Celebrating Milwaukee and Wisconsin with Books from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press and Others. But a Lot of Them are From the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Over the years, Wisconsin has had a number of publishers that specialized in local books. At one time, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Public Museum, and the Milwaukee Country Historical Society had active publishing programs. There were private publishers like Amherst Press and Wisconsin Trails. Even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had books. But publishing is a time-and-money-intensive operation, and even with the costs greatly reduced by digital publishing, the infrastructure of having dedicated staff has led many entities, both for profit and nonprofit, to put their resources elsewhere.

Arcadia Press and History Press, recently merged, have taken up the slack a bit, using standardized formatting to keep costs in check. Other national presses who specialize in multi-market localized books sometimes come along with hits, especially when they use local writers. We don't see as much from Globe Peguot, now a part of Rowan and Littlefield, but we just had our first entry from St. Louis's Reedy Press. And Chicago's Agate Publishing had two hits with Wisconsin Supper Clubs and Sanford D'Amato's Good Stock.*

But lately, it seems like the Wisconsin Historical Society Press is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Last year brought us Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader, Seventh Generation Earth Ethics, Scoop: Notes from a Small Ice Cream Shop, and Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, Early Chronicler of Plants, Rocks, Rivers, Mounds and All Things Wisconsin.

That last book was influential in raising Increase Lapham's profile enough that he is now going on the Wisconsin Writer's Wall of Fame. MPL's Central Library will be having a ceremony featuring John Gurda introducing the writers, Martha Bergland and Paul Hayes, on Tuesday, September 15, 6 to 7:30 pm. Following the induction ceremony, landscape historian Rob Nurre will present a program in the persona of Dr. Lapham, introducing treasures from the Richard E. and Lucile Krug Rare Books Room as well as from his personal collection.

It was the end of the summer and I thought I needed a little road trip so I made plants to drive to Madison to see ex-Boswellian Halley (of the Boswell and Books greeting card posts), who now works at the Society. The Wisconsin Historical Society has a beautiful building on the campus of UW-Madison that features exhibits in the lobby, in addition to the State Historical Society Museum on the Square. I spent some time looking at Frank Lloyd Wright materials, including architectural plants. I still find myself calling it the State Historical Society of Wisconsin - our old inventory was STATE, and as always, it took years for us to migrate to WHS. Now the books come from the University of Chicago warehouse, and combine with other distributees like the University of Wisconsin Press, so they all go under CDC.

This fall the Society has a bounty of Wisconsin titles, and many of authors will be doing events in and around the Milwaukee area. This seemed like a great time to highlight them for you.

Wednesday, October 7, 7 pm, at the Oconomowoc Public Library, 200 W. South St.: Rick March, author Polka Heartland: Why the Midwest Loves to Polka takes readers along on a joyful romp through the Midwestern musical traditions that give the "oompah-pah" of polka its sustaining beat.

Tuesday, October 13, 7 pm, at Books and Company, 1039 Summit Ave. in Oconomowoc: Beloved mystery writer Kathleen Ernst, best known for the Chloe Ellefson series, draws on Old World Wisconsin in her new photographic history, A Settler's Year: Pioneer Life Through the Seasons. There's construction on the street, so follow the signs for the Whitman Park Shopping Center and you'll get there with ease.

Tuesday, October 20, 6:30 pm, at Milwaukee Public Library's Loos Room at Centennial Hall, 733 N. 8th St.: Matthew J. Prigge celebrates the launch of Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City's First Century with an evening dedicated to Cream City troublemakers.

Sunday, October 25, 2 pm: Jerry Apps at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, 1111 E Brown Deer Rd. east of I43 in Bayside. The featured title will be Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist's Memoir airing on Milwaukee Public Television this fall. Apps is the author of many books, including the newly release and Wisconsin Agriculture: A History. Admission to the Schlitz grounds is $8, free for members of course.

Thursday, November 5, 7 pm: John Garofolo appears at the Shorewood Village Center, 3920 N Murray Ave, sponsored by the Shorewood Historical Society. He'll be speaking about Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Corres-pondent Killed in Action. Garofolo will also be the featured speaker at the Milwaukee Rotary Club on Tuesday, November 3. You must be invited by a Rotary member to attend this lunch event.

And finally, on Friday, November 20, 7 pm, at Boswell: James K Nelsen, author of Educating Milwaukee: How One City's History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped Its Schools. I have just finished this book and it's a fascinating book at how Milwaukee Public Schools has copied with educating children in the face of changing economics, racial makeup, and educational trends. Forced busing, magnet schools, school choice, charter schools, magnet schools, integration vs. nationalism, it's all there.

So yes, I decry the loss of some of the generators of local interest books but fortunately, folks come along to take up the slack. Historic Milwaukee, Inc. has the long-awaited book by John Gurda, illustrated by Jan Kotowicz, Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods. The launch is Thursday, September 24, at the Grain Exchange Room. We'll have a talk (one of several around town) from Mr. Gurda on Wednesday, December 2, 7 pm.

*Sanford D'Amato is back at Boswell, in conversation with Lori Friedrich, author of Milwaukee Food: A History of Cream City Cuisine, on Tuesday, November 24, 7 pm, published by the aforementioned History Press.

The Letter You'd Get Today if You Were Attending Tonight's Christopher Moore Event.

Say you were going to our Christopher Moore event for Secondhand Souls. You'd have a lot of questions, right? So I thought I'd post the letter I write to folks when they sign up for a Brown Paper Tickets event.

Greetings to Christopher Moore Fans,

We are excited about tonight's event celebrating Secondhand Souls**, the sequel to A Dirty Job. Here are some details you probably want to know.

1. We're going to start setting up the seating at 3 and hope to be done by 4. You can hold seats but we are not responsible for monitoring this, and really don't suggest it. There should not be a bad seat in the house, though some are better than others.

2. We'll start handing out line letters at 4 pm. Please hold onto your line letter when leaving the store for any reason, as that is your ticket to get you back in.

3. The store closes to the general public at 5:30. It's one admission ticket per attendee. If someone is driving you, that person can hang out in Starbucks next door. If they want to attend, there is a $20 gift card option if you as a couple don't want two books. But don't forget, Secondhand Souls makes a great-if-slightly-bizarre gift.

4. Moore will sign all books brought, but will only personalize two. Collectors (more than five books) will be asked to wait until the end of the line.

5. You line letter determines your place. Each letter represents 20 slots, starting with A. We will have preboarding for the pregnant and infirm, as they say when you're jetting off somewhere.

6. The publisher has provided us with some Sophie selfie sticks. We'll have a drawing for them. Your number will be on the back of your line letter.

7. Parking hints! There is a garage across the street, and for those who like these sorts of things, there is a small surface lot two blocks north of us across from Sendiks. We recommend when looking of parking that you think "south" and "east" instead of "north" and "west." In particular, there is a great deal of parking along Downer Avenue two blocks south of the bookstore.*

8. Get ready to have a great time! And please let friends know that the Brown Paper Tickets link will be up till 3 pm.

Best, and apologies in advance for typos,

The Boswell Booksellers, sometimes known as The Boswellians.

*This is excellent advice for anyone attending an event at Boswell.

**Not able to attend? You can still order a signed copy.

The Annotated Boswell Bestseller List for the Week Ending September 5, 2015

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Purity, by Jonathan Franzen
2. The Girl in the Spider's Web, by David Lagercrantz
3. The Nature of the Beast, by Louise Penny
4. Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee
5. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
6. Days of Awe, by Lauren Fox (event 9/15, 6:30, at Shorewood Public Library)
7. Barbara the Slut and Other People, by Lauren Holmes (event 9/14, 7 pm, at Boswell)
8. Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart
9. Secondhand Souls, by Christopher Moore (ticketed event 9/9, 7 pm, at Boswell)
10. The Water Museum, by Luis Alberto Urrea (event 9/17, 7 pm, at Boswell)

Four upcoming events make the top ten, but this week didn't have a hardcover fiction event, so there's no competition for Jonathan Franzen, and it's likely that an event still wouldn't have outsold Purity. If you want to see Franzen on tour, you can try St. Paul o 9/15, Kansas City on 9/16, or St. Louis on 9/17. It's quite possible that everything is sold out. As you may have read already, Michiko Kakutani's review in The New York Times comes straight out of a hymnal: "Mr. Franzen has added a new octave to his voice. In fact, even readers who have found his earlier work misanthropic, too filled with bile and spleen for their tastes, are likely to appreciate his ability here to not just satirize the darkest and pettiest of human impulses but to also capture his characters’ yearnings for connection and fresh starts — and to acknowledge the possibility of those hopes." Roxane Gay on NPR's All Things Considered not so much: "The shame of this novel is that purity is largely found not in the storytelling but in the author's passive aggressive contempt for nearly all his characters."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Bike Battles, by James Longhurst
2. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. Grain Brain, by David Perlmutter
4. How to Bake Pi, by Eugenia Cheng (event 9/19, 2 pm, at Boswell)
5. Rising Strong, by Brené Brown
6. The Making of Milwaukee, by John Gurda
7. H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald
8. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo
9. The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough
10. Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari

I can't remember the last time I saw three books from the Spiegel and Grau imprint on one bestseller list report, but this week, Between the World and Me, Just Mercy, and Brené Brown's Rising Strong. This follow up to the Boswell bestseller Daring Greatly is perhaps best summed up by Brown herself: "I feel so passionate about this book for a simple reason: I need it. This research taught me how to stay brave in struggle – and not just getting my ass kicked in the arena, but how to own my disappointments, failures, and even those heartbreaks that can take your breath away. It’s by far my most personal book."

From the Guardian profile by John-Paul Flintoff in 2013: "Brown, a Texan academic turned bestselling author, wife, daughter, sister and mother of two, came to prominence after recording a Ted talk in which she argued that to live a full life requires courage – and showing courage means doing things that make you feel vulnerable. It quickly became one of the most successful Ted talks of all time: more than 10 million people have seen it online and shared her message that we should stop worrying about being perfect, accept ourselves as we are, and engage meaningfully with one another."

Paperback Fiction:
1. Again and Again, by Ellen Bravo
2. Gods in Oslo, by John Plaski
3. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng (event 9/28, 7 pm, at Boswell)
4. Florence Gordon, by Brian Morton (in store lit group, 11/2, 7 pm)
5. Granta Book of the African Short Story, edited by Helon Habila
6. The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
7. Boy Snow Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi (in store lit group 10/5, 7 pm)
8. The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante
9. Euphoria, by Lily King
10. All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews

The Story of the Lost Child is the final volume in Elena Ferrante's quartet of novels about two Napelese friends that began in My Brilliant Friend, which I recently wrote about in the "what did the book club think?" post. Darcey Steinke wrote in Los Angeles Times: "The Neapolitan quartet succeeds in capturing life as lived, the striving female mind, the power of unknowing, the idea that agency within one's fate, not the fate itself, is what truly matters. You can read The Story of the Lost Child as a stand-alone book, but I entreat you to start at the beginning of this masterwork. Finishing the last volume, I felt like I'd entered, for a time, another existence. Like Anna Karenina, Lila and Elena are volatile, full of desire and rage. They too break domestic conventions, but it thrills me that instead of killing them off, Ferrante allows them, in all their chaos and pain, to thrive."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. 100 Things to Do in Milwaukee Before You Die, by Jennifer Posh
2. Yes Please, by Amy Poehler
3. The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
4. You Are a Badass, by Jen Sincero
5. A Path Appears, by Nicholas Kristof
6. Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow
7. Loving Lardo, by Wendy R. Olsen
8. The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar, by Martin Windrow
9. The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown
10. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson

Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton is the basis for the hit Broadway musical. That's a sentence I really never thought I would type. Leah Greenblatt writes in her Entertainment Weekly review: "Miranda’s singular gift for storytelling and wordplay makes even the Federalist Papers sound sexy, but the play’s intrigue come mostly from its potent stew of friendship and romance and outsize ambition; it’s as if House of Cards were folded into a sort of Days of Our Colonial Lives fever dream, then filtered through the minds of Tupac and Sondheim. It’s that strange and that spectacular, and you’d be crazy to miss it." It's going to be difficult for you to get tickets, but the book? That's easy.

Books for Kids:
1. The Day the Crayons Came Home, by Drew Daywalt, with illustrations by Oliver Jeffers
2. Queen of Shadows, by Sarah Maas
3. Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks a Lot, by Dav Pilkey
4. Waiting, by Kevin Henkes
5. Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor, by Jon Scieszka
6. Maps, by Aleksandra Mizielinska
7. Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell
8. What Pet Should I Get? by Dr. Seuss
9. Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans
10. Ladybug Girl and the Best Ever Playdate, by David Soman

Lots of new titles on the list this week, but let's focus on #2, Queen of Shadows by Sarah Maas, the fourth volume of the Throne of Glass series. From Kirkus Reviews: "At times believability is stretched (fugitives travel around the city freely, one or two heroes defeat large groups of enemies), but character motivations and interactions—friendships, romances, and others—are always nuanced and on point, especially as Aelin’s growing maturity offers her new perspectives on old acquaintances. The ending leaves readers poised for the next installment. Impossible to put down."

From the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins reviews Quixote: The Novel and the World, by Ian Stavans. He writes: "Not only does Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote (1605-'15) tower over Spanish literature like a giant windmill, it also can be seen as a turbine that powers Spanish culture. But the novel's kinetic energy doesn't stop at the Iberian peninsula. As scholar Ilan Stavans catalogs in his engaging cultural history, Quixote: The Novel and the World, Don Q and Sancho Panza have a powerful, ongoing influence on Latin American and U.S. literature and culture as well. Except for the Bible, no book has been translated into English more often, Stavans declares, listing 20 different English translations between 1612 and 2009."

Mike Fischer was less hot on the newest from Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. He begins: "Midway through "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" — a novel so bad and boring that it's hard to imagine it would have been published if it hadn't been written by Salman Rushdie — one of the principal characters wonders why nobody in Manhattan notices him, even though he walks through air, nearly four inches from the ground."For a more positive take, read San Francisco Chronicle's Carolina De Robertis: "In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that all those years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel."

And finally, here's a profile of Bradley Beaulieu, who will be at Boswell on Tuesday, September 8, for his book Twelve Kings in Sharakhai. He writes: "Beaulieu has a well-deserved, and growing, reputation not only for the richness of his epic fantasies but also for drawing on fresher springs of inspiration in their design." And here's an interesting detail about how your science degree can help with your writing: "Beaulieu, who earned a computer science and engineering degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, used a software program called Fractal Mapper when building up a new world. By inputting a planet's diameter, number of moons and other data and choices, it generates maps and plans that stimulate his fictional planning."

If you subscribe to the print edition of the Journal Sentinel, check out our ad highlighting some of our big fall events.

Time to Binge! Tyler Oakley Is coming to Boswell on Sunday, October 25, 7 pm. Tickets available Wednesday, September 9, 9 am.

Today we sent out an email newsletter. It had a lot of great events listed, but really, the one that is causing the biggest roar is our signing with Tyler Oakley, which will be on Sunday, October 25, 7 pm for Binge, his new memoir. We're putting tickets on sale on Wednesday, September 9, 9 am (that's 9/9 at 9 am) and sadly, I've confused the day/date mismatch a couple of times. My brain has said Tuesday. I need someone to proofread my brain. Would you help me with that?

Here's more info, and based on our calls, if you know a teenage girl, you should probably let them know about this signing right away: "Pop culture phenomenon, social rights advocate, and the most prominent LGBTQ+ voice on YouTube, Tyler Oakley brings you his first collection of witty, personal, and hilarious essays written in the voice that's earned him more than 21 million followers across social media."

"For someone who made a career out of over-sharing on the Internet, Tyler has a shocking number of personal mishaps and shenanigans to reveal in his first book: experiencing a legitimate rage blackout in a Cheesecake Factory; negotiating a tense stand-off with a White House official; crashing a car in front of his entire high school, in an Arby's uniform; projectile vomiting while bartering with a grandmother; and so much more. In Binge, Tyler delivers his best untold, hilariously side-splitting moments with the trademark flair that made him a star."

Here's more about the signing. Tickets will be available on Brown Paper Tickets on Wednesday, September 9, 9 am. Until we have more details, you can find the event by searching "brown paper tickets tyler oakley boswell." There are only 500 tickets available. Your ticket will get you one signed copy of the book and one photo, taken by a professional photographer. And yes, we know there were some problems with our Donald Driver event regarding photos; this will not be repeated. There are no selfies or cell phone photos, no personalizations, and no inscriptions. These restrictions are so that Tyler Oakley can meet as many people as possible. We want that, right?

We'll keep you posted about any changes. And please note, you must buy a ticket to get a signed copy of Binge. We are not able to take signing requests after the sellout. And as soon as we have the Brown Paper Tickets link, I'll post it here.

I promised former bookseller and FOB (Friend of Boswell) Carl, who programs the LGBT Film and Video Festival at UWM, that I would somehow tie the festival to this event. The festival runs October 15-25 and being that Mr. Oakley is such a supporter of LGBT causes, I'll bet he's seen some of the films and probably has a Tyler pick. I'm checking with his publicist to see.

The film/video screening schedule isn't released yet, but as soon as it's finalized, it will be posted on their website.

What Did the in-Store Lit Book Club Think of Richard Ford's "Canada" This Past Monday?

The nice thing about preparing for a book club discussion in the internet age is that it is so much easier to do research. In the old days, I would have been completely at the mercy of publishers to find many of these reviews and interviews. Would I have gone to the library and used a periodical index, the way I did for my research papers in high school? Would I still be cutting up The New York Times Book Review and saving the articles in a box? No, I'd probably wing it.

And while finding reviews and interviews is now super easy, I can't for the life of me recall whether I've read Richard Ford before. In addition, I've learned from my former coworker John that I might have had dinner with Richard Ford at David Schwartz's house may years ago, perhaps in 1990. My first thought was "I had dinner with Richard Ford and didn't read his book? How rude!" and then I remembered how often that happens at conventions. Plus I was young.

As soon as we booked Richard Ford for a ticketed event at Boswell on Thursday, October 15, 7 pm, cosponsored by Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UWM's School of Continuing Education, I decided that we would pick a Ford book to read. The problem was that we couldn't read Let Me Be Frank with You, as it wouldn't be in paperback for a long enough period before our event. And I didn't want to read anything older than Canada, as that would not be published by Ecco, who was bringing him to Milwaukee. No, it had to be Canada.

And that was a good thing. Our friend Carol had been telling us for years how wonderful Canada was, and unlike the Bascombe novels, it was a stand-alone. It's the story of a teenage boy, Dell Parsons, whose life is interrupted when his parents Bev and Neeva fall on hard times and try to rob a bank. He's separated from his twin sister Berner, very different from him but still his only friend of any sort, when she runs away after their parents are apprehended. He's sent away to a small town in Saskatchewan, only to be placed in another precarious situation. Camped at a lodge for hunters, owned by the brother of a friend of his mom's, he's left alone with Charley Quarters, an eccentric Metis (French-Indian), only to be eventually pulled into the orbit of Arthur Remlinger, who has a secret past. And as you've guessed, things don't go well.

This was Richard Ford's 10th book over all; his first, A Piece of My Heart, appeared in 1976. And though people associate Ford with Mississippi, where he was born, and New Jersey, the home of Frank Bascombe, Ford has visited Great Falls, Montana before in his fiction. I've read that an early story is about a 15-year-old boy in Great Falls whose world is also upended, but this time by the revelation of his mother's affair.

Several critics noted a change in style for Ford on Canada. Dell Parson, the teenage protagonist of Canada, is a quiet introspective observer desperate for normality, very different from Frank Bascombe. To me, Canada seemed like an interesting blend of storytelling styles, Southern gothic and Western sweep.

And now, I must warn you there are spoilers ahead!

Ford does this interesting balancing act where a few key incidents happen with much waiting in between. There's a good amount of foreshadowing such that you know what's going to happen, and yet he keeps a prevailing tension throughout the story. You know what happens, and yet you can't stop reading. Several attendees of the book club took note of this, and one wondered what the book would have been like without it. He was convinced he'd like it more, but I wasn't sure.

For the most part, the in store lit group was quite enthusiastic about Canada. Juli was swept up in the sense of place, the desolation of the landscape, as was Linda. Gail loved the writing and would stop to admire sentences. Jo, who was hesitant at first, thought it was incredible. And while Joyce found it slow going at first, once Dell started having more contact with other people, her view changed. I found it interesting that we had a very different opinion from Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, who loved part one of the book but was disappointed with part two. The group as a whole preferred the Saskatchewan story.

Several of us, notably Albert, were particularly taken with part three, the coda, many years later, when Dell reveals what came of his life, and chronicles one last visit with his sister, who he's only seen a few times in the forty years since the core of the story. Several readers liked how part three brought parts one and two of the story together.

Here are some topics we had fun discussing:
--Dell's obsession with bees. The social structure he didn't have? The quest for normality?
--Dell seeing life through glass and mirrors, a motif that reflected his life action plan
--The odd dynamic of Dell's parents, Bev and Neeva. Why did Neeva commit the crime? Why didn't she leave?
--The philosophy of the novel--one mistake can change your life forever
--Dell's survival skills
--The exaggerated nature of several characters in the story, notably Charlie and Arthur
--Why exactly did Neeva leave Dell in the care of Mildred, who previously had very little presence in the story?

Albert and I had an interesting disagreement about Arthur Remlinger (amusingly misspelled as Reminger and Premlinger in two British newspaper reviews - it's nice to know they need proofreaders as much as I do, but why haven't they been fixed online yet?). Albert thought that Dell was supposed to see himself in Arthur, while I was more interested in the comparing the characters of Arthur and Bev.

International jackets shown are for the British, Italian, and German versions of Canada, and in one case, Kanada. I looked at several more and they all follow the same bleak formula. The British version is the only one with the Canadian maple leaf; the European jackets tended to implied bleak landscapes. I thought the Germans picked a better photo than the Italians.

It turned out to be a terrific discussion! And now it's your turn. Why not pick Canada or Let Me Be Frank with You, or even The Sportswriter or Independence Day (the first book to win both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner) for your book club and then come to our Richard Ford event on Thursday, October 15 and get more insight. Tickets are $16 and include Let Me Be Frank with You in paperback. There's a $10 gift card option, and if you're a member of Osher, you can register on their website for discounted attendance.

Our upcoming in-store lit group discussions, both at 7 pm:
--Monday, October 5: Helen Oyeyemi's Boy Snow Bird
--Monday, November 2: Brian Morton's Florence Gordon.

Boswell's Annotated Bestseller List for the Week Ending August 29, 2015

What an exciting week! Yesterday I inadvertently sent out our staff newsletter to our entire mailing list. Perhaps it's not a good idea to work on both at the same time. Fortunately our staff newsletters don't tend to be chastise-y but information driven, so we had a long list of booked events that haven't been posted, plus a whole mess of staff recs, including many going into 2016. it turned out to be quite a conversation driver, and a lot of folks liked looking at, as my friend John says, "how the sausage is made."

Hardcover Fiction:
1. The Nature of the Beast, by Louise Penny
2. Wind/Pinball, by Haruki Murakami
3. Days of Awe, by Lauren Fox (event at Shorewood Public Library, 9/15, 6:30 pm)
4. Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee
5. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
6. Kitchens of the Great Midwest, by J. Ryan Stradal
7. X, by Sue Grafton
8. Secondhand Souls, by Christopher Moore (ticketed event 9/9, 7 pm)
9. Girl on a Train, by Paula Hawkins
10. Among the Ten Thousand Things, by Julia Pierpont

August 25 was definitely a mystery red letter day for releases with not just Louise Penny's latest, The Nature of the Beast, which have great recommendations from regular readers Sharon and Anne, but Sue Grafton's X, which is just two letters away from the end of the alphabet. At one time she said the series would be done with 26 installments, and she confirms in an interview with Mark Rubinstein in The Huffington Post that this is still the case. She also discusses how the series, like many, has moved from closed mysteries to open ones. The latter category is when you know who the villain is. I've always thought of that genre more as a thriller because I felt the whodunit was intrinsic to the genre, but of course, that's just one reader's opinion. I love the terms though and plan to use them a lot!

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Palm Springs Modern Living, by James Schnepf
2. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. The Grain Brain Cookbook, by David Perlmutter
4. The Last Love Song, by Tracy Daughterty
5. Strengths Finder 2.0, by Tom Rath
6. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo
7. Brain Maker, by David Perlmutter
8. We're Still Here, Ya Bastards, by Roberta Brandes Gratz
9. How to Bake Pi, by Eugenia Cheng (event 9/19, 2 pm, at Boswell)
10. Rising Strong, by Brené Brown

Several folks were buzzing about the new biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song, including Dennis, our #1 store champion (if you've ever been a bookseller in Milwaukee, you know who he is). Ariel Gonzalez reviews the book for the Miami Herald: "Joseph Heller and Donald Barthelme, the subjects of Daugherty’s last two books, were no longer around when he dove into their pasts. Though she is getting on in years (she turns 81 in December), Didion still speaks — but not, alas, to Daugherty. She withheld her cooperation. Faced with a shut door, he instead exploited the accessibility of her printed words. Hence the problem. Heller and Barthelme rarely wrote about themselves; Didion did — quite a bit, in fact. Summary and quotes from those widely praised works saturate this biography. You may be tempted to bypass it and go straight to the primary sources, but then you will miss Daugherty’s exemplary criticism; his autopsying of the corpus is incisively professional, close reading done with enthusiasm." Carolyn Kellogg's review from the Los Angeles Times is reprinted in the Journal Sentinel this Sunday.

Paperback Fiction:
1. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng (event 9/28 at Boswell, 7 pm)
2. Those Who Save Us, by Jenna Blum
3. Will's Music, by Obie Yadgar
4. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
5. The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
6. Euphoria, by Lily King
7. Nora Webster, by Colm Toíbín
8. Etta and Otto and Russell and James, by Emma Hooper
9. The Coincidence of Coconut Cake, by Amy E. Reichert (event 10/6 at East Library, 6:30 pm)
10. Shotgun Lovesongs, by Nickolas Butler

It's not too common that a traditional publisher sets a book in Milwaukee, so it's nice to see not one, but two books with local settings. Lauren Fox's Days of Awe is a bit soft focus Milwaukee, but The Coincidence of Coconut Cake screams Cream City, and in this case that stands for cream sauce, cream puff, and creme bruleee. It's the story of a critic who gives a small restauranteur a bad review, but this awkward beginning leads to romance. I guess you would call the book genre, but it's more romantic comedy. When you dig for reviews, you mostly get bloggers, not traditional media write ups. One thing I've learned is that many bloggers don't use their last names, which sort of changes the relationship between reviewer and reviewed. "Kathy" calls the book "a charming love story of misunderstandings, mistaken identity, and the power of food to bring two people together" while "Staircase Wit" found the book a bit improbable for her taste, but noted that "Lou is a delightful heroine, if a bit too good to be true, and her determined efforts to reveal the charming side of Milwaukee are very endearing and made me wish she had been my guide on my long ago trip when I had only a copy of Betsy in Spite of Herself and the Gen Con attendees to keep me company.* Ah, Gen Con.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. The Sex Myth, by Rachel Hills
2. 100 Things to Do in Milwaukee Before You Die, by Jennifer Posh (event at Boswell 9/1, 7 pm)
3. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, by Phoebe Glockner
4. Think Like a Freak, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
5. The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
6. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, by Jeff Hobbs
7. Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
8. You Are a Badass, by Jen Sincero
9. The Secret Garden, by Johanna Basford
10. The Wisconsin Supper Club Cookbook, by Mary Bergin

Being that Just Mercy is also being aggressively featured at Starbucks next door, I thought that would sort of deflate our sales, but demand is strong enough for that not to be the case. Just out in paperback, with Bryan Stevenson's interview repeated on Fresh Air, Rob Warden in The Washington Post wrote that "Stevenson, the visionary founder and executive director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, surely has done as much as any other living American to vindicate the innocent and temper justice with mercy for the guilty — efforts that have brought him, among myriad honors, a MacArthur genius grant and honorary degrees from Yale, Penn and Georgetown."

Books for Kids:
1. The Day the Crayons Came Home, by Drew Daywalt, with illustrations by Oliver Jeffers
2. What Pet Should I Get, by Dr. Seuss
3. The Nutshell Library, by Maurice Sendak
4. Appleblossom the Possum, by Holly Goldberg Sloan
5. The Book of Dares for Lost Friends, by Jane Kelley
6. Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby
7. Malcollm Under the Stars, by W.H. Beck
8 Pip Bartlett's Guide to Magical Creatures, by Maggie Stiefvater and Pearce Jackson
9. Auggie and Me: Three Wonder Stories, by R.J. Palacio
10. Goodbye Stranger, by Rebecca Stead

People are wondering about what begat Auggie and Me when author R.J. Palacio has said there would likely not be a sequel. Well it turns out that these are three collected short ebooks published for the first time in print, each one about a kid featured in the book Wonder. Publishers Weekly describes the book but doesn't quite review it and most of what else I found were bloggers. Hey, I'm a blogger--I can't wait to be quoted in someone else's newsletter. Unfortunately I did not read Auggie and Me so it won't be for that. I have however read The Day the Crayons Come Home and proclaim it "a technicolor sequel that rivals the Fast and Furious Franchise for nonstop action."

So what's likely to hit our bestseller lists next week? We turn to the Journal Sentinel book page where Mike Fischer reviews Jonathan Franzen's Purity, a likely our #1 hardcover fiction title for next week. He begins "Purity Tyler — heroine of the latest novel confirming that Jonathan Franzen is among this country's best living writers — goes by the nickname Pip. It's a nod to the hero of Dickens' Great Expectations — a novel that, like Purity itself, explores how we project our childish fantasies onto our children, making it harder for anyone to ever mature."

Reviewed by Jim Higgins is Kathleen Ernst's A Settler's Year: Pioneer Life Through the Seasons. Higgins notes that "In a time when the word immigrant is flung about in political discourse like a swear word, A Settler's Year is a gentle, visually engaging reminder that just a few generations ago, nearly all the people living in Wisconsin came from somewhere else — and made a new life here through hard work and the support of their neighbors."

September 1 is a huge release week, and the beginning of fall. And that's why Jim Higgins did a round up authors coming to the Milwaukee, area, including several Boswell-sponsored events. Perhaps the biggest might be John Gurda's Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, launching September 24 at the Grain Exchange. Gurda will be doing plenty of events around the metro area all fall to promote the book, including one at Boswell later in the season. Read all the highlights here.

A Field Guide to Boswell's Ticketed Events for Fall 2015.

We have no events this weekend, but tickets went on sale publicly for Rainn Wilson, which is being held at the Pabst Theater, the biggest venue we've ever worked with (or for sticklers, with which we've ever worked).

Here's the lay of the land, to quote Richard Ford, one of our featured titles.

Christopher Moore at Boswell on Wednesday, September 9, 7 pm, for Secondhand Souls. $29 includes all taxes and fees and the new book. The store is closed to the general public at 5:30 pm.

Brian Selznick at Alverno College's Pitman Theatre on Monday, October 12, 7 pm for The Marvels. This event is co-sponsored by Scholastic Book Fairs. $35 ticket includes taxes and all fees and the new book. Selznick is the acclaimed author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Richard Ford at Boswell on Thursday, October 15, 7 pm, for the paperback of Let Me Be Frank with You. Tickets are $16 and include all taxes and fees and the new paperback. The event is cosponsored by UWM's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Osher members can buy a specially priced ticket on their website. Boswell will close to the general public at 5:30 pm.

Graham Elliot at Bacchus on Friday, October 30, 6 pm, for Cooking Like a Master Chef: 100 Recipes to Make the Everyday Extraordinary. Tickets will include a copy of the book, a special dinner using recipes from the book, and wine. Call Bacchus to reserve your space, 414-765-1166.

Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor in conversation at Turner Hall Ballroom on Tuesday, November 10, 7 pm, for Welcome to Night Vale, the novel based on their acclaimed podcast. $22 is the base price for open seating, which includes the book. Taxes and fees are extra.

Rainn Wilson at the Pabst Theater on Thursday, November 12, 7 pm, for The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy. $26.50 is the base price for a reserved seat, which includes the book. Taxes and fees are extra.

We have at least one more ticketed signing that will be announced in September. Plus we are cosponsors of two ticketed events at the Lynden Sculpture Garden for the Women's Speaker Series, produced by Milwaukee Reads.
--P.S. Duffy for The Cartography of No Man's Land on Tuesday, September 29, 7 pm. $25 includes a copy for book, $20 for Lynden members.
--Renée Rosen for White Collar Girl on Monday, November 16, 7 pm. This event will feature a book club presentation from Jane Glaser and myself. Price to come.

In addition, we have several events with an admission charge that do not include a copy of the book.
--Jerry Apps at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center on Sunday, October 25, 2 pm, for Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist's Memoir. $8 admission to the grounds includes the event. Free to Schlitz members.
--Timothy Whealon at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum on Thursday, November 19, 5 pm reception, 6 pm talk, for In Pursuit of Beauty: The Interiors of Timothy Whealon. Admission is $20, $15 for FOVT members.

This is in addition to our three ticketed events with Preorder Signing Priority:
--Katherine Applegate for Crenshaw at Boswell on Friday, September 25, 6:30 pm
--Jenny Lawson for Furiously Happy at Boswell on Tuesday, October 27, 6:30 pm
--Sarah Vowell for Lafayette in the Somewhat United States at the Milwaukee Public Library's Centennial Hall on Saturday, October 31, 7 pm.

These three events are free, but preordered copies of the featured title will get you line letter in advance of the event date. Line letters will be given out in the order that special orders are taken. Folks who've been to Boswell events (or event Schwartz events) are well familiar with this concept. In particular, Lawson spends a lot of quality time with each attendee so a low line letter makes a big difference.

I know you're wondering whether all Boswell events are going to become ticketed. Absolutely not! We have an amazing lineup of free events where we rely on your kind and generous spirits to support the author, publisher, and Boswell with a book purchase. Among those folks coming to either Boswell or one of our partner venues is Adam Johnson, Chris Van Allsburg, Celeste Ng, Stuart Neville, Lincoln Purse, Jason Reynolds with Brendan Kiely, Gary Schmidt, Sarah Thornton, plus of course many of your favorite local and regional authors. Exciting, right?

Here are the authors listed, along with photo credits, when requested:
Rainn Wilson (Matt Hoyle)
Brian Selznick
Richard Ford
Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (Kyle Makrauer)
Renée Rosen
Katherine Applegate
Jason Reynolds

I'm Reading My Way Through San Francisco, in Honor of Upcoming Christopher Moore Visit for Secondhand Souls.

We’ve been lucky enough to host Christopher Moore several times since we’ve been open and while I’m certainly not able to read every author’s book who visits (we’ll sometimes have more than 30 events a month, and I’m more of a five-book-per-month reader), I have been able to sneak at least one Moore book onto my pile per visit. And now he's coming back for Secondhand Souls on September 9 for a ticketed event. Ticket info here, book info here.

The problem of course has been that four three of our four events, the featured title has been a sequel, and that has left me with the dilemma, knowing it is almost impossible for me to read two books by an author in advance of an event, of whether to read the original title or jump right into the sequel. Fortunately my Moore reading started with Sacre Bleu, which was a stand-alone. I should offer a caveat—my Moore reading actually started with Coyote Blue years ago, but that was not in conjunction with an event.

For The Serpent of Venice, I decided to jump right in and read the sequel to Fool, much like I will often read the newest mystery by an author instead of starting from the beginning. Very Shakespearean and a lot of fun, but I did feel like I was missing something. And that’s why for our upcoming event for Secondhand Souls, I decided to go back and read A Dirty Job, especially because a customer recently told me it was her very favorite Christopher Moore title. I also believe it was also the book tour of Moore’s first visit to Milwaukee, back in 2006.

Do you know the setup? Charlie Asher runs his family’s second-hand store in San Francisco. His wife Rachel is pregnant with their first child. After a visit, Charlie happens to come back to the hospital room to bring her a CD and spots this mysterious and very tall African man dressed in green in the room, and when Charlie asks what he’s doing there, the guy is in shock because he’s not supposed to be visible. And well, Rachel has died due to childbirth complications.

And after that, things start to get weird, because Charlie slowly figures out that he is a death merchant, charged with taking the soul vessels of the dying and passing them on to their next recipients. And if that isn’t enough to contend with, he gets caught up in this plot by some Celtic death demons who want to take over the world. Oh, and his new daughter seems to be able to kill people by saying Kitty.

There’s about ten other twists and I don’t want to give anything away. Like all Christopher Moore novels, it’s one part quest, one part philosophical treatise and the rest is just nuts. One can say that there is sort of a Moore-esque hero. Certainly Lucien Lessard of Sacre Bleu and Charlie Asher have a lot in common—well meaning, a bit awkward, romantic, horny, and generally up for the challenge of what life may throw at them, even if that happens to be fighting evil. And the books are truly laugh out loud funny.

But there’s something else that makes A Dirty Job special; it’s a true love letter to Christopher Moore’s adopted home of San Francisco. Charlie Asher and his posse, his sister Jane, his daughter Sophie, employees Ray and Lily, fellow death merchant Minty Fresh, and so on, seem to find themselves all over the city, from the Mission to the Tenderloin, to the Castro and The Haight. And it turns out that the story is interconnected with Moore’s vampire novels, particularly You Suck and Bite Me.

Reading A Dirty Job got me thinking about great San Francisco novels – if someone was visiting the Bay Area, I’d definitely suggest reading this. But of course San Francisco is one of the most literary cities out there. Of course people have been reading Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series for over thirty years. And more recently, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore had a long run on the paperback bestseller lists. But what else is out there?

I wrote to Pete Mulvihill at Green Apple Books and asked him what they recommend, since I figure they get a lot of tourists, and he showed me this list from Buzzfeed. Of course! Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Dave Eggers are on the list, as is one of my favorite books of all time, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. What a coincidence that two of the folks with books on the list, Michelle Tea and Ali Liebegott, actually appeared at Boswell some years ago.

One novel that Pete recommended that was not on the list was The Dead do not Improve, by Jay Caspian King. "Quirky and Fun," he told me. The Boston Globe called it "loopy, hilarious, neo-noir" while Milwaukee's own Crimespree Magazine praised it as "tragically hilarious and darkly uplifting."

I was wondering if there were other books out there. The Guardian list has The Golden Gate listed at #1, plus a few titles not on the other list.

And here’s another list that includes Amy Tan’s classic, The Joy Luck Club, plus another book that I read, Carter Beats the Devil. I didn’t remember the setting!

In The Wall Street Journal, Armistead Maupin recommended Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli. I am also a big fan of the also very Sf-y The Story of a Marriage. Did you know that his last novel, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, was meant to take place in San Francisco, but he changed the locale after getting a residency in New York. 

7x7 recently posted a list of 75 books about San Francisco. They obviously drew on the Buzzfeed list (or vice versa) as there is a lot of overlap in their top ten. But I was thrilled to see A Dirty Job finally listed, at #34. Was Oh, the Glory of it All on the list? Yes it was, but I'm focusing on fiction here. Telegraph Avenue? Check, though I might say that was more of an Oakland book. But what was Anne Tyler doing there with The Amateur Marriage? She set a book in a city besides Baltimore? I went back and looked at my copy and I would say that Haight-Ashbury is a bit player.

Instead, why didn’t they pick a novel or story collection by Alice Adams, whose novels were almost unanimously distinctively SF, with a small detour to the South, where Adams wrote several autobiographical novels. They are a very different kind of San Francisco that doesn’t generally get into these lists-Portrero Hill and the like. I was trying to come up with her most San Francisco-ish book, and I came up with Rich Rewards, the story of a New Yorker who flees to the Bay area to decorate a friends home and finds herself drawn into the lives of the friend’s friends. Oh, those Alex Katz jackets on the Penguin editions! And I can’t wait for Carol Sklenicka’s biography!

But all this is gravy. We’re talking about Christopher Moore’s San Francisco, where demons live in the sewers and Franken-squirrels are given orders from the Zen Center. Where used book and record, and cloth store owners are actually doing vital work collecting souls and redistributing them. And how dated is A Dirty Job? The dead show up in Charlie Asher’s notebook as if like magic. Now they’d show up on his phone or tablet, and it wouldn’t seem like magic at all.

One more thing about A Dirty Job. Underneath the craziness, it’s a heartfelt book about dealing with death. Through it all, characters are confronting the end of the lives of themselves and those around them, and it’s actually got some beautiful and yes, zenlike meditations on the subject. And if your dream is to inhabit a Franken-squirrel, that’s also an option.

Oh, and want to know if the new book, Secondhand Souls(just out on August 25), lives up to its predecessor? We’ve gotten a great read from Boswellian Conrad Silverberg, who writes: “You wake up in the wee hours of the night with the last few chapters you read still rolling around in your head. Compelled, you leave the comforts of your bed and seek a comfortable spot to read just a little bit more. Upon finishing, you kill the lights, and make your way back to bed in total darkness. You've done this before. You know the way. But, what's this? In your hand the book is glowing! The title and the silly little deathshead toddler are shining in the dark! More macabre DayGlo humor from Moore!”

You can't see all the skeletons in the display window, due to the glare. As we were putting this together, I customer complained, "Isn't it too early for a Halloween display?" but we assured him that we just had all the skeletons because the featured book was about a death merchant.  "Oh, OK, was his reply."

Got a San Francisco book suggestion? Comment here! And see you at our event for Christopher Moore on Wednesday, September 9, 7 pm. $29 ticket gets you admission and a signed copy of the book. There’s a gift card option on the day of the event. And you can buy your tickets on the Brown Paper Tickets site.