Events this week - Anuradha D Rajurkar, Margarita Montimore, Michelle Nijhuis

The Boswell virtual event schedule for this week

Tuesday, March 9, 7 pm
Anuradha D Rajurkar, author of American Betiya
in conversation with Lauren Fox

Register for the event here.  

Signed copies available. Personalization requests accepted!

Join us for the launch celebration for Milwaukee-area author Anuradha Rajurkar’s debut novel. She is the winner of the national SCBWI Emerging Voices award. She’ll chat with Lauren Fox, Milwaukee author of Send for Me.

American Betiya takes an honest look at the ways cultures can clash in an interracial relationship. Braiding together themes of sexuality, artistic expression, and appropriation, Rajurkar gives voice to a girl claiming ownership of her identity, one shattered stereotype at a time. Kathleen Glasgow, author of Girl in Pieces, says, "American Betiya thoughtfully examines cross-cultural boundaries, first love, the first steps of independence from family, and the power of art to transform and heal. I loved Rani's fierce, heartfelt, and beautifully told journey."

Rani Kelkar, a young woman growing up in Evanston, Illinois, can say she's never lied to her parents in her life. Then she meets Oliver, whose tattoos, charisma, and passion for art - the qualities that made him so attractive to Rani - make him her mother’s worst nightmare. They begin dating in secret, but when Oliver's troubled home life unravels, he starts to ask more of Rani than she knows how to give, desperately trying to fit into her world, no matter how high the cost.

Jim Higgins's review of American Betiya is featured here in the Smyrna/Clayton Sun-Times of Delaware.  

Wednesday, March 10, 7 pm
Margarita Montimore, author of Oona Out of Order
in conversation with Daniel Goldin and Jenny Chou

Register for the event here.  

Oona Out of Order is a national bestseller, Good Morning America Book Club pick, and a Boswell favorite. It’s also out in paperback on February 9 and we’re celebrating with special virtual event with Margarita Montimore. Oona Out of Order is a remarkably inventive novel about a woman who lives each year of her life out of order, exploring what it means to be human and live in the moment. For this event, Montimore will be in conversation with Boswellians Chou and Goldin.

If you loved The Immortalists or The Midnight Library, Oona Out of Order is a great book to read next. Boswellian Kay Wosewick calls Oona a “unique, fun, and thought-provoking tale.” And as Jenny Chou says, “For anyone who’s been waiting seventeen years for a novel as engrossing as The Time Traveler’s Wife, this is the book for you!" Please note that Oona Out of Order will also be the April selection of our Books & Beer Book Club. Details about that can be found right here.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random. And so begins Oona Out of Order.

Here's more enthusiasm from Mary Cadden in USA Today: "Montimore proves an adept storyteller. Oona is a good balance between serious and silly. There are laughs, to be sure, but the author captures the essence of Kenzie's 19-year-old self in an older body without making the story slapstick. With its countless epiphanies and surprises, Oona proves difficult to put down. "  

Thursday, March 11, 7 pm
Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
in conversation with Dan Egan

Cohosted by Schlitz Audubon Nature Center

Register for this event here.

Acclaimed science journalist (Atlantic, National Geographic, New York Times Magazine) Michelle Nijhuis discusses her new and vibrant history of the modern conservation movement, as told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. This event is cosponsored by Schlitz Audubon Nature Center and Boswell Book Company and Nijhuis will chat with Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. The first 20 folks to order Beloved Beasts get a matching field notebook.

In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.

Nijhuis’s book describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson and reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species - including our own. 

Publishers Weekly writes that "Nijhuis’s comprehensive survey is sure to delight nature enthusiasts and those concerned with disappearing species." And Dan Cryer in The Boston Globe noted "Michelle Nijhuis’ spirited and engaging Beloved Beasts tracks the not always predictable course of species protection from the flora and fauna classification system developed in the 18th century by the Swede Carl Linnaeus to the present day. Although much of her subject matter has been previously chronicled, the author makes it new by treating it as one continuous story and by focusing on fascinating personalities like Edge. Her prose flows easily from these pen-portraits to heart-breaking statistics to larger social trends."

Plus one cosponsorship
Sunday, March 14, 2 pm
Christian Picciolini, author of Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism

Hosted by the Nathan and Eshter Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, in partnership with Congregation Shalom,
Register for the event here.

HERC presents an afternoon with former White supremacist Christian Picciolini. After leaving the hate movement he helped create during his youth in the 1980s and '90s, he began the painstaking process of making amends and rebuilding his life. His life since leaving the white-power movement decades ago has been dedicated to helping others overcome their own hate. He now leads the Free Radicals Project, a global extremism prevention and disengagement network. It's all documented in Breaking Hate.

Photo credits!

Margarita Montimore by David Swanson

Michelle Nihjuis by Darcy Hunter

More on the Boswell upcoming events page.

What's selling at Boswell this week? The Boswell Bestseller list for the week ending March 6, 2021 has the answers

Here's what's selling at Boswell for the week ending March 6, 2021

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Tickets for March 16 event here)
2. The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
3. Send for Me, by Lauren Fox
4. Vines, by Shelly Nolden
5. The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah
6. A Desolution Called Peace, by Arkady Martine
7. Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell
8. The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
9. Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W Moniz
10. Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar

At least for this indie, the major new release that we're not having an event for is The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen's follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Sympathizer. We're not hosting an event with Nguyen, but you can find one here to attend here. Most are $5 or upgrade to a book-with-ticket option. I think it's a little weird that it's hard to tell which bookstore is hosting without clicking to the ticket link. Thúy Dinh at NPR's website wrote: "The Committed's revolutionary core is its plasticity — a novel of ideas that continuously shapeshifts to question its raison d'être. This fluidity can be seen in Vo Danh's meandering approach to self-knowledge. After a harrowing reckoning, he is committed to a psychiatric ward, where he must write his confession as a form of recovery and self-defense. As in The Sympathizer, Vo Danh - being 'a man of two minds' - refuses to tell a cohesive narrative."

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, Emmanuel Acho
2. The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee
3. Dusk Night, Dawn, by Anne Lamott
4. Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
5. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates
6. Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
7. A Promised Land, by Barack Obama
8. Four Hundred Souls, by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
9. The Black Church, by Henry Louis Gates
10. Three Ordinary Girls, by Tim Brady (Register for March 24 event here)

No, it wasn't the announcement that Emmanuel Acho was replacing Chris Harrison for the after-the-rose special of The Bachelor that drove Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, though I'm sure it helped nationally - that was a school order. More about the change in Bryan Pietsch's article in The New York Times right here. Here's a link to his podcast. And here's Acho talking to Tonya Mosely on NPR's Here and Now.

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Girl with the Louding Voice, by Abi Daré (Register for March 25 event here)
2. Behind the Lens, by Jeanée Sacken (Register for March 23 event here)
3. Oona Out of Order, by Margarita Montimore (Register for March 10 event here)
4. Hamlet, by Wiliam Shakespeare (Ignatius Press edition)
5. Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore (Watch our interview here)
6. In Five Years, by Rebecca Serle
7. The Samurai's Garden, by Gail Tsukiyama (Watch her conversation with Jane Hamilton here)
8. The Children's Bible, by Lydia Millet
9. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (The 60 Minutes interview linked here)
10. The Knockout Queen, by Rufi Thorpe (PEN/Faulkner Prize finalist) (and Watch our interview here)

Nice to see some fresh releases on the list. If you'd like to watch our interviews with Elizabeth Wetmore or Rufi Thorpe for Valentine and The Knockout Queen, I've linked to them above. You can also see Gail Tsukiyama talk to Jane Hamilton for her latest novel, The Color of Air, which is out in paperback on May 4. And if all goes well, our upcoming events with these top three paperback sellers should all be recorded, so we should have conversations with The Girl with the Louding Voice, Behind the Lens, and Oona Out of Order in our archive about two weeks after the event.

No event yet for Lydia Millet for The Children's Bible, but it was just announced as our June pick for my not-in-store-In-Store Lit Group.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Somewhere in the Unknown World, by Kao Kalia Yang
2. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
3. Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker
4. We Do This 'til We Free Us, by Mariame Kaba
5. Devotions, by Mary Oliver
6. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
7. Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown
8. The Body, by Bill Bryson
9. Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder (playing at the Downer Theatre)
10. Healing the Human Body with God's Remedies, by Lester Carter

Speaking of book clubs, the Lynden Sculpture Garden has one too, and they are discussing Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir on March 18 and April 22.This event is cohosted by the HOME Refugee Steering Committee. More information here. For more about the book, read Christine Brunkhorst's review in the Star Tribune, where she writes, "Reading these stories is like opening doors and finding yourself in the living rooms of neighbors you’ve hardly talked to. Thank you, Kao Kalia Yang, for opening these doors."

Books for Kids:
1. Escape Goat, by Ann Patchett, with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser
2. Max and the Midknights, by Lincoln Peirce
3. How High the Moon, by Karyn Parsons
4. The Giver graphic novel, by Lois Lowry
5. Lambslide, by Ann Patchett, with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser
6. Nancy Clancy: Late Breaking News V8, by Jane O'Connor/Robin Preiss Glasser
7. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy, by Tony Medina
8. The Assignment, by Liza Wiemer
9. Wow in the World, by Mindy Thomas/Guy Raz, with illustrations by Jack Teagle

10. Fancy Nancy (the original), by Jane O'Connor with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser  

Another podcast drives sales and this time it's a kids book - Wow in the World isn't a school order - it's demand for the book based on the #1 podcast for kids, with episodes like "Are Your Smarter than a Toilet," "Listen to Your Mummy," and "The Buzz on Bee Barf." That Guy sure can host a podcast!

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins reviews American Betiya, the debut YA novel from Anuradha Rajurkar. He writes: "Anuradha D. Rajurkar's American Betiya is a 21st-century variant of an archetypal tale: the first-generation American navigating between her parents' old-country values and the exciting world around her as she figures out who she is. Stir in hormones and a love both first and forbidden, and that journey of self-definition becomes an urgent one." Expect to see it debut at #1 next week. Register for the March 9 event here.

More about our event with Anuradha Rajurkar and our other upcoming events tomorrow.

On Reading an Author's Ouevre

After thinking about it for about twenty years, with one false start some years ago, I am finally indexing my reading list to an Excel file. That's different from this blog, where I list the 35 most recently read titles. This listed will be searchable and include the pub month (when known), the month I read it, plus the author or editor and when appropriate, either the illustrator or a second author or editor. If there are three or more authors or editors, the third and any others are out of luck. But it seems unlikely that I would have any interest in the third co-author of a book. Not impossible, just unlikely.

I have just finished reading Klara and the Sun, the latest Kazuo Ishiguro novel for which we are cohosting an event with Ron Charles (along with Left Bank Books and Anderson's Bookshops) on March 16. Tickets available here. The novel is getting great reviews, and I love the way it ties into his other books, particularly Never Let Me Go (2005). Yes, an AF (artificial friend) would seem to connect to the characters of Never Let Me Go, but there's something about Klara that reminds me of Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day (1989).

I had assumed that those were the only books I had read from Ishiguro, but in the indexing process, I found out that I had also read When We Were Orphans (2000). It was just over 20 years ago, and I hadn't held onto the book, so you can understand how I could make this mistake. At the time, I wrote, "Kazuo's novel has been said to be a combination of his first two novels" and later noted, "Is his entire self-image a delusion?" And I thought, Ishiguro's heroes, Klara among them, are both keenly observant and hobbled by blind spots. 

I hadn't meant to drop in a plug for Klara and the Sun here, but I just can't help mentioning this Maureen Corrigan review on NPR's Fresh Air: "Klara's misperception of the Sun as a caring deity calls to question our own limited human understanding of, well, everything. Like Klara, who sees the world through grids that sometimes go haywire, we humans only see through a glass, darkly. But great artists, like Ishiguro, are distinguished by their more expansive vision. I know that's something of an old-fashioned conceit, as is the word, 'masterpiece;' nevertheless, I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it." 

I told Jason that it turns out I read four of Ishiguro's novels and he said, "Now you only have to read three more to read them all." And it is tempting. I realized that when I was younger, I seemed to have the ability to catch up on authors. If I liked Elmore Leonard, I might find myself reading 20 of them - I still didn't read them all as I stopped at one Western. At one point, I read every Alice Hoffman work of fiction, but then she wrote many, many more and I fell behind again. I should note that in the old days, many of my catch-up books would be inexpensive mass market paperbacks, but nowadays, if I read All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle (I did, it's coming out in July) and want to read another, it's likely to be $23.99 as a print-on-demand paperback.

Recently I did complete a reading project, as part of my resolution to read one book a month that's more than two years old. I don't know why I had skipped over Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers (2011) when it was released in 2011. Maybe it was the speculative element? I wasn't a huge fan of Nine Inches (2013) , but loved Mrs. Fletcher (2017). Go figure. I think I like Perrotta most when he makes me uncomfortable, which might be why I liked Little Children (2004) so much. But I also have great fondness for The Wishbones (1997), as I have a special fondness for the book that introduced me to Perrotta, though I've read in some reader reviews it hasn't aged well. It's one of his few novels that wasn't adapted for the screen, but I always wondered if someone had seen an early version of this and ripped it off for The Wedding Singer, the 1998 film.

So who's next? I did notice that the only Anne Tyler novel I haven't read is Noah's Compass (2010).    

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending February 27, 2021

Boswell bestsellers for the week ending February 27, 2021

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Send for Me, by Lauren Fox
2. Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell
3. Leonard and Hungry Paul, by Rónán Hession
4. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
5. The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
6. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by VE Schwab
7. The Paris Library, by Janet Skeslien Charles
8. The Breaker V6, by Nick Petrie
9. The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah
10. Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W Moniz (Register for March 4 event here)

Nothing new this week in this category, though it's nice to see some sales for our upcoming event with short story writer Dantiel Moniz on March 4 for Milk Blood Heat. Several fall books increased sales momentum as time passed - all of them Boswell reads. The Midnight Library has broken out the biggest, but The Invisible Life of Addie Larue has also been a big success, and it's nice to see Hamnet holding its own.

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. No Hard Feelings, by Liz Fosslein
2. What It's Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley
3. Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
4. Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
5. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates
6. The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee
7. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders
8. Tom Stoppard, by Hermione Lee
9. Four Hundred Souls, edited by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
10. Beloved Beasts, by Michelle Nijhuis (Register for March 11 event here)

It's a second week of bestseller sales for Bill Gates's How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. From Richard Schiffman in the Christian Science Monitor: "this is a surprisingly good read. The author’s enthusiasm and curiosity about the way things work is infectious. He walks us through not just the basic science of global warming, but all the ways that our modern lives contribute to it."

Hermione Lee's award-winning biographies are always an event, at least in the UK, but we have enough theater fans at Boswell (who are not much going to theater at the moment) to be excited about her latest work, Tom Stoppard. From Boswell event regular Dan Kois at Slate, "Lee does her best to scour Stoppard’s life and 50-year career for that human fallibility, and while at 750 pages (plus notes) Tom Stoppard can feel as daunting as one of the master’s more vexing theatrical works, it never treats (as so many biographies do) the fame and accomplishment of its subject as foregone conclusions. Instead, Tom Stoppard remains alive to the unlikeliness of Tom Stoppard’s career from the very beginning."  

Paperback Fiction:
1. Oona Out of Order, by Margarita Montimore (Register for March 10 event here)
2. The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
3. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart
4. Circe, by Madeline Miller
5. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
6. Writers and Lovers, by Lily King
7. In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez
8. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Tickets for March 16 event here)
9. Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson
10. Love at First, by Kate Clayborn

It shows the powerful resurgence of the romance genre that Kate Clayborn hit our bestseller list in the first week for Love at First, which Christina Lauren called "a modern romance masterpiece." Booklist on this story, set in a Chicago apartment building: "Nora and Will enter into a playful feud, which involves poetry readings, interviews with local journalists, and rogue kittens all meant to scare Will away from the found family Nora has created after her grandmother's death. Instead, all of these shenanigans endear Will to Nora, and the two slowly begin to fall for one another in spite of Nora's fears of being disloyal to her neighbors. A superb cast of characters rounds out this sweet, slow-burn romance."

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. For the Good of the Game, by Bud Selig
2. The Purposeful Hustle, by Deanna Singh
3. Healing the Human Body with God's Remedies, by Lester Carter
4. American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of Wisconsin, by Charles Hagner
5. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
6. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
7. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
8. Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
9. Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder
10. Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall

At so many events, virtual and in person, one of the questions is, who is going to play so-and-so in the movie. Well, had we had an event with Jessica Bruder Nomadland (we did not!), I can't imagine that question would have been asked, I struggle to imagine the answer would be Frances McDormand, and I wouldn't have guessed that the movie rights would sell, let alone that it would be one of the films in awards contention. Someone found my staff rec card filed away. On my one for the website, I wrote: "Like all interesting subcultures, they connect both online and in gatherings. Most notably, they define themselves by who they are not, making it clear they are houseless but not homeless. Nomadland is a fascinating sociological look at a burgeoning subculture, and captures an economic crisis in the making, the hollowing out of the middle class." By the way, I'm on the search for a good recently published (upcoming or within the last year) nonfiction subculture book. Any ideas?

Books for Kids:
1. Stamped, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi
2. Elevator Bird, by Sarah Williamson
3. A Thousand No's, by DJ Corchin, with illustrations by Dan Dougherty
4. Escape Goat, by Ann Patchett, with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser
5. The Assignment, by Liza Wiemer
6. Where Are You?, by Sarah Williamson (alas, we've sold the last of these - it's now OSI)
7. Milo Imagines the World, by Matt de la Peña with illustrations by Christian Robinson
8. Desolation of Devil's Acre V5, by Ransom Riggs
9. Concrete Rose, by Angie Thomas
10. Pippa Park Raises Her Game, by Erin Yun

 
We cosponsored a writing workshop with Erin Yun at the WJ Niederkorn Public Library in Port Washington, where Yun told us that Pippa Park Raises Her Game was inspired by Great Expectations. She showed kids how to re-imagine public domain works as new works. Like everybody else, except perhaps for Simon and Schuster and the Fitzgerald estate, she was very excited about The Great Gatsby going into public domain. School Library Journal wrote: "In this reimagining of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, familiar themes and predictability are offset by the depiction of Korean culture and language, which add texture and depth to the narrative. Readers will sympathize with this likable heroine as she struggles to succeed." Paperback releases on April 13.

Over at the Journal Sentinel, Chris Foran promotes the self-published book, Before the Invention of Smiling: The Incredible Journey of the Zucker Family from Horse and Buggy to Indoor Plumbing. The family lived at Fourth and Vliet and later in Shorewood. Available on Amazon only. Mr. Zucker, here is how you can place your book on Ingram Spark so that independent bookstores have access to it. 

On Owning a Whole Mess of Books

I hope you all know that we are purchasing second-hand books again. Our system has changed, and we’re still not able to just be a drop off place for cartons of your discards, but if you follow the guidelines, some of your books in resellable condition will find a good home. Email us for more information – Here's a link to our guidelines.

Like all of you, or at least those of you that still love reading and collecting physical books (retronym alert!), my bookcases are full. There are only two options – create some more bookshelves or cull the collection. The first option isn't really an option.

To my thinking, there are three categories of books. The first is books that I haven’t read (one narrow bookcase, a shelf on a second case, and various random piles), the second is books that I have finished, but are not in the permanent collection (not a great way to store these – they are placed in piles in front of permanent collections titles of another case), and the third is the permanent collection, spread throughout the house from the kitchen (food books, a shelf of home repair, a few shelves of travel titles), the living room (most oversized books), the dining room (fiction) and our guest bedroom (most other categories of nonfiction, plus all the staging). My partner also has books, but I am not responsible for them.

If I decide to pass a book on after I read it, great! But if I think it goes in the permanent collection, it means I have to get rid of a title that I thought was in the permanent collection, but has been, as they say in museums, decommissioned. Sometimes these books are falling apart, with the newsprint-quality of paper disintegrating and the binding broken. That decision is easy. Or is it? I still have my mass market Anne Tyler novels, and most of them cannot handle much handling. Did you know Playboy had a paperback book imprint? Others are advanced copies, which by the bookseller code, shouldn’t be sold. There are only so many Little Free Libraries in the world, and I’m well aware that some of these books might just be taking up space, with the potential market for a reader being limited.

I am lucky in that I can try to sell my second books at Boswell. But I’m well aware that books I treasured might not have an audience and might go straight to the $5 cart, and if / when we’re open under normal circumstances, the cart outside where books are even cheaper. Some of these books have higher internet value, and we’ve noticed folks buying books with the obvious intent of re-selling them. At Schwartz, we did do more online second-hand sales, but we’ve not really found time to make it work at Boswell. Maybe someday.

What do I choose for my permanent collection? For a select number of authors like Barbara Pym, I have all their published work. For others, I just keep my favorites. Often there’s one title from an author. One of the rules I try to enforce unsuccessfully is that a book should be kept if you are pretty certain you will read the next book by that author. This strategy works for fiction, not so well for nonfiction, which is more subject driven. Last year I read If I Had Two Wings, the follow-up story collection (by 28 years) to the late Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury the Dead. So thrilled to see this new book as a National Book Critics Circle finalist. You can watch our interview with the late Randall Kenan here. I’m still waiting for a companion book for ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. It’s only been 17 years!

One other struggle I have is when to discard books in the staging area, the ones I haven’t read but always hoped to get to. There are some great books in here, classics in beautiful editions like Middlemarch and Moby Dick. Am I really going to read Moby Dick? And sometimes they are contemporary books where I thought I would get around to them but didn’t. I try to have a rule along the lines of you buy it, you read it (or at least gift it), but that just doesn’t always happen. I’m hoping to read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for our book club, two-to-three months after it comes out in paperback, but that date has been delayed more than once. And here’s where I confess that I never read All the Light You Cannot See. But I own one!

Both the permanently shelved and the staged titles have one type of book I common, where I bought the book, hosted the author, and had the book signed. Sometimes it’s just a signature (that’s easy), but most of the times it’s signed to me. Every so often, I’ll consign the book to Boswell for resale, only to have someone bring the book back to me saying it’s mine. Once an author did this. So now I put a sticky-note on the signature page where I write, “Alas, even booksellers run out of shelf space.”

More bookshelf philosophy in this 2019 Journal Sentinel story.

Musing on Zak Salih's Let's Get Back to the Party

I’m really excited about a novel that’s just come out that I fear is getting lost in the cracks. The book is Let’s Get Back to the Party, by Zak Salih. It’s the story of two almost friends, Omar and Sebastian, as their lives intersect but never quite cross in a meaningful way. Instead, they wind up bonding with two somewhat inappropriate people, Omar with the a student from the high school LGBTQ group that he mentors, and Sebastian with an older, Andrew Holleran-esque writer.

Initially when I started reading this book, I was calling it When Needy Met Cheaty, thinking I was diving into a story about two lovers, one who hopes to be monogamous and the other is anything but. There’s something about the use/user relationship in the story that I recognized from my past.

And then you say, who’s Andrew Holleran? And so I must detail to the earlier wave of fiction written by gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s. The author your probably know is Edmund White, while just about everybody will be a blur to most readers. When authors and critics talk about windows and mirrors, it felt like this early wave was marketed pretty predominantly as mirrors.

The author who crossed to the mainstream first seemed to be Armistead Maupin, but he did so by surrounding his gay protagonist with folks of all sorts of sexual identities. I remember going to college in the late 1970s and seeing Tales of the City in way more dorm rooms than I expected. College is going to be great. That’s back when folks had books in dorm rooms, I guess. Other folks did it by positioning for the literati, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty, David Leavitt’s Family Dancing, and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library. Hollinghurst eventually won the Booker Prize, but that was in the 2000s, which I consider post-whatever I’m talking about.

To be upfront, this was a pretty White movement, though I also read the works of Larry Duplechan (Blackbird) and Jaime Manrique (a large bibliography, but my favorite was Latin Moon in Manhattan). And I had to pinch myself to believe that I read Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy in 1996. It’s been so great that Black gay men (and women and trans and nonbinary folks) are getting the chance to tell their stories now. In the past year I’ve read Real Life by Brandon Taylor, Memorial from Bryan Washington, and I’m still working on Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets, and also enjoyed the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives from Saeed Jones. I should also mention here that Dennis Staples, who had a great pre-COVID event for This Town Sleeps, has his paperback release on March 16, a great book for folks who are interested in gay Indigenous writers.

The second part of the 1980s, no surprise, featured a lot of novels about men living and dying with AIDS, and the disease took a toll on a number of writers, whether they were writing about it or not. I remember being blown away by David Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, which was the first novel I read that tackled the subject with no blinders. I believe I drove down to Unabridged in Chicago to see a Feinberg appearance. I remember going with my friends to a reading of The Boys on the Rock, by John Fox, which I think was at the old A Different Light in, well, whatever that neighborhood was. Chelsea? Fox also died of AIDS complications.

Nowadays, the hottest part of the G genre in LGBTQIA fiction appears to be romance (not that non-romance books aren't sometimes romantic), and based on a bookseller session I recently attended (or at least who was participating in the chat), the market seems to have a strong audience that presents female, and in a large number of cases, the books are written by them as well. In a world dominated by #ownvoices, this seems to be an accepted exception. I don’t quite understand it, but it’s not a new trend. I recall the 1990s novel The God in Flight from Laura Argiri and on the non-romance side, both Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists made a great impact on me. Everybody knows Simon’s story was the best! Currently #2 on the paperback bestseller list is Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, which is now outselling her more recent Circe. 

I admit that I attended said virtual event to hear from Paul Rudnick. I still have my hardcover copy of I’ll Take It (not quite of the genre) but I think my favorite book of his continues to be If You Ask Me, the first book of collected columns by Libby Gelman-Waxner (even less so). And I should also note that ten years ago when Stephen McCauley appeared at Boswell, his audience was 90% women. McCauley will actually be our conversation partner for another upcoming event on April 6 with Michael Lowenthal, a fellow greater Bostonian. Lowenthal wrote two novels that I was particularly taken by – The Same Embrace, about two brothers, one gay, the other an Orthodox Jew, and Avoidance, a powerful but very uncomfortable book set at a summer camp. Lowenthal’s new collection is Sex with Strangers, which features a story based on his work as an assistant to John Preston as he was dying of AIDS complications. I read a number of Preston anthologies during this period, as well as Franny, Queen of Provincetown. McCauley’s latest is My Ex-Life and it’s a delight.

But, to quote a recent novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party. We’re cohosting the Zak Salih with Outwords, the LGBTQ bookstore in Milwaukee, with Larry Wheelock joining me for the conversation. The Outwords men’s book club is reading the book and I’m hoping we’ll be able to have a session where Salih answers some spoiler questions. Seems too early in the book’s life to subject the whole audience to that, but we’ve sometimes done this for paperback events, so maybe you’ll want to finish Oona Out of Order before you join us for the March 10 event with Margarita Montimore.

There’s a special place in my heart for novels about frenemies, and I think Let’s Get Back to the Party is one. Each participant has potential to be a friend, lover, or competitor for affections. So messy. Salih’s novel is “a moving, eloquent, and often funny novel that resonates long after its end,” to quote from myself. I read this book when it was sent to me as an advance copy and I’m planning to read it again this weekend in preparation for my talk. This book will take its place among some of my favorite books of the genre, many of which have been traveling along with me for 30+ years. And if you don’t want to try it because you want a mirror or window into one author’s vision of contemporary gay life in Washington DC, read it because you like Sally Rooney. I think it’s a fair comparison.

And because you need more convincing, here are a few pull quotes. From BookPage, Let's Get Back to the Party is "a gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now." O Magazine called it "a stirring ode to the many faces of queerness." And there are blurbs from two writers whose books I enjoy, Louis Bayard and John Glynn. More here. 

And just to throw out more names, I've seen a number of folks compare Salih's novel to the works of Garth Greenwell. Larry Wheelock and I speak to Zak Salih about Let's Get Back to the Party on Wednesday, March 3, 7 pm Central Time. Register here. You can also buy it from Outwords here.

By the way, I still want to read that book called When Needy Met Cheaty.

Boswell bestsellers, week ending February 20, 2021

Boswell bestsellers, week ending February 20, 2021

Hardcover Fiction:
1. Send for Me, by Lauren Fox (signed copies available again soon - just ask!)
2. Leonard and Hungry Paul, by Rónán Hession
3. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy
4. The Kindest Lie, by Nancy Johnson (bookplates available)
5. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
6. The Court of Silver Flames V4, by Sarah Maas
7. Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell
8. My Year Abroad, by Chang Rae Lee
9. Anxious People, by Fredrick Backman
10. City of a Thousand Gates (bookplates available)

I am often confused by bestseller categorization, but in what world is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse a nonfiction story? That's all I have to say about that.

Meanwhile, we've got two new releases and they are both from Riverhead. Making its debut is No One Is Talking About This, which if you watch book news, has completely dominated the hardcover fiction sphere this week. I looked at the Bookmarks report this week for the title, and I don't think I've ever seen so many blocks filled in so quickly. Here's Ron Charles in The Washington Post, who also reviewed Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler: "You can hear in these moments Lockwood’s experience as a poet. She’s a master of startling concision when highlighting the absurdities we’ve grown too lazy to notice. 'Every day,” she writes, “their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.'"

Adrienne Westenfeld on the Poet Laureate of the internet, in Esquire: "Never has the experience of being Extremely Online been more viscerally rendered." And so forth.

Also from Riverhead is Chang-Rae Lee's My Year Abroad, which is also getting great reviews.   

Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Vanguard, by Martha S Jones (Register for our March 29 event here)
2. What It's Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley (Register for our February 23 event here)
3. Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
4. The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee
5. Under a White Sky, by Elizabeth Kolbert
6. One Drop, by Yaba Blay
7. Between Two Kingdoms, by Suleika Jaouad
8. Four Hundred Souls, edited by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
9. Think Again, by Adam Grant
10. Chatter, by Ethan Kross (bookplates available)


Not only is Ibram X Kendi represented in the anthology Four Hundred Souls, but there's also The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, about which Kendi said "This is the book I've been waiting for." McGhee, the former president of the inequality-focused thinktank Demos, has other fans, including Elizabeth Gilbert ("I am grateful for McGhee’s research, her humanity, and her never-more-important teachings") and George Saunders ("A vital, urgent, stirring, beautifully written book that offers a compassionate road map out of our present troubled moment.")

Paperback Fiction:
1. The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
2. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
3. The Confessions of Frannie Langton, by Sara Collins (April Daniel's Lit Group pick- more here on our Boswell-run book clubs)
4. State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
5. Oona Out of Order, by Margarita Montimore (Register for March 10 event here)
6. The Shadow King, by Maaza Mengiste (May Daniel's Lit Group pick)
7. The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
8. Writers and Lovers, by Lily King
9. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi
10. Temporary, by Hilary Leichter

With a large book club, Ann Patchett scores double slots on this week's top 10 with Dutch House and the book club selection State of Wonder. Two releases that had strong sales in hardcover also arrived - The Glass Hotel, which in hardcover had the honor of being our first event to convert from in-store to virtual, and Writers and Lovers, which was also the subject of a virtual event, but not until December, when King spoke to Lisa and I. We hadn't started recording in April, but here's the Lily King video. Nice to see that they kept the iconic hardcover jackets on all three of these titles - I don't really understand when the publisher changes the jacket on a hit, unless maybe if the hardcover is all type. I tried to find a round-up of misleading mass market jackets of old, but all I found is this post from Tea and Ink Society, an amusing roundup of mostly ebook classics.

Paperback Nonfiction:
1. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2. Know My Name, by Chanel Miller
3. Devotions, by Mary Oliver
4. How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell
5. The Body, by Bill Bryson
6. Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown
7. Weather for Dummies, by John D Cox
8. Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
9. Dreyer's English, by Benjamin Dreyer
10. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

While all our focus with Melville House has been on Leonard and Hungry Paul, they have a national bestseller in Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (which I think we mentioned before, but nonfiction paperback bestsellers doesn't see a lot of new blood. I think what's vital for a bestseller in this category is a quote from Jia Tolentino. She talked up Patricia Lockwood above, and on Odell's debut, she wrote in The New Yorker, where she also reviewed Digital Minimalism: "She struck a hopeful nerve of possibility that I hadn't felt in a long time." That's the pull quote, but here's the caveat: "It is hard to grasp how individual acts of refusal would build collective momentum outside the platforms that they aim to refuse. Last year, after a former employee of the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica revealed that the firm had collected the data of millions of Facebook users and given that data to the Trump campaign, the hashtag #deletefacebook trended—on Twitter."

Books for Kids:
1. Escape Goat, by Ann Patchett, with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser
2. Lambslide, by Ann Patchett, with illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser
3. The Assignment, by Liza Wiemer
4. Alone in the Woods, by Rebecca Behrens
5. Premeditated Myrtle V1, by Elizabeth C Bunce
6. How to Get Away with Myrtle V2, by Elizabeth C Bunce
7. Elevator Bird, by Sarah Williamson
8. Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens
9. Milo Imagines the World, by Matt de la Peña with illustrations by Christian Robinson
10. Bunheads, by Misty Copeland with illustrations by Setor Flagzigbey

This week's virtual school visit focus is on Elizabeth C Bunce, whose series of kids mysteries, Premeditated Myrtle and How to Get Away with Myrtle has won raves from the trade critics, with Kirkus noting that the books feature "A saucy, likable heroine shines in a mystery marked by clever, unexpected twists." In even better news, Premeditated Myrtle is shortlisted for an Edgar Award. Now I want to read it! Contact Jenny if your school would like to participate in our virtual school visits. We even have multi-school events where we run the tech.

Check out the Shepherd Express book page for reviews and info about our upcoming event with David Allen Sibley, but note that we are now out of stock on What It's Like to Be a Bird until after the event (and we'll have very nice bookplates!). And while there's nothing new local this week, the Journal Sentinel book page has profiles and reviews as they are released.

This week virtually at Boswell - Rebecca Sacks, author of City of a Thousand Gates, and Nancy Johnson, author of The Kindest Lie

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

Tuesday, February 16, 7 pm
Rebecca Sacks, author of City of a Thousand Gates
in Conversation with Daniel Goldin and Lisa Baudoin for a Virtual Event
Register here for this event

Readings from Oconomowaukee presents a conversation with author Rebecca Sacks, who received a Canada Council for the Arts grant as well as the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation's Henfield Prize for Fiction. Her dispatches from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were published in Paris Review Daily. And now she'll talk to Lisa Baudoin and I about her new book, a haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine.

Porter Shreve reviewed City of a Thousand Gates for The Washington Post, noting that Sacks: "makes a convincing case for a literature of multiplicity, polyphonic and clamorous, abuzz with challenges and contradictions, with no clear answers but a promise to stay alert to the world, in all its peril and vitality."

From Ayelet Tsabari in The New York Times: "The novel digs into the enduring wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and offers an unflinching, unforgiving look into the harsh realities of the occupation and its impact on people’s lives. Sacks works to dispel what Mai refers to as the “fantasy of a symmetrical conflict,” but the author’s description of the deep-seated hatred on both sides reads devastatingly true."

What's my comparison title? I might suggest Nicole Krauss's recent works (more Great House or Forest Dark than History of Love) or, for those who know their National Book Award finalists, Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist. And look at that, Krauss actually wrote a recommendation for the book: "Probing and investigative, City of a Thousand Gates illustrates the endless reverberations of political conflict and its violence within the most intimate corners of personal life. Sacks deeply humanizes a conflict that dehumanizes on every level.""

Thursday, February 18, 7:30 pm
Nancy Johnson, author of The Kindest Lie
in Conversation with Shannon Sims for a Virtual Event
Register here for this event

Boswell presents Nancy Johnson, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who now presents her debut novel, The Kindest Lie, which Catherine Adel West called "a soul-stirring, vividly told saga that demands to be read." For this event, Johnson will be in conversation with Shannon Sims, television anchor at TMJ4. If you loved The Vanishing Half, another story of family separation, this book might be for you.

You've already read how The Kindest Lie was placed virtually in my hands in an act of kindness by another writer. If you haven't, here's the link to that Boswell and Books blog post. But lots of readers and critics are discovering this wonderful book. Paula L. Woods in the Los Angeles Times wrote: "The Kindest Lie is less concerned with solving that mystery than examining the complex forces of racial inequity and the fateful decisions that can make or break a family, or a community. On those terms, the novel is a triumph, a deeply affecting work of truth and reconciliation over what it means to live the American Dream - and not just for the winners."

And here is Anissa Gray in The Washington Post: "What is the cost of secrets and lies? That is the question at the heart of Nancy Johnson’s debut novel, The Kindest Lie. It is the story of a woman preparing to have her first child with the husband she adores; but first, she must confront the fact that she already has a son - a baby she was forced to give up when she was a teenager... It is a story about reconciliation, set against a backdrop of racism and resentments. But more than anything, it is a meditation on family and forgiveness."

Photo credits!

Nancy Johnson by Nina Subin

More on the Boswell upcoming events page