Boswell bestsellers, week ending November 7, 2020

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending November 7, 2020

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy
2. Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar
3. American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins
4. Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam
5. The Searcher, by Tana French
6. The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter (signed tip-in copies available)
7. Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots
8. Snow, by John Banville
9. Piranesi, by Suanna Clarke
10. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

No new books this week, which gives me room for a rumination. I think that by The New York Times putting The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (but no Oxford comma) in the miscellaneous category instead of fiction, the book's sales impact is being muted. The author describes it as a small graphic novel. Were it moved, it would be the second oldest book on the list after Where the Crawdads Sing. It's hard to argue that the hardcover fiction list is more prominent than the potpourri catch-all that is advice/how-to/miscellaneous. Nora Krug in The Washington Post reported on the phenom in January. It's still going.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. The Best of Me, by David Sedaris
2. Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
3. The Moment of Lift, by Melinda Gates
4. Thinking Inside the Box, by Adrienne Raphel (Register for November 10 event here)
5. The Well Plated Cookbook, by Erin Clarke
6. Greenlights, by Michael McConaughey
7. How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
8. Modern Comfort Food, by Ina Garten
9. Ottolenghi Flavor, by Yottam Ottolenghi
10. Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld
11. Setsuko's Secret, by Shirley Ann Higuchi (Register for November 12 event here)
12. I'll Be Seeing You, by Elizabeth Berg (Register for November 9 event here)

It's new but it's not new. But Heller McAlpin writes in the Christian Science Monitor: "OK, so technically, there’s nothing new here. But The Best of Me is an excellent introduction to Sedaris’ work if, somehow, you’re not among the millions who have made him a mainstay on bestseller lists and flocked to his ticketed readings. Even if you’ve read or listened to every word he’s ever written, it’s a terrific highlights reel and a chance to view the arc of Sedaris’ development as a writer over 25 years" But where's my new bonus track and fold-out poster?

Paperback Fiction:
1. By a Lake Near a Moon, by DeWitt Clinton (register for November 11 event here)
2. Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout
3. The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner
4. Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
5. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk
6. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart
7. Circe, by Madeline Miller
8. The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
9. Vintage 1954, by Antoine Laurain
10. Mirror Lake, by Juneau Black

I do not know why Vintage 1954 outsold The Readers' Room last week, only it's not a bulk sale and I did hand-sell at least one of them. Speaking of backlist pops with new releses, it was this week that I noticed that Song of Achilles is on The New York Times paperback list along with Circe, month's after what I thought would be a promotional pop. I did also notice good bestseller runs for Mothers and Homegoing with the releases of The Vanishing Half and Transcendent Kingdom. I hadn't seen this much in the past few years, so I'm wondering if a new retail (in-store or online) marketing program.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Memorable Milwaukee, by Darlene Wesenberg Rzezotarski (signed copies available)
2. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
3. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
4. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
5. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
6. Furious Hours, by Casey Cep
7. The Bastard Brigade, by Sam Kean
8. The Body Is Not an Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor
9. My Own Words, by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
10. Monsieur Mediocre, by John Von Sothen

Casey Cep sent us several signed bookplates for the paperback edition of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, so the book is not only in new releases and book club recommendations, but on our bookplate display as well. A recent Cep column in The Wall Street Journal describes a situation that often befalls me, pronouncing words improperly that you only know from reading: "I came across a delightful account of this predicament during my research into the life of the novelist Harper Lee. Lee loved doggerel and nonsense poetry—not only reading and reciting it but also writing it. One of my favorite examples, a reflection on what it was like to move from the Deep South to New York City at the age of 23, was sent by Lee to a friend of hers under the fantastically farcical title 'Some Sociological Aspects of Peculiarities of Pronunciation Found in Persons From Alabama Who Read a Great Deal to Themselve.s'"

Books for Kids:
1. Wishes and Wellingtons, by Julie Berry
2. Sun Flower Lion, by Kevin Henkes (signed copies available)
3. The True Definition of Neva Beane (Register for November 19 event here)
4. The Mitten, by Jan Brett
5. Lilly and Friends, by Kevin Henkes (also signed - please request in special instructions)
6. The Enigma Game, by Elizabeth Wein (Register for November 8 event here - that's today!)
7. Margaret's Unicorn, by Briony May Smith
8. The Very Last Leaf, by Stef Wade
9. The Assignment, by Liza Wiemer
10. Every Night Is Pizza Night, by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

We had a nice pop in sales for one of our recent virtual school visits with Julie Berry, author of Wishes and Wellingtons. Weirdly enough, the origin of this book was as an Audible Original, which was why there was a Brilliance edition (both brands are owned by Amazon) in 2019. It's the story of a girl who finds a djinni in a sardine tin. Kirkus Reviews called it "a nostalgic Dickens and (E.) Nesbit mashup)."

A day in Madison - Anthology cards and signed copies from Kevin Henkes, Steven Wright, and Quan Barry

One of the things about a bookstore in the time of COVID is that with events virtual, it's much rarer to get signed copies. We have found that there are at least three tiers of desirability in terms of signatures, and several possible sub-tiers.

1. An actual signed book where the authors signs in the full title, or less to our taste, the half title. 

2. A signed tip-in. This is when authors sign sheets of paper that are cut and bound into the book. That's the problem with a tip-in - if you make it look like a half-title, most people won't know the difference. That said, most of the signed tip-ins are on blank sheets of paper, making them look like endpapers. Folks who do events who aren't writers love signing endpapers, because there's more room. And because publishers rarely used colored endpapers, let alone ones with something like a map on them, there's not really any reason not to sign there.

2a. That said, we've seen a few examples of publishers doing some nice tip-ins. Nobody beats the recent release of Glennon Doyle's Untamed with the special cheetah tip-in. What a great idea - we'd love to see more of this. Doyle's fans love this edition. I'd link but I suspect we're out. Check with Boswell.

3. Bookplates. At first things were going pretty well with bookplates, particularly during lockdown. But as time has gone on, there's less interest. A good bookplate can still make a difference, but we're noticing that by fall, publishers were less interested in chasing them for us. 

We do like the special bookplates that reference the book in background image, but nay to the ones with an actual jacket of the book. Too literal! We've also suspected instances of bookplates that are photocopied. We saw this a few years ago with a home repair duo at a theater event, but we never expected to see it with novelists. We also see a lot of generic bookplates where we can't quite figure out what the signature is. 

So that said, I realized that three books I was pushing for fall had authors in Madison, just a little too far away for us to ask them to visit Boswell to sign. So I organized a signing tour. I visited Steven Wright, author of The Coyotes of Carthage, Quan Barry, whose novel is We Ride Upon Sticks, and Kevin Henkes with fall releases Sun Flower Lion and Lilly & Friends: A Picture Book Treasury, a bound collection of the Lilly early readers. Everybody was masked. And for good measure, our friends at Books & Company also got their copies of Sun Flower Lion and Lilly & Friends signed too - these two links go to the Books & Company website.

While I was in Madison, I stopped by Anthology, the card store on State Street that produces custom Madison and Wisconsin-centered designs. If you're wondering whether we can sell Madison-themed product in the store, my experience is that we can't unless its Wisconsin athletics themed. But my guess is that you can't make that card because the lawyers are ready to pounce upon that. 

Because it's possible not every copy in the store is signed (we left a box of Henkes behind in error), please make sure you request a signed copy in the special instructions or when you order by phone. If you're browsing in the store, you can check for yourself. I'd also be remiss if I didn't remind you about our virtual event with Kevin Henkes for Sun Flower Lion on December 4 at 3 pm with Jane Hamilton. Register here. InkLink will also have signed copies - it's an Ink/Well event!

One last thing. Quan Barry signed books in her apartment lobby. During the signing, several folks asked what we were doing. I wound up selling a copy to one of the inquiring folks. I should note that both We Ride Upon Sticks, The Coyotes of Carthage, and Sun Flower Lion are three of my picks for the holidays. I wouldn't drive for hours for just any book.

What is selling at Boswell for the week ending October 31, 2020?

What is selling at Boswell for the week ending October 31, 2020? I'll tell you.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter (signed tip-in copies available)
2. The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
3. The Boy, the Horse, the Fox, and the Mole, by Charlie Mackesy
4. Writers and Lovers, by Lily King (register for December 9 event here)
5. A Time for Mercy, by John Grisham
6. Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar
7. Missionaries, by Phil Klay
8. Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam
9. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by VE Schwab
10. The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante

Announce our event with Lily King, I said to Chris, and maybe we can see a pop in sales for Writers and Lovers. In fact, this is King's best week for us since April. She'll be in conversation with Lisa Baudoin of Books and Company and me on December 9. Dare I say, "Makes a great gift?"

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
2. Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
3. I'll Be Seeing You, by Elizabeth Berg (register for November 9 event here)
4. 99 Percent Invisible City, by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt
5. The Well-Plated Cookbook, by Erin Clarke (request personalized copies when ordering)
6. Accidentally Wes Anderson, by Wally Koval
7. Becoming, by Michelle Obama
8. The Dead Are Arising, by Les Payne/Tamara Payne
9. Upswing, by Robert Putnam
10. Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X was a project thirty years in the making for journalist Les Payne, who died in 2018, not able to see his work to publication. Tamara Payne is the primary researcher and also the daughter of Les Payne. Michael P Jeffries notes in his New York Times review: "The historian Manning Marable’s award-winning biography, published in 2011, argues that Malcolm’s autobiography embellishes his early crimes to dramatize his later redemption. The Dead Are Arising does not directly engage Marable, but it refutes his interpretation and fills in gaps in Malcolm’s own account.

Paperback Fiction:
1. Mirror Lake, by Juneau Black
2. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart
3. The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
4. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
5. By a Lake Near a Moon, by DeWitt Clinton
6. Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson
7. Where We Come From, by Oscar Cásares (register for December 8 event here)
8. Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi
9. Open Door, by Margaret Oliphant/Seth
10. The Overstory, by Richard Powers

If I said that 40% of the top ten were past or future In-Store Lit Group selections, that would sort of be exaggerating the group's importance, being that two of the titles were National Book Award winners. But it's nice to see a pop for Shuggie Bain, the Scottish coming-of-age novel that is shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award. Speaking of Scottish writers, it wouldn't be Christmas without one (or more) of those Seth Christmas ghost story packages. Just out is Margaret or Mrs. Oliphant's The Open Door, one of several of her works of fiction that encompassed the supernatural. In this spooky story, Colonel Mortimer has taken a lease at Brentwood and things just go from eerie to horrifying. 

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
2. Shade, by Pete Souza
3. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
4. The Yellow House, by Sarah M Brown
5. Spying on the South, by Tony Horwitz
6. Burnout, by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski
7. Stony the Road, by Henry Louis Gates
8. 111 Places in Milwaukee that You Must Not Miss, by Michelle Madden
9. The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent
10. The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk

It looks like a fresh list, with the only title repeating from last week being Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, but every title in our top ten is a good six months out in paperback or quite a bit more. But don't tell that to our customers, who are still coming in for their first browse in months - they never saw Spying on the South. The late Tony Horwitz's book chronicled a year in the life of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead when he was a reporter covering the South for The New York Times and how it affected his work.

Books for Kids:
1. Look Both Ways, by Jason Reynolds
2. Skunk and Badger, by Amy Timberlake/Jon Klassen
3. My Two Blankets, by Irena Kobald/Freya Blackwood
4. Moon for Moe and Me, by Jane Bresin Zalben/Mehrdokht Amini
5. Milo's Museum, by Zetta Elliott
6. The Deep End, by Jeff Kinney
7. Bill Nye's Great Big World of Science
8. I Am Every Good Thing, by Derrick Barnes/Gordon C James
9. The Assignment, by Liza Wiemer
10. Baby Faces board book, by Margaret Miller

From Derrick Barnes and Gordon C James, the Caldicott Honor team that created Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut comes I Am Every Good Thing, with six starred advance reviews, a celebration of how extraordinary Black boys are. Booklist writes: "The need for a book like this, at a moment like this, could not be greater."

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins offers a wonderful profile of Joan Johnson, the new Milwaukee Public Library Director.

Juneau Black talk shade. Shady Hollow, that is.

Mirror Lake is the third Shady Hollow mystery. We're thrilled at Boswell to be hosting an event with Juneau Black, also known as Sharon Nagle and Jocelyn Cole. For folks in Milwaukee, substitute Koehler for Cole. For folks in the romance world, substitute Elizabeth for Jocelyn. As folks in the know always say, whether you like spies, knights, or demon hunters, Elizabeth Cole will sweep you off your feet. Okay, I don't know who says that yet, but I'm trying to jump-start it. Here's more about Elizabeth Cole's other books.

I checked the Goodreads reviews on Mirror Lake and I particularly liked this one from Lynn Morrison, partly because I didn't know who she was. She writes: "This was my first cozy mystery where the main characters are animals rather than people. However, as a huge fan of paranormal cozies, I quickly settled in. Vera Vixen captured my heart and my mind. Super savvy, absolutely no nonsense, and firmly standing on her own two feet. And the mystery - the lack of a body was a very unusual premise. Every time I thought I had the mystery solved, the writer would introduce a new twist to keep me guessing. Highly recommend!"

Here's Jessica's review: "Mirror Lake is basically the book version of curling up with a mug of tea under a perfectly fuzzy blanket on a crisp fall day. Vera is clever and a joy to follow, and I loved the unique murder mystery story line and the creatures of Shady Hollow. I started with this, the third book in the series, but will definitely go back and read the first two." Not sure of Jessica's last name, but being what the series is, it could be Rabbit.

And it's unanimous - we're all in love with Vera Vixen.

I'm not going to lie - Mirror Lake is my second favorite novel of 2020 told from an animal's perspective, narrowly beat out by Perumal Murugan's The Story of a Goat.

Hammer and Birch is part of the Cole, Inc., but I started to think, if these books were published by a traditional publisher, who would that be? I've always thought it would fit in well with Kensington's publishing program. They are probably the foremost publisher of cozies. I used to see more from Avon and Berkley, but the decline of the mass market format has definitely hurt this genre. I know this is a leap, but one more not forget that Alexander McCall Smith's first three novels were first published by Edinburgh University Press and not Pantheon.

And finally, a last reminder, that both Juneau and Black will be in conversation with me tonight, October 29, 2020. Register here for this event, which is at 7 pm CDT. We also have signed copies, though I should note that only Black signed them, not Juneau.

Boswell Events - All about Jess Walter's THE COLD MILLIONS - on sale today, event tomorrow

I love novels where the city is a main character. For some reason, they really resonate with me long after other novels fade from consciousness. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, even Chicago - those books are not hard to come up with because publishers are amenable to publishing them without worrying they are too regional. I'm more interested in the second tier - like Mark Weingardner's Crooked River Burning, which is a great Cleveland novel, and Lauren Belfer's City of Light, which puts the "flo" in Buffalo. Then we went on a crazy detour about Pittsburgh, partly because I've read a lot of good Pittsburgh novels, and partly because I work with one core Pittsburgher and another who spent formative years there. Madi opted for Zoje Stage's Baby Teeth, a recent horror entry set in Shadyside, while Chris went for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which has the best literary passage about the best entrance to coming into a city - for those who don't know what that is, it's coming through the Fort Pitt tunnel and the almost magical unveiling of Pittsburgh.

But Spokane. My only exposure to Spokane has been through the work of Sherman Alexie. I've heard a lot about Auntie's Bookstore, Spokane's literary landmark. And I know The Crescent, the old department store that for many years was owned by the old Marshall Field and Company and had the exact same typeface. In the day, I dreamed of somehow going there so I could shop the store - my friend Bill even gave me a credit card application. I never got a shopping bag. The division was eventually folded into Frederick and Nelson, the Seattle division, and of course it's all long gone. But I still like walking city centers to see what was what - not just the department stores but the hotels and theaters and parks. Was there a trolley? Is it on a river? The key is to go to the main branch of the public library, head to the microfilm/microfiche/something else, and pull up old copies of the Spokesman-Review, or whatever it was called before it likely merged a few of the papers together.

But now I almost don't have to. Jess Walter has written The Cold Millions, a novel seeped in the fabric of Spokane. It's set in the early 1900s, filled with industrialists and mine owners and working poor and prostitutes and union organizers. At the heart of the book are two brothers who wind up working with the Wobblies - the IWW - a union that, unlike many at the time, hoped to benefit all workers, no matter their race or gender or whatever people use to build themselves up by putting other people down. The book is set during the Free Speech Demonstrations of 1909 - so timely. I actually read a great book about the IWW from Dean Strang, the Madison lawyer-author, Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. It was really great to not enter the story blind, though Dean's book certainly isn't required reading to enjoy The Cold Millions.

For those of you who loved Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter's last novel, the emotional heft of that book is here too. It doesn't jump back and forth in time and is inspired by authors like John Dos Passos, per Maureen Corrigan, or Steinback, per Mark Athitakis. Corrigan, in her exuberant Wall Street Journal review, compared the book to classic Herman Wouk and Howard Fast, a page-turner with a point of view. She also mentions Doctorow a lot, but I have heard that Doctorow wasn't a fan of accurate detail in his books - he made a lot of stuff up - whereas it feels like Walter did some research. That said, he never lets the historical detail get in the way of the story.

Because it's hard to read The Wall Street Journal without a subscription, I've taken the opportunity to quote a little more. "In The Cold Millions, Mr. Walter takes the frustrations with participatory democracy and the dented dream of American social mobility expressed by the individual heroes of those earlier novels and renders them collective. The result is a strikingly earnest novel filled with a gusto that honors the beauty of believing in social change and simultaneously recognizes the cruel limits of the possible."

We hosted Jess Walter for the paperback of Beautiful Ruins and boy was it a great event. I remember my fellow bookseller Dave telling me how much I would enjoy it. I think he was buying for Next Chapter - we regularly would say, "this is a Daniel book" or "this is a Dave book," and boy was it fun when we got it right. He hit the nail on the head with this one. When this virtual event was announced, Dave, now a sales representative, wrote to me and let me know he'd be buying a ticket to our event, but could I at least remember that he hand-sold the book to me and thus, could I let him read my advance copy when I was done? I could, I did, and he's attending. Now why aren't you? 

Our free events are going great, with one problem. They are just not selling the books they did in the last spring. Some publishers are pushing for ticketed virtual events and we're on board with trying them. But how many should there be when anyone can attend any of them? And if you tape it, can someone see the conversation afterwards if they don't buy a ticket? How different is a virtual event from a media interview or a podcast? 

We're going to have a great conversation with the Great Karen Russell of Swamplandia!, Orange World, and the just-released-in-paper-covers-for-the-first-time Sleep Donation.  We're not planning to post our event on our virtual event archive page for a while, and we might not post it at all. 

The publisher, for their part, has to limit the programs to ticketed events because if the Boswell event is ticketed and others are free, why would most folks go to ours (except for you of course - you are the best!) ? And don't forget, we've got to sell books to make the whole thing work - that's sort of our business plan. We're offering a great price on our Jess Walter event ticket, which includes admission and a signed (tip-in) copy of The Cold Millions. You can send it out media mail for $4 more, or you can call for other faster options. I think the book is great, so it's made it much easier for me to sell this idea. Hope I've convinced you. If not, here are reviews from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today (Steph Cha calls the book "tremendous"), and the Star Tribune. It's hard for me to know which sites will let you in and which will not. It might depend on how much you visit. 

The Eventbrite link for ticketing is jesswalter-boswellmke.eventbrite.com. Jess Walter's appearance is 7 pm CDT on Wednesday, October 28. That's 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Easter, and Midnight if you're in London. We were 6 hours behind but they already ended their equivalent of daylight savings time.

By the way, The Crescent does have a role in The Cold Millions. 

Boswell events this week, part one - Readings from Oconomowaukee, with Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library

Monday, October 26, 3 pm CDT
Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library
Readings from Oconomowaukee series
in conversation with Lisa Baudoin from Books and Company and me - register here.

One of the things about living in the COVID era is that we've had to be creative in our programming. It wasn't easy and it wasn't fast. We just stared at our event calendar falling apart in March and only tried doing a Zoom event in April. And despite that being fairly successful, I continued to cancel events in May and June and reschedule them, when we probably could have pivoted many, including a number of ticketed event - but that's another story.

We quickly realized that 99% of the events had to be conversations. We had one traditional talk and it was really boring. We had a recent event where the author didn't embrace the conversation format and instead read and talked for much longer than we suggested - it was all sort of canned. There was a conversation partner, but that part of the event was displaced. We sold zero copies of that author's book in that case.  

There are some stats that we've noticed. On average, 65% of the people who register for an event show up. In most cases, about 50% of the folks who do log in to our event are local, from Southeast Wisconsin. Yes, we do sometimes have folks that travel from Madison or Green Bay or Chicago (particularly the northern suburbs) for an in-person event, and on strange circumstances, fly in from a far-away city. But once they come to a physical event, they are actually more likely to buy the book. With virtual events, not so much. That 50% number can vary widely - it's more of a median than a mean.

We considered an in-person event's sell through acceptable if 35% of the folks bought a book, higher for launches, and that's why many of our in-person programs for higher profile authors are ticketed. That number is lower for virtual events. Book plates help, tip-ins help more, actual signed books are a beautiful thing. Alas, we do not have any more bookplates for Matt Haig's event.

Despite no bookplates, The Midnight Library is selling well at Boswell; it helps that we sold a lot of copies of his last book, How to Stop Time. I was able to get an early hardcover to prepare for today's event (alas, no physical advance copies available), but I had a bit of dilemma when I finished it - it would help the event for me to pass my copy on to another bookseller before the event, but I felt I needed the book to prepare.

An existential crisis is at the heart of Matt Haig's The Midnight Library. Nora has lost her job, her boyfriend, her cat, and her friends. There is a notion that when making a choice, we are more likely to regret not doing something as opposed to doing something and failing. And Nora has a load of regrets. So in the process of overdosing, she winds up at the Midnight Library, where her childhood librarian curates the books that offer the alternatives to Nora's existence. You start reading the book and that life becomes yours. For example, what if she'd never left her brother's band?

I call these kinds of books Sliding Doors stories, named after the Gwyneth Paltrow 1998 movie. Stories about the multiverse are quite popular, no doubt helped along by quantum theory. I've read several myself - our buyer Jason tends to read as many as he can get his hands on. My introduction to the multiverse was through DC comics where they tried to justify the differences in the Golden Age and Silver Age heroes by saying they were on parallel Earths, and yes, if you vibrated quite right a certain sort of superhero could move from one to another for cross-over adventures, which led to several Crisis mini-series to fix continuity, which led to me being very confused. But like thinking above three dimensions*, I kind of have to go with it without fully understanding it.

The thing about Matt Haig's novels, particularly his more recent ones, is that I think there's a reader for these books who normally reads nonfiction of a certain human potential nature - they are fictional incarnations of his popular nonfiction book, Reasons to Stay Alive. So many of his books are about what makes a life worth living, from The Humans (his most in-demand paperback novel at Ingram), which is about an omniscient alien who takes the form of a mathematician to learn more about the race, to The Radleys, concerning a family of vampires, to How to Stop Time, about a secret society of people who live for a thousand years. And in a sense, Nora continues that storyline - she could hop into the lives of these different Noras indefinitely, living a life where she didn't give up competitive swimming, or the one where she was the Arctic scientist.

In another universe, COVID didn't happen, and it's likely that we wouldn't have been able to host Matt Haig. Lisa Baudoin and I put together a joint series at the Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts and someday, we hope to return to that program. But these Readings from Oconomowaukee series is different and more personal. Instead of big names interviewing the authors, we take that on. And if you think it's easy to have a three-way conversation without stepping on your partner's words, it's not! We practice. But we love it! And I think we might try to continue this series when in-person events resume, perhaps with two programs, one during the day at one store and the other in the evening at the other store, with us both in conversation at each.  

And we haven't even touched on Matt Haig's kids books! Or my desire to repackage Haig's adult backlist novels, something that in the day of ebooks and print-on-demand, rarely happens anymore.

You can still register for our Matt Haig conversation at 3 pm CDT here. And you can buy the book from Boswell here, and from Books and Company here. 

 
*I have a secret fondness for The Fifth Dimension.

Novellas, Instagram collections, MacArthur fellows, imaginary countries, stress relief, and more Boswell bestsellers for the week ending October 24, 2020

Here's what is selling at Boswell this week,

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar
2. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by VE Schwab
3. The Searcher, by Tana French
4. The Lost Shtetl, by Max Gross
5. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
6. Jack, by Marilynne Robinson
7. Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman
8. The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig (Register for October 26, 3 pm CDT event here)
9. The Silence, by Don DeLillo
10. A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik

The only newly released book that hits our top ten for hardcover fiction is The Silence, by Don DeLillo, which Chris wrote in his rec is "a piercing novella that asks: what will we grasp for when we lose that which anchors us to modernity?" Link to our sales page for it in full. Over at Book Marks, critics are mixed, with some raves and some pans. But the weirdest thing to me was on Tom Breihan's #1 blog on Stereogum where the comments section for John Parr's "Man in Motion" became a conversation about Don DeLillo sparked by a post about White Noise, which came out in 1985 and continues to be the only DeLillo book I ever finished. I should I note here that I read more pages in Underworld than there actually are in The Silence. But my thought was, was this an organic conversation or was that post placed there in conjunction with The Silence's release?

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey
2. Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
3. Thinking Inside the Box, by Adrienne Raphel (Register for November 10, 7 pm CDT event here)
4. I'm Still Here, by Austin Channing Brown (Register for November 17 book club event with ABHM here)
5. Accidentally Wes Anderson, by Wally Koval'
6. Home Style Cookery, by Matty Matheson
7. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
8. Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown, by John Lithgow
9. Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld
10. Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

The Instagram following for @accidentallywesanderson is 888,000, which definitely helped the first week sales for the book from Wally Koval. Accidentally Wes Anderson's comp is Cabin Porn, but I'm guessing we're going to beat our numbers. Louise Long talked to Koval in British Vogue. Among her questions: "Anderson himself says in the introduction to the book, 'I am still confused [about] what it means to be deliberately me.' Why did you land on the word “accidentally” for the name of the account?"

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Readers' Room, by Antoine Laurain
2. The Town Crazy, by Suzzy Roche
3. Wild Rose, by Louise Gluck
4. Disaster Tourist, by Yun Ko-Eun
5. The Overstory, by Richard Powers
6. Dune, by Frank Herbert
7. The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman
8. Circe, by Madeline Miller
9. Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson
10. The Red Notebook, by Antoine Laurain

Jacqueline Woodson, whose Red at the Bone hits our list in paperback this week, is one of three fiction writers to be 2020 MacArthur fellows. I assume several of the others have written fiction, but their descriptions did not indicate they are predeominantly fiction writers. NK Jemisin, who has made regular appearances on our bestseller lists, is another, and the third is Christina Rivera Garza, a writer who has won numerous prizes in Mexico, and teaches on both sides of the border, is the third. Her novels are pretty hard to get in English (the most recent is short discount and nonreturnable from our wholesaler - a shout out to bookstores not to stock it) but a nonfiction book, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, is available from Feminist Press.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo
2. They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei
3. Our Malady, by Timothy Snyder
4. The Second Mountain, by David Brooks
5. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
6. Burnout, by Emily and Anna Nagoski
7. Welcome to the Unwelcome, by Pema Chodron
8. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
9. For the Love of Europe, by Rick Steves
10. People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn

We have a book club reading Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, but since the book is published in 2020, it's worthy of highlighting to me. Plus I would say current conditions are probably contributing to anxiety that probably exacerbates burnout, right? The Nagoski twins (yes, identical), one a sex educator (Come As You Are) and the other a music professor who together write about the importance of the stress cycle and how to complete it. Here's a video.

Books for Kids:
1. Screaming Hairy Armadillo and 76 Other Animals with Weird, Wild Names, by Matthew and Steve Murrie
2. The Night Before Christmas, by Jan Brett
3. The Polar Express, by Chris Van Allsburg
4. Skunk and Badger, by Amy Timberlake/Jon Klassen
5. The Very Last Leaf, by Stef Wade/Jennifer Davidson
6. Mañanaland, by Pam Muñoz Ryan
7. A Place for Pluto, by Stef Wade/Melanie Demmer
8. Dear Martin, by Nic Stone
9. Dear Justyce, by Nic Stone
10. The Assignment, by Liza Wiemer

Pam Muñoz Ryan's Mañanaland is the latest from the Newbery Medalist (for Echo) and was part of a recent school purchase. For kids 8 and up, this novel may be set in the fictional country of Santa Maria, but as Publishers Weekly notes, the novel is "at its core, wrenchingly real." Booklist's starred review offers this praise: "This story, infused with magic, reminds children that humanity thrives when people embrace differences and construct bridges instead of borders. Another unforgettable work from a master storyteller."

Today's Journal Sentinel reviews are for Leave the World Behind, by Runaam Alam, and The Book of Two Ways, from Jodi Picoult.

Event update - Max Gross, Antoine Laurain, Suzzy Roche, Thomas Maltman and next week - Matt Haig and Jess Walter

Here's what's happening at virtual Boswell this week.

Monday, October 19, 7 pm
Max Gross, author of The Lost Shtetl
in Conversation with Andrew Silow-Carroll for a Virtual Event

Join us for a virtual event with Max Gross, debut author of a remarkable novel, written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart, about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists - until now. Cohosted by The Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center and the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. Hell chat with his former mentor Silow-Carroll, editor of The New York Jewish Week. Click right here to register for this Zoom event.

Gross, formerly at the Forward and now Editor of the Commercial Observer, has written a novel with starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus. Boswell Book Company’s Chris Lee says, “It’s a myth, it’s a fable, it’s something like a newly discovered religious text. In a world with a seemingly endless supply of novels about the ends-of-the-earth reaching consequences of WWII and the Holocaust, The Lost Shtetl is a wondrous left turn. Gross has written a clever, affecting parable of the ways history, sooner or later, reaches us all.”

For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together or risk their village disappearing for good.

Tuesday, October 20, 2 pm
Antoine Laurain, author of The Readers’ Room
in Conversation with Anne Leplae and Daniel Goldin for a Virtual Event

Boswell Book Company hosts the virtual return of our in-house favorite French author, Antoine Laurain, author of beloved novels like Vintage 1954 and The Red Notebook (and The Red Notebook and French Rhapsody and Smoking Kills and The Portrait). He’ll chat about his latest, in which a Parisian editor is drawn into a murder investigation when an unknown thriller author is shortlisted for a prize. Laurain will chat with Anne Leplae, the Executive Director of Alliance Française de Milwaukee, and Daniel Goldin. Click right here to register for this virtual Zoom event. 

Publishers Weekly notes of The Readers’ Room, “A profound love of books and authors underpins this sprightly mystery,” and the European Literature Network calls it “another winner for Laurain.” And from Daniel Goldin’s recommendation: “Each character is brought to life with the quirky details Laurain does so well, a few literary figures make an appearance, and the book offers up connections to Laurain’s past works, including French Rhapsody and The Red Notebook, which was recently on the Duchess of Cornwall’s quarantine reading list.

When the manuscript of a debut crime novel arrives at a Parisian publishing house, everyone in the readers' room is convinced it's something special. And the committee for France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, agrees. But when the shortlist is announced, there's a problem for editor Violaine Lepage: she has no idea of the author's identity. Intrigue and charm combine in this dazzling novel of mystery, love and the power of books.

Wednesday, October 21 7 pm Suzzy Roche, author of The Town Crazy 

in Conversation with Jane Hamilton for a Virtual Event

Suzzy Roche, a founding member of the band The Roches (and author of Wayward Sints), will be in conversation with Jane Hamilton for a virtual Ink/Well event sponsored by Ink Link Books and Boswell Book Company. Roche’s latest is a novel of passion, absurdity, innocence, and sorrow. Click here to register for this virtual event.  

The Town Crazy is set in the sleepy town of Hanzloo, Pennsylvania. In 1961, a single father moves into town with his young son, which arouses suspicion from the husbands and the interest of the wives, but at the same time, one of the wives seems to be losing her mind, and no one knows what to do. A contemporary, often humorous take on a bygone era, The Town Crazy also delves into the terror and cruelty of childhood, the dangerous loneliness of failing marriages, sexual repression and desire, and the intersection of art and religion, all culminating in a tragedy for which everyone in the town bears some responsibility. 

Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion says, "The Town Crazy casts a strong spell, and I don't think I've shaken it off yet, nor do I want to. Suzzy Roche understands so much about other people’s lives; her fiction, just like her singing and songwriting, is thrilling, beautiful, and shattering. I will be thinking about this town, these people, this captivating novel, for a long time."

I made my own record chat between 1975 and 2002, meaning I would rate my favorite songs every week. For 23 of those years, I tabulated to 100. The Roches had numerous chartings, but alas, by the time Suzzy went solo, I had stopped. Their highest peak was #3 in 1992 for Troubled Love. How did I ever have so much time?

Thursday, October 22, 7 pm
Thomas Maltman, author of The Land
in Conversation with William Kent Krueger for a Virtual Event

Thrillwaukee heads northwest for an evening of criminal Minnesotan masterminds. Thomas Maltman chats about his follow up novel to his IndieNext pick Little Wolves, a story of violence set in the heart of a pastoral landscape, with William Kent Krueger, author of Ordinary Grace. Click here to register for this virtual event.

Recovering from a terrible auto accident just before the turn of the millennium, college dropout and hobbyist computer-game programmer Lucien Swenson becomes the caretaker of a house in northern Minnesota. Shortly after moving in, Lucien sets out to find a woman with whom he had an affair, who vanished along with money stolen from the bank where they had worked together. At once a mystery and spiritual noir, The Land explores the dark side of belief, entrenched white supremacy in the Heartland, the uniquely American obsession with end times, and the sacrifices we make for those we love. 

Leif Enger, author of Virgil Wander and Peace Like a River says, “Maltman’s The Land is a gift to readers longing for a tale of lost love, fringe prophets, souls in cold suspension, and ravens that darken the skies of a Northern winter. Set against a looming apocalypse and the clicking of a projector showing classic films, The Land is generous, intricate, and propulsive.”

Monday, October 26, 3 pm
Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library
A Readings from Oconomowaukee Virtual Event
in Conversation with Daniel Goldin and Lisa Baudoin

Presenting the latest event in the Readings from Oconomowaukee series from Books and Company and Boswell Books. Matt Haig, author of the novel How to Stop Time and the memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, joins us all the way from Brighton, England for this special afternoon event to chat about his latest, which draws on quantum wave theory to tell the charming story of an English woman with situational depression. Click here to register for this Zoom virtual event.  

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? 

In Matt Haig’s enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. 

So many people love Matt Haig's writing, but I can't think of a better quoter than Jameela Jamil, since this book would definitely be of interest to lovers of The Good Place. She wrote: "I can't describe how much his work means to me. So necessary...[Matt Haig is] the king of empathy."

Wednesday, October 28, 7 pm
A Ticketed Event with Jess Walter, author of The Cold Millions
in Conversation with Karen Russell for a Virtual Event

We are pleased to host a ticketed virtual with Jess Walter, the author of the beloved #1 bestseller Beautiful Ruins and Edar winner for Citizen Vince, for a conversation about his first new novel in eight years. Walter will chat with Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia and Sleep Donation, a haunting novella praised by Stephen King, now available in paperback. What a great pairing!

Tickets are available at jesswalter-boswellmke.eventbrite.com for $23.19 (20% off the price of The Cold Millions), plus sales tax and ticket fee, and include "admission" on one device to the event. The first 60 folks to sign up will get a signed tip-in copy of The Cold Millions. Folks who sign up after that will either get tip-ins or a signed book with bookplate.

What better place to quote from for The Cold Millions event than the literary website The Millions? Matt Harvkey dives deep into Jess Walter's latest here. "...The Cold Millions has politics in its DNA. It raises questions about power’s corrupting influence, about the sides people take and fortify with rhetoric, and about brotherhood, both genetic and thematic. The book is intimate enough to tell a moving story about Rye and Gig, and expansive enough to tell other stories too - about labor, class, inequality, privilege, corruption, and migration. But above all, The Cold Millions is about Spokane." Read the rest!

A final note - all of Jess Walter's initial events are ticketed. If you're going to read the book anyway, why not buy it as part of the event and watch this great conversation? We've discounted the book so even with the ticket fee, it's under list price. We'll ship anywhere in the continental United States for $4. And don't forget about the signed bookplate. And can I just say, remember how much you loved Beautiful Ruins?

More on Boswell's upcoming events page. All start time are Central time (or Chicago time, if you'd prefer).