This is Where I Came In--Reflections on Little Bee Three Years Later.

If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you know that for the first six months, I was pretty obsessed with Little Bee. It was the last event hosted at the Schwarz Bookshop on Downer, and pretty much the last book at Schwartz where I led a charge to consolidate some major handselling. By the time the event happened, we had about eight people on staff who read the book. I even had a case of Little Bee quotes from around the country. I had fun!

With Little Bee, I did something I rarely do, which is read the manuscript. I guess now we're expected to read e-manuscripts--Jason just told me he's read two of them, though I've slacked on getting folks to write early reviews. And rarer than that, I actually really loved the manuscript. I find that when I read things very early, and there is no book jacket, and the type isn 't set, the experience for me isn't quite there. Honestly, that's one of those things I don't understand about reading ebooks; the enjoyment for me is partly in the package.

By reading the manuscript, I spent not one but two bookseller conventions (Great Lakes in the fall and Winter Institute in January) yammering about the book. I put the book in a lot of booksellers' hands, and then went back and did the same thing to customers.

We wound up having a very good event for this sort of breakout, early in the process, low thirties. I note that my hand-selling skills were nothing if not rusty. I really didn't know many of my customers yet and they really didn't trust me. And yet we wound up selling over 100 copies in hardcover, and though I had friends that could plow through 500 copies of non bestselling hardcovers, for me, 100 was amazing. It helped that in December, I was invited to go on Morning Edition with Susan Stamberg and my Little Bee conversation was the one featured on the air.

At the time, I was obsessed with showing the jackets for Cleave's novel as it was released in various countries. I wondered why the US and UK held firm on different titles--as you know it was called The Other Hand in the UK, though later editions show that Little Bee was likely the better title, as variations of this title were the preferred way to go, but not in Spanish, where they went in a completely different direction.

I wondered whether they would keep the beautiful hardcover jacket, or go in a more commercial direction it up the way they did for the UK paperback. I have to say I was rather shocked that they went with the original, but boy did it pop against everything else out there. It just goes to show that sometimes the best course of action is the unexpected. And haven't we all seen a lot of copycat jackets since?

Was I alone in my Little Bee love? Of course not--there were booksellers all over the country cheering the book on. And of course most people did not get events--I spoke several times to a suburban Chicago store that so desperately wanted Cleave to get to their store, but it just never happened.

And then the book broke out in paperback. At the time, Borders was really working on making these things happen, and like City of Thieves and A Reliable Wife (also books heavily blogged about on Boswell and Books), they found titles with handselling potential and worked them very aggressively. The rumor was that the booksellers were forced to upsell these books to everyone who came in, no matter what they wanted. It was surely successful at breaking books, but forced handselling comes at a price, both in your relationship with customers and also as a proprietor, with your booksellers.

We recently sold our 500th copy of Little Bee. And then the manuscript came for the next book. I know I should have read it right away, but other Boswell business got in the way.  When Jason got an an advanced copy of Gold with the tentative jacket, a striking yellow and black number that plays off of Little Bee and uses the classic optical illusion of a chalice that turns into two faces, I dug right in. But it's too early to write about that.

And now it was time to write our event proposal for Gold. We'll see how it goes. But how swell would it be for Cleave to return to Milwaukee this summer? Remember his Milwaukee winter video?

So now what happens? We wait! That's the way these proposals go.

What Could be Sweeter for Valentine's Day Than an Iron Cupcake Recap?: Commemorating the Brewers, Badgers, Robins, Cherries, Beer, the North Woods, and Well, Other Things About Wisconsin.

On Sunday, February 12, we partnered with Sandy Ploy the Cupcake Queen, and also Discovery World to be part of the final Iron Cupcake Challenge, Wisconsin Eye Candy. Featured at the event were Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, the culinary artists behind Hello Cupcake, What's New, Cupcake?, and the just-released Cupcakes, Cookies, & Pie, Oh My! And yes, we have signed copies available for sale. One is even decorated with a little bit o' frosting.

The event (which sold out quite quickly so congrats to the winners of our free ticket giveaway) was a benefit for Pablove, and included a cookbook auction, and tee shirts from Too Much Metal Fred. But of course the stars were the baking teams that came together to highlight the highs and lows of Wisconsin cultural history (I guess the lows would be Ed Gein, who yes, was commemorated with raspberries and phyllo dough. I shall say no more about that.)

The new projects in Cupcakes, Cookies & Pie, Oh My, are simply amazing, and the authors brought their cupcake shoes, their emoti-pops, their taco dip pie, plus of course the wonderful pound cake sheep, featured on the jacket. The black sheep's disctinctive wool was created by dipping mini marshmallows in cocoa powder. And the olives in the taco dip? Those are cut up Crows (licorice-flavored Dots).

 The Powerpoint was great, but what is truly amazing are Richardson's stop-motion videos that turn recipes into animated cartoons. Some of these awesome videos will be available as an app in March. And someone has to investigate why the videos are active in the Kindle edition of the ebook, but not in the Google Books edition. Wah!

In addition to Tack and Richardson's cookbooks, we brought an assortment of cupcake stuff, including air fresheners, lip glass, boxed cards, magnets, wrapping paper, and so forth. Oh, and bubble gum.  I didn't worry about sell through as, having done this twice before, the cupcake stuff has proven to be quite popular at Boswell afterwards.

Perhaps the highlight of the day for me, despite really loving the hodag cupcake, was the young woman who came up to the desk and told us that Hello Cupcake was the reason she enrolled in culinary school.

So congrats to the winners. And once again, thanks to Sandy Ploy and her army of mint-ions, plus Discovery World, for a great event.

What's Going On at Boswell This Week--Vyleta, Fox, and Dubus.

In addition to our To Kill a Mockingbird event with Mary McDonagh Murphy and Deborah Staples, featured in Sunday's post, we have three great author events coming up later in the week.

On Wednesday, February 15, we're featuring Dan Vyleta, UWM assistant professor, author of the novel The Quiet Twin. Finally out in the United States, the book was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Prize when released in Canada. Canadian by citizenship, he is the son of Czech parents who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s, and also spent time in the UK, where he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge.

Set in 1930s Austria as the Nazis came to power (the same setting as the nonfiction memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes),  it focuses on Dr. Beer, who follows the deviant methods of Dr. Freud, who has taken on as a patient, Zucka, the niece of Dr. Speckstein. Speckstein holds power as a Nazi informer, and coerces Beer into investigating a string of local murders, hoping Freudian analysis can unlock the mystery. But then it turns out nothing is quite as it seems.

The story The Independent called The Quiet Twin a sharp and engaging literary thriller, while The National Post offered that "Vyleta’s second novel is truly a work of art; his deft manipulation of narrative and characters (and readers), a master class in psychological sleight of hand."

Vyleta's first novel Pavel and I is also getting its paperback release in the United States, on February 28. I'm unsure of what use a two-week delay will be. When it was first published in 2008, the book received much praise, such as this from The Edmonton Journal: "Vyleta's startling debut is an impeccably constructed spy thriller, one of those old-fashioned page-turners that might be devoured at one sitting. Think The Good German meets The Third Man, or perhaps Oliver Twist conjoined with Ian McEwan's The Innocent."

Yes, Vyleta's last stop before Milwaukee was apparently Edmonton, sort of a Milwaukee-like city that I mostly think of as the setting for many of Carol Shields's novels (and because I am who I am, was once the home of Canada's Hudson's Bay Company and is the present home of what is said to be one of Canada's best bookstores, McNally Jackson.)


***

Our other two events have already had featured posts in this blog.

On Thursday, February 16, 7 pm, Lauren Fox appears at Boswell in celebration of the release of her second novel, Friends Like Us. Read more here.

And on Friday, February 17, 7 pm, Andre Dubus III makes a stop in Milwaukee for the promotion of the paperback release of his acclaimed memoir Townie. Here's my take on this powerful story.

What's Selling at Boswell...And a Special "To Kill a Mockingbird" Event on Monday Afternoon (That's Tomorrow) with Milwaukee Rep and Big Read.

Being that Boswell and Books's weekly event recap release time doesn't give a Monday afternoon event justice, it made sense to give a shout out to our 2 pm event with Mary McDonagh Murphy and Deborah Staples now. They're both speaking tomorrow, Monday, February 13, 2 pm. The author of Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of To Kill a Mockingbird, is joined by Milwaukee Rep Resident Acting Company member Deborah Staples, all at Boswell.

Staples discusses her role in the Milwaukee Rep's production of To Kill a Mockingbird, with performances now running through March 11. McDonagh Murphy will talk about the novel's enduring power, and a bit about her documentary Hey Boo.

On Monday evening, February 13, Murphy will be speaking at the Milwaukee Rep for a keynote address, in conjunction with the airing of this very documentary. It's also a free event. More on their Facebook page.

Here's hoping that Scout, Atticus, and Boo appears on next week's list. But now it's time for last week's top selling titles.

***

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
2. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander
3. The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
4. American Dervish, by Ayad Akhtar
5. Goodnight iPad, by Ann Droid

Everything is exploding for Nathan Englander's new short story collection, which came out on Tuesday. The New York Times Book Review front-page feature is set to be next Sunday, and we've heard some great things from local critics as well. Our event is on Tuesday, February 21, 7 pm, co-sponsored by the JCC. Michiko Kakutani's daily NYT review is filled with praise, even if it does at times temper that praise with Kakutani-isms.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Quiet, by Susan Cain
2. A Nation of Moochers, by Charles Sykes
3. Thinking the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt
4. The Science of Yoga, by William J. Broad
5. The Journal of Best Practices, by David Finch

While it's always fun to meditate on a yoga book, I instead direct my attention to the last major work to be published by historian Tony Judt, which was reviewed by Mike Fischer in the Journal Sentinel last Sunday. Fisher notes:

"Thinking the Twentieth Century is a passionate, deeply felt indictment of 'simple' and seamless narratives that purport to explain everything: fascism and communism as well as Zionism and nationalism, identity politics and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and - our current infatuation--economics."

I love how Fischer's reviews wind up on websites of newspapers from all over the country. I imagine folks in Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Bellingham, and Modesto opening their paper in a local coffee shop, jotting down Thinking the Twentieth Century, and walking into King's English, Rainy Day Books, or Village Books and asking for the title. Alas, I have no bookstore in my head for Modesto, and a search turned up a Christian bookstore and a comic store. And yes, I know there are a lot of other ways that scenario can play out, but I can dream, can't I?

Paperback Fiction:
1. Cast a Cold Eye, by K. M. Koenigs
2. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht
3. Swamplandia, by Karen Russell
4. Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith
5. Kramm, by K. M. Koenigs

The store had a great time with Misters Koenigs (above) and Clark (below), but the big news is that Stacie has fallen in love with Glaciers, a new novel from Tin House about a young woman in Portland whose job is to work with damaged books in a library basement, but whose own rich life unfolds slowly through a beautiful interior narrative. This is probably just the first of many times you will see this book on our bestseller lists.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Running Water, by Abraham Louis Clark
2. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
3. F in Exams, by Richard Benson
4. A Brief History of Thought, by Luc Benson
5. Look Me in the Eye, by John Elder Robison

We've just announced tickets to John Elder Robison's appearance at Boswell on Thursday, March 22, 7 pm, co-sponsored by Autism Speaks, which is getting ready for their big fundraiser, Walk Now for Autism Speaks, on Saturday, April 28. Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye and Be Different, and will be appearing for the paperback release of the latter title. You may have read about Robison in this Christmas New York Times profile of John's son Jack and his girlfriend Kristin, both living with Asperger's Syndrome. Or you may just know him as Augusten Burroughs's brother.

We are donating the entire $5 admission to Autism Speaks. Buy your ticket here.

Books for Kids:
1. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
2. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White
3. Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Patterson
4. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl
5. Mr. Popper's Penguins, by Richard Atwater

Needless to say, most of this week's kid's list is bulk order. I normally leave those titles off but I thought it would be nice to class up my bestseller lists.

Saturday GIft Post, But Once Again I Can't Find the Camera Battery Recharger.

I came back from my visit to Massachusetts to find a number of gift items had arrived. Just in time for Iron Cupcake, we received our cupcake lip gloss. We got a nice assortment of leather animal keychains. And some new spring-like items arrived. We seem to do very well with bird designs, so don't be surprised by them.

The problem is that I can't take any photos on my camera, and my cell phone camera simply isn't very good. Once again, I have misplaced the battery recharger. Sigh.

Let's try one thing. I can't believe we haven't sold Gymnastic Monkey yet, despite being way more fun than a barrel of the very same monkeys. The reason that if these are in a barrel, it's hard to press the sides together and make them flip around.



Maybe this video will convince some people that gymnastic monkeys are the new bendy robots.

When a Bookstore Moves Closer, or Further Away--A Visit to Three Stores on the Way to Worcester.

What value is a trip anywhere if there isn't at least one bookstore detour? Being that I had to get from Logan Airport to Worcester for my talks at Holy Cross, I thought about what bookstore I hadn't seen that was not too far out of the way. Then I remembered reading that Newtonville Books, which I'd never been to, was planning a move. And I'd never been to Newton, despite it being in my consciousness since the days of watching Zoom, where every kid who wrote in seemed to be from there.

The store was opened by Tim Huggins in 1998, and quickly became one of those places that was constantly making news in the book world for its innovative events, combining books and brews, books and rock music. There's some memory in my brain saying there weren't any section headers in the store. Now that's a store created for discovery!

Huggins sold the store to Mary Cotton in 2007. And now they've decided to move the store from Newtonville to Newton Centre. The former is a shopping district with a nice assortment of cafes, but it is only on a bus line. There is a commuter train stop but apparently stopping every two hours isn't convenient for many people. Their new location is near a T stop, which they think will really make a difference. And there's still a decent amount of parking. One thing that's interesting about Massachusetts retail in general is that there seems to be a higher density of bank branches than in Wisconsin.

I scouted the new location and then headed to the original storefront, which is open through March. Almost immediately I found (and subsequently bought) a signed copy of Peter Orner's Love and Shame and Love, which I'd been talking about with Joel Berkowitz at UWM's Center for Jewish Studies. The new store is getting out of the used book biz and is expanding the kids' area. But the biggest change is that the store as it stands now has a dedicated events space, with chairs set up pretty much all the time. They'll be moving to the Boswell-preferred method of cases on casters, that you move out of the way for events.

At the checkout, I wound up talking with Sarah (contact me if I should drop the "h"--editor's note, she indeed has an H), who I'd met at a bookseller conference about a year and a half before, and she gave me more details. Whatever changes they make, they plan to continue their fine events schedule. I left a note for Hannah Pittard, who was there on Thursday for The Fates will Find Their Way.  And we chatted a bit about Andre Dubus's Townie, appearing on February 28.

But really, the event I wanted to attend was their celebrity book club discussion, led by Allegra Goodman, on February 16 7 pm. The book selection is Middlemarch. Can you imagine a more interesting evening? I think I could have chartered a trip with our friend Jane's class from Cardinal Strich.

Oh, and I love their signature walls in the back. It's something they can't move physically, but Tim's going to help them move it in spirit.

So enough excitement for me, so you'd think. But Claudia cut out an interesting article about a bookstore in Webster, about a half hour away, called Booksellers Gourmet. The store is tight, at about 1000 square feet, and the owner does just about everything herself. Why not visit?

One of the upsides of the possibilities of huge numbers of tiny bookstores would be how the personality of the proprietor comes to the fore. You don't have enough time to do everything, so you have to decide what's most important to you.  In this case, there was a mix of new and used books, art on the walls, quirky gift items, some chocolate, and a small cafe. Important new titles from Russell Banks and Mark Bittman shared the stage with pulp comics from a deceased author of note and artisan pottery. There was a second-hand room with "collectibles" from the 1920s and in the kids room, an assortment of Melissa and Doug toys.

The current art on display was a called "The Heart of the Matter", a multi-artist display with a timely theme. Here's a list of their other art shows.  I could criticize this or that, but then I thought about how the owner was doing this all pretty much by herself. Amazing! In keeping with the theme of the show, this store was definitely a endeavor straight from the heart of its owner.

As we were already wandering around, I asked my sister if we could visit the current location of Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough. As you may know, Tatnuck was the beloved bookstore in Worcester. My sister said that if you went there for lunch, you'd always run into someone you know, sometimes three to four people. They opened this branch in Westborough several years ago, but wound up having to close the original location and sell off this one to new owners.

Unlike their first two locations, which were in neighborhoods, this Tatnuck shares a big box strip with national and regional chains. It's still a very large space, with books taking up a little less than half. Like many of my friends at other bookstores, there's a great number of gift items, from games and toys, to mugs and kitchenware.

If I knew the owners, I'd probably suggest more journals and boxed cards* which seem to work very well in most bookstores I visit, and less ceramic collectibles. Similarly, I might suggest playing with book sections, adding a lot more fiction, and decreasing shelf space of some of the more thinly-stocked sections like photography. Hey, some folks charge thousands of dollars for this expert service...

But in the end, cosmetic changes aren't really what's needed in order to turn my sister into a regular; everybody makes a calculation of distance and opportunity and connection as variables, and this adds up to...it's just too far.  She needs an indie bookstore in the Worcester area**, home of several major colleges (Holy Cross, Clark, WPI, Assumption, Worcester State) and three enormous hospital campuses. As I learned in Atlanta, however, folks say they want an indie bookstore, and then are unhappy that it isn't exactly what they wanted and don't support them, and this is the unhappy house-of-card moment for indies. How do we figure out who we should please the most and still stay true to our visition, because you can't please everyone and if you don't love the store you've created, you can't put your all into it?

And the conversation continues. Back to Milwaukee to see if I learned anything. Locating closer to a light rail station is pretty much out of the question.

*For journals, how can you go wrong with Paperblanks, and for boxed cards, it seems like Galison was an obvious addition. I could be wrong, but I didn't see a presence of either at the store.

**Of course she would love it in the city limits, but admitted that just about everybody also shops in Shrewsbury.

On Sherry Turkle and Being Connected, and How They Relates to Books and Bookstores--a Visit to Holy Cross in Worcester.

About a month ago, my sister was telling me about an interesting project going on at Holy Cross, in conjunction with their Monserrat freshman immersion program. The students were participating in a digital turn-off day (officially called Connections), and as part of the experiment, they were reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other.

After discussing it with some of her colleagues, they decided it might be a good idea for me to talk to a few classes about the changes in publishing and bookselling over the past 25 years, with special notice paid to online vs. bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and ebooks vs. physical books,.

First I decided to read Turkle’s book, which came out last year and seems to approach the issue from two directions. In part one, Turkle, MIT professor of social studies of science and technology, explores the increasing use of robots as substitutions for human behavior. This can be things like Tamagotchi and Furby toys, to the development of the more advanced My Real Baby and AIBO the robot dog. And then there are the robots that are more than toys, like the development of Paro, a pet seal for the elderly that has become quite popular in parts of the world.

In part two, she looks at the rise of less personal forms of communication, from text and instant messaging, to social networks like Facebook. At the same time, she investigates folks who spend time on Second Life and World of Warcraft. Connected or not? Well, it’s Turkle’s thesis that Facebook and even texting are just another avatar, a place to reinvent yourself. And in both cases, what were once personal connections get reduced to data. Those former connections—the personal interactions, particularly phone calls, are shunned.

At one extreme, technology becomes the substitute for the living being; at the other, people sort become part of the technology. And I guess both ideas describe what is going on in the book world. The physical bookstore becomes a website. The bookseller becomes a checkout device and a recommendation algorithm. A book tour budget is trimmed, and the savings are spent on buzz-creating social networking sites.

One thing I note about bookstores is that when you take price out of the equation (and you do have to take price out, as the prices are not "true" in a market sense—our major online competitor loses money on books to build market share), the major hurdle for competition is convenience. And I suspect folks make the decision about whether to shop online or at a physical bookstore for comparably priced items depends on how close a bookstore is and how much they like it.

All three classes went pretty well. I was surprised what a high percentage of students had been to a physical bookstore in the last few years to do something aside from buying textbooks. The last class, which ran a little longer, actually discussed how they read books, where they buy them, and how they make decisions about what to buy. And surprisingly enough for me, I think more of the students in the class read non-schoolbooks on a regular basis than I did in college.

So now it is up to the Holy Cross students, faculty and staff. Can they still stay connected without their technology? I’ll find out afterwards and who knows, maybe I’ll try to duplicate the experiment back in Milwaukee.

Whistful Wordplay Categorizes Local Literarian Lauren Fox--Whereas I Am Only Good with Alliteration. Friends Like Us out 2/14, Our Event is 2/16, 7 pm.

I wish someone would say to me, “Let’s eat vegetarian” and I would offer suggestions like “The Lentil-men’s Club.” That’s not the way my brain works, but that’s the way the synapses fire for Milwaukee-area novelist Lauren Fox, whose second novel, Friends Like Us, is being published by Knopf on February 14.

I read Fox’s first novel, Still Life with Husband, when it first came out, but I wasn’t really involved with her event, and if we met, it was briefly. But for Friends Like Us, it’s been a different story. Jason and I saw Fox at the Great Lakes Booksellers conference, where she was part of the reading room series. Then she was at the store for another authors’ launch event. And then we got to chat again at the holidays. And there I found out that her childhood babysitter was our good friend Rose Anne. And there are probably 700 other connections. So it goes when you work on the floor of a bookstore, but even more so when you own it, I suppose.

The new novel is about a young woman sort of stuck in the maturity process. I kind of call this genre slacker novels, only I wonder whether this denigrates them. That’s not the case—I read plenty of them. In fact, we just hosted novelist and poet Leigh Stein, whose novel The Fallback Plan certainly fits the bill.

The other thing to note is that they are often as different from each other as noir mysteries are from cozies. Categorizing can do more harm than good. But I suppose I am drawn to these types of stories. You can only imagine that while there are a good number of “lifer” booksellers, there are just as many who are between gigs. You’d be surprised at how many resume cover letters imply if not state, “I don’t know what I want to do so I’m thinking bookselling because I like to read.” And just about all of us start out that way--you turn around and realize you've been bookselling for a quarter century.

Willa, however, writes freelance copy for an ad agency, and also works in a flower shop. I wouldn’t exactly call her a flower arranger as that implies a skill that she doesn’t exactly have. Her friend Jane clean houses, babysits, and writes poetry, Her once-gawky high school friend, now filled out? He’s a part-time librarian sans MLS, which is pretty much bookseller equivalence.

So Ben’s back and though he’s got his eye on Willa, she can’t get past the high-school friendship and so he winds up dating her best friend Jane. Willa’s got, well, issues. Her parents had a messy divorce. Her brother has a series of messed-up relationships and has recently been kicked out of his apartment for yet another. She’s had a short-lived affair with her boss, only he pushed her aside for someone else.

Issues indeed. Willa’s got a lot of work to do to recover from the sins of her parents. It’s not just a question of forgiveness, but just even an acknowledgement that we, as humans, are prone to mistakes, and we have to work through them. Friends and family let us down, and it’s what we do with that knowledge that we become adults. Fox may see the world through a bit of a fractured lens, but there’s a sense of humanity about this separates it from some slacker novels that fall into satire and meanness.

But really, whether Fox wrote a coming-of-age novel or a murder mystery, her sense of wordplay is what separates Friends Like Us from the pack. Fox is the master of clever bon mot, and by keeping most of the voice as Willa’s, she’s able to create a hard and soft woman both, cracking wise through her disappointments. And this is a sad story. Couples break up or come to relationship détente. Friends separate. Career paths, when you finally map them, turn out to be disappointing. But how can you be sad for long when the path is filled with such silliness, such as orderly Jane’s poem, The Universe is a Vacuum Cleaner, in which she rhymes “clog of hair” with “fog of despair”?

Another piece of fun Fox has is with her setting. It’s Milwaukee to be sure (though not necessarily the building below right), but as she did with Still Life with Husband, she chooses to neither to make up an imaginary city nor use actual landmarks with their names intact, although there is an expedition to the Domes. I don’t know if folks know that several of her first novel’s scenes were set at White’s Bookshop and that Schwartz (as in Harry W.) is “black” in German. In the new novel, among other places, several characters head to the River Rock coffee shop. And a wedding is planned at Alewife Park. Can I just assume that is a smelly take on “Atwater?”

The only problem that ever happens (and this is not easy; happens with the best of writers) is that it’s probably enough that the protagonist and the higher power who created this world are wordsmiths of the first order. It’s tempting to give every other character these mad language skills. I think that’s why a lot of my favorite humorists stumble when they write novels. It’s hard and sometimes boring to write the straight men (and women). Fox for the most part avoids this trap, but like a rough on a golf course, she sometimes hits into it.

That sort of aside makes me wonder what it would be like to have Fox write a collection of humorous essays. And then I start thinking of how much fun everyone will have at Fox’s event at Boswell. She’s speaking/reading on Thursday, February 16, at 7 pm. Hope you’ll join the celebration, and you’ll be forgiven and even welcomed if you make a few jokes along the way.