The Traditional Short Friday Post--A New Shipment of Plastic Bags Means a New Color.

Snow overnight meant that my morning was spent shoveling, though with the warm afternoon weather, I think a decent amount melted by now. I got to work for my closing Friday shift after my traditional bowl of chicken tikka masala soup at The Soup House (on Milwaukee and Michigan) and a lingonberry cupcake from the Milwaukee Cupcake Company on Milwaukee Street in the Third Ward.

We finally got some more Little Thinkers to fill up our case--it was looking mighty thin there for a bit. They are still out of stock on a number of our mainstays, but at least Virginia Woolf, Queen Elizabeth, Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakepeare are keeping company with our other regulars.

The big news, however, was that our new shipments of plastic Boswell bags came in. If you haven't been following the blog, we like to change the color with each shipment. The new bag is Pantone #548, which our color matcher called deep Arctic blue, but I find akin to a dark wash denim.

I'm glad they arrived. We ran out of our orange bags and were halfway through my emergency stash of plain white bags.

Oh, and I also updated my reading log on the blog. I hadn't done so for several months. So many details!

On Peter Cameron, Coral Glynn, The Fifties, and a Whole Bunch of Wonderful Writers, Many of Whom I Haven't Read (Yet).

The setting is a English village in the 1950s. Coral Glynn, a young nurse takes as her charge an elderly dying woman, Mrs. Hart. Also living there is the woman's disabled son, Major Clement Hart and their fiercely loyal housekeeper, Mrs. Prence. Then theelder Hart passes and Coral receives an offer of marriage from the Major.
I don't want to say more than that. I feel I've perhaps given too much away, though there is far more on the copy of the book jacket. What one has to know is the pieces are all in place. Coral, shy and innocent as she appears, is not exactly what she appears to be, nor is the Major.

Coral Glynn (on sale 2/28) is a novel imbued with fifties British style. But it's not the fifties that we think about, Eisenhower-era nuclear families taking new government-built highways from our little boxes to our sparkling new shopping malls.

In England, the country was still rebuilding from a devastating war. Sure, council flats were going up in areas where not everyone wanted to see them. But that wasn't really so much about what was going on the United States--that was more related to the fraying of the traditional class system.

Now I'm no expert, but I've been told that a sharp reading of fifties fiction will indicate that many authors were writing about this, as well as the cultural changes that exploded in the sixties. Things like new ways to think about, not just class, but gender roles and sexual identity. And Cameron has great command of the period, and yet is able to play out more the struggles that were often not quite named in novels of that time. The Major has a past (not giving much away,  it is revealed quickly) with his friend Robin (now married to Dolly), and Coral has been a victim of impropriety at her previous household.

You can tell that Cameron has read widely from this oeuvre (he cites Rose Macaulay, Penelope Mortimer, and Elizabeth Taylor on his website), but from my personal experience, we're talking mostly about the early novels of Barbara Pym here. Pym wrote diligently through the 1950s to little acclaim, gave up, and was rediscovered in the 1970s, later called the most under-rated novelist of the twentieth century. She is one of my favorite novelists, and certainly one of the few adult writers whose novels I have reread. Some of her most lauded works came after she started writing again (I believe Cameron's favorite is Quartet in Autumn), but I have a special love for the early books, that seem in some ways so observant of the future.

But my friend John is an expert on other novelists of this sort. I think about his love for Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose body of work stretches from the twenties (actually there is something published in 1911, but it seems far removed and it's for another writer to explain the gap) into the early 1960s. And several years ago, he turned me on to Elizabeth Jenkins's The Tortoise and The Hare, which I've written about in Boswell and Books. Alas, despite some success selling this novel, nobody has yet to reissue another--perhaps one is on Nancy Pearl's list of Kindle exclusives--a sigh, as an aside.

So now here's the place where I note that the code of honor for bookselling is that we never reveal who purchased a book. That's what opposition to the Patriot Act is all about. But I wrote to Cameron and asked if it was ok, and since I got permission (the way Bunch of Grapes must do when asked what the Obamas bought on vacation) to say that Cameron bought his copy of The Tortoise and the Hare from us. Needless to say, I was quite the giddy schoolgirl about the whole thing.

And like any proud bookseller, I'm pretty sure he was happy with the purchase. For despite being a totally different book in tone, it is one of those very novels written in the fifties that hints at coming changes, seeming at once so very period and surprisingly modern.

I don't know if you've read Peter Cameron's past fiction, but I think I've read everything he's published, except maybe for the second short story collection, which I still regret. From One Way or Another to Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You, Cameron has created a body of work where each work, despite its differences, shares a haunting tone laced with humor, a powerful voice, and a remarkable way with language.

I love them all but I would say the three that have stayed with me the longest are City of Your Final Destination, The Weekend, and the sadly out of print Leap Year, which was written in installments for a newspaper, a la Tales of the City. Now I don't know if Cameron's first novel will hold up twenty years later, and honestly I'm not sure I want to know. I'm scared that if I don't like it at much, it will destroy my good memories. Funny how that is.

That's the beauty of art. When I read Coral Glynn, I announce that despite his having synthesized many, many works of this time period, this is so extremely and individually a welcome addition to the Cameron canon. And the book's coda, which perhaps turned it from a great work into one I wanted to hug to my chest and maybe give a little peck to, is an homage to Pym, whether intended or not.

Last Minute Things to Know About Jennifer Chiaverini's Event at the Public Market

I'm almost off to the Public Market (400 North Water Street) for our event with Jennifer Chiaverini, author of the Elm Creek Quilt novels and the newest, Sonoma Rose. As always, Ms. Chiaverini is offering fabric bundles as a door prize. Thank goodness we just traded emails--I'll be collecting names for the drawing.
We're co-sponsoring the event with Thief Wine. With any purchase of Sonoma Rose, in addition to the latest collectible pin, you will get $3 off any glass (or for designated drivers, bottle) of wine at Thief Market today.

We've just booked our next event at the Public Market for Saturday, May 5, 11 am. It's Jenny Lewis and her new book, Midwest Sweet Baking. She'll be bringing treats.
***

I continue to put out our new boxes from Poland, and now that we have our new table that pairs Polish books and boxes, I've got several new varieties on display. I've had some very nice comments about our musical instrument themed boxes, but I'm a sucker for stained wood, and this blue floral box may just be my favorite.

Ten Things I Did Today While Trying to Work Off Nervous Energy for Tonight's Event with Nathan Englander.

1. At the moment, I am just about to set up chairs for Nathan Englander's event in conjunction with the release of his acclaimed short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. Someone called and asked when the talk about Anne Frank would be. Here are some other things I've been working on.

2. Writing an advance recommendation for Natalie Bakopoulos's first novel, The Green Shore. As is the practice, I will not be saying what I said so far in advance of the book's release, but I can say that I liked it a lot. I was just explaining the hold-for-publication practice of reviewing books, but how the more public presence of trade reviewers like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus has shaken up that model.

3. I've been confirming several events. We're hosting another round of kids' events this spring, capped* by Kate DiCamillo's appearance at Centennial Hall on Tuesday, April 17, 7 pm. We've got several suburban and neighborhood library events lined up as well, at Franklin, Greenfield, Shorewood, and Bay View. If you're an area library with the energy to help promote an event, you should be in touch with me. I'll have the schedule in a future blog.

4. We need supplies! I turned around and we're almost out of our Dunder Mifflin copy paper. We need more Boswell Benefits sign-up sheets and Boswell's Best bookmarks. And we needed to go back to our supplier of pricing gun labels. We ordered replacement labels for the Avery Dennison 210, but they sent us ten rolls fit for the 216.

5. Amie's paying bills. I started signing checks today, but tomorrow bodes for a big pile of signatures.

6. We've got four big conferences in March, and I've been frantic, collating authors, recommended titles, and in some cases, notable new titles. I think everything is open to the public. There's the Green Energy Summit on March 7-9, UWM Spring Writers workshop on March 9-11, the Wisconsin Restarant Show on March 12-14, and the UWM Spring Leadership Conference on March 30. When I take a breath, I'll come back and link to tickets for each.

7. We needed more journals from Paperblanks, and for some reason, address books. I thought you weren't buying any address books any more, but as is the case in these things, you need the right address books. The Paperblanks ones are too pretty to pass up for technology. Alas, some of my frontlist order cancelled without being filled from last year and I was missing many of the newer baroque styles. Never fear, they are reordered.

8. And greeting cards too. We have no overstock of wedding/anniversary/baby. An order just came in from Compendium. Alas, they are cards that need to be price stickered and we can't do that, due to item #4.
9. Print event signs for Stacie! For some reason, our extension cord stopped working for our break room printer. We can't seem to get the wifi to work either. So everything needs to be put on a stick and moved to my laptop. The only problem with that is that my connection also doesn't always work. Oh, and sometimes I'm not here.

10. Oh, and there are something like 648 emails I haven't quite replied to. Someone asked for a photo of the store's interior. Done! Apologies in advance to everyone else (except for the 50 or so emails I did reply to).

*By capped, I sort of mean highlighted, whereas Stacie thought it meant last. It is almost our last kids' event of the season, at least so far.

Welcome to the Week That Was (the One Ending February 18, 2012)--A Bunch of Events, Unseasonably Warm Weather, and The Resulting Bestsellers.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo
2. The End of Illness, by David B. Agus
3. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain (third week in the top five!)
4. All There Is: Love Stories from Storycorps, by David Isay
5. Enemies: A History of the FBI, by Tim Weiner

Boo, staff writer for The New Yorker, is winning raves for her "intimate, unforgettable portrait of India's urban poor," to quote Kirkus.  But that's just one of the breakout titles of the last few weeks. Publishing folks love to publish breakout fiction in January and February because the books seem to get more attention, but nonfiction really pops as well. And we'd probably have had William Broad's The Science of Yoga on the list too, if only we and the wholesalers hadn't run out of copies.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Friends Like Us, by Lauren Fox (who is pictured reading her excellent review in People Magazine)
2. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander (event 2/21)
3. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
4. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey
5. Goodnight iPad, by Ann Droyd

One doesn't expect to have so much excitement in the middle of February, but a barrage of great author events mixed with mild weather, gave us a really run week of bestsellers. So great to see The Snow Child picking up some traction. I'm pretty sure I listed Sharon's rec for the book here earlier.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Townie, by Andre Dubus III
2. Cupcakes, Cookies, and Pie, Oh My!, by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson
3. Scout, Atticus, and Boo, by Mary McDonagh Murphy
4. Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, by John Nichols
5. Bossypants, by Tina Fey

Nichols's new release is just one of the Wisconsin protest books that we have been selling well at Boswell. I think it's time for a roundup, perhaps on a blog later this week. I assume he is doing an event somewhere for someone. As soon as I figure out the answer, I'll let you know.

All my close-up photos of Andre Dubus III from Friday night's event are a bit blurry. I may have to upgrade to a better camera. The blurriness is perfectly represents, however, the kinetic energy of Dubus, the boisterous of the evening, combined with the emotional intensity of the subject. The publisher tour is pretty much over, but he's appearing at schools all over the place for the rest of the year, and there is still Newtonville on February 28.

Paperback Fiction:
1. Still Life with Husband, by Lauren Fox
2. The Quiet Twin, by Dan Vyleta
3. Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson (event 2/29)
4. The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown
5. The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt

What's more intense, the battle of the family members (husband versus twin versus sister, versus sister versus brother?) or battle of the Eleanors?  To me, this is an exciting list, as there are a lot of fresh faces, and the potential of knockouts. Perhaps I am still stuck on Townie and all its boxing.

Books for Kids:
1. Cold Cereal, by Adam Rex
2. The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex
3. Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, by Adam Rex
4. Frankenstein Takes the Cake, by Adam Rex
5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
6. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
7. Hug Time, by Patrick McDonnell
8. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, by Katherine Paterson
9. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
10. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

I expanded to ten because I thought it would be a little boring to have an all Adam Rex list, but expanding it to ten just gave us a bunch of Suzanne Collins. Hug Time was definitely our go-to Valentine's Day book this year. And it's nice to see that we are keeping up with John Green sales. We've got a great rec from Pam at the front of the store with our display.

Signed copies available of all of the new books from last week's events--Townie, Friends Like Us, Cold Cereal (actually from 2/10 but as an offsite, it's sale wandered into the next week), The Quiet Twin, Scout, Atticus & Boo, and Cupcakes, Cookies & Pie, Oh My! You can also reserve a signed copy for any of our upcoming events.

Saturday Gift Post--New Book Jacket Tee Shirts, Journals, and Coasters

As I think I mentioned previously, I didn't think I'd get our Penguin Classics mugs seven months after they were ordered, but they were certainly welcome. Coincidentally I was in the process of restocking our Out of Print tee selection, and since they had an incentive special, we went a little deeper into the line, bringing in Lolita, The Bell Jar, Ulysses, and A Clockwork Orange. Inadvertently, I also brought in a few of their alternative design for The Great Gatsby--that was just a question of marking the wrong line for reorder.

Because there are so many sizes, we generally don't buy more than two of any sku, and often just one. But what I didn't count on was that the Boswellians would immediately pick off several I bought in singles. If our customers react as warmly to the new selection as our booksellers, we should be reordering soon.

My only beef is that the v-neck tees are a bit inconsistent. Some have a very deep v while others are more modest.

In addition to the tees (and did I mention their Books for Africa program, where a book is donated for each tee sold?), we also brought in a selection of their journals, their coaster set, and an assortment of blank greeting cards.

So this ties in well to our new moderns-from-classics display, which we've had a lot of fun putting together. But that's for another post.

Enjoy Jennifer Chiaverini at the Public Market, and Have Some Wine (Partially) on Us, Wednesday, February 22, 5:30 pm.

If you've been paying attention to our events with Jennifer Chiaverini, you've probably noticed that we've developed a very nice partnership with Patched Works in Elm Grove. Of course that didn't mean we weren't going to challenge ourselves with each event. Our first event was at Boswell, our second was at the Sunset Playhouse, and our third was at the Elm Grove Woman's Club. OK, I confess, it would be sort of lovely to have a formula.

But then I heard that Patched Works was having a retreat in early March, at the Olympia Resort and Spa (March 8-11, to be exact), and honestly, how could Chiaverini not appear at that? And being that the Olympia is so close to our friends Books & Company, it made sense for them to be the designated bookseller. It looks like tickets are still available, by the way. I have learned from Julie and Jennifer that retreats are a big deal for quilters. Who knew?

So that left us with yet another opportunity to break the event mold. I asked Ms. Chiaverini if she had any ideas about a good partnership, and she said to me, the new book, Sonoma Rose, has a wine theme. Can you do something with that? So we went to our friends at the Milwaukee Public Market and asked if they wanted to team up with Thief Wine to put together something different. So that's what we're doing next Wednesday, February 22, at 5:30 pm.

Thief Wine was started by Aimee Murphy and Phil Bilodeau (pictured). At each of their locations (they have another just north of us in Shorewood), they stock 600 wines, and have about 30-35 wines available by the glass in their wine bar. Just in the time that I was setting up this event, Phil had been to Europe and California searching for perfect wines for their operation.

Note the special time. This gives folks working downtown and the Third Ward (and Walker's Point, and the East Side, and the Marquette area, and even beyond, as you are travelling against rush hour traffic) a chance to have relax with Chiaverini before heading home. We're hoping that other attendees will get a sitter for a girls' night out. And then of course there are a good number of Chiaverini's fans who are retired. Her is as broad and diverse as a giant patchwork quilt, though of course, I have noticed that I haven't met too many of her fans who are anti-quilting.

Sonoma Rose is set on a Californa rye farm, during prohibition. Rosa Diaz Barclay has eight kids, but four have succumbed to a mysterious wasting disease. Rosa winds up fleeing the farm (and her volatile husband with her surviving kids, and in her new mess of a situation, is rescued by her first love. Hey, I'm not going to give the plot away to you--let's just note that Rosa winds up in wine country, where she becomes determined to learn the fine (but still outlawed) craft. And yes, she's a quilter.

If you or someone you know reads the series but have yet to meet Chiaverini, you're in for a treat. Her talks are warm and witty, and it's almost as if you're chatting with the gang about mutual friends. Here's more things you need to know.

--Chiaverini will be giving out the commemorative Sonoma Rose pin with every purchase of the new novel.

--We'll be offering a $3 coupon off any glass or bottle (so folks who are driving don't feel left out) of wine at Thief Wine in the Public Market with each purchase of Sonoma Rose, good only on Wednesday, March 22.

--The Public Market offers an hour of free parking with any purchase in their Water Street lot. Most meters in the area are $1.50 per hour, but only run until 6 pm, so that option might be even less expensive.

--The Public Market is located at 400 North Water Street, just under the 794 freeway downtown. For dinner, I don't think you can do better for a sit-down meal than the St. Paul Fish Market. Wednesday is the king crab dinner special! (OK, there are plenty of other great places to go, including the Cafe Benelux across the street. Pannekoeken really are pancakes on steroids.)

We'll have a nice assortment of backlist, but I have learned from these events that most fans have all the older titles. It's really all about the new book, Sonoma Rose, which goes on sales just the day before.

See you there!

Ten Thousand Saints Author Eleanor Henderson Inspires Our Rock and Roll Window.

When I lived in New York in the early eighties, I was, well, a lot younger. I was also pretty obsessed with music, and I had a ritual. Just about every week, I would head out on a trek, starting in the West Village and then heading east, either alone or with my friend Thom. What were even the names of the stores? Vinyl Mania and Sounds and a bunch of other stores.

I'd moved back to New York after going to college in small town New England, and that made me fidgety about the safety of my environs. I rarely went into Alphabet City, unless I was going to Pyramid (which several of my good friends too much for me to avoid completely), but Avenue B was about the farthest east I roamed. Amusingly enough, I noted a few years later that the neighborhood had perhaps moved from unvisitable to unaffordable awfully quickly.

So perhaps I brought slightly more to the table than some in my reading of Eleanor Henderson's powerful novel Ten Thousand Saints, a Valentine of sorts to eighties punk music (or I guess, specifically straight edge) which has just come out in paperback. The story starts in Lintonburg, Vermont. Teddy and Jude, best friends and outsiders both, are hanging out, celebrating Teddy's birthday, which is also New Year's Eve.

Both kids come from broken homes. Jude lives with his mom, whose glass-blowing skills are renowned among bong users, while his dad's mad skills growing pot turned out to be more appreciated in New York (the details are in the book). Teddy's mom is more of a mess. Queen Bea hasn't really let Teddy know who his father is; he just knows that he is Indian. Gandhi, not Geronimo. And his older brother Johnny has already left Burlington, I mean Lintonburg, to live the life of a straight edge rocker.

On this day, Jude's dad's girlfriend's daughter pays an unexpected (she was skiing with friends at Stowe) to the boys, and they head off to a wild party. By the end of the evening, the story is set in motion--Teddy's dead, Eliza's pregnant, and Jude's on the run from goons, aiming to head towards his brother Johnny in New York.

In a lot of ways, the story has a ring of A Visit to the Goon Squad, not so much in structure (which is more traditional), but in some themes and settings. Henderson's novel is fairly compressed in time, but this is very much a story about change. Surprisingly enough, I was also saw some connections to The Art of Fielding, but with kids a little younger but still in that age of discovery, with music substituting for books and baseball as the guiding influence and passion, and yes, at least one homoerotic subplot.

And though I certainly didn't need any more personal connection to the story than I already had, I should note that I went to school on the Vermont/New Hampshire border, and one of my closer friends turned out to be not a fellow student, but one of the chefs at the cafe where I worked. Of course her mad skills are with food and landscaping, not glass blowing. And let me say that her family life turned out to be not that dissimilar to Jude's mom, Harriet. I'd ask Henderson if she knew S., but I suspect the truth is that their situation is not too uncommon in Vermont.

Yes, Henderson is coming on Wednesday, February 29, 7 pm (editor's note: this event was cancelled, due to a death in the family). And what an honor this is! Ten Thousand Saints was one of the most lauded books of 2011. Here's Nick Hornby's review in The Believer:

“Henderson’s writing…is warm, engaged, and precise….Ten Thousand Saints is the offspring of Lester Bangs and Anne Tyler, and who wouldn’t want to read that baby?”

Speaking of Nick Hornby, I had started making a list of rock novels last year (including High Fidelity, of course), just when it was a little too late to do a window around A Visit from the Goon Squad. It's apparently not an easy subject to write about--beginning authors often get niched by focusing on music, while well known authors are said to stumble. I was surprised that even Tom Perotta (The Wishbones) and Jay McInerney (The Last of the Savages) couldn't keep their rock novels going, meaning they are out of print. (Wrong! It turns out that McInerney's novel is still in print--it just is not longer stocked by Ingram. Thanks, Jason G.)

Needless to say, the highlight of the window would be my old collection of 45s. What was I holding onto them for, if it wasn't to do a cool window for Eleanor Henderson? But what added to the magic is that we just booked Mike Doughty, late of Soul Coughing, for his memoir, The Book of Drugs. He's going to be at Shank Hall on Sunday, March 25, 8 pm, and he'll be doing a talk/reading/signing at 4 pm the same night. Buy tickets for the Shank Hall show here.

So the window. Rock novels. Here is what I came up with:
Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie
Goodbye Without Leaving, by Laurie Colwin
Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo
The Commitments, by Roddy Doyle
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

Idoru, by William Gibson
Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson
High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
You Don’t Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem
The Armageddon Rag, by George R. R. Martin
The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips
Never Mind the Pollacks, by Neal Pollack
The Ground Beneath her Feet, by Salman Rushdie
Rock Bottom, by Michael Schilling
Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta

I think we've got a record player going in later today. We'll post the even-better rock window on Facebook.

What's on your list? And just as a qualifier, we're looking for books in print! I found plenty of books I wasn't able to sell. But if you have a suggestion, please send it as a comment and I will post it.