A ten-point Jacqueline Woodson post for Red at the Bone

1. It’s 1995 and I am working at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, buying the new books from Tom, my Penguin rep. You might remember Tom from when he and I formed Team C.O.T. (City of Thieves). We were so looking forward to David Benioff’s novel, but he took up his time with this Game of Thrones thing. Tom pulls out his Dutton catalog and talks up this novel from Jacqueline Woodson called Autobiography of a Family Photo. He loves it! I feature it on our Schwartz 100.

2. Jacqueline Woodson’s kids books go on to become huge successes. Brown Girl Dreaming seemingly wins every award, including the National Book Award for Young People. Woodson visits Milwaukee for the Wisconsin Reading Association conference and teacher after teacher comes to tell us what a wonderful speaker Woodson is. We hoped that maybe a public event could be added on to this, but the schedule is too tight.

3. While we don’t host Woodson for a kids book, we are thrilled to be part of her tour for Another Brooklyn not long after. We cohost a public event at the Milwaukee Public Library. The book is beautiful and has a reference to Abraham & Strauss. Yes, this is my second reference to A&S in as many blog posts. It was a very nice store and holds a lot of memories. And apparently, not just for me.

We had hoped to bring Woodson to an area school, promising the kids would read Another Brooklyn. After a lot of negotiation, it was set up, only we then realized the school was not in session! Instead, we hosted kids at Boswell as part of the author’s Young People’s Ambassador work for the National Poetry Foundation. Most of the kids get a copy of After Tupac and D. Foster. What a day!

4. In 2018 I went to Book Expo and waited in line for a signed print of Jacqueline Woodson’s forthcoming picture book, The Day You Begin. I also got a signed copy of Harbor Me, her YA novel, for one of our booksellers. It went on to be one of his top five books for the year. I got to chat with the author, and she remembered her visit to Milwaukee fondly. That’s good, I thought. Maybe she’ll come back someday. Unfortunately, the carton with the print and a bunch of reading copies for Boswell got lost on the way back from the show. Sigh.

5. Chris and I visited New York to pitch events to publishers last February. I pitched my heart out for Woodson for her upcoming novel (also for adults), Red at the Bone. I so wanted to do that high school event with Friend-of-Boswell Kelly. I had some great ideas for our public event too. And then, you wait.

6. I get to read Red at the Bone. It’s more than I could hope. My thoughts: “Jacqueline Woodson’s latest dreamily moves between characters and across time as she chronicles the lives of two families brought together by a teen pregnancy and fractured when the still-teenage mother leaves them behind for a far-away college. Issues of race, class and sexual identity play out in the family, from memories of the Tulsa Race Massacre to the two family’s economic differences, to the mother’s secretive relationship with a fellow student in college. Music swirls through the narrative, from the jazz clubs of Oakland to a 1990s Wu Tang Clan concert to the sounds of Prince at a coming-of-age party. And words swirl through the story too; Red at the Bone might be called a novel, but it’s surely as much a poem, a shimmering ode to survival.”

7. We get the chance to host Woodson. The school comes together. 300 Milwaukee Public School students will read Red at the Bone and then meet with Woodson and Dasha Kelly Hamilton for a facilitated discussion. Amazing! We’re so grateful for this. Thanks, Kelly.

8. The public event comes together. It’s our annual Rose Petranech Lecture, in memory of one of our wonderful customers -  not only a voracious reader, but a Diversity Officer at Marquette University. The event is ticketed with a book (link here). In the spirit of Rose's life work, we aimed to partner with several organizations – Public Allies, Diverse + Resilient, Alice’s Garden - to bring folks in who might not normally attend a ticketed event at Boswell.

9. Red at the Bone is released. Reviews are great! Here’s Joshunda Sanders in Time: “A treasure awaits readers who encounter Red at the Bone, who descend the staircase with a loose step as 16-year-old Melody does in her coming-of-age party at the start of the novel. Jacqueline Woodson’s latest book for adults looks at a middle-class black family in Brooklyn and the struggles and triumphs that brought them to this moment, celebrating the daughter who was the unexpected product of a teenage romance. The novel is both a uniquely black story about multigenerational love and upward mobility - and a universal American tale of striving, failing, then trying again.”

10. The missing carton from Book Expo is recovered, over a year after it went missing. It’s addressed to me and the box has been opened. Inside is the signed print of The Day You Begin. What an unexpected gift! We framed at East Side Gallery, and it now welcomes folks who enter Boswell. Tickets are $28 and still available at woodsonmke.bpt.me.

A post about Alice Hoffman's The World That We Knew and her upcoming visit to Milwaukee

Here’s the setup for Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, The World That We Knew, which goes on sale September 24*. The story starts in Berlin, where a widow senses the grim future they will have under Nazi control, particularly after her husband's murder. Hanni can't leave, as this would mean abandoning her elderly mother, but maybe there’s hope for her daughter Lea. They know that their Rabbi has been experimenting with golems. Hanni is Orthodox, she can only talk to the rabbi’s wife, who refuses to help. On leaving, she is confronted by the Rabbi’s daughter Ettie, who has been spying on her father and might know how to make a golem. As part of her payment, Ettie wants a train ticket out of Germany too, for her and her sister Marta. The golem is created, with the task of taking care of Lea. Ettie warns Hanni that the golem, named Ava, must be destroyed when Lea is safe, or it will become too powerful and destructive. And the escape begins.

What a great book! But this is not the first book I’ve read by Alice Hoffman, nor my second. The history goes back a bit further than that, more than thirty years. And I know exactly when I came to read Hoffman and when my enthusiasm jumped to another level because in my twenties, I started writing down every book I read. I felt so bad about having started so late, but now I kind of laugh about that. Soon after starting as a bookseller, I began to create a monthly list, not just ranking but reviewing the books I read, and then I’d mail the list out to friends. It was Booklist, but not the one from the American Library Association. In 1987, I still worked on the floor of the Iron Block Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop. It was my Booklist, and I'm sure Stephen McCauley was thrilled to hear that The Object of My Affection was the #1 book for its month.

#1 for August was the first novel I read by Alice Hoffman. Illumination Night takes place on Martha’s Vineyard and follows a number of characters – a middle-aged woman who won’t leave her home, a nearly blind grandmother struggling with her delinquent granddaughter. And, as I note, “a giant who grows vegetables, with a penchant for the romantic.” At one point I wrote “Hoffman gets compared a lot to Anne Tyler and Louise Erdrich and will someday be a bestselling author – perhaps in twenty years?’

It took less time than that. She followed up with At Risk, a novel about a young gymnast who contacts AIDS from a blood transfusion. It was an earnest effort, but I thought that maybe we were going to end the relationship after two dates. I was wrong. Seventh Heaven was my #1 book for July 1990 (a really good year for reading!) and I noted that it more than fulfilled the promise of Illumination Night for me. Set in a Long Island subdivision, it features a shrinking boy, a young woman hiding out in the Lord & Taylor (Abraham & Strauss is also featured in the book – two department stores in one novel!), and at least one love triangle.

I loved Seventh Heaven, and what was even more fun, so did many of my bookseller colleagues at the Book Nook in Whitefish Bay. This was handselling at its most enjoyable. “Take this book and fall in love.” It’s one of my favorite things to do as a bookseller still, which I’m sure you’ve guessed. I’m pretty sure that Seventh Heaven was also Hoffman’s first New York Times bestseller. It also has one of my favorite hardcover treatments, from Fred Marcellino, whose most famous work is likely the iconic hardcover illustration for The Handmaid's Tale.** Here's the original Publishers Weekly review.

While Hoffman has often dropped ultra-realistic novels, it was really the ones with a little supernatural that I took to. I’m not a fantasy person, and that’s not what they read like. They are more like domestic magical realism, coined after the South American writers of the sixties and seventies that specialized in this sort of thing. Many of her books would feature what appeared to be werewolves, ghosts, and witches, the last of which is from Practical Magic, which is one of her better selling backlist titles, due to the movie adaptation.

I went back and read her first four novels, and discovered another of my favorites, Fortune’s Daughter, about a fortune teller who actually has the gift. I noticed that her work had softened a bit with age, which is not that unusual. Anne Tyler’s first novel is also kind of raw. And I continued to read each novel as it came out for many years. But eventually it came to a point where I was now often reading three books a month where I once read nine. So while I’d love to say I’ve read all 35 of Hoffman’s novels, I can’t say that. But 20 is good, right? I can’t think of too many other authors where I’ve read so much.

At about the time Boswell opened, Hoffman had a bit of a change of course. She started writing in a more traditionally historical genre. There was The Dovekeepers, a Biblical tale, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, set on the Lower East Side, and The Marriage of Opposites, which to my knowledge, is her only adult novel that focuses on a real historic figure, the mother of artist Camille Pissarro. This was one of Jane’s favorites, and we went on to sell more than 100 copies of this book. Like most independent bookstores, we have a lot of customers who like narratives set in the art world, and if you find a good one, you can run with it.

I’m so thrilled we’re hosting Alice Hoffman for the first time through Boswell. This is bucket list territory! We’ve teamed up with the Harry and Rose Samson Jewish Community Center, the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Research Center, and ABCD (After Breast Cancer Diagnosis) as cosponsors. We had actually looked at hosting Hoffman in the bookstore for a previous novel, but it didn’t come together. I had been talking to Laurie at the JCC, who told me that they would love, love, love to host Hoffman. And when The World That We Knew was announced, I saw that it would be of great interest to JCC patrons, as well as HERC, another of our regular partners. I had been chatting with ABCD about doing something, as Hoffman has been a strong advocate of breast cancer awareness and documented her story in a nonfiction book called Survival Lessons. Sadly, this book went out of stock just as we were putting together marketing for this event. 

One of the things that I love about The World That We Knew is that I can see all the themes that you can see a clear through line from Hoffman’s earlier novels to her present work. - the tension between mothers and daughters, the risks and rewards of first love, and that there is magic in the world, and you must know the rules, but sometimes you have to break them to get what you want. Whether you’ve liked Hoffman’s earlier works or her more recent historical fiction, The World That We Knew blends both together. The truth is that I could write for several more hours about Alice Hoffman – such an important part of my life. I might say a few more words and some point. But for now, The World That We Knew goes on sale September 24. More information about the September 26 ticketed event on the JCC website, which some would say is 32 years in the making!

*I feel like maybe I should have listed the event ticket link up front, which is jccmilwaukee.org/arts-ideas/alicehoffman/.

**I think at one point, I actually chose what to read based on whether it had a Fred Marcellino jacket.

What's selling at Boswell this week? - September 8-14, 2019

What's been selling at Boswell?

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
2. This Tender Land, by William Kent Krueger
3. A Better Man, by Louise Penny
4. Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
5. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
6. The Institute, by Stephen King
7. Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie
8. City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert
9. Fly Already, by Etgar Keret
10. The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott

You might have heard that The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale came out last week. You might even know someone who got it early. We sold ours on time. It might be the best first week for a non-event hardcover fiction release this year - I should verify that. Meanwhile, Julie Myserson writes in The Guardian: "Given all of this history – and the fact that for 35 years fans have apparently been begging for answers to a host of Gilead-related questions – it’s not surprising that The Testaments feels as eagerly awaited as a handmaid’s bouncing baby. If ever a novelist could justify the spawning of a sequel, Atwood can."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Something Deeply Hidden, by Sean Carroll
2. For the Good of the Game, by Bud Selig
3. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, by Caitlin Doughty
4. Our History Is the Future, by Nick Estes
5. Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell
6. Educated, by Tara Westover
7. She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
8. The Education of an Idealist, by Samantha Power
9. Lifespan, by David A Sinclair
10. Epic Bike Rides of the Americas, by Lonely Planet

Caitlin Doughty ran a very successful preorder campaign for indie bookstores on Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs - folks also got a Doughty pin! If we run out, we'll have more on October 20 when Doughty interviews Landis Blair for The Envious Siblings. Register at landisblairmke.bpt.me. Margaret Wappler writes in the Los Angeles Times: "After graduating from mortuary school, she opened her own funeral home, wrote two memoirs, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity, and developed a web series, Ask a Mortician, where she educates the morbidly curious (ahem, all of us) on such taboo topics as necrophilia and sewing a mouth shut. Her approach is wickedly funny, all while packing in concrete information. In her new book, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Doughty answers the frank queries of teenagers and other kids..."

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Overstory, by Richard Powers
2. Milwaukee Noir, edited by Tim Hennessy
3. The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald
4. Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert
5. There There, by Tommy Orange
6. The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
7. Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger
8. The Maze at Windermere, by Gregory Blake Smith
9. Paris by the Book, by Liam Callanan
10. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson

The Goldfinch made a huge leap to #1 on the national paperback bestsellers lists, following a similar jump from The Art of Racing in the Rain (which I don't think ever hit our top 10). It doesn't look like either film is working. Business Insider reported on the Garth Stein adaptation being a flop for Disney (though it's officially a Fox Studios holdover). Hannah Shaw-Williams in Screen Rant actually wrote a piece on why she thinks the reviews on The Goldfinch are so particularly bad.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. The Outward Mindset, by Arbinger Institute
2. Beating Guns, by Shane Claiborne
3. Incredibull Stella, by Marika Meeks with Elizabeth Ridley
4. The Future Is History, by Masha Gessen
5. The Man Without a Face, by Masha Gessen
6. Brothers, by Masha Gessen
7. One Pot Vegetarian , by Sabrian Fauda-Role
8. These Truths, by Jill Lepore
9. 111 Places in Milwaukee That You Must Not Miss, by Michelle Madden
10. Calypso, by David Sedaris

Jill Leppore's These Truths doesn't seem like the kind of book to me that would work in paperback, but here it is in our top 10. Ivan DeLuce in Business Insider (look at me quoting from them twice in one week!) did note that Bill Gates just recommended it, along with "every word David Foster Wallace has ever written."


Books for Kids:
1. Strike Zone, by Mike Lupica
2. All the Impossible Things, by Lindsay Lackey
3. Heat, by Mike Lupica
4. Elvis Is King, by Jonah Winter, with illustrations by Red Nose Studio
5. The Cape, by Kate Hannigan
6. Miracle on 49th Street, by Mike Lupica
7. The Secret Subway, by Shana Corey, with illustrations by Red Nose Studio
8. Adventures of Mark Johnson, by Harlan D Hayman
9. No Slam Dunk, by Mike Lupica
10. Five Dark Fates, by Kendare Blake

It's school visit season! Several folks in this week's top 10 had visits, and that's not just Mike Lupica. Lindsey Lackey's debut, All the Impossible Things was a big hit earlier in the month, while Kate Hannigan comes to town for The Cape this Wednesday. In both cases, there are no public events. We should have signed copies - though I should note we sold through all our signed copies of Mike Lupica's Strike Zone.

From the Journal Sentinel Book Page:

--Mark Athitakis (USA Today) reviews Nell Zink's Doxology: "The opening pages of Nell Zink’s irreverent, ersatz social novel Doxology suggest a quirky tale about parenthood and punk rock in 1980s New York. But it soon expands into something bigger, more charming and ambitious, encompassing the most serious themes of the 21st century while remaining comic and earthbound."

--Elliot Schrefer (also USA Today) takes on Rob Hart's The Warehouse: "In this near-future novel, a massive tech company, Amaz- whoops, I mean Cloud, has become the corporate answer to government itself, bringing workers together in climate-controlled, carefully surveilled villages separated by hundreds of miles of sun-broiled wasteland. After the Black Friday Massacres brought an end to physical shopping, Cloud is one of the few employers left in the country, and scoring a job there also means submitting to its rules and relocating to a MotherCloud facility."

--Russell Contreras (Associated Press) writes about Jeffrey Ostler's Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas: "A new book by a noted historian attempts to show how expanding American democracy hurt Native Americans in the early days of the nation and how tribes viewed the young United States as an entity seeking to erase them from existence."

Here are the Boswell bestsellers for the week ending September 7, 2019

Here are the Boswell bestsellers for the week ending September 7, 2019

Hardcover Fiction:
1. This Tender Land, by William Kent Krueger (event today, Sunday, September 8, 3 pm)
2. A Better Man V15, by Louise Penny
3. Fly Already, by Etgar Keret
4. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
5. The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott
6. Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
7. The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo
8. City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert
9. Big Sky V5, by Kate Atkinson
10. The Girl Who Lived Twice V6, by David Lagercrantz

From the profile of Lara Prescott by Karen Valby in The New York Times: "The Secrets We Kept, a gorgeous and romantic feast of a novel anchored by a cast of indelible secretaries — some groomed to be secret agents, and all clacking away at covert C.I.A. documents on mint-green typewriters - promptly sold to Knopf at auction for $2 million." Prescott notes that she was turned down for MFA programs her first time out, and was discouraged by at least one prominent writer to write more like Hemingway - that's the code for writing more like a man, isn't it? The book is also the new Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. For the Good of the Game, by Bud Selig
2. How To, by Randall Munroe
3. The Pioneers, by David McCullough
4. The Economists' Hour, by Binyamin Appelbaum
5. The Second Mountain, by David Brooks
6. Educated, by Tara Westover
7. Furious Hours, by Casey Cep
8. On Spice, by Caitlin PenzeyMoog
9. The Drink That Made Wisconsin Famous, by Doug Hoverson
10. Salt Fat Acid Heat, by Samin Nosrat

Noel King talks to Binyamin Appelbaum about his new book, The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, which documents the rise of economists (most notably Milton Friedman) to help control American economic policy on NPR's Morning Edition: "I think it's a classic example of a revolution that went too far. The gains are real. The benefits are real. Economists brought a lot of discipline to policymaking. In a lot of ways, they improved the quality of public policy. But by sort of embracing that idea to the exclusion of any other priorities, by saying, we're just going to focus on efficiency. By advocating for economists to take the wheel and excluding other points of view, we ended up in a really problematic place."

Paperback Fiction:
1. A Thread So Fine, by Susan Welch
2. The Overstory, by Richard Powers
3. Ohio, by Stephen Markley
4. The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez
5. There There, by Tommy Orange
6. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson
7. A Fortune for Your Disaster, by Hanif Abdurraqib
8. The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
9. We're All in This Together, by Amy Jones
10. Vintage 1954, by Antoine Laurain

Hanif Absurraquib's second collection of poetry, A Fortune for Your Disaster, is going to get massive attention, but I'm still working off of the trade reviews. Here is Publishers's Weekly: " An old adage in creative writing workshops holds that a writer ought to show how an action or idea unfolds instead of simply telling readers that it happened. So when an author's unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it's tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry, the author's second collection. With the swagger of a boxer and the restraint of a scholar, Abdurraqib invokes pop culture and Black history with equal ease, alternating stream-of-consciousness prose poems with deeply introspective lamentations.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Spirit of a Dream, by David Rearick
2. Get a Financial Life, by Beth Kobliner
3. Whose Story Is This?, by Rebecca Solnit
4. Savage Gods, by Paul Kingsnorth
5. Calypso, by David Sedaris
6. Old in Art School, by Nell Painter
7. Fiske Guide to Colleges 2020, by Edward B Fiske
8. One Pot Vegetarian, by Sabrina Fauda-Role
9. To Obama, by Jeanne Marie Laskas
10. The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben Macintyre

At The Spectator, Nina Lyon reviews Paul Kingsnorth's Savage Gods, published here by Two Dollar Radio after much attention in Great Britain. She writes: "The venerable Oxford philologist Max Müller held that ‘mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language’. Gods filled a void, reanimating meaning as words became more fixed and less metaphorical. A more fundamental disease of language - the words themselves - is the subject of Paul Kingsnorth’s memoir." Or to be specific, Kingsnorth contemplates an end to writing, focusing on working the land and helping raise his family.

Books for Kids
1. The Great Shelby Holmes V1, by Elizabeth Eulberg
2. Dog Man For Whom the Ball Rolls V7, by Dav Pilkey
3. Rite of Passage, by Richard Wright
4. Lawrence in the Fall, by Matthew Farina and Doug Salati (event at Boswell Sat Sep 20, 11 am)
5. Restart, by Gordon Korman
6. Explorers, by Nellie Huang
7. Pumpkinheads, by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks
8. Voyage to the Bunny Planet, by Rosemary Wells
9. Lulu and Rocky in Milwaukee, by Babara Joosse and Renée Graef
10. The Great Shelby Holmes and the Haunted Hound V4, by Elizabeth Eulberg

Rainbow Rowell's latest, Pumpkinheads, is a graphic novel illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks about two friends who bond while working at a pumpkin patch in Nebraska. Voice of Youth Advocates writes that "Even readers who do not love Halloween, pumpkins, and Midwestern cultural icons as much as Deja and Josiah do will be pulled into this romantic, nostalgic, and wonderfully illustrated story." And Publishers Weekly writes: "The pacing is assured, driving along in short bursts that leave room for key scenes to stretch, but it's the primary characters' authentic friendship--built over several seasons working alongside one another - and the variously inclusive cast that really bring this funny last-day story home."

From the Journal Sentinel:

From Mark Athitakis (USA Today): "The opening pages of Nell Zink’s irreverent, ersatz social novel Doxology suggest a quirky tale about parenthood and punk rock in 1980s New York. But it soon expands into something bigger, more charming and ambitious, encompassing the most serious themes of the 21st century while remaining comic and earthbound."

From Russell Contreras (Associated Press): "A new book by a noted historian attempts to show how expanding American democracy hurt Native Americans in the early days of the nation and how tribes viewed the young United States as an entity seeking to erase them from existence. University of Oregon history professor Jeffrey Ostler’s just-released Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas argues that the emergence of American democracy depended on the taking of Native lands.

Eliot Schrefer reviews The Warehouse (USA Today): "In this near-future novel, a massive tech company, Amaz- whoops, I mean Cloud, has become the corporate answer to government itself, bringing workers together in climate-controlled, carefully surveilled villages separated by hundreds of miles of sun-broiled wasteland. After the Black Friday Massacres brought an end to physical shopping, Cloud is one of the few employers left in the country, and scoring a job there also means submitting to its rules and relocating to a MotherCloud facility." Think Michael Crichton.

A Boswell gift post - what's happening in greeting cards

It's September and that means it's time to get our fall holiday spinner up. Normally I'd put out the 12-pocket one, but we're having such success with the New Yorker cards (two reorders in two months) that I'm loathe to consolidate them into our regular assortment. It took me close to ten years to bring them in and now I feel I lost ten years of sale. With each reorder, we've been able to bring in a few new designs in addition to reordering the old ones. Here's some sausage details - I usually reorder a block card if it sells out in six months, but I can't figure out if this card buyer is going broad (lots of different designs) or deep (multiple units of the same card) and that would determine how much I rotate them.

Fortunately, by just adding two fall themed blank cards, I was able to fill a 24 unit spinner with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and a few Rosh Hashanah cards. One of the things I've learned over the past few years is that Halloween doesn't sell as well as I thought it would (based on how many cards are on the market) while Thanksgiving sells a bit better (with a far more limited selection to choose from). Do you think perhaps that the Thanksgiving card is an end-of-year alternative to Christmas/generic-holiday/New Year/a-tiny-bit-of-Hanukkah cards? We're also looking for general interest lines that might feature some Ramadan, Hajj, and Eid cards, which according to this article, are the three holidays where Muslims send cards. 

We usually do also try a new local line each year. Earlier I brought in Persika Design, which is the work of Christina Schepmann Thomas. The secret trick to get reorders is more birthday and less friendship/love, which has a strong Valentine's Day sale but is modest the rest of the year. I get the feeling that this is a stronger category in boutiques. I also feel like this is changing. When we opened, I read several columns advising indicating that our percentage of blanks were too high. Now I'm seeing that they turn faster than all our occasion cards except birthday and they are neck-and-neck with sympathy. 

In addition to Nelson Line's New Yorker cards,the Little Red House's blank bird cards, designed by Aggie Cheung in San Jose, have been a big hit. Another line that seemed weak on birthday but is turning just fine is Anthology, created by the Sisters Komai (Sachi and Laura) for their store on State Street in Madison. They wrote to me and asked if I wanted to try their cards, many of which are Wisconsin themed, and I did. I've now reordered three times. They also have wonderful Madison-themed cards, but we don't have those at Boswell. 

Our latest local line is She Said It, from Kathryn Christenson and her daughter Anna, working from the based in the Milwaukee and Madison area. The line is a collection of quotes from women in history. I'm generally not a text card enthusiast. We brought in one line that really didn't sell well and have rejected a dozen more. I think people think that because we're a bookstore filled with text, we like plain text, but when it comes to cards, I think we need a little art too, to pop. The cards are multicolored and hand-lettered, which make all the difference, I hope!

So far we brought in eight designs and five are on the shelf - more will come out as space opens up. The quotes are from Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Breedlove, Marie Curie, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman. Oh, and Jane Austen. Currently I have them in encouragement, even though there are cards not too dissimilar in blank. Hey, it's sort of like you'll see a book on baseball during World War II sometimes in the baseball section and sometimes in the World War II section, depending on the store. 

Grammar, usage, proofreading, and two books - Cecelia Watson's Semicolon and Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians*

As we at Boswell pile up email newsletters and blog posts and press releases and signs, I have learned that not everybody agrees on common usage and grammar. Style guides offer conflicting advice and as we've had various people pass through the department writing marking material, we've see variations in the way we did things. So we came up with one rule, which was to at least be consistent within one newsletter, blog, or press release. If we decided, as one of our marketing folks decreed, to stop putting an apostrophe before the s when referring to a decade (1920s, not 1920's), we'd have to make sure that every time we cut and pasted some publisher copy (we're not journalists, we cut and paste a lot of marketing copy), we'd remember to fix this, especially if it’s done both ways in one story.

We have a weird tic where for a dash, we use a "space, hyphen, space." I'm not sure where this came from, as I was definitely a double hyphen person, but one of our sources was doing this, and just decided to standardize, with one exception - we do use an em dash with no spaces to separate event headers from the copy in our print calendars. Once again, that was the doing of another long-gone bookseller.

That said, you have to give a bit. Chris is adamant about making sure that two clauses that could stand as sentences be connected by a comma before the conjunction – I have to say that we’ve never had another bookseller that consistently corrected that. Sometimes I have to put my foot down. Another bookseller insisted that when separating independent clauses by a semicolon, you should capitalize the first word in the second clause. “Not on my watch,” I cried! And while we’re using quotes, I have this other pet peeve about overusing quotation marks in non-quotation situations. I find them very unhelpful and only leave them in if you can’t understand the sentence without them.

I also want to say one more thing about the dash, or to be specific, the em dash. In just the last decade since I've been writing and pasting and proofreading, it feels like its use as exploded, and this sometimes works me up into a state. And that's why I was so excited to read Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. Cecelia Watson chronicles the punctuation’s origin, its explosion in use and subsequent falling out of favor, and its possible comeback. What I liked about the book was more of this idea that grammar was once an art and then was reverse engineered to become a science during the mania of applying the scientific method to everything. Though I still wince when I see a sign in a store that uses an apostrophe and s for a plural, I will no longer go up to the customer service desk and demand a correction. I don’t think I’ve actually done this, but I’ve certainly thought about this.

Watson argues for the mark’s comeback, quoting artists of the form such as Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, and Rebecca Solnit, arguing how, to quote myself, “artistic license can lead to a more joyfully nuanced reading life.” The book made quite a splash over the summer, resonating with the critics, reviewers, and segment producers who are probably often immersed in the kind of grammar debates that we go through. And can I mention that while I don’t subscribe to Grammarly (despite it interrupting every other video I watch), I have noted that Microsoft’s grammar rules don’t match mine. I’m sorry, but that proper name ending in s really should have an apostrophe s when it is a possessive.

One way Cecelia Watson laid things out was by looking at language criticism as either descriptive or prescriptive. That reminded me of my old dictionary talk I used to give, where I’d sort out the major dictionaries from prescriptive (American Heritage) to descriptive (Websters New World), with Merriam Webster somewhere in between. But the truth is that until the early 1960s, Merriam Webster was a prescriptive dictionary, and its change in attitudes sent shockwaves through the language community.

Can that be the basis of a novel? Yes, it can! Cathleen Schine’s latest, just out this week, is The Grammarians, the story of two sisters, Daphne and Laurel Wolfe, sisters who grow up with a great love of language. Like so many other novels I read (and Schine’s own Three Weissmanns of Westport), are the sisters feuding? Yes, eventually. I’m not sure why everyone doesn’t write novels with identical twins so that at one point the sisters can do a switcheroo. In The Grammarians, there is an excellent switcheroo.

Some language books can be rewarding but feel a bit like a class assignment. While I did recently read The Milkman, I’m not sure I can ever handle Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, for example. Over 1000 pages and pretty much one sentence? Our In-Store Lit Group will vote me out of office. But if it wins the Man Booker, I make no promises to the group. But The Grammarians language writing is something else entirely - exuberant, effervescent – I felt a little tipsy afterwards.

Daphne and Laurel grow up together, but then they grow apart, and it comes to a head over their father’s prized possession, a copy of the Webster’s International Dictionary. By adulthood, Daphne and Laurel Wolfe have become two versions of the dictionary itself, one the descriptive poet and the other the prescriptive columnist. Yes, they are the personification of diverging dictionary philosophies. But since this is a comedy, you can expect that things will eventually work out, with some unexpected twists along the way.

Like another Schine novel I enjoyed, Fin and Lady, the story is steeped in New York nostalgia. But more than her previous books, The Grammarians really called to mind Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time, in its almost fairy-tale telling. In fact, it is the most Colwiny-est novel I have read in a long time, and if that is not a compliment, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and I'm sure there are typos in this post, but it's possible that they are stylistic errors I made on purpose. 

*We like the Oxford comma; not everyone and every style guide does.

Events - Dave Rearick on sailing, Susan Welch's Twin Cities sister story, William Kent Krueger's #1 Indie Next Pick

Here's what's going on this week at Boswell.

Wednesday, September 4, 7:00 pm, at Boswell:
Dave Rearick, author of Spirit of a Dream: A Sailor's Ultimate Journey Around the World Alone

Dave Rearick has been sailing since his first ride on a Sunfish off the southern shores of Lake Michigan at age 12. He has raced throughout the Great Lakes, with over 28 Mackinac Races, 7 Solo Mac Races, 2 Solo Super Mac Races, and has won the Mike Silverthorne and Ralph Elberg Awards, given by the Great Lakes Singlehanded Society.

On October 2, 2013, Dave Rearick began an epic solo voyage around the world. Onboard his racing sloop, appropriately named Bodacious Dream, Dave sailed from Newport, Rhode Island to Cape Town, South Africa. From Cape Town, Dave sailed to Wellington, New Zealand where 'Bo' was originally built, and then onto the fabled Galapagos Islands, one of earth's great nature preserves. On the final leg, Dave returned to Newport, Rhode Island by way of the Panama Canal.

Rearick’s full circumnavigation took 256 days to complete, leaving an indelible memory of the challenges and rewards of being at one with nature, the solitude of the open sea, and the ever-changing landscape of life.

Thursday, September 5, 7 pm, at Boswell:
Susan Welch, author of A Thread So Fine

Susan Welch grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. She earned a Masters in International Management and built an international career in the brewing industry. Now this Midwest native discusses her debut novel about two sisters, drawn in part from her mother’s stories of being quarantined as a TB patient in 1940s Minnesota.

Welch’s debut is a deeply personal novel, layered with reality and insights about her family and life for women coming of age in the post-war boom in the heartland. One sister falls ill with tuberculosis and the other falls prey to a violent assault. Separated by increasing distance, both physical and emotional, the two women go on to live their own lives, yet one of them vows to hold fast to the invisible thread that connects them and protect her sister’s secret.

Kirkus Reviews calls A Thread So Fine “an engaging and poignant historical novel.” As a girl, Welch heard her mother’s stories about months in quarantine as a 19-year-old TB patient. As an adult, Welch discovered her own adoption story. The characters in her novel were created as a way to imagine how women such as her birth mother and adoptive mother might have overcome challenges as young Catholic women in the post-World War II culture of the Midwest.


Sunday, September 8, 3 pm, at Boswell:
William Kent Krueger, author of This Tender Land

On sale today! Edgar-winner William Kent Krueger returns to Boswell with his long-awaited stand-alone novel, This Tender Land. Krueger’s latest follows an orphaned boy's life-changing adventure traveling down America's great rivers during the 1930s, seeking a place to call home and a sense of purpose in a world sinking into despair. Cosponsored by Crimespree magazine.

Register for this free event at kruegermke.bpt.me. This Tender Land has been named the #1 Indie Next Pick for September. While our preorder campaign is over, you can make sure we have a copy of the book held for you at the event by upgrading to book-with-ticket through Friday.

Over the course of one unforgettable summer, four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

Christine Brunkhorst in the Star Tribune calls This Tender Land "a picaresque tale of adventure during the Great Depression. Part Grapes of Wrath, part Huckleberry Finn, Krueger’s novel is a journey over inner and outer terrain toward wisdom and freedom."

More on the Boswell upcoming events page.

Photo credit for William Kent Krueger - Diane Krueger

Boswell Bestsellers for the week ending August 31, 2019

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending August 31, 2019

Hardcover Fiction:
1. A Better Man V15, by Louise Penny
2. Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
3. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
4. The Girl Who Lived Twice V6, by David Lagercrantz
5. City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert
6. Circe, by Madeline Miller
7. Inland, by Téa Obreht
8. Normal People, by Sally Rooney
9. The New Girl V19, by Daniel Silva
10. The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo

St. Martin's Minotaur didn't listen to Jason and moved Louise Penny back to her end-of-August slot for A Better Man. Jason thought that sales went up with the November release, but our guess is that at other outlets, there's less competition for placement. From Tom Nolan in The Wall Street Journal: "Over the past 14 years, Ms. Penny has written a saga in which both hero and author have grown in ability and assurance. A Better Man, with its mix of meteorological suspense, psychological insight and criminal pursuit, is arguably the best book yet in an outstanding, original oeuvre. We look forward to additional encounters with the dignified, inspirational Armand Gamache."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. For the Good of the Game, by Bud Selig
2. Strengthsfinder 2.0, by Tom Rath
3. Educated, by Tara Westover
4. The Dying of Whiteness, by JOnathan M Metzl
5. How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
6. Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
7. The Ghosts of Eden Park, by Karen Abbott
8. Ruffage, by Abra Berens
9. The Source of Self Regard, by Toni Morrison
10. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, but Nobody Wants to Die, by Amy Gutmann

It's the first week out for Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Health Care in America, written by a University of Pennsylvania professor and the school's present, both of whom served on President Obama's bio-ethics panel. Andrea Mitchell calls the book "required reading for anyone with a heartbeat who wants to understand the ethical and practical contradictions of our cultural obsession with prolonging life at all costs."

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Air You Breathe, by Frances de Pontes Peebles
2. The Overstory, by Richard Powers (In-Store Lit Group at Boswell, Oct 14 7 pm)
3. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
4. Milwaukee Noir, edited by Tim Hennessy
5. The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
6. The Incendiaries, by R.O. Kwon
7. Good Omens (3 paperback editions), by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
8. Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney
9. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

Our November In-Store Lit Group pick returns to our regular schedule after two displaced weeks - Labor Day throws things off. Thought we're open 10 am to 5 pm, we're closed in the evening when we'd normally meet. November's pick is The Incendiaries, which some critics say is about "violence and beauty," while others say no, its themes are "politics and faith." And here's the Ron Charles take, from The Washington Post: "The Incendiaries is a sharp, little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye. You keep blinking at these pages, struggling to bring the story into some comforting focus, convinced you can look past its unsettling intimations. But R.O. Kwon doesn’t make it easy to get her debut out of your system."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Policing the Planet, edited by Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton
2. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
3. White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo
4. The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein
5. White Rage, by Carol Anderson
6. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
7. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
8. Reclaiming Community, by Bianca Baldridge
9. Calypso, by David Sedaris
10. 111 Places in Milwaukee that You Must Not Miss, by Michelle Madden

As you might note, we had a large order for books that deal with race issues this week. Most of them have already been highlighted on our bestseller wrap ups, but I think this is the first appearance of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives. It's an anthology and a little more academic than the other titles - I think all by The Color of Law went on to be New York Times bestsellers and Rothstein's book was certainly on some national lists (and many weeks in Milwaukee). Cornel wrote of Camp and Heatherton's collection: "“This book is the best analytical and political response we have to the historic rebellions in Ferguson. Don't miss it."

Books for Kids:
1. Dog Man For Whom the Ball Rolls V7, by Dav Pilkey
2. Lulu and Rocky in Milwaukee, by Barbara Joosse and Renée Graef
3. Rite of Passage, by Richard Write
4. The Downstairs Girl, by Stacey Lee
5. Hello Girls, by Brittany Cavallaro
6. Pigeon Needs a Bath, by Mo Willems
7. Best Friends, by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham
8. The Lightning Thief V1 by Rick Riordan
9. Lawrence in the Fall, by Matthew Farina and Doug Salati (event at Boswell, Sat Sep 21, 11 am)
10. Pigeon Has to Go to School, by Mo Willems

Great to see a first week pop for The Downstairs Girl, from Stacey Lee. Lee visited between books to the Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series. Her new book is a variation on Dear Mrs. Bird, about Jo Kuan, a young woman who secretly writes an Agony Aunt column in Atlanta in the 1890s. Booklist wrote: "If anyone found out that a Chinese American teenager was behind the column, she'd be run out of town or worse. Lee has concocted another thrilling historical novel, blending stellar plotting and a dynamic cast of characters with well-researched details and sharp commentary on America's history of racism and prejudice."

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins offers a fall preview. In addition to some events we've been promoting, Higgins revealed the keynote for the Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books, Andre Dubus III, appearing for the paperback edition of Gone So Long.

Barbara VandenBurgh reviews Téa Obreht's Inland in The Arizona Republic: "The Serbian-American writer displays dazzling dexterity and wit with the English language, transporting the reader to a fantastical late 19th century that borders on outright fantasy, where descriptions wax decadent and ghosts are treated as a matter of fact."

Bruce DeSilva's Associated Press review tackles The Cold Way Home: "Julia Keller’s eighth yarn featuring small-town West Virginia crime fighter Bell Elkins is a heartbreaking blues song of a novel, employing beauty to evoke despair while reminding readers that even in the darkest of days, there might also be light"