On the New Cultural History of Dungeons and Dragons, and the Warner Books Editor I Knew Who, Like Me, Found His Dream Job in Wisconsin at TSR..

Another Warner Books memory resurfaces. When you start a new job, everyone who has been there a day longer than you seems like they've been there forever. Everyone who starts the day after you or later is a newbie. A number of folks I worked with who were starting out around the time I did went on to be publishing bigwigs.

But today I am reminded of one of my old colleagues. Brian seemed to assist one of our romance editors, but his focus was clearly that of fantasy and science fiction. Our go-to author at Warner seemed to be Alan Dean Foster, who seemingly appeared on the list every other month, but Thomsen's knowledge went well beyond our list. I was a novice sf reader who'd read the basics but then found my interest drifted. I was good at math and science but something was missing. I didn't have what it took to be a geek? Was it cowardice? A lack of technical ability?

But I would say it was the complete and utter absence of Dungeons and Dragons in my teenage years? How can it be that I was never invited to even participate? I skipped lunch so I could volunteer in the science lab. For goodness sake, I was co-captain of our high school math team and I had the polyester jacket to prove it. We raised the money for these jackets by selling bagels, by the way. I asked around the office and seemingly half of my contemporaries at the bookstore were involved in long-running Dungeons and Dragons games. I met someone who told me they delivered pizzas to Gary Gygax and to this day, wore this detail as a badge of honor.

Needless to say, I ran into Brian several years after moving to Wisconsin on a Midwest Express flight. The only nice thing about Frontier eating the airline and then pooping it out is that we can call it by its proper name, instead of that less mellifluous Midwest Airlines, as once they changed it, you could no longer hear "the best care in the air, the best, Midwest Express." Brian had moved to the mother ship, TSR, where he was an editor (!) We each asked if the other had ever got one of the coveted lobster flights, moaned about the colder winters and the need to drive. I didn't actually get my license until three years after I moved to Milwaukee, but I don't think you really could navigate Lake Geneva carless. We wished each other well. And then the memory ends.*

Why does this memory stick with me so strongly when I can't remember folks who insist I was close friends with them in college? The brain is a strange place. But I think it's that weird experience of bridging two phases of my life, running into one of my Warner associates in Milwaukee, much like when I ran into one of my authors on the Pfister Hotel elevator several years after I moved here.He'd divorced his wife and became an eastern-ish mystic, while she remarried and started an excercise program with her hunky new husband. But I digress.

Back to Lake Geneva. It's the town It was the center of the geek universe for a moment in time. And it's all recaptured in Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It, the new book written by Forbes senior editor David Ewalt, where his specialty is technology and internet culture (I just learned that he's clearly a geek and not a nerd. It's all on this website).I wound up reading this book after hosting back to back events with Nathan Rabin and Chuck Klosterman. Having read and enjoyed both books, and realizing that they were edited by the same fellow, Brant Rumble, I wound up with the question that every editor (and agent, and publicist) wants to hear: "What else have ya got?" This was his answer.

Ewalt's book is part cultural history of Dungeons and Dragons, and part personal journey through his own experiences in role playing games. With its origins in military simulation games, creators David Arneson and Gary Gygax were influenced by epic fantasy to create something different, a story that didn’t have to follow history. It exploded in the 1980s, and for a while, was considered to be the gateway drug to Satanism (just after heavy metal and before video games). Ewalt traces the rise and fall of TSR, and its current standing in the hands of Wizards of the Coast, itself a division of Hasbro, on the cusp of releasing an open-ended version five that tried to write the wrongs of the overly regimented version four.

While this is going on, Ewalt and his friends play a game of Vampire World, a post-apocalyptic version of the game. That’s one of the big things I learned in Of Dice and Men; it ain’t all medieval castles in these worlds. There’s a detour into live-action roleplaying, and a visit to several gaming conferences and Wizards headquarters, but I was sort of surprised that the journey did not included a visit to GenCon, a long-time Milwaukee tradition; we’ll ignore the fact that they decamped to Indianapolis some years ago.

Though Ewalt keeps personal details to a minimum, we know that he was an avid player who left the game behind in college, for the equally nerdy subculture of progressive college journalism. He returned to the game, for one more go-around, but as he got more and more immersed in the game, another question arose: could Ewalt someday be a DM (Dungeon Master?)

The trick in these journalism-memoir hybrids is that many authors get so immersed in their own story that they forget that readers actually came to the story for the journalistic meat, the subculture world the author is exploring. In this case, I would say that I could have used slightly more personal details; Ewalt remains an enigma. His girlfriend, his family, his non D friends, and his Forbes colleagues never really weigh in on Ewalt and his Dungeons and Dragon pursuits. I almost feel like I had a better handle on his alter ego, Westlocke the cleric, but was that an insight into Ewalt’s own character an idealized version of himself? Hard to say.

On the other hand, for many readers, they'd probably prefer the avatar to the writer. I can also think of many a memoir hybrid that was brought down by too much personal info, like the unnamed waitress memoir that started off delicious and veered off the map when she started dating one of the icky bartenders.
 
I still can't figure out why the whole thing passed me by. The game started getting traction in the 1970s when I was in high school, and certainly should have been an option by my college years. Why didn't my roommate play, who would pick up The Lord of the Rings and start reading from a seemingly random place when he was nervous? Why didn't the radio station techies I hung out with invite me for a game? I mentioned I was a math major in college, right?

I guess I'll never know. But now that I've read Of Dice and Men, I feel like I caught up on what I missed.

*Like TSR, Brian passed away in 2008, but he like the gaming company, he lives on in a lot of memories.

"Let Him Go," Larry Watson's Latest, is a Western Noir Story of A Couple Desperate to Find Their Grandchild.

Several of us have read the new novel by Larry Watson, Let Him Go. I was chatting with Sharon about the book, and this led to another bookseller saying that they were excited that it was not a coming-of-age-novel, as was the case with Montana 1948 and American Boy. I replied that while there are themes that repeat throughout Watson’s work, only about half of them would touch on this genre; Laura and Sundown, Yellow Moon might be the others. Perhaps because I’d also read The Orchard, his novel about a painter who obsesses over his model in Door County, I hadn’t quite pigeon-holed him. But it's interesting that several folks are calling this a big leap for Watson. (Oops, had to rework this first paragraph, as I confused Sharon with the other bookseller. She hadn't read Watson before, and when I think about it, I think the whole argument was conceptual, not based on the reading of the other books!)

What Sharon loved about the new book, and Jason too, I might add, is the dark rural noir elements of the story. George and Margaret Blackledge at first seem like sweet grandparents who just want their grandson back. With their son dead from a riding accident, their daughter-in-law, previously living with them, has taken to no-good Donnie Weboy, and skipped Dalton-North Dakota for the family ranch in Gladstone, Montana. And Margaret just doesn’t think Donnie and Lorna are going to treat little Jimmy well, or perhaps in him she sees her own son.

Whatever the reason, Margaret convinces George to find the Weboys. But this clan, led by the widowed Darlene, is pretty tough. Everyone they meet tells them to stay clear. Margaret, however, is a women driven, and George has no choice but to follow behind. They’ve got quite the complicated relationship, and their passion and tenderness is also mixed with anger and secrets.

We all know this is going to go badly, and George does too; he pretty much warns Margaret to steer clear of all of them, certainly Uncle Bill, the neat-as-a-pin, cigar-chewing uncle that guides them towards the ranch.

Watson is a master at capturing the mid-century West. It’s the moment when a lot of farmers and ranchers are realizing that there might be better options for them. For some, like George and Margaret’s daughter Janie, it’s moving to a big city to teach. Lorna gets a job at the Montgomery Ward. For the Weboys, it’s staying on the land, but using it to keep their junked cars and parts that they sell. Stolen? Wouldn’t put it past them.

And boy, these folks are dark and hard to read, and one of the things you have to be careful about is whether hospitality is a measure of trustworthiness. Blanche Weboy, after all, throws her doors open to the Blackledges, while some of the most sympathetic characters in the book are more standoffish.

There's a moment in the story when Blanche confronts Margaret and says, if I were in your place, I'd do the same thing And that's the moment when I thought is this a family confronting pure evil, or is this an Andre Dubus III-like meeting of two uncontrolled forces caught in a conflict they can't control, neither one of them purely good or evil? I lean towards the former theory, but could be swayed by the latter.

In a way, Let Him Go bookends American Boy and some of other Watson coming-of-age stories. It’s a looking back tale instead of looking forward. But either way you look, the world can be a very dark place. Larry Watson is visiting Boswell on Tuesday, September 10, 7 pm, for the launch of Let Him Go. I’ll leave you with our recommendation from Jason.

“It’s early 1950s North Dakota. George and Margaret Blackledge have lost their son in a tragic horse accident; his widow Lorna has married Donnie and moved to Montana. Margaret does not trust the sketchy Weboy clan with her grandchild, and convinces George to go after them to bring the boy home, with Lorna or without. The Blackledges are not ready for what awaits them in Gladstone, and their world will never be the same again. Larry Watson is a master at setting the atmosphere and the characters up in this tragedy waiting to happen. My heart went out for their desperate situation and their dead-end choices. Brilliant! ”

Elmore Leonard, We Hardly Knew Ye. Actually, We Didn't Know Ye, We Just Read a Lot of Ye. 1925-2013

Back when I worked at Warner Books, I did not get involved in many editorial decisions. Editors would sometimes ask us to read manuscripts, and then use our reads to help get the deal. I don’t know what they did with a negative read once they were gunning to publish someone. Ignore it, I guess.

So one day, someone gives me a manuscript for this novelist named Elmore Leonard. It might have been Karren*, who at that time might have been Karine, as she was one of several folks I worked with who used a numerologist to adjust their names for SUCCESS!) who gave it to me, as she was a good dealmaker and we liked talking to each other about books. Welcome to the eighties.

It turns out that I had become obsessed with Elmore Leonard (photo credit Linda Solomon). I can’t figure out why I started reading him, but I was voracious, as you can see in the addendum. And that's probably why they included a junior publicity person in an important acquisition meeting.

I became what you might call an addict. I had read a lot of mysteries, but these weren’t mysteries in my book, because you knew the villain. The heroes weren’t always that good, but boy, the villains were quite bad, and were pretty violent too, moreso with the later books. Often funny. I loved that the plots were rather intricate and filled with double and even triple crosses. You can see why Quentin Tarantino was a fan.

So that manuscript was the novel Glitz, and Arbor House came to us to be their paperback partner in an attempt to break Elmore Leonard out beyond his cult following. To do that, they needed money and they apparently couldn’t get that from Avon, their normal paperback sibling, Avon. It’s all in this New York Times article about their big plans, leading to Glitz becoming Leonard’s first New York Times bestseller, but what it doesn’t say is that I yapped more at that meeting than I ever did before. I was in my early twenties and often had no idea what I was talking about. Do I now? But I sure did love Leonard and I was positive that other people would too

The article doesn’t make mention of Warner, who provided a lot of the cash, but I remember that even after the book was signed, Warner seemed involved in the marketing of the book, as my coworker Margaret in advertising had several ad proofs. I had befriended George Coleman, a Donald Fine protégé invovled in the Leonard, who later left Arbor House to return to Fine at his new independent house, and and later (I think) he brought Dale Brown to Putnam. He was one of those people who was about my age but had a talent that made me feel like I was a gawky 13 year old. I still run into folks like that, but I won’t list names. Alas, George died of AIDS at a very young 35.

It's coming back to me, how I started reading Leonard. I think George sent me one of his novels, in order to trade for some Warner title, perhaps Megatrends or Life Extension. It's how I met a lot of people in publishing. Editors or the publisher or the even the president would come to me and say, go get me a copy of this book, and I would call the publicity department and see if they'd be interested in say, The Richard Simmons Never-Say-Diet Cookbook.

After the deal was set up, I wasn’t really obligated to read future Elmore Leonards. As the junior assistant paperback publicist, my job was mostly to say no to requests and you really don't have to know about the books when you're just rejecting everyone. That being said, in addition to the multiple-book hard-soft deal, we also picked up a lot of his backlist and I tended to read what what we published. Warner had four Gail Godwin books on our backlist, which we repackaged whenever when she had a successful novel; I read them all. When we acquired the Popular Library backlist, I read a whole mess of P.D. James. And so I kept reading Elmore Leonard. Including at least one western.

After I moved to Harry W. Schwartz and we started our event program, I figured we’d eventually host Mr. Leonard. After all, the Detroit suburbs weren't really that far from Milwaukee, though he also spent a fair amount of time in Florida, as you can tell from the increasingly Floridian setting of the stories. It never happened, and I’m pretty sure the only time I met Mr. Leonard was at that planning meeting for Glitz in New York. And needless to say, at that point, I was too star struck to talk to him.

Mr. Leonard died this week, after a stroke.

***

I stated keeping track of my reading in 1984. I'm pretty sure this is not a complete list, though it doesn't start much earlier than Cat Chaser, and I could tell by the last few annotated titles that Rum Punch might have been the last. Hey, I can't think of too many other authors in my reading where I read twenty of the novels. I would say that makes Leonard one of my all-time favorites.

January 1984: Cat Chaser
February 1984: Stick
April 1984: LaBrava
May 1984: 52 Pickup
June 1984: Unknown Man #89
July 1984: City Primeval
August 1984: Split Images
September 1984: Swag
November 1984: Glitz
December 1984: The Switch (I read 17 books that month. Oh for the day.)
February 1986: The Hunted
April 1986: Mr. Majestyk
September 1986: The Big Bounce
December 1986: Bandits
July 1987: Touch
May 1988: Freaky Deaky
May 1989: Killshot
August 1990: Get Shorty
September 1991: Maximum Bob
September 1992: Rum Punch (which became the film "Jackie Brown")

His most recent book is Raylan. His most quoted is Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. I'm shocked by how many of his titles continue to be republished!

*I don't normally do this but I changed the editor's name. Maybe her friends don't know she kept changing her name's spelling at the advice of a numerologist.

Five Superpowered Women Novelists Take Down the Boswell Best This Week-Moyes, Shannon, Maynard, Pessl, and Yanagihara.

Night Film (Random House) has been getting all sorts of great attention, including some love from our own Sharon K. Nagel:

"When the daughter of a mysterious, cult-like film director is found dead, journalist Scott McGrath is unable to stay away from the investigation. He has studied Cordova, the director, for years, although little is known. This fascinating novel is a mash up of photographs, newspaper articles, underground website postings, and police reports. Pessl skillfully leads the reader down one mysterious corridor after the next, creating this labyrinth of a story. Here is the solution to what to read after you have finished Gone Girl."

As you can see, Stacie's taken advantage of the new "staff rec" function of our website, and is now able to include some personalized info along with the publisher feed.  The publisher went with a heavy but thin stock paper. We know it means it's high quality and that this is a book that still won't be yellowed in ten years. Sometimes though folks equate thick pages that bulk up a book with quality. I learned my lesson after The Lonely Polygamist. Expect this book to look a little fatter after a few printings, as Random House likely adjusts.

Jason wanted to make sure that I included the video trailer that's been making the rounds. Here is is.


Our initial copies are also signed. How can you not buy this?

Hanya Yangihara's The People in the Trees (Doubleday) has a beautiful jacket with raised letters, though it has notably less heft. I do like the maps on the endpapers, something I was hoping to see on Andrew Sean Greer's latest, but those maps wound up closer to the text. Doesn't everyone know that maps (in this case, Ivu-iu Village) belong on endpapers? I thought you'd agree with me.

It's 1950 and young doctor Norton Perina signs up for a Micronesian anthropological expedition. They meet a group of feral tree dwellers with an unusually long life expectancy. Some are smuggled out and there the problems begin.

The story is told by one of the scientist's colleagues, who is chronicling his mentor's rise and fall, with a defense of the seemingly indefensible. Let me just say that one of the hoops you have to jump through to enjoy the book is not mentioned on the flap copy. But it's hard to keep the secret from reviewers, and they are certainly going to tell us. Here's Carol Memmott in the Chicago Tribune with the story.

"In 1976, D. Carleton Gadjusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for proving the link between a slow-acting prion disease that caused madness and death in the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea and the tribe’s funerary ritual of eating deceased members of their tribe. Debut novelist Hanya Yanagihara, an editor at large with Condé Nast Traveler, wrote in a recent essay that she was fascinated not only by Gadjusek's celebrated contributions to medical science but with his notorious personal life. During the years he spent traveling to Papua New Guinea and Micronesia, he adopted more than 50 children who lived with him in his Maryland home. Gadjusek was arrested, tried and sent to prison after being accused of sexually abusing some of them."

So of course the strangest parts of the story turned out to be true, or rather truish. I read a good amount of the book early on, and really liked it a lot, but other books got in the way. I think this novel will elicit very strong reactions, but Anne Perleberg Andersen in the Star Tribune came at it in a more analytical fashion. "Yanagihara asks what we want the scientist to be. Can Perina be a great mind without being a great — or even a good — man? What, in the end, are we willing to forgive for progress?"

Speaking of diseases, at a recent wedding, I was questioned as to whether I had "Jojo fever" by bookselling colleagues Ken and Lisa. The symptoms seem to be only wanting to read Jojo Moyes novels. Sharon contracted a case and wound up really enjoying Me Before You. Now it's time for The Girl You Left Behind, (Pamela Dorman/Viking) and it's the story of a young woman (Liv) who's given a portrait of a woman almost 100 years earlier, shortly before her husband's death. A chance encounter reveals the painting's true worth, and as the publisher notes, a battle begins over its troubled history. Was the painting looted? Who is to pay reparations? And who is the new owner?

Elizabeth Egan in the Los Angeles Times writes "Minor quibbles aside, The Girl You Left Behind is, well, impossible to leave behind. Even the most hard-hearted reader will want to know what happens to these women, not just the flesh-and-blood ones but also the bewitching one on the wall. Where will the painting land, and was its subject a casualty of war? In this moving paean to daring, determination and perspicacity, Moyes keeps the reader guessing down to the last hankie."

Three novels in, and I'm still writing up Penguin Random House, and that's with me being picky. But The Bone Season is from Bloomsbury, and Samantha Shannon's debut novel has been picked for the inaugural selection of Today Show Book Club 2.0. I read a little of this novel too. It's about a kick ass dreamwalker in London's criminal underground, who is caught and brought to Oxford, where a race of aliens is planning to use the clairvoyants for their own (dare I say nefarious?) purposes.

I was just saying to someone asking about books skewing to women in their twenties, that many of them are looking for Gone Girl-esque pscyhological thrillers, or fantasy-tinged thrillers such as A Discovery of Witches or City of Dark Magic. I feel that with the selection of The Bone Season, the Today show said we're aiming for fun, neither Oprah 1.0 or 2.0, and we're aiming a little younger in the demographics. I think publishers are seeing how many adults are reading young adult dystopian novels and want some of that audience.

From USA Today: "In fact, the publisher that first gave us the Potter books is hoping that The Bone Season, and subsequent books in the series, will join the science-fiction-cum-fantasy benchmark set in recent times by writers such as Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) and Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)."

Our own Hannah Johnson-Breimeier writes "The all-powerful governing body Scion has made clairvoyance illegal in London. Paige Mahoney is a dreamwalker, who works for a clairvoyant syndicate until she commits an unthinkable crime. When the authorities find her, she's taken to a secret prison run by the Rephaim, a terrible and mysterious new race. Paige is put into the keeping of the Warden, with whom she must cooperate in order to survive long enough to escape. Bone Season is the riveting introduction to a new sci-fi series from Samantha Sutton."

Joyce Maynard's new novel, After Her (William Morrow), is set in late seventies Northern California. Patty and Rachel are young teens playing around on their summer vactation when young women start turning up dead and their dad is put in charge of finding the "Sunset Strangler."  As the case takes a toll on her father, Rachel comes up with a plan to solve the case, but it apparently doesn't go well. Now thirty years later she revisits it, with an eye at redemption.

The back jacket's got a nice assorment of New England writers (Maynard writes in the Wall Street Journal of her New Hampshire home), including Christopher Castellani, Stewart O'Nan, Caroline Leavitt, Jodi Picoult, and Jill McCorkle (honorary, I think she moved back down south after many years in Massachusetts). Complex thriller, page-turning mystery, nothing short of a masterpiece. But these writers don't help position the novel--their styles are quite different. This Ann Levin review from the Associated Press, picked up by the Star Tribune (I am doing my part for confusing coastal types about the difference between Milwaukee and Minneapolis--I quote the Star Tribune almost as much as I do the Journal Sentinel)seemed to imply that this was a commercial novel masquerading as a literary novel.

But no, that's just one take. Our own Sharon Nagel liked it a lot, and being a reader who crosses genres she felt that while the mystery was fine, she thought it worked best as a literary novel about sisters. Read it and decide for yourself, then argue it out over a glass of wine.

Like Yanagiahara's novel, this is inspired by true events, the "Trailside Killer" case that terrorized San Francisco. Of the advance reviews, Publishers Weekly was the most enthusiastic. "Maynard captures the way that memory works in fragments: Rachel recalls 'My Sharona' as the soundtrack of the summer, fusing her perspective with that of the killer, who sings it to his victims. Her retelling also flip-flops seamlessly from her teenage anxieties to the front-page news a testament to Maynard's narrative dexterity. This cinematic coming-of-age murder mystery satisfyingly blends suspense with nostalgia."

All these titles are Boswell's Best through next Monday, August 26.

Monday Event Post--Reuben Eisenstein on Monday, Andrea Thalasinos and Susanna Daniel on Tuesday, Toby Barlow on Wednesday!

Monday, August 19, 7 pm:
Reuben Eisenstein, author of Date Certain.

Many years working as a pathologist in teaching hospitals influenced this debut novella that is a medical thriller, an existential dilemma, and a police anti-procedural.

A young doctor named Ben Stone is getting adjusted to his new job as Chief of Pathology at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, when his world is turned upside-down by a bizarre case: an apparently healthy man appear in the Emergency Room, interrupting interrupts a routine autopsy conference, and says he has come to die. His exam indicates all is normal, yet he dies anyway.

Ben's life is further complicated by Mahmoud, a sinister trainee in the Pathology Department, who stalks Ben and seems to have an eerie control over Ben's mind and his dreams. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic County Medical Examiner and an overbearing detective seek answers about the mysterious death, and there's the problem of missing and/or mislabeled bodily organs.…

Tuesday, August 20, 7 pm:
Andrea Thalasinos, author of Traveling Light and An Echo Through the Snow
and Susanna Daniels, author of Sea Creatures and Stiltsville.

Two women face difficult choices about marriage and family in these two riveting, inspiring novels about the struggles we must face when those we love are fighting their own battles, which we can’t win for them, and how those battles can put ourselves and others we love in danger.

Andrea Thalasinos’ second novel, Traveling Light, is an inspiring story about a woman who takes a leave of absence from her promising academic career, and troubled marriage, for a road trip with a canine companion she can’t live without. Paula has been sleeping on the couch for the last ten years, driven out of her marital bedroom by her husband’s compulsive hoarding. When a man dying in a hospital urges her to rescue his beloved dog, Fotis, she accepts, intending to find the dog a good home. But when Fotis enters her life, Paula quickly realizes she doesn’t want him to leave. Instead, they leave together, traveling the road Westward until they are waylaid in northern Minnesota when an impulsive decision to volunteer briefly at a wildlife rehabilitation center changes Paula forever.

Returning to the Stiltsvile setting of her first novel, Sea Creatures is a riveting domestic drama by Susanna Daniel in which a mother must make the unthinkable choice between her husband and her son in a mesmerizing exploration of the high stakes of marriage and parenthood. Georgia and Graham flee Illinois for Miami after their careers derail due to Graham’s severe sleep disorder.

Their fresh start is made more complicated when their son ceases to speak and Georgia strikes up a friendship with an artist who might be able to offer her more than just hope for a new life. “A captivating, haunting novel about the complexities of the human heart and its attachments, terrain as slippery and beautiful and disaster prone as Daniel's South Florida.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

Wednesday, August 21, 7 pm:
Toby Barlow, author of Babayaga and Sharp Teeth.

Fans have eagerly waited five years for another dose of Toby Barlow, ever since his imaginative and fierce debut novel, Sharp Teeth, surprised readers and reviewers, including David Mamet. His new novel is set in 1959 Paris where a Detroit ad executive (who may or may not be CIA), two ageless Russian witches (one is young and beautiful, the other more traditionally “witchy”), a police detective who gets turned into a flea when he comes to close to solving a grisly murder, and an American who wants to start a literary journal, converge with LSD, buried rifles, and jazz musicians for a romp through Paris such as you’ve never before experienced.

“If his brilliant Sharp Teeth wasn’t enough to make you read anything Toby Barlow writes, he’s done it again, giving a well-worn story a tasty twist. Babayaga is a pulpy, magical adventure set in a Paris any reader would love to visit.” —Stewart O’Nan

Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times says that Toby Barlow works his magic to make the impossible possible. "Before Babayaga, I thought Disney had captured all the world's folk tales and remade them as child-friendly blockbusters. But author Toby Barlow got to Baba Yaga--fearsome witches plucked from old Russian legend--first, and he brings them to life in 1950s Paris."

But who can say it better than our own Mel Morrow. "Babayaga is incantatory. A singular tale of falling in love set against the backdrop of post-WWII Paris, with tones of Russian folklore and CIA murder mystery, this profound and poetic novel wrings the unique from ubiquitous themes. The prose is haute couture, the story as rich and compelling as Paris. Toby Barlow is my Beatrice."

plus a reminder for
Tuesday, August 27, 7 pm:
a ticketed event with Louise Penny, author of How the Light Gets in, the newest mystery in the Inspector Gamache series. Note: only buy the book through our website if you are definitely not coming and just want a signed copy. Otherwise, please buy a ticket from Brown Paper Tickets.

Tickets are $25.99 plus tax, and include a copy of How the Light Gets In. On the night of the event only, there is a $20 gift card option. Tickets are nonrefundable, but we will hold a signed copy of How the Light Gets In for you if you are not able to attend.

Here's Anne McMahon on the newest from Penny: "Several circumstances in the life of Inspector Gamache and his friends in Three Pines await illumination. Book store owner Myrna needs help searching for a missing friend, Jean-Guy Beauvoir remains estranged and self-destructive, and Gamache's carefully selected staff is being just as carefully destroyed by the Chief Superintendent. These three story lines converge for a stunning conclusion. Once again, Louise Penny draws you in and holds you captive. I'll be reading and re- reading How the Light Gets In until the next Chief Inspector Gamache mystery is written."

There are light refreshments being served, including themed cupcakes from Milwaukee Cupcake Company, iced tea, and a special poutin amuse bouche from Nick. Once again, here's a ticket-purchasing link.

Sunday Bestseller Post--Stoner Revival, the Next Gone Girl (Again), Paterniti on TV, the Future of Star Wars Licensing, and More.

We've done a lot of book club sales this week, so I switched up the list presentation order.

Paperback Fiction:
1. Pryme Knumber, by Matthew Flynn
2. Open City, by Teju Cole
3. Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
4. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
5. Stoner, by John Williams
6. The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg
7. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey
8. The Barbarian Nurseries, by Hector Tobar
9. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin (appearing with Beth Ann Fennelly for his new novel on Thursday, October 24)
10. The Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones
11. The Silent Wife, by A.S.A. Harrison
12. The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
13. Microtones, by Robert Vaughan
14. Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles
15. Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow

One of our larger book clubs has a good percentage of attendees who like to buy their books all at once, and this makes a week of very nice numbers for the selected titles. You'll recognize that I've talked about most of them at one point on the blog. Our interest with Stoner predates Boswell, when a number of booksellers went crazy selling the recently released New York Review of Books edition when Carol Grossmeyer saw it and bought it off a staff rec at Elliot Bay. Now it's said to have become a bestseller in a number of European countries, and that has energy has translated back into very large sales at a number of American bookstores. 

In non book club action, The Silent Wife is the newest book getting the "read this after Gone Girl" buzz. The author is, alas, also getting the "Rent" slash Girl with the Dragon Tattoo backstory. She died after completing this novel.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. The Sixteenth Rail, by Adam J. Schrager
2. Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman
3. Futurism's Bastard Son, by Billy X. Curmano
4. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
5. Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks

Adding book items to our website database causes me no end of problems. I never quite got Futurism's Bastard Son to load quite right, and now I'm trying to add Robert Vaughan's Microtones. Sometimes I get the text up but no image file.  When you search for it, you see the cover image, but when you pull up the item, you don't. I'll keep working on it.

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
2. Babayaga, by Toby Barlow
3. The Cuckoo's Calling, by J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith
4. Inferno, by Dan Brown
5. And the Mountain's Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

We've now got too reads on Babayaga and with Stacie's window also intriguing passers by, we're feeling a bit better prepared for our event with Toby Barlow on Wednesday, August 21, 7 pm. He got the book preview in the Shepherd Express, sharing the spotlight with Reuben Eisenstein's Date Certain, whose review from Paul McComas highlighted our event on Monday, August 19, 7 pm

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Zealot, by Reza Aslan
2. The Making of Milwaukee, by John Gurda
3. The Telling Room, by Michael Paterniti
4. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
5. Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg

Alas, Nick's dreams of hosting Michael Paterniti for The Telling Room are not likely to come to pass at this point.  The first time you get an Indie Next quote, it seems like anything can happen, but there are still pre-designated book tours and budgets and the like. That said, he can watch an interview with Paterniti on Portland's WCSH television here. It's the best I can do at this point!

Books for Kids:
1. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs
2. The School for Good and Evil, by Shoman Chainani
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
4. The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppet, by Tom Angleberger
5. Hollow Earth, by John Barrowman and Carole E. Barrowman

Several booksellers and I were just pondering the fate of all these interesting Star Wars licenses in lieu of Disney's purchase. Something like Tom Angleberger's kids' series, the newest of which, The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppet, finds the MacQuarrie Middle School kids besieged by Professor FunTime and his incessant videos that promise to raise test scores. Do you really think Disney would allow this without having complete control? I don't. We'll see what happens to projects like this or William Shakespeare's Star Wars or Darth Vader and Son.

In the Journal Sentinel, Mike Fischer tackles Night Film. He writes: "The title of Marisha Pessl's Night Film— a gothic thriller that's among the best novels I've read this year — refers to the movies made by fictional director Stanislas Cordova, a dark and mysterious genius who, we're told, went "down into the dark crags and muck of human desire and longing."

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Grace Bond Staples reviews March, John Lewis's graphic novel about his role in the civil rights marches and demonstrations of the 1960s. Created with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, it's the first installment of a three-part series.

And from the Detroit Free Press, Julie Hinds profiles Toby Barlow (see above), who is coming to Boswell for Babayaga ."Why did Barlow spend about four years creating a fictional vision of post-World War II Paris that's populated with an ad man from Detroit who becomes entangled with spies, witches whose lives span centuries and one very curious police detective who adjusts remarkably well to being magically transformed into a flea?"

All this in the Cue section, plus Miss Manners tells you the correct way to "répondez s'il vous plaît."

Saturday Gift Post--Bookmarks from Bookjigs, Boxed Cards from Steven M. Lewers.

Our gift show orders are arriving, and that is fun because in many cases it means new vendors. One line that I looked at in at the Minneapolis gift show (which of course wasn't Minneapolis at all, but suburban Hopkins) last year was Bookjig, created by Franklin Mill (or maybe it's Gazinga, I'm a bit confused by who owns whom) of Utah. The idea is that the bookmark clips onto your book with a ribbon. It's a variation of the magnet bookmarks we stock (like I Clip), combined with the ribbon marker that comes in some lines like Paperblanks.

I think the strongest thing about the line is their great visual graphics. It's actually hard to find attractive looking bookmarks, especially tasselled ones. The pretty ones are effectively pieces of paper, while the tasselled ones tend to have some design issues. To me, this is effectively a very nicely designed tassel bookmark, only the piece of paper is a clip (or as they call it, a jig). There's a fox, squirrel, bird, ladybug, floral, and my dark horse choice, a seahorse. I think you were supposed to buy by collection, but I was a bit contrarian.

In addition to the bookmarks, they make a matching line of spiral notebooks in two sizes. We tend to avoid gift vendors who forces sixes in their notebooks; the sell through is just too slow, and there are so many other gift vendors that allow us to order in threes (or twos, or even ones) that it's not worth it. When I see something like that, I think they are chasing mass merchants. The Bookjigs themselves are bought in 12s, and I usually won't buy bookmarks in quantity beyond 6s, which is why it took me a year to overcome my hesitations and place the order. We'll see how it goes.

Minimums were much easier in another new line for the store, from Steven M. Lewers of New Hampshire. Amie had brought info back on the line from Heartland Fall Forum last year, but I guess I really needed to see the designs in person. We wound up focusing on his boxed notecards, with many nature motifs, including fish, cardinals, turtles, frogs, leaves, butterflies, owls, and apples. In most of the boxes, there is an assortment of cards, not just the one pictured. We also brought in a few of his blank cards and his laminated apple guide.

Lewers started the line after leaving Houghton Mifflin, where he brand managed the Peterson bird guides and got the idea for these laminated guides. I think birds was first. It turns out he was a long-time friend of David Schwartz. Though I don't think I ever met him, Schwartz kept in touch and used to talk about him a lot. If truth be told, I didn't just buy this line because I thought customers would like it; it released some nice memories too.

On Friday we received yet another gift show shipment, from Chicago this time. I'm pretty excited about that one too, but my enthusiasm will have to wait.

Marriage and Booksellers, Marriage and Books, Susanna Daniel and Andrea Thalasinos, It's LIke Some Stream of Consciousness Word Vine

Yesterday I went to the wedding of former booksellers Dave (now a rep) and Valerie (now a school librarian). They had old-fashioned libary checkout cards to leave notes and a bookmark with a Mark Twain saying. But the most beautiful bookish thing was the arch of books that they were married under, on the War Memorial promenade, overlooking Lake Michigan. Before you get all "how dare you deface books?" on me, everyone who works with books knows that there are some books that work better as an archway over a wedding than they do for reading.

It was a lovely evening!

***

Marriage and relationships are on my mind, as I just finished reading Susanna Daniel's Sea Creatures, her second novel following Stiltsville. Daniel is going to be appearing with fellow second novelist (An Echo Through the Snow, Traveling Light) and fellow Madisonian Andrea Thalasinos next Tuesday, August 20, 7 pm, at Boswell.

The book returns to the Stiltsville of the Biscayne Bay, a community of houses built on...well, you know what. Georgia Quillan's returned to South Florida with her husband, with both their professional career tails between their legs (him denied tenure, her with a failed small college prep business). Her widowed father and her stepmom agree to let them park a houseboat on the Coral Gables canal, as her husband has accepted a new and nearby research job. Georgia takes a job doing errands for a loner artist in the nearby Stiltsville community.

Oh, and her husband has parasomnia (an extreme form of sleepwalking) and her son has selective mutism. Their past is a mess, with a lot of unresolved issues regarding not just her family disorders, but regarding her mom's death, and the future is pretty fragile. You can just sense Hurricane Andrew off in the distance, and that hurricane portends a worsening of the family bonds.

Daniel says she was partly inspired by the story from Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk with Me, a memoir I read several years ago, in conjunction with his theater appearance where we sold books. Graham doesn't really sleep for long periods of time, and when he does, he has to strap himself in. But he wasn't always taking these precautions, and like Birbiglia, the family's escape from the Chicago area was preciptated by his crashing through a paned window on a balcony.

The sea creatures were played up a bit more on the advance edition, but the octopus was replaced on the finished jacket, as the Harper folk apparently didn't know how hot these icons are on gift items of late. Weren't they reading my blog posts? Of course the family are all sea creatures--not just Graham, Georgia, and their son Frankie live on a houseboat, but so does Charlie, the man that Georgia does errants for. I do think the new cover adjusts the focus of the potential audience for the book (as do all cover changes, right?) and the publisher will see whether not easily being merchandised with octopus journals was worth it in hopes of a more hospitable audience. I'm just kidding about this, of course.

Interestingly enough, as the event came together, we realized that Daniel and Thalasinos had written books with some themes that would make it appear that the pairing of our authors was kismet. Traveling Light is about a woman who comes to a crossroads ten years after leaving her husband, dog in tow, who is dealing with a hoarding disorder. Like parasomnia, hoarding is something that we didn't really understand until recently, but both can have devastating effects on relationships.

Also like Georgia Quillan, Paula Makaikis winds up escaping to a new locale (in this case, Minnesota) for a new start, and must confront some father issues as well. With these interesting similarities in mind, I asked Susanna Daniel and Andrea Thalasinos if they wouldn't mind structuring their event as more of a discussion. In addition to a short reading from each, they will be discussing the psychological components of the books as well as the strong sense of place that each tried to bring to their novels. And of course they'll be a question and answer period too.

Sea Creatures has been getting some very nice review around the country, including Laura Albritton in The Miami Herald proclaiming its fantasticness: "While Miami has inspired its satirical works of genius, chilling mystery novels and excellent accounts of Cuban exile, we’ve mostly run short on first-rate literature that takes the city seriously enough to capture its eccentricities without flinching. A writer just can’t roll into town for a few months and hope to understand the soul of this place. But Daniel, with Sea Creatures, gets it absolutely pitch perfect."

In the Roanoke Times, Lawrence Wayne Markert called Thalasinos' newest "an engaging story, a good summer read, about Paula Makaikis’ journey of personal discovery. Stuck for 10 years in a third unsuccessful marriage, this time to a hoarder who is an accomplished physicist at Columbia University, fate in the tradition of classical Greek literature sends Paula into new exterior and interior territory."

Yes, I could have matched Daniels with another Florida writer or Thalasinos with another dog-friendly novel. But pairing together two novels about women overcoming their husband's health disorders? You've got to admit that's unique. See you Tuesday.