's some encouragement from Alexander Chee from last year's NPR review:

"The novel's structure is the bravura performance, with the quest in the present crosscut regularly by flashback chapters from Julia's past, the two timelines intersecting at the climax. We discover the old wound that binds Julia and Quentin to Fillory's doom — and with it, the book's true precipitating moment, as well as what is at stake for this world — moments before the novel's climax. The payoff is spectacular, a climax reinventing what we know of both novels thus far in the trilogy." Read the rest here.

Grossman is in the area for an event at Chicago's Leaky Con this coming Friday, August 10. It's a conversation with John Green. Can it be sold out yet? I suspect so.

As you know, opening for Grossman will be Michael Poore, author of Up Jumps the Devil.  Publishers Weekly offered this praise:

"In his skillfully plotted and richly metaphorical debut novel, Poore sweeps from the beginning of time to a media-obsessed, 21st-century America chronicling the Devil’s quest to 'raise the civilizations of earth until they looked down on Heaven.'"

Laura Schultz in the online magazine The New York Journal of Books calls Up Jumps the Devil an "elegiac masterpiece."

I have no video to show you of Poore, so I leave you with the next best thing, John Davis and the Monster Orchestra with some disco-era mood music.

Sunday Bestseller Post from Boswell for the Week Ending August 4, 2012.

Hardcover fiction:
1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
2. Heading Out to Wonderful, by Robert Goolrick
3. Broken Harbor, by Tana French
4. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers
5. The Fallen Angel, by Daniel Silva

There are some bestselling authors who can sell well in independents, despite aggressive price competition in other markts. Daniel Silva is one of those authors, and reviews make all the difference. Here is NPR critic Alan Cheuse extolling Silva's newest, The Fallen Angel (Harper). In this installment, Silva's special agent slash art restorer Gabriel Allon is working on a Caravaggio in the Vatican. Someone on the staff dies, and yes, there's another conspiracy underfoot. He's also hot for another new spy novel, A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming, which goes on sale this Tuesday.

Hardcover nonfiction:
1. From Animal House to Our House, by Ron Tanner
2. Bush Wins, by John Klima
3. I am a Pole and So Can You, by Stephen Colbert
4. Darth Vader and Son, by Jeffrey Brown
5. Pring's Photographer's Miscellany, by Roger Pring

Well, now you can see that I am opportunistically moving the Colbert and Brown impulse books from fiction (where I think they belong) to nonfiction (where The New York Times classifies them), based on how the books on the list are selling. Nonfiction was light this week, but it was nice to see a pop from Pring's Photographer's Miscellany: Stories, Techniques, Tips, and Trivia (Ilex/IPS), which is currently on our impulse table.  It's the book that every photographer doesn't know that they want you, but actually do.

Paperback fiction:
1. Pryme Knumber, by Matt Flynn
2. Office Girl, by Joe Meno
3. Fifty Shades Freed, by E.L. James
4. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
5. Fifty Shades Darker, by E.L. James
6. The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka (lit book club 8/6, 7 pm)
7. The Time in Between, by Maria Dueñas
8. The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
9. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (buzz builds for movie)
10. Up Jumps the Devil, by Michael Poore

Interest is heating up for our event with Lev Grossman and Michael Poore this coming Tuesday, August 7. But to me, the interesting story this week in the pop of the doorstop novel, now in paperback The Time in Between (Atria), by Maria Dueñas. The publisher really worked hard to get reads in hardcover for this, and now that might be paying off in paperback. It's the story of a Sira, a dressmaker who, choosing between two suitors during the Spanish Civil War, but her true choice winds up being a life of espionage. Patty Rhule at USA Today calls it Le Carre light, and why not? It's summer after all. Best of all, at 600 pages, you only have to pack one book for the trip.

Paperback nonfiction:
1. How to be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran
2. The Tao of Travel, by Paul Theoux
3. Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, by Jesse Jarnow
4. 1493, by Charles Mann
5. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

I find again and again that Jason is great at spotting books that I would have missed as a buyer. Who the heck is Caitlin Moran and why do I want her? But it turns out we're selling lots of How to be a Woman (Harper Perennial), and in part it's because "there's lots of things to love" about Moran, according to Emma Brockes in The New York Times. A feminist memoir-festo and funny too? That's a good fit for our store.

Books for Kids:
1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
2. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
3. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
4. Olympia the Games Fairy, by Daisy Meadows
5. The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

It's hard to get ahead of Collins,but even kids can get Olympic fever. Kristy and Rachel are very excited about the local triathlon going on, but when people start swimming in circles, losing bike tires, and tripping over their feet while running, it becomes clear that magic objects belonging to Olympia the Games Fairy (Rainbow Magic Special Edition, Scholastic) have disappeared. Having read how crazy the Olympic Games committee is about protecting sponsors (Bagels displayed in rings? Banned!), I would suggest that all little girls keep this book out of their backpack when visiting London.

In the Journal Sentinel today, Jim Higgins continues his series of interviewing writers about book they're excited about. The new book that Larry Watson touts is Schmidt Steps Back (Knopf), by Louis Begley. One should not that the series was adapted into About Schmidt, but the Alexander Payne movie pretty much had nothing to do with the book. American Boy is now out in paperback.

Also in the Journal Sentinel, Mike Fischer reviews Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, a book that shouldn't miss, being that it combines two of Fischer's great loves--he doubles as a drama critic. And yes, he likes it, arguing that Callow's experience as an actor adds to the depth of the work. It's out this coming Tuesday from Vintage.

And putting our speculative and spy themes in this post together at last, Jim Higgins reviews The Coldest War (Tor), which yes, is a speculative spy novel. The genre specifically is altnernative history, and this sequel to Bitter Seeds finds us in 1963, where Russia rules everything east of Paris. Oh, and there are also warlocks and twin Russians who were the subject of experiments to give people superpowers. From Higgins: "Tregillis' breathtaking set pieces include an attempted ambush of an invisible assassin and the rescue of a savant from an enemy stronghold. Some of the seeds he planted in the first novel flower bitterly and impressively in this one."

Saturday Gift Post--My First Trip to the Minneapolis Gift Mart (Which is Not in Minneapolis)

This morning I headed out to Minnetonka for the Minneapolis Gift Mart’s, periodic gift show. Like most marts, the show is a combination of permanent showrooms, opened to retail buyers without appointments, combined with temporary booths for folks who don’t normally show. One assumes that the showrooms are open by appointment at other times, but one would have to be far more substantial operation than an indie bookstore. for that to happen.
As I have mentioned previously in the blog, some of the vendors don’t really understand the concept of a bookstore at a gift show. “Let me show you some books” was a refrain I heard more than once. I tried to explain that we buy books from book vendors at book shows, and that at a show like this, we are looking for anything but books.

I have been a bit concerned by the continual shrinking of space at the Chicago show. Most recently, Google has displace a several gift vendors down from permanent show rooms to temporaries. A this show, there didn’t seem to be a concern, although it was less than convenient to have the temporaries at the Mariott next door (and being that this was a pretty suburban setting, next door was about a half mile away).

It’s fascinating that the shows also have very different characters. Chicago is filled with vendors of home holiday décor. Minneapolis had a better selection of kitchenware vendors, not only than Chicago but seemingly than Atlanta. But for Boswell, I think we’re likely to add at least one stationery vendor, one journal vendor, and one chocolate vendor. I’ll let you know when they arrive.

I Stop at Magers and Quinn in Minneapolis's Uptown Neighborhood.

While my official reason to visit Minnesota was to attend a gift show, I can’t pretend that at least part of the incentive for the travel was to visit the bookstores of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Things have changed a lot since I was last there, and while several Boswellians will be attending a trade show here in October, I will be back in Milwaukee keeping fort and running several events.

After the multi-hour highway trip, with the noticeable increase in water park resorts since my last journey, we were ready for a little urban neighborhood exploration.

Uptown was calling. Our former Hachette rep Suzanne noted that the Uptown Art Fair was going on, so we carefully parked about five blocks from the action, first ducking into Kowakski’s. I can’t avoid a great regional supermarket, and my friend Mary Heather turned me onto this store’s charms several years ago.

It was fitting that the art festival was going on, as the store were visiting, Magers and Quinn, opened in this location during the festival in 1994. Interestingly enough, they moved into this former car dealership just a few years before Schwartz moved into their Downer dealership in ’97. Unlike Schwartz, I think they own the building, as they take up all three floors. And though like Downer, they deal in both new and used books, their inventory seems to be more focused on second hand and bargain, unlike Boswell’s inventory (and Schwartz’s before it), which is predominantly new. I love this renaming of the humor section. My apologies for taking a picture without permission. I'll take it down if you request it!

In addition to building up their new inventory (seeing an void in the market with the loss of Borders Uptown, and Odegaard’s before it), they have also stepped up their event program. It turns out that we share a lot of authors; among the writers that did both Magers and Quinn and Boswell this season were Donald Ray Pollock, Robert Goolrick, Matthew Batt, and Alison Hagy.

Coming up, we’re both hosting Pauls Toutonghi for Evel Knievel Days. Hey, I’m reading that right now. It’s big open space that is a combination of tall shelves and tables, mixing new, used and bargain together, even on tables. It reminded me a bit of Oak Park’s Book Table in this regard. As one very smart bookseller once said to me, criticizing folks who separate out their new, used, and bargain, “a book is a book is a book.”

I can't leave a store without checking out their rec section. Ethan, who I know a bit from when he worked at Milkweed, was recommending Matt Burgess's Dogfight. Yes, it's a book that's in my to-be-read pile for some time. Another reason to read it. I also liked their “If you like” case, where books like The Hunger Games, The Paris Wife, and State of Wonder, were matched with suitable follow ups. And they had a nice selection of nameplate mugs, reusable bags, and this very nice postcards.

A Different Kind of Apocalypse in Simon Rich's Feig-Allen Hybrid Speculative Romantic Comedy, "What in God's Name."

So years ago I came upon this book called Ant Farm. I read it; thought it hilarious. I passed it to Jason; also loved it. We sold a few at Schwartz, but it was a bit of an uphill battle.

Hey, I found the rec I wrote when the collection came out in 2007.

Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations, by Simon Rich, Random House, 2007.
Honestly this is the goofiest and by that I mean most delightful book of humorous essays I have read in some time. It’s all very Paul Feig-like in its focus on middle school, like when the judge sentences the perp and victim to forty years. “I don’t care who started it!” The gang looks for the old man’s booze in “Slumber Party.” A guy’s rough patch leads to trouble naming colors in “Crayola Co.” And some mnemonics lead to a little cultural strife in “Homework.” Sometimes they miss, but really, why isn’t this guy famous?

Wel. it turned out he did become a well-known commodity in the industry. I started seeing his byline in The New Yorker. I learned he was a staff writer for Saturday Night Live. He was also contributing to The Believer. Just last week I read his wonderful column, told from the perspective of...well, I can't tell you, as that gives away the joke. I also can't link you to it, as the New Yorker is subscription only. Hey, you should subscribe like I do. Let me climb back aboard the thought train...
A second collection comes out, Free-Range Chickens, as does a novel, Elliot Allagash. The novel is optioned for film by Jason Reitman. I checked sales and we hadn’t sold a copy of either (I’m transitioning from the Downer Schwartz to Boswell seamlessly, as we share a database) book in either format. I suspect the track isn’t that great. Believe me, I know about track records. I am pulling my hair out that an American publisher won’t pick up Shauna Singh Baldwin’s new novel, The Selector of Souls, even with The Tiger’s Claw shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and also optioned for film. Apparently track on the first novel (two novels ago) is part of the problem. But OK, that’s for a different essay.

I decided to pick up the new novel, What in God’s Name (Reagan Arthur Books, $23.99, it's out next Tuesday), mostly as a breather between upcoming event books. It really takes the pressure off to read a book where you’re quite positive that the publisher will never send the author. I don’t have to be on my best behavior! Well, to be sure, I should stick with dead authors, but why not, I’m going to live dangerously? In Rich’s world or maybe it’s ours, heaven is run like a company, with angels calling the shots. Craig works in miracles, and is training Eliza, who has been promoted from prayer intake. She’s organized prayers by a number system, and has noticed that an inordinate amount of praying revolves around field goals, and most of these cancel each other out, so why waste God’s time with them? Eliza is a bit naïve, but very capable.

The problem is that their jobs are no long for this world.—God has gotten bored with Earth, which in his mind is on a downward trajectory anyway. He’s going to destroy it with either fire or ice, he hasn’t decided yet. And anyway, he wants to concentrate his attention on opening Sola, his new Asian fusion restaurant. The heaven bits in particular remind me quite a bit of vintage Woody Allen essays, and also was reminded of Sleeper.

Back to the plot setup. Craig, who now has a connection to God as he’s promised to invest in the enterprise, has a good heart and doesn’t want the world to end. So he makes a bet that if he can perform one agreed-upon miracle in the next month, God will call off his plan. And the miracle? To get two nebbish New Yorkers to fess up to their mutual attraction and kiss.

So angels can do certain things, like manipulate temperature, wind currents, and other natural phenomena. They can make age a battery and start a fire. But what they can’t do is force people do to something they don’t want to do. It’s sort of like the rules of Edward Eager’s children’s novels (Half Magic, et al) or the The Fairy Godparents television series. It’s not magic in this case, but divine intervention, but whatever you call it, it only goes so far.

Rich has a tendency to be hilarious. Several belly laughs came out of nowhere, much like the vomit that spewed from a famous talk show host’s mouth, just one of the bits of angel manipulation that moves the plot along. Another bit has an entire restaurant getting food poisoning just so Sam can lose a little weight.

Wow, does this seem like a Hollywood romantic comedy with some speculative elements woven in? Who was that director of Bridesmaids? Why it was Paul Feig, the guy I compared Rich to in my review five years ago. It even does that Hollywood thing where the protagonist is a nebbish Jewish guy and the heroine is a very glamorous (and most decidedly not Jewish) actress playing regular gal.

If I had one problem with What in God’s Name, the hoop, so to speak, that I had trouble jumping through, it's that there's some sort of line between a novel and a movie treatment, and I couldn’t get past my thoughts that instead of reading the former, I was reading the latter, remolded into the former. One day I’ll be able to analyze the detailed points that helped me make this decision, but for the moment, let’s just say I’m making the judgment, much like Rich’s God knows what is and isn’t Asian fusion.

That said, it is summer, and summer’s about escapism, and besides, this would probably be a pretty good Hollywood movie, if you got someone like Paul Feig to direct it. I laughed out loud quite a bit, and I assure you, I’ve read a lot of comic novels and essays where that’s never happened. Plus it’s pretty charming. You could totally get the girl if you gave her this book as a present.

A Short Post About The Next Color of Our Large Paper Bag.

I can't believe we already went through our large paper bags. Since I am obsessed with color, I spent way too long looking at various color websites. I decided to go with a milk chocolate brown. Mel said it reminds her of an old candy store. We've still got plenty of magenta bags to go through. I just didn't want to find myself in the middle of a crazy fall with bags to buy as well.

For our plastic bag, I wound up reordering our most recent blue bag. It just hadn't been around enough for me to say goodbye.

And now I have to check on giftwrap.