Boswell Events: Amber Tamblyn, John Koethe, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Three Iraq War Veterans Reading Together - Brian Castner, Matthew Hefti, and Ross Ritchell.

Tuesday, March 15, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Amber Tamblyn, author of Dark Sparkler.

Actress and writer Amber Tamblyn has published three books, studying under masters such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Her acting work has been rewarded with nominations for a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and an Independent Spirit Award.

So I was putting together the blog post for this week's events and noticed that Carly Lenz's review is featured on the HarperCollins website. How cool is that? Carly has recently taken a job as an archivist at Harley Davidson, working out of the museum, but she'll be back to work tomorrow's event.

Here's her recommendation: "A highly original and creative collection of poetry by award-winning actress and poet Amber Tamblyn, Dark Sparkler exists as both artwork and resource, spotlighting a variety of talented women over time whose lives and careers are explored, lamented, and beautifully recognized through Tamblyn's poetic voice. The poems are simultaneously dark and enlightening, provocative and subtle, eulogistic and memorial, all showcasing Tamblyn's talent as a writer and her intimate understanding of the perseverance these women experienced in the throes of Hollywood. Dark Sparkler will educate and astonish you." — Carly Lenz, Boswell Book Company

Here's what a few other notables had to say about the collection.

“Amber Tamblyn’s Dark Sparkler is an elegy, a eulogy, a rhapsody, a rage. In these astonishing poems inspired by dead actresses, Tamblyn fiercely examines the spectacle of the actress as she lives and dies and how our hands and hearts linger on their lives.” —Roxane Gay, who has a memoir called Hunger, coming out in June. Why not preorder a copy from us now?

With a drummer’s approach to wording and a coroner’s attention to bodily detail, Amber Tamblyn’s tragicomic dead girl poems are a thoughtful, ghoulish kick.” — Sarah Vowell, whose most recent work is Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, of course.

As you may know, Tamblyn is in town as she is traveling with her husband, who is doing a show at the Pabst. How cool is that. And I should also note a signing restriction: You must purchase or have purchased a copy of Dark Sparkler to get on the signing line.

Friday, March 18, 7 pm, at Boswell:
John Koethe, author of The Swimmer.  (Photo credit Kevin Miyosaki)

This is John Koethe's tenth collection of poems and his first for FSG. Koethe's previous collections have won the Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has received a lifetime achievement award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and was the first Milwaukee Poet Laureate. Here's a short excerpt from the review from Jim Higgins in the Journal Sentinel. "In 'Idiot Wind' (which shares a title with one of Dylan's bitterest songs), former Milwaukee poet laureate John Koethe questions the enterprise of making poems, judging his own performance short of ideal...Far be it from me to argue with a guy who can quote Wittgenstein, but in the case of The Swimmer, his 10th collection of poetry, Koethe is protesting too much."

Steve Donoghue in Open Letters Monthly notes that many poems in The Swimmer navigate the territory of aging. He writes: The particular awareness of 70 is thorny enough even for ordinary folk; the enfencing limitations, the private announcements of wear, the sure, unwanted knowledge that each remaining year will be thinner than the one before – the consignment of heartiness to special occasions, long of both anticipation and recovery. For the keener heart of a poet, the cold certainty that life’s summer is over and won’t come again is a steeper thing, usually provoking either “late style” lunacy or the peremptory abandonment of the Muse. Koethe is stout enough to look at it straight on, despite “this terrifying feeling of contingency” that fans open and closed in virtually every poem in The Swimmer."

 One thing you may not know (but you will not find surprising) is that Koethe also has a wonderful eye for art. This year's National Book Awards ceremony program featured a work from John Ashberry called The Painter, which came from Koethe's collection.

 Another National Book Awards connection is that one of the judges, G. Neri, is in town to visit schools for part of Middle Grade Mania. We were not able to schedule a public event, but I'd like to give a shout out for his new novel, Tru and Nelle, a middle-grade novel about the friendship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote. We should have signed copies after the school visits on Wednesday. 

Saturday, March 19, 2 pm, at Boswell:
Brian Castner, Ross Ritchell, Matthew Hefti, three writers and Iraq War Veterans

Brian Castner, author of All the Ways We Kill and Die: An Elegy for a Fallen Comrade, and the Hunt for His Killer.
In his latest book, Brian Castner focuses on the tight-knit EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) community. One of their own is hurt, an alarm goes out. When Brian Castner, an Iraq War vet, learns that his friend and EOD brother Matt has been killed by an IED in Afghanistan, he goes to console Matt’s widow, but he also begins a personal investigation. Is the bomb maker who killed Matt the same man American forces have been hunting since Iraq, known as the Engineer? In All the Ways We Kill and Die, Brian Castner’s investigation reveals how warfare has changed since Iraq, becoming personal even as it has become hi-tech, with our drones, bomb disposal robots, and CSI-like techniques.  Castner is a Marquette graduate whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Outside, and NPR. He is also the author of The Long Walk, a memoir.

Ross Ritchell, author of The Knife. (Photo credit Greg Baier)
The Knife is a debut novel, now in paperback. As scenes of horseshoes and horseplay cut to dim Ambien-soaked trips in helicopters and beyond, his story takes us deep beneath the testosterone-laced patter into the lonelier, more ambivalent world of military life in the Middle East. Brian Turner wrote in The Washington Post: "On its surface, The Knife, by former Army Ranger Ross Ritchell, is a debut novel filled with enough adrenaline-fueled combat to satisfy any Hollywood producer. But while the book admirably focuses on the sights and sounds of a soldier’s life, a closer reading reveals a deeply elegiac story." Ross Ritchell is a former soldier in a United States Special Operations Command direct-action team conducting classified operations in the Middle East. Upon his discharge, he enrolled at Northwestern University, where he earned an MFA. He lives with his family in Illinois.

Matthew Hefti, author of A Hard and Heavy Thing.
Contemplating suicide after nearly a decade at war, Levi sits down to write a note to his best friend Nick, explaining why things have to come to this inevitable end. Years earlier, Levi—a sergeant in the army—made a tragic choice that led his team into ambush, leaving three soldiers dead and two badly injured. During the attack, Levi risked death to save a badly burned and disfigured Nick. His actions won him the Silver Star for gallantry, but nothing could alleviate the guilt he carried after that fateful day. He may have saved Nick in Iraq, but when Levi returns home and spirals out of control, it is Nick’s turn to play the savior, urging Levi to write. Madison writer Hefti spent 12 years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician. He earned his BA and MFA while enlisted, and now is pursuing his Juris Doctor and UW Law School.

All three writers will talk and read and then take questions together.

Sunday, March 20, 3 pm, at Boswell:
Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Two If By Sea. (Photo credit Janet Kay.)
Welcome back Jacquelyn Mitchard, long-time Wisconsin favorite!

Just hours after his wife and her entire family perish in the Christmas Eve tsunami in Brisbane, American expat and former police officer Frank Mercy goes out to join his volunteer rescue unit and pulls a little boy from a submerged car, saving the child's life with only seconds to spare. In that moment, Frank's own life is transformed. Not quite knowing why, Frank sidesteps the law, when, instead of turning Ian over to the Red Cross, he takes the boy home to the Midwestern farm where he grew up. Not long into their journey, Frank begins to believe that Ian has an extraordinary, impossible telepathic gift; but his only wish is to protect the deeply frightened child. As Frank struggles to start over, training horses as his father and grandfather did before him, he meets Claudia, a champion equestrian and someone with whom he can share his life and his fears for Ian. Both of them know that it will be impossible to keep Ian's gift a secret forever. Already, ominous coincidences have put Frank s police instincts on high alert, as strangers trespass the quiet life at the family farm.

Jodi Picoult writes: "Mitchard's latest novel explores the fascinating question of those who have extraordinary gifts, what responsibility comes with those gifts, and where the line of morality falls between those poles. A thoughtful, sweeping read."

Need to see further out into our schedule? Check our upcoming events page.

What's Been Selling at Boswell This Past Week? The Answer is in This Blog Post.

Here are the bestsellers for Boswell Book Company's week ending March 12, 2016.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Spill Simmer Falter Wither, by Sara Baume
2. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
3. The Waters of Eternal Youth, by Donna Leon
4. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff
5. The Drifter, by Nicholas Petrie
6. The Heart, by Maylis De Kerangal
7. The Doubter''s Almanac, by Ethan Canin
8. Steel Kiss, by Jeffery Deaver
9. Noonday, by Pat Barker
10. After You, by Jojo Moyes

The Heart is a French novel that was translated by Sam Taylor. It's about a fatal accident and the resulting transplant that results, told through various participants in the story. The book has been an international bestseller. Lydia Kiesling wrote in The Guardian: "De Kerangal crams an enormous amount of insight and information into this brief span of time. The novel contains a quantity of fairly straightforward reportage about the way that organ donation works (in France) on administrative, logistical and clinical levels. Like the best kind of journalist, De Kerangal also manages to capture those seemingly superfluous details of a complex medical procedure that make a narrative so riveting: the surgeon who incants a Latin phrase during the transplant, the nurse who owns a rare kind of singing goldfinch he bought in Algeria, the central administrator for organ donation who subsists mostly on 'cheeseburgers and nicotine gum'...But the author’s larger project is the articulation of the enormities that surround any medical event, any death."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Conspiracies of the Ruling Class, by Lawrence Lindsey
2. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
3. Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, by John Gurda
4. Locally Laid, by Lucie B. Amundsen
5. Dark Money, by Jane Mayer
6. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
7. Maximum Clarity, by Ben Johnston
8. The Violet Hour, by Katie Roiphe
9. American Girls, by Nancy Jo Sales
10. At the Existentialist Cafe, by Sarah Bakewell

Is it a conspiracy of of the ruling class that Conspiracies of the Ruling Class is #1 this week? No, somebody just bought a bunch of copies. Further down, our interest in death continues with Katie Roiphe's new The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. She chronicles the final days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak. Helen McAlpin in the Los Angeles Times calls the work "an analytical blend of journalism, literary criticism and memoir that — like her earlier book, Uncommon Arrangements, about unconventional literary marriages — tackles a personal obsession. By closely examining the demise of five writers who have long fascinated her, Roiphe hopes to defang death, which has haunted her since an early brush with mortality when she was 12."

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy
2. The Loss of All Lost Things, by Amina Gautier
3. A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman
4. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagahira
5. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, by Katarina Bivald
6. Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes
7. Nora Webster, by Colm Tóibín
8. My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante
9. Room, by Emma Donoghue
10. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, by Mona Awad

If you read the blog regularly, you know we're reading The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy in May, in which the Turner matriarch moves into her eldest son Cha-Cha's house and together with his 12 siblings, he's got to figure out what to do with the family home.This book has gotten a National Book Award nomination and many great reviews, including one from book and theater critic Mike Fischer. Fischer wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "They're bound together by their dying matriarch, whose own migration from Arkansas — like the separate move north made by her deceased husband — is told through moving flashbacks to the 1940s. They're bound together by the now-vacant Detroit house that they still own and in which they were all raised. And, finally, they're bound together by the crumbling city in which that house somehow survives."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. In Those Nightmarish Days, edited by Samuel Kassow
2. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
3. We Gotta Get Out of This Place, by Craig Werner and Doug Bradley
4. World War II Milwaukee, by Meg Jones (event 4/18 at Milwaukee Public Library)
5. Cream City Chronicles, by John Gurda
6. Bettyville, by George Hodgman
7. A General Theory of Love, by Thomas Lewis
8. We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie
9. Grace and Style, by Grace Helbig
10. Kitchen Hacks, by America's Test Kitchen

It's nice to see several event books having post-event bumps in sales. Sales were helped for Bettyville by the airing of the Lake Effect piece. While you're podcasting, you might as well listen to the We Gotta Get Out of This Place Lake Effect story as well. And like several of these books, we still have signed copies of Grace and Style.

Kids Picture Books and Board Books:
1. I am a Bunny, by Ole Risom with illustrations by Richard Scarry
2. A is for Activist, by Innosanto Nagara
3. Whose Hands Are These? by Miranda Paul with illustrations by Luciana Navarro Powell
4. The Day the Crayons Came Home, by Drew Daywalt, with illustrations by Oliver Jeffers
5. Finding Winnie, by Lindsay Mattick, with illustrations by Sophie Blackall

Kids Middle Grade and Chapter Books:
1. I Survived the Hindenburg Disaster, 1937, by Lauren Tarshis
2. Maybe a Fox, by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee
3. I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912, by Lauren Tarshis
4. I Survived: True Stories, Five Epic Disasters, by Lauren Tarshis
5. I survived the Great Chicago Fire, 1871, by Lauren Tarshis

Kids Young Adult and Teen Books:
1. The Book Thief Tenth Anniversary Edition (hardcover), by Markus Zusak
2. The Book Thief Tenth Anniversary Edition (paperback), by Markus Zusak
3. A Study in Charlotte, by Brittany Cavallaro
4. I am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak
5. Underdogs, by Markus Zusak

Guess which seven kids authors we hosted this past week? Talk about exciting! And while we did school visits with Miranda Paul on Friday, most of her sales will show up next week. And don't forget we're hosting a 3 pm event with Paul for her new book, Whose Hands are These: A Community Helper Guessing Book , at 3 pm. There will be stories, activities, and hand-print cookies too.

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins reviews John Koethe's tenth book of poems, The Swimmer. "There's nothing hermetic about the poems in The Swimmer: no personal mythology or private vocabulary required to unlock their secret meanings, just the patient and persistent attention you'd give a friend explaining something subtle — especially if the friend was a retired professor of philosophy." Our event with Koethe is Friday, March 18, 7 pm.

Mike Fischer weighs in on Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen. It's a timely story about America's history with forced sterlizations, with champions including Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Cohen's chapters on Holmes make clear that Buck was no anomaly; Holmes was a longtime eugenicist who'd previously contemplated infanticide to weed out 'undesirables' He admitted that writing the Buck decision had given him 'pleasure,' noting that 'sooner or later one gets a chance to say what one thinks.'" Powerful stuff, though Fischer finds the format a bit repetitive.

And also in the print edition is Marion Winik's review of American Girls: Social Media and the Lives of Teenagers, by Nancy Jo Sales. One take away: "Perhaps the most problematic effect of social media is the fierce emphasis on physical appearance. 'For many girls, the pressure to be considered hot is felt on a nearly continual basis online,' writes Sales." Sales notes a rise in plastic surgery among teens. Gotta look good for your selfies!

What Did the Book Club Think of "Just Mercy"?

If you've been paying attention to the bestseller lists, you've probably spotted Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, firmly settled among the nonfiction paperback titles. Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and professor of law at New York University, has dedicated his life to helping prisoners on death row and those sentenced to death in prison, which is a very smart flipping of the traditional life in prison without parole.

Just because someone has a great story, it doesn't mean they have a great book. But Just Mercy is a triumph in that regard as well. Stevenson does triple duty in his book. The overarching story chronicles the case of Walter McMillan, on death row for murdering a woman, convicted with very flimsy evidence. But in between telling that tale he covers a different subject, perhaps judges' authority to override juries in several states, perhaps the rise in convicting pregnant women. And much about the rise in trying juveniles as adults. I call it The Good Wife structure, though How to Get Away with Murder is another good example - you tell one long story counterpointed with self-contained shorter stories. It apparently works well both for television and books.

And I should note that while there is a strong racial and ethnic component to this problem - black and Latinos are imprisoned in much higher percentage than whites - there is also class involved. Wealthy people do not generally wind up on death row.

And then of course we have another story, that of Stevenson's life, or at least that of the Equal Justice Initiative's growth. You can't really call this a memoir, even though it's first person, as Stevenson really tries to step back from the story and focus on the folks profiled. The only time Steveson is in the spotlight is when he recounts being targeted by the Atlanta police for being a Black man in a neighborhood that had a reported robbery and the policeman suggests he not move...or else. The actual quote from Stevenson is quite a bit worse than that. He is aggressively searched and explanations are not allowed. If you think this is acceptable, under the circumstances, how would you feel if it happened to you?

A bystander tells the police to ask Stevenson about her missing cat, among other things. The police eventually realize that they've made a mistake. There are no apologies. It's a comic line in a tragic scenario.

So what did the book club think? I don't think there was anyone who didn't like the book.

One attendee thought it was a great book to read in tandem with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. Both were edited by Chris Jackson, and Coates has actually been talking up Just Mercy.

We talked a lot about the cases with children in particular. We noted the difference in the adolescent brain, and I spoke about Kent Kiel's book, The Psychopath Whisperer, confirming through scans that teenagers brains can and do change, but that prison does not have the hoped-for consequence of reforming criminals.

We also discussed the plight of folks with mental illness. Prisons were used to contain those with mental illness until reform created hospitals. And now we've swung in the other direction, defunding care facilities, and that's led to more folks with mental illness back in prisons.

There was some conversation of the tide turning on our incarceration numbers, even with Republicans, but we also noted how quickly the argument can be reversed, seen most recently with immigration reform and free trade policy. And the truth is that even though crime in general is down, the perception among the general public is that it is actually up.

Our resident alien was probably the most horrified by the story, though certainly she wasn't surprised. As an Australian, she is amused by various American foibles.

We had a solid hour of animated discussion, with just about everyone having something to add to the conversation.

If you're looking for additional reading, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is probably another book to add to your to-be-read list.

And now for our upcoming book selections - we're lightening it up a little by discussing Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove on Monday, April 4, 7 pm. Please note that Backman is visiting Boswell on May 14, 2 pm.

In May, we'll be discussing Angela Flournoy's The Turner House. That discussion is Monday, May 2, 7 pm. This novel about a Detroit family was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Our in-store lit group discussions are held in the magazine area. There is no pre-registration required.

Markus Zusak Writes Me a Note About "The Book Thief." I Follow His Advice Nine Years Later.

The Book Thief came out in 2006. In 2007, Markus Zusak visited a Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, and I got a copy of the book signed. I admitted I hadn't read his breakout bestseller yet, so he wrote me a joshing note, which I've reprinted at right.

Fast-forward nine years. We're cosponsoring an event with the Milwaukee Public Library this week, and I still hadn't read the book. So I dropped everything to finally be able to speak eloquently about the story.

Now you must understand that I can't read every book for every event. There are only so many hours in a day, and I have other things that need to be done to keep Boswell going. Plus I'm lucky enough to have lots of other great readers, and their recommendations are an equally powerful tool.

But not reading The Book Thief? It felt like a hole in my brain that needed to be filled.

We've had any number of recommendations for The Book Thief over the years, though most were generated back when I was working at Schwartz. Jen told me that The Book Thief was one of her favorite books of all time, while Todd, who currently has a rec on the book, talked about the power for books to sustain people in the most difficult times. And I'm sure that half the booksellers I didn't ask have something to add.

The numbers on The Book Thief are staggering. The novel has been in our top 100 bestsellers for every year through 2014. In 2009, it was #14. and I should note that is a full two years after the paperback came out, which was released 18 months after the hardcover. And I'm not talking about kids books here, but all categories. It's one of those books that has appealed to folks of all ages. On one hand, we've had tremendous orders to schools, but on the other, it's also been one of our most popular book club titles for years.

The new edition, which just came out on Tuesday, has tenth anniversary bonus content in both a newly reissued paperback (same ISBN) and a commemorative hardcover (new jacket, better paper, same bonus content). Included are notebook pages, that mapped which books Liesel read and what they were about, and how the illustrations came together. There's a new introduction by Zusak and even a list of corrections. The paperback jacket must say "anniversary edition" at the top to have the bonus content.

And now when I meet Mr. Zusak again I can be part of the conversation. Our cosponsored event is Friday, March 11, 6:30 pm, at Milwaukee Public Library's Centennial Hall, 733 N. Eighth St. At least I think I can be part of the conversation - I'm on page 400, but should be finished before starting time.

For more information about other upcoming kids events, including bookseller reviews, read the latest edition of the Boswell kids email newsletter.

Tickets Now on Sale for the Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library Literary Lunch on Tuesday, May 3, With Featured Speaker Curtis Sittenfeld.

One of the Milwaukee's annual highlights for book lovers is the Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library Literary Lunch. While we host lots of wonderful authors in all sorts of venues, there's something about a meal celebrating reading that just gets to me. I wonder why? Over the years that we've taken on partnering this project, stepping into Schwartz's shoes in 2009 with a Facebook note from the author getting us the great Leif Enger at the last minute, The Friends Lunch gone on to celebrate the writing of Donna Leon, Sue Miller, Elinor Lipman, Elizabeth Berg, Chad Harbach, and Shauna Singh Baldwin. This year's guest is Curtis Sittenfeld, and her new book, Eligible, is part of a very special series.

The Austen Project pairs six bestselling contemporary authors with Jane Austen’s six complete works: Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Taking these well-loved stories as their base, each author will write their own unique take on Jane Austen’s novels. Three have already come out, with Joanna Trollope covering Sense and Sesibility, Val McDermid reimagining Northanger Abbey, and Alexander McCall Smith channeling Emma.

For Jane Austen's best-known and most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice, the Project chose Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and Sisterland, to offer a new take on an old classic. Could she possibly outdo Clueless, which I think is held as the gold standard for Pride and Prejudice redux? It turns out Sittenfeld is no stranger to such machinations, having created a fictionalized first family from Wisconsin with similarities to George and Laura Bush in American Wife.

The buzz on Eligible, transporting Austen's characters to contemporary Cincinnati, is great. Booklist's starred review offered this praise: "Sittenfeld has updated some of the characters and story lines to better fit a contemporary setting, but her charming retelling is a delightful romp for not only Austen devotees but lovers of romantic comedies and sly satire, as well."

Here's what Boswellian Sharon Nagel had to say: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a retelling of Pride and Prejudice must be cleverly written and wickedly funny. Curtis Sittenfeld has accomplished that with her fantastic new novel. The Bennet sisters have been transported to modern day Cincinnati. Jane is a yoga instructor, Liz, a writer for a women’s magazine, Lydia and Kitty do nothing but work out, and Mary spends most of her time in her room. The two older sisters live in New York, but have come home to check on Mr. Bennet, who is recovering from a heart attack. The storyline is one that will be familiar to most Austen readers, but with some extremely funny twists. I thoroughly enjoyed Eligible from start to finish. Even for a confirmed Austen fan like myself, there were some pleasant surprises."

Now I'm not going to lie to you, at least not in the blog, at least not right now. The Austen Project has been the focus of some grumbling among Austen devotees. Deborah Yaffe, author of Among the Janeites, complained that Joanna Trollope hewed too close to the source material with Sense and Sensibility, Val McDermid's update on Northanger Abbey updated implausibly, and well, she thought Alexander McCall Smith simply didn't like Emma. Here's also a fascinating piece about updating the story in The Atlantic, from a talk Sittenfeld gave at the Aspen Ideas Festival, discussing the politics of entail, and why keeping the Bennett sisters in their early twenties doesn't make sense in the contemporary world. In Eligible, forty is the new twenty.

What a great event this is going to be! My reading shelf is already piled precariously high, but this blog post has me anxious to add Eligible to this. How's that for hand-selling?

Tickets to the Tuesday, May 3 luncheon at the stately Wisconsin Club are $70 and include a copy of Eligible, with Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Club members eligible for $60 tickets. Patron and benefactor seats are also available. There will be a signing starting at 11 am, with Sittenfeld also available after the lunch.

Email Newsletter Preview: Boswell Events for the Week of March 7, 2016: Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee, Lucie Amundsen, Brittany Cavallaro, Samuel Kassow, Sara Baume, Lauren Tarshis, Markus Zusak, Amina Gautier, and Miranda Paul.

Here's what is happening in the world of Boswell for the week of March 7.

Monday, March 7, 6:30 pm, at the Oak Creek Library:
Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee, authors of Maybe a Fox.

Boswell's first event at the new Oak Creek Library is a collaboration between Newbery and National Book Award finalist Kathi Appelt and Pulizer nominee and bestselling writer Alison McGhee, the story of two sisters in rural Vermont who are still grieving for their mother, and what happens when one of the sisters disappears. You know McGhee from Someday, Firefly Hollow, and the Bink and Gollie books (written with Kate DiCamillo) and Appelt is the author of both The Underneath and The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp.

Kirkus Reviews writes: "Magical elements—a legend about brothers who chanced the Slip for a girl’s love; an elusive grotto; spirit animals sent to complete a task unfinished for a human—all confer transcendent dimensions on the story. Appelt and McGhee’s rich, polished narrative invites the reader to experience the world both as Jules and as the fox."

The Oak Creek Library is now located at 8040 S Sixth St, just west of Howell Ave in Drexel Town Center.

Tuesday, March 8, 7 pm, at the Riverside Park Urban Ecology Center:
Lucie Amundsen, author of Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-Changing Egg Farm-From Scratch.

Join us for an evening with Lucie Amundsen, co-owner of Locally Laid Egg Company, a farm that provides pasture-raised eggs in Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana. Locally Laid grew out of a very popular blog that chronicled her family adventures.

My recommendation for Locally Laid: "Lucie and her husband Jason originally meant just to have a chicken coop out back in the chick-friendly town of Duluth, but one thing led to another and the next thing they knew, they were setting up shop specializing in pasture-raised eggs. Amundsen genially tells their story, including all her anxiety and regrets about the whole business, and how their marketing and advertising team (just Lucie really) outmaneuvered much bigger operations to be an Intel finalist for their small business competition. Two convention trips, one to a corporate gathering and the other for sustainable agriculture, ares an amusing study in contrasts. Amundsen also explains the ins and outs of regulations, why local is often more important than organic, and why America would be better off if we stopped focusing on tenderness so much when it comes to chicken. Stew hens were once a staple of soups but nowadays, we all pretty much want are tender baby chicks in our broth, leaving few options for hens who've outlived their golden laying years. An informative and entertaining read!" (Daniel Goldin)

The Riverside Park Urban Ecology Center is located at 1500 E. Park Place, just west of Oakland Avenue. Suggested admission to this event on Tuesday, March 8, 7 pm, is $10, $5 for UEC members.

Wednesday, March 9, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Brittany Cavallaro, author of A Study in Charlotte.

Last year Brittany Cavallaro visited Boswell for her first book of poetry. Now she's at the bookstore for her first young-adult novel, the first book in a witty, suspenseful new trilogy about a brilliant new crime-solving duo: the teen descendants of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Here's the recommendation from Boswellian Todd Wellman: "It is difficult to establish compelling, believable characters that follow in the footsteps of another well-known cast, but Cavallaro has succeeded with James Watson and Charlotte Holmes. Offering the right amount of hints and red herrings, Charlotte follows descendant Watson about his prep school as he meets his generation's Holmes, gets framed for murder, and fails at writing evocative poetry. The book smartly removes easy Bruce Wayne-style funding from the immediate players for most of the book -- Watson and Holmes are distanced from their families just enough -- leaving the characters to rely on cunning and poker games to finance their detective work. Drugs, sexual violence, bullying, and rage shadow Watson and Holmes, and the two new friends have to struggle with their own demons as they try to identify the ones hunting them down."

From Kirkus's starred review: "These sleuths may still be in school—and working out of a supply closet with smartphones—but Cavallaro’s crackling dialogue, well-drawn characters, and complicated relationships make this feel like a seamless and sharp renewal of Doyle’s series."

Wednesday, March 9, 7 pm, at the UWM Golda Meir Library fourth-floor conference center:
Samuel Kassow, editor of In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz.

Samuel Kassow, based at Trinity Uniersity, will present a talk based on In Those Nightmarish Days. This book sheds light on two brilliant but lesser known ghetto journalists: Josef Zelkowicz and Peretz Opoczynski. An ordained rabbi, Zelkowicz became a key member of the archive in the Lodz ghetto. Opoczynski was a journalist and mailman who contributed to the Warsaw ghetto s secret Oyneg Shabes archive. While otherghetto writers sought to create an objective record of their circumstances, Zelkowicz and Opoczynski chronicled daily life and Jewish responses to ghettoization by the Nazis with powerful immediacy. Expertly translated by David Suchoff, these profound writings are at last accessible to contemporary readers."

Born in a displaced persons' camp in Stuttgart, Samuel Kassow's mother survived because a classmate hid her and her sister in a dug-out underneath the barn on his family's farm, while his father was arrested by Russians and spent the duration of the war in a Soviet prison camp.

This event is presented by the Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies. Golda Meir Library is located at 2311 E Hartford Ave.

Thursday, March 10, 6:30 pm, at the Greenfield Public Library:
Lauren Tarshis, author of I Survived the Hindenburg Disaster, 1937.

Lauren Tarshis, bestselling author of the I Survived series, is on her first national tour. She'll be discussing her latest, I Survived the Hindenburg Disaster, 1937, in which eleven-year-old Hugo Ballard tells of the journey of he, his parents, and his sister Gertie, as they made the thrilling four-thousand-mile journey across the Atlantic in a zeppelin as big as the Titanic, and what happened when a fateful blast rocked the ship as it was preparing to land.

Kids and teachers alike love the I Survived series for its historical accuracy blended with great storytelling. The series captures the resilience and strength of young people in the midst of unimaginable scenarios. Lauren has brought her signature warmth and exhaustive research to topics such as the September 11 attacks, the destruction of Pompeii, Hurricane Katrina, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, among others.

The Greenfield Public Library is located 5310 W Layton Ave, just off the 60th St exit of I894.

Thursday, March 10, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither.

All the way from Cork, Sara Baume is appearing at Boswell for her award-winning debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a novel that follows, over the course of four seasons, a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog. One can't say enough about this debut, which won the Rooney Irish Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. But Boswellian Anne McMahon might have said it all when she noted: "As I was reading this wonderful book by Sara Baume, my eyes kept filling - and it was hard to tell if it was because of the beauty of the language or the pathos of the story. This is a special book, one that has to go in my permanent collection. An unforgettable experience."

Or perhaps you'd rather hear from Joseph O'Connor, who wrote of Baume's debut in The Irish Times: "What elevates the book beyond the category of promising first novel is the author's astonishing power with language. This is a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite. Again and again it wows you with its ambition, its implication, the more forceful for never being italicised, that simple words from our frail and brittle English language, placed quietly in order, with assiduous care, can do almost anything at all. There are no easy tricks, no strainings for effect. This is a gimmick-free novel of truthfulness, uncorrupted by a yearning for praise. At its heart is a touching and inspiriting sense of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits."

Sara Baume has previously been awarded the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award and the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. The tour is cosponsored by the Irish Arts Center (New York).

Friday, March 11, 6:30 pm, at Milwaukee Public Library's Centennial Hall:
Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief Tenth Anniversary Edition.

Can you believe it's been ten years since The Book Thief touched our hearts? This amazing success story has been read by adults and kids alike since its original publication. Now the Printz Honor winner Markus Zusak is returning to the United States (from Australia) to celebrate the release of The Book Thief Tenth Anniversary Edition. This special edition, available in hardcover and paperback, will include marked-up manuscript pages, original sketches, and pages from the author's writing notebook.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist-books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

The Book Thief was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It has been translated into over thirty languages and has sold nine million copies around the world. Author Markus Zusak is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens.

Milwaukee Public Library's Centennial Hall is located at 733 N Eighth St on Friday, March 11, 6:30 pm.

Friday, March 11, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Amina Gautier, author of The Loss of All Lost Things.

Amina Gautier previously lived in Milwaukee as a Marquette dissertation fellow. Now she's here for The Loss of All Lost Things, winner of the Elixir Press Prize. The fifteen stories in this collection explore the unpredictable ways in which characters negotiate, experience, and manage various forms of loss. They lose loved ones; they lose their security and self-worth; they lose children; they lose their ability to hide and shield their emotions; they lose their reputations, their careers, their hometowns, and their life savings.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi wrote in the Washington Independent Review of Books: "Consider all the loss it is possible to endure: lost wages, lost opportunities, lost objects, lost youth, lost hope, lost minds, lost innocence, lost loves, lost loved ones, the loss of a child. Consider all the ways that we endure that loss, or don't endure. That, very simply and eloquently, is what Amina Gautier does in her latest story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things."

All three of Amina Gautier's collections are prize winers. In addition, she has been awarded fellowships at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference and the Sewanee Writer's Conference. Gautier was raised in Brooklyn and educated at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

Sunday, March 13, 3 pm, at Boswell:
Storytime and Activities with Miranda Paul, author of Whose Hands are These?: A Community Helper Guessing Book.

If your hands can mix and mash, what job might you have? What if your hands reach, wrench, yank, and crank? The hands in Whose Hands are These - and the people attached to them-do all sorts of helpful work. And together, these helpers make their community a safe and fun place to live. As you read, keep an eye out for community members who make repeat appearances! Can you guess all the jobs based on the actions of these busy hands?

Miranda Paul is an award-winning children's book author. One Plastic Bag was named a Junior Library Guild Selection. This event is not just a storytime - it's also a family-friendly story time with activities, treats (hand stamp cookies), and prizes!.

Annotated Boswell Bestsellers for the Week Ending March 5, 2016.

There are fiction weeks and there are nonfiction weeks. This is a nonfiction week.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
2. City of Thorns, by Ben Rawlence
3. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
4. Crowns, photographs by Michael Cunningham
5. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
6. Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, various authors including Peter Hatch
7. At the Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell
8. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo
9. Dark Money, by Jane Meyer
10. Pugs in Costumes, by Virginia Woof

More on Evicted:
--Gabriel Thompson in The San Francisco Chronicle writes that "Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty. Desmond makes a convincing case that policymakers and academics have overlooked the role of the private rental market, and that eviction 'is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.'"
--Right here on Lake Effect, an interview with Desmond
--Gillian B. White in The Atlantic offers an interview --And someone remembers that Jason DeParle wrote the last groundbreaking book on Milwaukee and poverty, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare, back in 2004. He reviews the book in The New York Review of Books.

Desmond will be on Kathleen Dunn's show on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow, Monday, March 7, 2 pm Central.

Another pop in sales is for At the Existentialist Cafe, from Sarah Bakewell. Karen Long reviewed the book in the Los Angeles Times: "Bakewell, a former London book curator who studied philosophy at the University of Leeds, likes wordy subtitles. Here she plunks one on her fourth work of nonfiction: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others. She isn't kidding about the others —- the book finishes with a roll call 'Cast of Characters' that runs 79 names long. Even the screenplays of Terrence Malick, with their heavy doses of Martin Heidegger, swing briefly into view. She draws on each one, symphonically, to make a case for existentialism as more pertinent to the 21st century than a nostalgia for black turtlenecks, booze, cigarettes and rebellious alienation."

Hardcover Fiction:
1. My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout
2. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
3. Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf
4. Georgia, by Dawn Tripp
5. Arcadia, by Iain Pears
6. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff
7. The Drifter, by Nicholas Petrie
8. The Little Paris Bookshop, by Nina George

Not only is our hardcover fiction list a little thin, but half the books that did make it are more than six months old, with Mr. Doerr being of particularly older vintage. One new title that popped on is Iain Pears's Arcadia. He's been making waves since An Instance at the Fingerpost came out in 1998 and his newest book comes with an app. Here's what The Independent had to say: "In the year 2222, rebellious low-tech renegades refuse to be happy under the Scientific Government that runs a planet of 30 billion drugged serfs in the wake of catastrophic climate change. Well, the marketing of Arcadia brought out the renegade in me. Yes, a beautifully designed app (by Touchpress) allows readers to trace many alternative paths through this novel's three intersecting storylines. That privilege, however, comes at the cost of obedience to the embryonic version of Scientific Government controlled by Apple Inc." I'm a little confused as to why this review does not have a byline - it's possible it's just promotional copy." The Guardian review is also positive, with caveats, and it's from a real person, Steven Poole.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. We Gotta Get Out of This Place, by Craig Werner and Doug Bradley
2. First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung
3. A Rich Spot of Earth, by Peter J Hatch
4. Lucky Child, by Loung Ung
5. Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit
6. Tunnel, Smuggle, Collect, by Jeffrey Gingold
7. H is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald (ticketed event 4/12 at Schlitz Audubon)
8. Lulu in the Sky, by Loung Ung
9. Cream City Chronicles, by John Gurda
10. Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow

After ten years, John Gurda's Cream City Chronicles just came out in paperback. When it came out in hardcover, Bobby Tanzilo wrote in OnMilwaukee.com: "This book of newspaper columns penned by Gurda is a perfect complement to The Making of Milwaukee. Instead of trying to tell it all, these essays focus on the interesting, the unique and the important. Fascinating tidbits that can be read sporadically or in one sitting." One decade on, it's the perfect compliment to Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods.

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, by Katarina Bivald (event 5/19, 7 pm)
2. A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman (event 5/14, 2 pm)
3. The Loss of All Lost Things, by Amina Gautier (event 3/11, 7 pm)
4. My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante (no, she's not coming)
5. The Life of Elves, by Muriel Barbery
6. Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
7. Me Before You, by JoJo Moyes
8. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
9. The Coincidence of Coconut Cake, by Amy E. Reichert
10. You Have Never Been Here, by Mary Rickert

We had a nice paperback pop on Naomi Novik's Uprooted. On the NPR Books site, Amal Eh-Mohtar wrote: "I've read a staggering number of excellent books recently, and it has done things to my head. I'm not sure the human brain was meant to read so many brilliant books in such short order — even less sure that swinging my reading-pendulum from Hannu Rajaniemi's collected science fiction stories to Naomi Novik's sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel is at all wise. By all rights I should have tumbled into Uprooted feeling disoriented and confused, dissonant and harsh in my criticism — but no. Uprooted has leapt forward to claim the title of Best Book I've Read Yet This Year." It's a title, which is why the words are capitalized.

Boswellian Pam Stilp is also a fan, who wrote: "This timeless story which reads like a fairy tale of old, is set in a fictional Eastern European land, where a blood-thirsty woods surrounds a valley of peaceful villagers." The rest of her recommendation is on our website.

Books for Kids:
1. Forest of Wonders, by Linda Sue Park
2. Mary Jemison: Native American Captive, by Jane Kelley writing as E.F. Abbott
3. Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns, by Hena Khan
4. Night of the Moon, by Hena Khan
5. I Am a Bunny, by Ole Risom with illustrations by Richard Scarry
6. When Spring Comes, by Kevin Henkes, with illustrations by Laura Dronzek
7. Pax, by Sara Pennypacker, with illustrations by Jon Klassen
8. Big Nate Blasts Off v8, by Lincoln Peirce
9. Firelight, volume 7 of Amulet, by Kazu Kibushi
10. I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak (event 3/11)

This week the top four are driven by event sales, but you may not know about that, because they were all from school visits. Linda Sue Park would have made a great public event, but we hosted her on the 1st day of sale for Forest of Wonders, the first volume in the Wing and Claw series, and they needed the evening to get Park to her next destination. It's a switch-up from historical fiction to fantasy, and all the advance reviews are positive. Kirkus offers a starred review: "With its engaging hero, talking animals, arcane magic, moral issues, and unresolved plot, this first of a proposed trilogy promises more exciting forest wonders." And yes, we have signed copies!

Some of you might be wondering why I Am the Messenger hit our top 10 but not The Book Thief. We're getting the new 10th anniversary editions in both hardcover and paperback and they don't arrive till Tuesday.

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Helen Oyeyemi's new collection, What is Not Yours is Not Yours, is reviewed by Mike Fischer on the Book Page. He calls the collection "breathtakingly bold and original." He notes: "Reading and being read by these stories, one's discoveries are shadowed by all that remains tantalizingly unknown, within any story daring to be original and stay true to its most rare vision."

Jim Higgins offers information on Bryan Stevenson's visit to MATC on Wednesday, March 9 for Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. His talk is entitled "American Injustice: Mercy, Humanity and Making a Difference."

On a similar note, the print edition has Karen R. Long's Newsday review of Incarceration Nation: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, by Baz Dreisinger. Long's take: "Readers who can stomach bombast will be rewarded with a comparative look at the systems that have locked away 10.3 million human beings, including 2.3 million in the United States. The range of arrangements is dizzying."