What I'm Missing on Twitter.

Thank goodness that Stacie is monitoring our Twitter feed, or I would have totally missed this interaction:

@boswellbooks

Our weekly bestseller lists, including play-by-play commentary. http://fb.me/23B3iVq0h

@patrickerville

I hold you responsible @DeanBakopoulos RT @boswellbooks Our weekly bestseller lists, including play-by-play commentary. http://fb.me/23B3iVq0h

@DeanBakopoulos

.@patrickerville .@boswellbooks I think mostly I have ghost enemies, not ghost friends. Also, ur #1 on that list and I am #6. So that hurts.

@patrickerville

Former student at @boswellbooks reading referred to @DeanBakopoulos as "your little buddy" when chatting after Q&A. Highlight of tour.

@DeanBakopoulos

@patrickerville @boswellbooks I know. So weird she noticed and mentioned the ten pounds you gained on book tour.

Selling books at the David Maraniss event (confession: I didn't sell any--I just hung out with the folks in line before they opened the doors), I came up with a new Twitter game.

You try to think up a crazy hashtag, which actually has tweets attached. Then you read the posts allowed until someone can guess the hashtag. 

Oh, check out our new staff recs on The Boswellians.

By Popular Demand, Stacie and I Come Up with a Plan to Post Events on Our Website Earlier.

I think the biggest requests we get from customers (and even from some authors) is to post our events earlier somewhere. Though I get a little nervous about events that might still be subject to change, we've certainly had plenty of events cancelled at the last minute due to weather and illness. It's never too late for things to change.

So now we're trying to show our events earlier. Stacie wrote the code, and we're trying to copy and paste, then substitute the relevant data. I've made it a part of our event confirmation ritual. Today we finally confirmed our Libba Bray event at the Milwakuee Public Library on October 4 (we're looking for folks to help us brainstorm to put together a twenties-era ambience for The Diviners) and Michael Ennis on September 17 (Jason and Conrad both love The Malice of Fortune, a Eco-esque literary thriller about Machiavelli).

And of course tomorrow, we'll have to move one of them. But that's part of the game, so just confirm closer to the event. But now you have more time to mark your calendars. So here's the link.

Checking Out the World War II Books on Boswell's Recently Published and Boswell's Best Shelves.

It’s Tuesday, and that means new titles, but I am bored of just listing random brand-new arrivals. No, I want a theme, and after putzing around with music books (Elton John’s Love is the Cure and Christopher Anderson’s Mick both caught my eye), I decided to focus on World War II. Whenever Anderson has a new book out, I remember the mediocre launch of publicity I put together for Father: The Figure and the Force (Warner Books, 1983). Hey, I got you Regis, at least.

On the Boswell’s Best is Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day, by Stephen Talty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Best remembered for his pirate narrative, Empire of Blue Water, Talty is one of those authors who search high and low for a footnote from history to bring to life in a good narrative. This is the story of Juan Pujol, an eccectric hotelier and chicken farmer (per Kirkus) who set up an elaborate scam to fool the Germans into thinking that D-Day would be at Calais, not at Normandy.  D.B. Grady writes a particularly enthusiastic review of Agent Garbo in the Atlantic; it’s not often that you see war writing touted as “beautiful.” 

If Talty’s focus is micro, then Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War (Little, Brown) is clearly macro. Praised as an epic, authoritative work on the defining moment in the 20th century, this old-school tome is fully footnoted and indexed, just the way I like my history. But to paraphrase Passover, why is this World War II history different from all other World War histories? For one thing, Beevor, author of the bestselling D-Day, pegs the start of the war earlier than most, at the 1939 defeat of the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol by General Zhukov. Roger Moorhouse in the Independent calls The Second World War a “splendid” book with pages that “fly by with considerable speed.”

Still recent but not just out of the packing boxes is James Campbell’s The Color of War: How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America (Crown). The author of The Ghost Mountain Boys chronicles the battle for Saipan, fought mostly by White Americans, juxtaposed with a terrible explosion that killed Black troops at Port Chicago, troops that were still not allowed to fight among their fellow soldiers. It’s that this terrible tragedy was due to the poor training of the soliders, who were considered with such distaste for their race that one could posit that they were seen as expendable. After this tragedy, when a number of Black servicemen refused to go back to doing this hazardous work without proper training, they were court-martialed. Dennis Byrne notes in the Chicago Tribune that their commanding White officers were the ones who should have gone to trial.

I asked our buyer Jason for a good new World War II themed novel and he came up with Frances Itani’s Requiem (Atlantic Monthly). The author of Deafening (which I read and enjoyed several years ago) writes of one Japanese-Canadian family who was deported from their British Columbia home after the Pearl Harbor attack and send to internment camps. The focus of the story is on Bin Okuma, who jumps back and forth between his postwar travels and his life in the camps. Of course when I think of books about internment camps, my thoughts run to Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine and Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, but the Canadian reviewers (well, Quill and Quire) also note Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. Hey, a book set in Canada. Maybe you’d like to consider Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls? It’s still got U.S. rights available!

Agent Garbo and The Second World War are Boswell's Best, 20% off, at least through July 23. The Color of War and Requiem qualify for Boswell Benefits points.

What's Selling at Boswell, Week Ending July 14, 2012?

Hardcover fiction:
1. This Bright River, by Patrick Somerville
2. Gold, by Chris Cleave (event 7/16)
3. Shadow of Night, by Deborah Harknesss
4. A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin
5. Sacré Bleu, by Christopher Moore

Janet Maslin's two favorite books take the top spots this week.  I won't link to the Sunday Book review piece for Gold (being a senstive emotional guy can be tough, can't it?), though Jay Jennings in the San Francisco Chronicle notes that "at times Cleave can be as sensitive as Alice Munro in his portrayal of small human moments" $5 Pablove fundraiser tickets available here.

Hardcover nonfiction:
1. The Good Food Revolution, by Will Allen
2. Bushville Wins, by John Klima
3. Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss (event 7/18)
4. The President's Club, by Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs
5. The Price of Inequality, by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Dueling Norton economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have been steady sellers for us since their recent dual releases. Even their jackets are similar. But this week The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future takes the lead. The Guardian's Yvonne Roberts seems to enjoy how "Stiglitz methodically and lyrically (almost joyously) exposes the myths that provide justification for 'deficit fetishism' and the rule of austerity." No surprise, the Financial Times review was less positive.

Paperback fiction:
1. Pryme Knumber, by Matt Flynn
2. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James
3. State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
4. Fifty Shades Darker, by E.L. James
5. The Bay of Foxes, by Sheila Kohler
6. Fifty Shades Freed, by E.L. James
7. Becoming Jane Eyre, by Sheila Kohler
8. My American Unhappiness, by Dean Bakopoulos
9. The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka
10. The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock (event 7/17)

Our paperback fictions were strong enough this week to extend the list to five; it is also the only way to get new titles on the list, what with the domination by E.L. James. We've got a lot of event authors on the list this week; if you exclude E.L. James, whom we're not hosting, though folks of course have asked, the only non-event author on the list is Julie Otsuka. We've got several book clubs hosting her including the in-store lit group on August 6. Perhaps our sales momentum will bode well for us making the cut for a future Otsuka tour.

Paperback nonfiction:
1. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller
2. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller
3. Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed
4. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson
5. Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer

Following the success of Wild, Strayed's publisher has released Tiny Beautiful Things, her "Dear Sugar" columns from The Rumpus. No cheap add on this, both Stacie and Sharon are huge fans of the book.

Books for kids:
1. The Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids, by Terese Allen and Bobbi Malone
2. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
3. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
4. Numbers, by Thierry Laval
5. Killing Mr. Griffin, by Lois Duncan

Terese Allen and Bobbi Malone are both doing events are the state for The Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids. I noticed that Malone is signing at Old World Wisconsin on August 5, while Allen will do a talk at the Eat Local Challenge at the Urban Ecology Center on Saturday, August 25, 1 pm, co-sponsored by Outpost Natural Foods.

So Close to Mexico, Maine, but Not Quite Close Enough for Me to Visit, Except Through Monica Wood's New Memoir.

So I’m in New England for a few days, Boston for one, Worcester for two, and of course I realize that I’m so close to so many places I would love to go, but absolutely have no time to visit them. It’s sort of like when I went to Atlanta and could not think of a way to get over to Athens to see Avid Bookshop. And here I am, probably less than an hour from Providence where I could browse Brown University Bookstore and find out what Tovah is reading.

Or I could go up to Maine and walk around Portland and spend time at Stuart and Chris’s Longfellow Books. Whenever I think about that store, I remember falling in love with Monica Wood’s Any Bitter Thing a number of years ago. We sold a great deal of copies of that novel at Schwartz, and apparently we’d told Stuart and Ms. Wood wound up sending us a very nice note. Eventually I wound up going to Maine and meeting her at a bookstore reception because for some reason, I think she did read at Schwartz for the paperback and I didn’t attend. I was lazy back then, especially when half the events involved driving 15 miles north or west, and I didn’t own a car.

And now Wood has just written When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine. It’s always interesting to read an author’s novel and then read a memoir. Some novels are almost autobiographical, and you learn what was true and what was not. Other novels couldn’t be farther from the truth. But many titles are somewhere in between. The plot’s totally imagined but perhaps a character is based a bit on a real person. Like Father Mike in Wood’s novel bears some resemblance to Father Bob in Wood’s life.

I’ve been more often trying to write blog posts about the books I read immediately after finishing them because if I wait too long, I forget the details.

Here’s my take on the new memoir:

“Living in Mexico, Maine in the early 1960s, the Irish Catholic Wood family (four girls and a boy) lived a pleasant life, if you can exclude their grumpy Lithuanian landlords downstairs. But then three deaths happened, two fast, one slow. First, Dad died of a heart attack. Secondly, President Kennedy was shot. And finally, the Oxford paper mill, the paternal employer that kept the town going, started on its slow decline. Told from the perspective of fourth grader Monica, it’s a nostalgic and poignant look at coming to terms with grief and change, both from both a child’s perspective, and the adult that this child became.”

And that reminded me that the paper mill was like a character in the story. I had written quite a bit and it was only when I reread my review that I discovered I had left out the slow decline of the town’s employment center and raison d’etre. And of course much American industry in the United States has followed the same path, but in this case, you can see how the attitude of the factory owner’s changed when they moved out of town, well before the mill started changing ownership every few years.

I immediately gave my copy to Anne, and she also enjoyed Wood’s story. Some of the most fun experiences of reading a story is identification. And though Anne did not grow up in a poor mill town, and her father did not die when she was a young girl, she could identify with many of the small details. As much as we should never prejudge folks based on their religious or ethnic or racial identities, there is a shared experience celebrated in many artistic works that gives additional pleasure to the folks that shared the experience!

So it is not surprising that one of the first reviews to be posted was from U.S. Catholic. Catherine O’Connell-Cahill’s praise is effusive, noting “This book is a shining example of everything a memoir should be.”

I like a little balance. Read some books inside my comfort zone, but mix things up with a little adventurous reading. Just reading many of our event books alone get me in genres I’d never consider on my own and sometimes it piques my interest for further reading. But that’s what’s interesting about reading. To use a food metaphor, my adventurous eating is someone else’s comfort food. But When we Were the Kennedys works for either, I think.

For Worcester, there's always John Dufresne, but that's for another post.

A Short Post on a July 14 Bicycle Race That Has Nothing to do with Local Merchants.

Here are some things your should know about the Saturday, July 14 bicycle race on Downer Avenue:
1. The Downer Avenue Merchants Association has nothing to do with this race.
2. We had less than two weeks' notice that it was happening.
3. There seemed to be no neighborhood notification.
4. This race has not been owned by "Otto" for many years.
5. There are no ancillary activities.
6. That said, there is professional racing from 6-10 pm.
7. Streets will be closed.
8. The Downer 30 bus will be diverted.

Joe Meno's Back to Akashic and He's Also Back at Boswell, on Thursday, August 2, 7 pm.

Art and writing. Kind of the same, kind of different. Who hasn’t read a novel about an artist and thought, “I guess one creative process is substituting for another. This is really about writing.” Or so I thought when I read Carol Anshaw’s recent novel, Carry the One. So I asked Anshaw, how much did you draw from your writing life in creating the life of an artist?” And several folks chuckled, and Anshaw replied, “I didn’t draw from it at all. I’m also a painter.”

The intersection between art and writing has always been a recurring theme in literature, and it’s surely a motif, as every illustrated book is a dance between word and picture. We’ve heard from many a children’s book writer and illustrator about the pairing of both together by editors. Sometimes they don’t even meet beforehand.

On a less commercial note, I’ve recently read a couple of novels about young people creating art movements. They’re not exactly historical, but both are set in the recent past, specifically, just before the internet takeover. When I read Don Lee’s new novel, The Collective, I wasn’t thinking that my reading list had become thematic. It is, however, about three college students, a visual artist and two writers, all Asian American, who meet in college, hoping to change the world with art (both visual and written).

Their ideas take on life, and they build this collective in Cambridge. But the show they build up to becomes a colossal failure, leading to the group’s self destruction. I’m not giving anything away here; the story starts with one character contemplating another’s death, several years afterward. I’m not really writing about Lee’s novel here, but simply putting in the context of this reading trend of mine.

So a bit later I pick up Joe Meno’s new novel Office Girl. He’s back at Akashic, after a flirtation with Norton. I guess he also had at least one novel at Harper. It’s not that this novel is particularly experimental; it’s just a different kind of canvas. Jack and Odile are two struggling souls in their twenties, frustrated art students, one dating a married man, and the other married, but just abandoned by his spouse. Both work a series of dead-end jobs.

Jack has become obsessed with taping the sounds of his life. His apartment is crammed with boxes sorted out by subject. And Odile? She’s been rejected by her art school establishment for not buying into the pronouncements of her authority figures, whether establishment or subversive. Odile wants to be her own kind of subversive, and that does not involve paintings of Winnie the Pooh snorting heroin.

So Jack has become a bit obsessed with Odile, and Odile is up for the attention because it seems like Jack is willing to indulge her. Or is he actually looking for an outlet for his own artistic energy. So they coin the Alphonse F. movement, which is part performance art, part craft, part prank. Haunting the city bus. Smashing bananas into a car. Creating and distributing a dirty magazine.

It sort of reminded me of Paul and Holly’s shoplifting-with-strange-masks episode in the movie version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” And so I wondered if Meno meant for this art movement of sorts to be a channeling of hormonal rebellion. And for some reason I also thought of the film “Breathless”, which was not about an art movement, but sort of helped usher in the new wave movement in film.

I thought of other comparisons, but one interesting difference is that this story doesn’t seem to end in violence, the way I thought it might. All you need is a few bloody deaths and you might have something akin to Barry Gifford, but for Meno, he's happy to keep the subversion mild. Meno's rebellion has a gentle charm, and that is reinforced with the Cody Hudson illustrations. There’s one particularly silly take on the imaginary building party that Jack’s friend takes him to. The revelers are the the Eiffel Tower, the John Hancock building, Big Ben, and a bridge, all of them having a little drink. The collection of sex organs don’t shock so much as make you smile—so very much like Emmi Hsu’s artwork for Fomato cards.

Not that all the illustrations are bright. There are the broken glasses, the mangled bicycle. But Todd Baxter’s photographs are almost always focused on the stark and disconnected—snowscapes and shoe-clad feet, and a woman posed in a Star Wars mask who could be straight out of the adult sequel to Darth Vader and Son.

In the end, this might not be so much about a movement as a moment. It’s when you meet the person who helps you face adulthood. I’m not just talking about Jack and Odile’s effect on each other, but also Jack’s stepfather David and Odile’s younger brother Ike. It’s about finding out who you don’t want to be, like Odile’s married boyfriend Paul or Jack’s wife Elise, though honestly I don’t think she was so bad. And like many stories of turning points, it ends, and we don’t know what happens next, and we shouldn’t know.

No sequels. But I wouldn’t mind a soundtrack. And just one more note.

Joe Meno’s coming to Boswell on Thursday, August 2, 7 pm with poet Dan Nowak opening for him. I'd like to point out that in an unusual move for a hardcover/paper simultaneous release, the two editions have different jackets. You might know him from his previous books, Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails, and The Great Perhaps. Come with your own collective, and feel free to make a big statement.

Walking Around Boston.

On my way to a wedding, we detoured to Boston for a day. We're staying at the Nine Zero for a night before we go to Worcester. There was a Borders just a couple of blocks away. It looks like the space used to be a bank. It's just a few blocks from the Filenes, which is still empty since Macys consolidated their department store business in Boston.

With both B&N and Borders out of downtown (the one that shows up on maps is actually the college bookstore for a campus for Tufts), I wonder if there is now a space for an indie bookstore somewhere around here. I'm glad to hear that Trident is expanding, but that's more in the Back Bay, where there is also a B&N. Now I understand a bit better why the Barbara's does so well in South Station.

On the other hand, there were two cupcake stores within two blocks of the hotel.