I went to #bea16: Adult Author Breakfast and Buzz Panel!

My last BEA post, I promise (what? I'm still excited).

I got up early Thursday to catch the shuttle to McCormick for the Adult Author Breakfast. The food was convention-standard continental breakfast - rolls, muffins, fruit, coffee that could strip the paint off a car - but the entertainment was stellar.  After several industry awards were given out, the audience got to hear from four authors.  Host Faith Salie - whose new book Approval Junkie came out in April - warmed up the room with some jokes about things she had heard about BEA in the 1980s.  Then Colson Whitehead spoke about his upcoming book, The Underground Railroad, that I have had on my must-read-when-I-get-my-hands-on-it list since it was announced - I am fully ready to have my mind fucking blown with a genre-bending, historical novel about a black woman's dangerous journey to escape the slave-holding South via an actual underground railroad (out September 2016).  Louise Penny spoke eloquently about her development of Inspector Gamache, who was modeled on her husband, Michael - there wasn't a dry eye in the room when she related Michael's struggle with dementia, one that he is losing (A Great Reckoning is out August 30).  Sebastian Junger finished up the presentations with his book Tribe, about how we as humans seek companionship and how sometimes those who have undergone a collective bonding experience, like combat veterans, find it hard to adjust to our current society that also places emphasis on individualism (out Tuesday, May 24).

Now, this is the craziest panel I attended - the BEA Adult Editors' Buzz panel on Wednesday night.  On Jenn's advice (and previous experience), Jenn, Michelle, and I were already planning to attend and then Riverhead tweeted out that they would have matching tote bags for Brit Bennett's book at the panel.  And we knew we had to get there early (we did - we sat down front on the end near a book table).

So, books.  EVERYTHING at this panel sounds amazing.

1) Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge, out October 25, 2016.  This is a history of a single day in America - November 23, 2013 - and chronicles the lives of the ten children who were killed on that day by guns (on average, seven children per day are killed by guns).  A necessary and heartbreaking title.
2) Darktown by Thomas Mullen, out September 13, 2016.  A historical novel set in 1948 Atlanta when the police department is ordered to hire black police officers - who are not allowed to arrest a white person, drive a squad car, or set foot inside police headquarters.  When a black woman last seen with a white man turns up dead, the two black officers suspect a cover-up by white officers.  Recommended as a Walter Mosley readalike.  (I believe this is also based in historical fact regarding the police integration - or lack thereof - in Atlanta.)
3) History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, tentatively scheduled for release in January 2017.  A fourteen-year-old girl, who lives in what is the last vestiges of a hippie commune in northern Minnesota, becomes entangled in a family's life by becoming the babysitter to their young son.  And then shit goes sideways (basically - that's not what the rep said in the pitch, but that's what happens).
4) Little Deaths by Emma Flint, out January 17, 2017.  A true crime aficionado has written a historical whodunit set in 1960s Queens based on the real-life tale of a recently divorced mom, the murder of her two children, and the media storm that ensued during the trial.  Yes, will read, thank you.
5) The Mothers by Brit Bennett, out October 11, 2016.  Look at this gorgeous cover and matching tote bag.  The Mothers is a debut novel set in a contemporary black community in Southern California and follows grief-stricken teen Nadia and what happens after she makes a fateful decision.  This is narrated by a Greek-chorus of moms and aunties, from what I've heard, and it sounds so amazing.
6) The Nix by Nathan Hill, out August 30, 2016. A big, juicy debut with political overtones about a man who finds out that his estranged mother may not be the woman he thought she was with a hidden life.  This is set in Iowa (holla!) and Hill is an Iowan as well (double holla!).

And that's it for BEA 2016!  It was great and I really hope to go again in the future.

I went to #bea16: I found some comics!

I made sure to visit "comics row" (I think that's the official term for it) - Image, Valiant, IDW, and other independent comics publishers were grouped in a row together.  Weirdly, Boom! was down on the end of a different row next to Moleskine (eh?).


I picked up some singles from Image (I had been interested in Black Science but hadn't picked it up, yet) and their "Firsts" books (which I think I'll take to the store to share once I finish reading through them).  I chatted with the Valiant rep for a bit - mostly about how much I love Faith and the upcoming trade and (squee!) ongoing series - and about some other trades.  He recommended The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage and I think I'll really like it.

When I dropped by the Boom! booth I got lucky - the creator of Goldie Vance, Hope Larson, was signing issue one of the series.  Goldie is a sixteen-year-old living with her dad at a Florida resort in the 1960s - she really wants to be a detective and so when the real resort detective has a case he can't solve Goldie steps in.  Hope says this will appeal to fans of Lumberjanes (awww, yiss) but there are 100% less lake monsters and supernatural foxes (rats).  The trade will be available in October.

And finally, I'll just leave this here.  Berkeley Breathed, y'all.  New Bloom County.  What is life, even?

I went to #bea16: Middle grade and YA books!

The hottest category of books at BEA seemed to be YA/teen fantasy and middle grade.  I didn't brave the in-booth lines for Victoria Roth, Melissa de la Cruz, Leigh Bardugo, Kendare Blake, Sabaa Tahir (which was crazy), and Tahereh Mafi (which was completely bonkers, yikes).  But I did have tickets for some signings in the autograph area (and found a few surprises).

High on my list of middle grade books coming out this fall was Raina Telgemeier's Ghosts.  I loved her memoirs Smile and Sisters and the novel Drama.  Ghosts follows a tween after her family's move to the California coast for her little sister's health (she has cystic fibrosis and the coastal air will be better for her lungs) and the possibility that her new town might be haunted.  It comes out September 13, 2016 - I paged through it briefly and the colors are just gorgeous.  (There were some super-cute #goraina totebags in the Scholastic booth later on, but I didn't manage to snag one.)



I got to meet one of my literary idols at BEA - Ann Martin.  ANN freaking MARTIN.  She of the BSC and so many other books. I almost cried on her.  Ann (I'm just going to call her Ann) was there promoting her reboot of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series that follows Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's niece, Missy Piggle-Wiggle.  So I got to tell her how much I loved the BSC, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, AND that my nickname was "Missy" until college.  My Venn diagram is basically a circle for this book. *muppet-arms* Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Whatever Cure will be out on September 6, 2016.  (When Ann asked if I wanted it inscribed, I just blubbered that I couldn't decide if I would like it inscribed to my nieces, who are ten, or to myself, because she's ANN MARTIN and I lurrrve her - so she just wrote "Happy Reading!" *dies*)

I used my front-of-the-line pass at the Marissa Meyer signing (which meant I got to be about number 25 in line because a lot of us saved our passes for that one). This one was important to me because not only do I love the Lunar Chronicles series, I wanted to tell her how much teens and parents at my store love her books.  The heroines of the Lunar Chronicles are all smart and strong girls - they're mechanics and farmers and hackers first and fairy-tale heroines second and everyone loves to read about them and root for them.  So much.  Marissa was signing ARCs of her new standalone, Heartless, which is a backstory for the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, and that will publish on November 8, 2016.  (Gorgeous ARC production)

I lucked into this next book.  Shannon Hale tweeted about Squirrel Girl ARCs so I pottered on over to the Disney booth to ask if they were doing a galley drop.  It turns out that's what Shannon and Dean Hale would be signing that day!  So I hopped in the line (there were about 20-25 people already there) which led to the weirdest signing line wait.  The people who got in line behind me immediately started complaining about the wait (eh? it wasn't bad or long, so I don't know who peed in their Wheaties that morning), then they started complaining they didn't know what the line was for, and then after I explained 1) who Shannon Hale was and 2) what Squirrel Girl was they said it sounded dumb and then stayed in the line.  WTF? I got busy reading American Gods on my nook before I tried to strangle them.  (Also, at the same time, there was a thriller writer at a small press hawking her book to those of us in the signing line and a self-help publisher trying to interest us in a book about conflict resolution in marriage...probably not much overlap with Squirrel Girl fans.)  But then I got to the front of the line and geeked out with Dean Hale about the issue of SG where she convinces Galactus not to eat the Earth and *high-fived* and got super-cute squirrel ears.  The Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl: Squirrel Meets World is scheduled to publish on February 7, 2017 (*sad trombone*) but it looks adorable and I can't wait to read it.

And this last one was truly a surprise - on Friday, I was taking a break to have a bit of caffeine intake and a scone and people-watch when I saw a few familiar faces heading to a little out-of-the-way table in the autograph area.  Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton and a rep with a stack of books. Eeek, I thought I had missed their signing.  So I quick gathered up my stuff and scampered on over to the table to be nosy - turns out that they were finishing their signing and had moved out of the booth area because of someone else's signing (Leigh Bardugo's?) being sort of nuts.  So I got completely lucky and got a signed copy of Tiny Pretty Things (and a pin!) and got to chat with two awesome authors that I tweet with online (spoiler: they liked my twitter handle).  The next book in their series, Shiny Broken Pieces, publishes on July 6, 2016.

Next post: comics!

I went to #bea16: Books that found me there

So one of the crazier things about BEA - that I knew in theory but was still unprepared for the magnitude - was the number of books that I hadn't heard of that either crossed my path or were shoved into my hands by reps and publicists.

Books.  They just find me, you know?

My first surprise came in the form of a Shirley Jackson biography I practically stumbled over while asking about Bolshoi Confidential at Liveright.  Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin is scheduled to come out in September 2016.  From the blurb, it seems to be more of a biography of the work and how Jackson uses domestic horror (which may be why she doesn't seem to be in the "canon" unlike Hawthorne and Poe).  I love me some Shirley Jackson, so this is going in the stack.  (Interestingly enough, Ruth Franklin wrote the forward to Penguin Classics 2013 re-release of Jackson's The Road Through the Wall.)


Another biography that found me was Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird.  I happened to be wandering past the Penguin Random House booth when the galley drop happened - the rep thrust it at me with the line "This has never-before-seen information about Victoria's private life."  I have no idea how she knew I liked Victorian history - the last time we talked was during the George Saunders signing - but I was like SOLD.  This is going to be a good, juicy biography for those cold winter months.  It releases November 29, 2016.  (This better have a glossy photo insert in the finished copies.)


Another book I nearly stumbled over was Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King.  Monet painted the Water Lilies near the end of his life when his sight was failing and he had suffered personal disappointments (World War I was fast approaching, too).  They are beautiful canvases - I had seen the Monets at the Art Institute a few days before so this was clearly meant to be.  I always mean to read more art history and just never get around to it.  This will be out from Bloomsbury on September 6, 2016.  (This is also one I hope that will have a nice photo insert.)

When I stopped by the Graywolf booth on day one, Marisa told me I had to come back the next day for Belle Boggs's signing of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood.  I had completely missed this on my galley schedule (it was there - I went back and checked and I just hadn't noticed).  I loved Bogg's writing in Orion and this is a collection/expansion on her writing about (what the subtitle says) fertility and motherhood.  Even though I'm unlikely to sprog anytime soon (for both personal and practical reasons), I am interested in the experiences of women who want children and experience heartbreak and hardship during their journey.  Also, this is Graywolf and they've never steered me wrong on a book.  This will publish on September 6, 2016.  (Boggs was putting pressed four-leaf clovers in the books as she signed them which was an unexpectedly sweet gesture during a crazy book conference.)

On Friday I went to the Book Club Speed Dating event.  This was really cool - you got assigned a table and publicists went around and rapid-fire pitched books that would be good for book clubs.  I picked up several things (mysteries/thrillers) I thought might work for the book club at the store but what really caught my eye were the books from Other Press.  The two reps there - Mona (she of the French accent) and Christie [Edit: Other Press got me her name - I'm so sorry I didn't get your card!] - just sold the heck out of their three books.  The first one, Among the Living by Jonathan Rabb, they unfortunately didn't have any spare copies to give out but it does sound interesting (a Holocaust survivor joins the established Jewish community in Savannah, GA, in the 1940s and attempts to make a "normal" life) - out October 4, 2016.  Then they pitched the novel The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith.  This is out now (May 3) so you can pick this up immediately.  Smith chose for her topic George Eliot's late-life marriage to John Walter Cross in 1880, who was twenty years her junior (Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes, but they were never able to marry, until his death in 1878).  Smith set her novel during the honeymoon Eliot and Cross took in Venice and examines Eliot's thoughts about aging and grief.  This might as well have "MELISSA'S WHEELHOUSE" stamped on the cover.

And then Mona pitched Constellation by Adrien Bosc (translated by Willard Wood).  This is a historical novel about the famous 1949 crash of the maiden voyage of the Constellation airplane (among the thirty-eight passengers was Edith Piaf's lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan).  Bosc tries to piece together why the plane crashed (could it have been avoided?) and the lives of all its passengers.  I almost crawled over the table to rip it out of her hands.  My father was a systems engineer with Rockwell so I grew up hearing about engineering and aviation history + debut novel + novel in translation = I need it in my eyeballs now.  WHEELHOUSE.  This also won the Grand Prix du roman de l’academie francaise.  (I was prepared to throw elbows for this one.)  Constellation released on May 10, so if you are into this you can get it immediately.

Now, this next one I wasn't able to get at BEA.  They didn't have galleys available but I got on the galley list with the publisher.  I was walking past the Norton booth when I did a one-eighty and made a beeline to a poster.  They have a book about Zika virus coming out in July.  My epidemiology senses were tingling.  Yes, yes, yes I will read a book about this - it's by Donald McNeil so I'm thinking it will have good reporting.  Norton also put out one of my favorites in the genre - Spillover by David Quammen (the Norton rep and I geeked out over it) - so I have high hopes.



Those were my surprise book finds at BEA (the adult ones anyway, I'll have one when I do the kids' books).  I was talking with Michelle and Jenn about things we were surprised we didn't find and Michelle mentioned a lack of science fiction.  I have to agree.  We saw a lot of fantasy (particularly for the YA audience) but we didn't see a lot of hard-core SF.  There was the new Cronin zombie book and Blake Crouch's book but nothing like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch or a William Gibson or an Andy Weir.  Maybe we missed it?

I went to #bea16: Books on my radar (adults)

Before driving off to Chicago for a week of books and more books, I knew that I would have to plan out what books I wanted to look for.

I hadn't the foggiest idea how to go about that.  Edelweiss still had (has) a tab for "BEA 2015" so that went nowhere.  An article listed out the top ten galleys at BEA, but I knew there were more than ten galleys in the whole of the show (come on, I've seen the haul videos).  Conveniently, roommate Jenn came to the rescue with a link to the Library Journal Galley and Signing Guide.  I was at least able to make a schedule of where I needed to be when if there was something I was looking for.

At the very top of my list was Bolshoi Confidential by Simon Morrison, out from Liveright (Norton) in October 2016.  For some reason I thought this was a novel initially but heck no, it's an exposé of the Russian ballet company the Bolshoi culminating in the 2011 acid attack on the artistic director.  Of course I have to read this.  It was the first galley I picked up (I got caught in a scrum at the junction of the Hachette and Scholastic booths immediately after the exhibit hall opened on Wednesday so after extracting myself I headed for the relatively calmer waters of the literary presses).  When "balletbookworm" is on your business cards, no one can argue with that.



Along the same lines, I stopped by Overlook Press to pick up Florence Foster Jenkins: The Life of the World's Worst Opera Singer by Darryl W. Bullock, out June 7, 2016.  My voice teacher used to bring up how popular Florence Foster Jenkins was as a singer even though she was a dreadful because she was an entertainer.  This book sounds so fascinating - a batty socialite who bankrolls her own opera career which is a critical bomb but plays to packed houses?  Yes, please.  There is apparently a competing title about Florence coming out a bit later that's the tie-in for a movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep (say what?) but this is the book I was looking for.



Graywolf Press is high on my list of publishers who consistently put out amazing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  Eula Biss's On Immunity, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass.  Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy, out September 6, 2016, is going to be their next big hit, in my opinion.  It was longlisted for the Booker last year and won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.  The novel concerns a trip taken by three elderly women to a religious seaside town and their interactions with a young documentary filmmaker, Nomi.  The action takes place over five days and I've recently been interested in novels that have compressed timelines.



When Eimear McBride's novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing won the Bailey's Prize in 2014 I immediately hopped on the library online catalog I placed it on hold.  It was such a mind-bending book, with an interesting change in the voice as the narrator grew from infant to young woman.  Crown had galleys of her next book, The Lesser Bohemians, out September 2016, available on Friday.  Oh, I can't wait to read it and the rep said this voice is just as good - this one is a coming of age novel that follows a young Irish woman who arrives in mid-1990s London for drama school and falls for an older actor.  I have high hopes for this.




Yes, I couldn't pass up Alan Moore's Jerusalem.  This enormous, 1200-page behemoth will be out September 2016 - Liveright is publishing it as both a hardcover and a three-volume paperback set with slipcase (like 2666 and Skippy Dies) so readers can pick their poison.  If you fall asleep reading often, I wouldn't pick the hardcover.  Clearly, this isn't the final cover art.  It looks completely batshit insane and the back cover is mostly a picture of Moore's face which was on a giant banner by the escalators, too.  Getting this galley was made all the more fun in that the Norton people told me I had to promise to wear a button to get the galley - the button had a "happy penis" on it, which is clearly appropriate to the book but not much of a challenge, in my opinion (I just can't put it on my lanyard at the store, drat).  My response - hand 'em over, the book and the button both.


Last, but certainly not least, I braved one in-booth signing line at the Penguin Random House booth to get a galley of George Saunders's first-ever novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.  It comes out February 14, 2017 (2017!!!!) and I've already started reading it.  It's so, so, so good, beautiful structure and interesting concept.  Essentially, the story concerns the night after the internment of Willie Lincoln (who died of typhoid during Lincoln's presidency) and is told through a combination of quotes from historical sources and a conversation-like narrative from the spirits that inhabit the graveyard.  It is amazing.


And I'm so stoked that I stood in line and got it signed (I had a conversation with Saunders - he asked where my town was and I said near Iowa City and he said he ate at Pagliai's on the way through IC while helping his daughter move to California, eeeee!).  Once I finish reading it, it's never leaving my house again.   Ok, but seriously, mark your calendars for February 14, 2017.  You will want to read this.  (This was also that signing where people were going up to the rep opening the books for Saunders and asking if they could just have one and getting real snotty about things like tickets and waiting in line.)

And that's my highlights for adult galleys I was planning to look out for at BEA 2016.  I'll have surprises, kids/teens highlights, and more to come.

I went to #bea16: Tales from a newbie

After years of seeing pictures and hearing stories about Book Expo America - the big industry trade show for publishing - I decided that I should try to go in 2016.  It would be moving back to Chicago for the first time in something like ten years meaning I could easily drive there.  So I'd just have to find a hotel and pony up the greenbacks for registration.

So I did.  Conveniently, Jenn of Jenn's Bookshelves and Michelle of That's What She Read had room for a tribute volunteer to crash on the hide-a-bed in their room.  So that's the hotel sorted.  And I used a Christmas gift to register for BEA.  My registration came out to over $300 because not only did I get the three-day pass but registered for BloggerCon (a same-site concurrent event for book bloggers) and the Adult Author Breakfast and ten ticketed signings (go big or go home, right?).  I passed on BookCon, that was going to be too many people in the convention center for my taste.

I had so much fun.  We wound up miscalculating on days and got an extra day in Chicago on Tuesday so we went to the Art Institute (I snagged some more prints for my rotating gallery).  We got real Chicago-style pizza.  We went to a party hosted by a literary agency at the Arts Building - in a beautiful interior courtyard - and another the next night at 360 Chicago at the top of the John Hancock Building hosted by Sourcebooks (that was wild).  And then we got to take the scenic route from McCormick Place to O'Hare because the freeway was completely backed up due to an accident - we got to see a part of south Chicago I'd never been in before, I'll say that much.

I bet you're still reading to hear about the books, right?  Well, I think for this post I'll stick primarily to what I saw or did at BEA.  I'll do another post highlighting books I'd been looking for at BEA and another about surprise books I hadn't expected to find.  Otherwise, this post is going to be hella long.

First off, I got to see so many of my favorite people who I only ever talk to online!  Meeting my roomies Jenn and Michelle only confirmed how awesome and lovely they are.  I kept (conveniently, because it was such a treat) running into Liberty who is always a sweetheart and also Rachel Manwill who got a tattoo at BEA (ok, not at BEA, she went to a tattoo artist elsewhere, but still, pretty rad).  I also got to chat with Rebecca, Amanda, Jeff, Yan, Clint, Jenn, Jessica, Kim, and Cassandra from my most favorite of bookternet sites, Book Riot - usually when we were all running from one place to another, of course, but I plan on seeing them all again at Book Riot Live.  I got to meet Candace (Beth Fish Reads) FINALLY! I ran across Kevin Smokler and I'm so excited for his new book, Brat Pack America, out this fall.  I finally got to meet Nathan Dunbar, who is quite a bit taller than I expected and that helped when we were tweeting in order to locate each other (congrats on the new gig), and Eric Smith, who was wearing his hat which helped me recognize him (because he didn't have a corgi on his person and that would have been weird but adorable).  And I finally, at the very end of the show, found the booksellers from Prairie Lights (my local indie), who I knew were there but hadn't come across them - I found them in the signing line for Berkeley Breathed at the Image booth because of course all the Iowa booksellers will all be there.

Second, I got to meet so many of the publicists and marketing staff that I email and tweet with about books and advance buzz and galleys.  This was really worth the price of the registration.  Getting to meet the Graywolf staff in person (Hi, Marisa!), seeing Pam Jafee from HarperCollins/Avon/whatever publisher hat she happens to be wearing at the time, meeting the Liveright people at Norton, and making friends with Mona from Other Press (and does she has a yummy French accent) - that was so, so awesome.  I sat down with the rep from Chooseco to talk about how much the kids at my store love Choose-Your-Own Adventure books.  I even managed to track down the elusive Erika Barmash - "elusive" because she had done a few huge events with Bloomsbury that week and I got lucky in that I finally wandered by the booth when she wasn't mobbed.

For my part, I should have made a Bloggess-style cutout of my Twitter avatar on a stick.  No one knows what I look like but they sure know who my cats are, particularly the stripy one napping on my knitting.

So that's the people I know...and there were A LOT of people in McCormick for BEA.  I was hearing from BEA alumni that there were fewer people present this year but that there was more space at McCormick than Javits in New York City.  This is insane to me!  There were so many people at this thing and then you stuff more of them (and more publisher/exhibitor booths since there were fewer of them this year, too) into a smaller space that is not as new...yikes!  If I go to BEA at Javits in NYC (and I'd like to, if only just to see what that's like) I'll definitely have to pack the hand sanitizer.  Eek!

I managed to catch a few panels.  I'll go into the Adult Author Breakfast and BEA Adult Editors' Buzz panels in a later post but suffice to say they had fantastic selections.  The What's New In YA? Panel was a gem - Lauren Oliver, Allyson Noel, Kendare Blake, and Melissa de la Cruz moderated by Veronica Roth.  Absolutely a scream and Kendare Blake's new book, Three Dark Crowns, sounds completely amazeballs.

I got pitched a variety of random books by authors, both on the fly and while stuck in a signing line.  A very nice lady caught Nathan and me and asked about getting her STEM book published (I wish her luck, she's got a lot of enthusiasm and STEM is big right now).  An odd person cornered me and kept trying figure out what kind of books I sold then walked off when I told him which bookstore I worked for (um, ok?).  I wound up with a postcard for some completely cracked-out sounding book about [insert slur here] shamans talking to a white lady in the desert (it's "true", apparently) - that wound up in the hotel garbage.  People will just walk down signing lines and pitch their book to anyone who can't get away.  You do you, but I would think that perhaps for the money one spends to get a pass to BEA one might be a tad more professional?  It just strikes me as odd.

The one thing that I was seemingly not prepared for, even though I'd heard stories, was how unbelievably rude attendees were to the reps and publishing staff.  I always tried to lead with a handshake, introduce myself, and then my twitter handle/blog (see above for why), and then ask politely after whatever galley or information I was trying to find.  I was registered as a bookseller so I always tried to be professional.  But the number of times I saw people try to take things that were marked "For Display Only" or "Do Not Take" or grabbed entire stacks of the same book or (and this was my favorite) tried to tell a rep in the middle of an author signing that they should just be able to "get" a galley without waiting in line....wow.  It wasn't even one type of attendee - I saw booksellers, bloggers, people with press passes, authors all doing it.  At the speed-dating event I attended (which was a pretty cool event), a woman at my table interrupted every rep during their pitch to ask how she could get free books from them.  Holy cow, so rude.  And I'll admit my eyes got a bit bigger than my brain and I grabbed stuff in passing but only if it was set out as an obvious galley drop.  (Ok, fine, I did beeline it to the galley table at the BEA Adult Editors' Buzz panel - I'll get to that in a subsequent post - but I only snagged one copy of each.)  Teen/YA Fantasy galley drops and in-booth signings were particularly insane.  I thought I was going to get murdered by a few YA bloggers because I was trying to get past the Bloomsbury booth during the run-up to the Sarah J. Maas cover reveal and all I wanted was to get to the Graywolf booth.  Yikes!  I had been hoping to snag a few titles for our kids' leads at the store but nope.

Overall, though, I had such a great time at BEA.  Most of it was exactly as I expected - which was a big, crazy industry show.  I definitely want to go again.  Unfortunately, not BloggerCon, which was a bust for me - not my blogging tribe.  But a repeat BEA trip is definitely in my future!

(And "First BEA Hoarding Compulsion" should be in the DSM-V - I took a picture of everything I came home with unpacked onto the couch and it's never going on the Internet because it makes me look completely insane.)

Nobel Prize for Literature 2012: Mo Yan

I was slightly dreading the Nobel announcement this year.  There was buzz about Bob Dylan and I just didn't want the prize to go to him, no matter how outside a chance it seemed (and then there were the chuckleheads to said it should go to EL James - sorry, my egalitarianism doesn't extend even remotely that far).  I'd be much happier to see the prize go to Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, AS Byatt, or comprable (or, if dead people were allowed, Kurt Vonnegut who totally got the shaft in his lifetime).

And the committee managed to surprise me yet again - they selected the Chinese writer, Mo Yan. 

Now, I don't think I've run across him before.  I don't mind.  Finding authors new to me is half the fun of the Nobel when it doesn't go to a favorite of mine.  But the nice thing is that he does have a significant body of work translated into English and is either currently available or will be available soon and it is accessible.  The committee said nice things about his imagery - "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary" - so I'd like to try on his words for size.  This is much easier done than for the awardee last year, Thomas Tranströmer, who writes Swedish poetry and is really hard to find stateside (compared to the 2010 winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose backlist catalogue is just filthy with available books). 

The NYT has a nice article which ends with a quote from Mo regarding his decision to attend the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair when China refused to allow dissident writers to attend:

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

Surprises from my Secret Santa!

I received my Secret Santa package about a week ago but I've been really remiss in blogging about it (particularly as I would remember while at work and had no picture of what I actually received).

Well, my SS was Jill of Book, Books Everywhere and just look what was in my package!





Talk about getting spoiled!  I almost cried when I opened the box.  She sent EL Doctorow's Ragtime (something I keep thinking I have then get home and realize I don't have it), Tasha Alexander's And Only to Deceive (my SIL says those are good), Richard Paul Evan's The Christmas List, and Patricia Miller Mauro's Safe from the Past AND chocolate (yum, yum).  Thanks so much, Jill!  This December has been hard, what with Mom's diagnosis and surgery and all (she's doing so well, we're all so thankful), so a lovely box of Christmas cheer and book love was just what I needed. 

Thank you many times!  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Solves that question....

So last week when I blogged about QR Markham's plagiarism I wondered whether he was punking us or just plain stupid.

GalleyCat reported that Markham (or Quentin Rowan as was) explained his reasons in an email to novelist Jeremy Duns.

After reading said "reasons" my vote is now for "just plain stupid" (additionally, that is the lamest set of excuses, ever).

Tsk, tsk, they never learn, or do they?

This week Twitter lit up with the revelation that a new, well-received spy novel - QR Markham's Assassin of Secrets - was heavily lifted from other spy novels (including James Bond, to which the book was compared).  Little, Brown recalled the entire print run (The Book Bench blog at the New Yorker summarizes and muses on the situation well).  Ed Rants went on a hunt for the lifted passages and found so many from different sources that the plagiarised novel is looking more and more like a collage.

My question is, how did Markham think no one would ever find the lifted sections?  It's not like he ripped off an obscure, out-of-print-and-copyright novel that few would remember.  He lifted from Geoffrey O'Brien, Charles McCarry, and John Gardner (according to Halford a whole six page stretch was lifted from a Gardner novel).  People obviously still read and are fans of those authors.  Pulling stupid stunts like this really gives both the author and publisher a black eye.  The editor and publisher especially for not catching the plagiarism beforehand. 

Conversely, is Markham doing this on purpose?  An article he wrote for HuffPo (which has since been pulled) was largely cobbled together from an O'Brien work.  The Paris Review ran one of his short stories in 2002 which has since been found to contain passages from a Graham Greene book.  It almost seems like he was testing the system, dipping a toe to take the temperature and see if he could slip an entire novel collated from existing novels.

If Markham is "punking" the literary world, no one is laughing.  Least of all Little, Brown.  I just want to know why - was it Markham's intent to deliberately put this book out there and see if anyone would notice or was he honestly hoping it would go under the radar so he could make more money off the series contract?

From the desk of the Booklady: Read it!

Booklovers everywhere were saddened yesterday to learn that Borders a) filed for bankruptcy protection and b) was going to close 200 stores (maybe more if they need to get the cash flow under control). Rebecca Schinsky, the Booklady, wrote a great post about shopping in real bookstores: Get Thee to a Bookery! [or Borders Went Belly-Up. Now What?]. Please go read it.

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen! (PS: Free Sourcebooks ebooks today 12/16/10!)

In honor of Miss Jane Austen's 235th birthday (Many happy returns!) Sourcebooks is offering TEN Austen-inspired titles as free ebooks (my nook is currently busy downloading):

Eliza’s Daughter by Joan Aiken
The Darcys & the Bingleys by Marsha Altman
Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife by Linda Berdoll
What Would Jane Austen Do? by Laurie Brown
The Pemberley Chronicles by Rebecca Ann Collins
The Other Mr. Darcy by Monica Fairview
Mr. Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange
Mr. & Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy: Two Shall Become One by Sharon Lathan
Lydia Bennet’s Story by Jane Odiwe
Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy by Abigail Reynolds

Sourcebooks is also offering free downloads of their illustrated editions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Emma.

Strike while the iron is hot!  I believe these titles are free for today ONLY so check your favorite ebook outlet.

I've been burned by Austen-world off-shoot novels before, so I never read any of these after my experience with Mr. Darcy's Daughters, etc., but I'm not turning up my nose at free books!  I'll have them on my nook and when the inclination strikes, I'll be ready!
 
I found out about the sale via Laurel Ann's Austenprose posting :)

#SpeakLoudly - LAH's SPEAK is NOT pornography.

Today, a little birdie blogged about a pastor in Missouri who wants to ban Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak because it is pornography.

That's right - a man who has professed to spread the love of the Lord has found scenes depicting the rape of a young girl, who subsequently manifests depressive symptoms after her assault and cannot speak about it, as pornography.

That pastor's spreading something, alright, but it's not love.  Love says Speak tells the truth, that a girl who has had something terrible happen to her is still a whole person capable of giving and receiving love.  That it is not her fault.  That we hear her and we listen when she speaks. 

Speak was first published as I was graduating college and I didn't read it until this year, ten years later.  Melinda is not alone, even if she is a fictional character.  I have a friend who was Roofied and woke up in a strange man's bed.  Another friend was date-raped by a man who she thought was a friend.  Another was sexually abused as a child.  They did not speak.  Not until much later.  One tried to commit suicide, which is how I know about her assault - she told me so I would know why she tried to kill herself.  Laurie Halse Anderson could have ended Speak so differently, it could have been so bad, but she chose to end with hope.  Hope that Melinda could tell her story and people could understand what happened.  They could be her supporters, not her detractors.

Speak tells teens that it is OK to tell someone that you have been assaulted or a loved one has been assaulted.  Listen to Laurie Halse Anderson read her Speak Poem created from the letters sent to her from teens who read her book and reached out to her:



What would those teens have done without Speak?  Would they have ever told anyone what happened to them?

Pornography is meant to titillate, to arouse.  If you consider Speak to be pornographic then you think it is arousing to watch little girls get raped.  People who like to rape little girls or watch little girls get raped are pedophiles.

We need to #SpeakLoudly to keep Speak available and accessible to teens.  Buy a copy and read it.  Borrow it from the library.  Loan your copy to a friend.  Talk about it with your daughter, son, brother, sister, parent.  Watch the movie adaptation with Kristen Stewart.

Don't let someone else speak for you.

Oprah has the "Freedom" to pick whatever she likes

But it is a bit strange that she went with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm reading it right now - Freedom is a great book, well-written, and a great portrait of middle-american disaffection.  However, there are any number of less well-known writers with wonderful books available to choose from.  Why the Franzen?  I saw an idea floating around on Twitter that perhaps its some sort of karma-thing before her TV show ends.

Whatever the reason, I do hope her discussion with Franzen will be interesting.  That's the one thing that was a big failure when The Corrections was selected in 2001.  The discussion.  Earlier this year, I read Kathleen Rooney's book Reading With Oprah and she also had misgivings that the Franzen interview was cancelled.  Rather than having a schmaltzy book discussion, Oprah could have had a fierce, hard-hitting discussion with Franzen about highbrow vs. lowbrow culture or why the television format makes an Oprah's Book Club pick seem more like fluff than the book might actually be. 

Regardless of what I, or anyone else, think, Oprah has earned the right to do whatever the hell she wants.  I, on the other hand, will be happily reading Freedom on my nook (and mine was pre-ordered, ha!, so no Oprah stickers for me).

Beth Fish Reads: Harper Perennial Books: Reviews

Beth Fish is spotlighting books from Harper Perennial!  You know, the HarperCollins imprint with the "olive" on the spine and oftentimes a nice "P.S." guide in the back?  It's an imprint I, personally, look for when I'm buying books - I'm kind of a geek in that I like my imprints to look nice on the shelf when lined up next to each other with their pretty spines (I "collect" other imprints, too). 

Check out Beth Fish's Introductory post as well as Beth Fish Reads: Harper Perennial Books: Reviews to see what other Harper Perennial titles are abuzz in the blogging world.  Use the "Mr. Linky" to link up your Harper Perennial posts.  I linked up my reviews to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Poisonwood Bible, and It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me - I hope to have The Falls, The Moonflower Vine, A Vindication of Love, and Vanishing and Other Stories coming along in the next few months, too.

(And if you have time, mosey on by The Olive Reader - Harper Perennial's fantastic blog)

Iowa City Book Festival 2010: Sunday

Today was the "A Day in the City of Literature" portion of the Iowa City Book Festival.  All different book discussions or book-related activities were spread out all over downtown - I was having trouble figuring out the times on everything (plus parking downtown is a pain on Sundays because of the special parking on the street for churchgoers).  I decided to go to the Book Crafts event at Home Ec Workshop since there's yarn and fabric there, too (I could have gone to the bead shop for a book-making demonstration - I think that's what was there but I really don't use beads much).

The book craft activity wasn't anything terribly special - you could color/sticker your own bookmark or accordion book, so it was like a kids' event we have at the bookstore - so I decided to look through the yarn instead.

I found:

Malabrigo Worsted in Sotobosque - a really beautiful pink-brown-black kettle-dyed yarn.  It reminds me so much of an Iodine Clock demo, only pink instead of yellow.  I think I'll make the DNA Helix cable scarf out of this instead...maybe.

I also came home with some (more) sock yarn.  Malabrigo Sock in Primavera - pretty, no?


I didn't find any fabric I liked there - I was looking for something specific and, while Home Ec has great cotton prints, I didn't see anything in the color I needed.

So I went to Jo-Ann - which is turning into Wal-Mart, I am not kidding.  There are ketchup and mustard refillable containers for sale and a bin of cheap flip-flops near the door.  Really?  I understand that people like to decorate flip-flops but the containers and other crap are a bit much especially considering it took me nearly an hour to find good quality fabric.  Then I had to find the right color, also not easy because the selection of good quality material for dressmaking/couture sewing is pitiful; if I made quilts I'd be in business because they've got everything under the sun in cotton quilting fabric.  I miss my Hancock fabrics. *sob*  I want to go to Mood!

What I really needed was a nice, smooth fashion fabric to make a sash for a new dress (dress is ready-made but the sash that comes with it leaves something to be desired).  Since the dress is such a unique color green I wanted to use a darker shade of green instead of matching directly (if I had to, I would have used black, but I got lucky in the end).

The dress color is on the left, the new hunter green fabric is on the right.  That will definitely look pretty as a sash.  I got 3.5 yds so I'm going to cut (very)wide bias strips, fuse them with interfacing, seam them end-to-end with flat seams, and then sew the sides together to make a nice sash without any wrong sides.  It should be long enough to wrap around my waist twice before tying it off.

And we all wonder when those skills our moms taught us will come in handy!

So that was my day in the City of Literature!  And here I sit at my blog, typing away and knitting madly instead of reading.

I can't wait to see what they do for the festival next year!

Iowa City Book Festival 2010: Saturday

The Iowa City Book Festival was bigger and better this year!  This is what happens when your city is designated a UNESCO City of Literature (only the third in existence, after Edinburgh* and Melbourne).

Audrey Niffenegger kicked off the Shambaugh lecture series by reading from Her Fearful Symmetry and then taking questions.  The organizers allowed for about 40 minutes of questions which was great.  Audrey talked about how she came for a workshop at the IWP summer session and at that time The Time Traveler's Wife was plotted thematically - after workshopping TTW she restructured it more along Claire's life chronology and then it made sense.  She also talked about her visual artwork and, in response to an audience question, said she purposely gave Claire an art preference/style/type that she herself wouldn't have to make so Claire could be conceptual and readers could imagine what they liked.  She also said she liked to ground her books in reality as much as possible using real places and modelling her characters on real people since her plots all center around a very "unreal" concept - ghosts, time-travel, etc.  She signed books afterward and I took Jackie's copy of TTW to have it signed for her.

Great Audrey quote: "I'm decadent, but I'm not that decadent" when asked if she reads purely for pleasure (she's currently reading an advance of a book about coffins/death rituals or something like that - she says it's very good).

I did some knitting while hogging my seat in-between discussions (I missed Ash from English Major's Junk Food when she presented her "picks" out in the lobby - she posted her picks here on her blog) .

Jane Smiley spoke next and let me tell you - she is a riot.  She did her doctoral work at the UI and taught at ISU so the audience was filled with people she knew from around town (her daughter, Lucy Silag, is in the IWW).  She read two passages from her new book, Private Life, including one about a charcter named Pete who was inspired by a Russian man who bid on the right to be a character in her book (a racing thoroughbred charity benefitted from the auction).  She told a lot of funny stories about living in Iowa City or working at Iowa State (she pled the 5th when asked if Moo was based on ISU - she said that Moo was inspired by the idiosyncracies of the land-grant university).

Great Jane quotes: "Wikipedia is great for authors because it's often "wrong"...characters must have a point-of-view" and "You can have a favorite horse because the other horses don't care".

She also signed books after her talk:

[Now, I bet you're wondering why there's only this picture here - my computer crashed and lost all the pictures from this day, none were terribly dear, but it makes me mad just the same.  So I have author quotes instead of pictures.]

After getting A Thousand Acres signed I wandered around among the vendors, publishers, and groups set up outside.  I didn't last long because the heat and sun started bothering me so I retreated to the bagel place for lunch and something cold to drink.

I went to the yarn shop instead of back to the festival (I know - naughty).  I was looking for something to use to knit the DNA helix pattern Christina wants me to teach her when we're at Conclave.  I found some pretty Noro Kureyon at The Knitting Shoppe:

I was captured by this single odd-ball skein.  I'm thinking one won't be enough for a cable knit scarf so I found two skeins of this other colorway and there's enough overlap between the three that I can put the odd-ball skein between the other two and make a scarf. Yay!

And then I had to go to work (boo) - but I had a lot of fun at the book festival!

*Whoah, my bad, I had Dublin listed as a City of Literature, it's not - I meant Edinburgh, Scotland, and it was the first one!  Thanks to Lizzy for catching that one! :)

Vote for the "Lost" Booker!

The Man Booker Prize is awarding a special prize for novels that were "lost" in the shuffle when the Booker Prize rules changed in 1971.  That year the award went from a retrospective award to one given to novels published during that year - many novels published in 1970 became ineligible for the award or were never submitted for consideration.

A panel of judges created a shortlist of six books from the many novels were lost to consideration and the public will vote to determine the winner.  The six novels are:

• The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden (this seems to be the only title not currently available in the US)
• Troubles by J G Farrell
• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
• The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
• The Vivisector by Patrick White
 
The reading public will determine the winner - cast your vote for the winning "Lost" Booker Winner here before April 23!  The winner will be announced on May 19.

I definitely won't get all six novels read before the deadline but I do have Troubles and I'm going to read as much of that one as I can (also I totally want The Vivisector because the cover art is awesome).

"Home" wins 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction

I've yet to read Marilynne Robinson's latest novel Home....[hangs head in shame]....but I have a new reason to get going on it:

Winner of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction

Marilynne Robinson isn't a native Iowan but we claim her as Iowan by right of residence. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, she's my boss's neighbor, and we all frequent the same yarn shop (if you're ever in Iowa City and need yarn, go see Edie at The Knitting Shoppe on Muscative Ave). Represent!

Now if only I could remember in which stack I put my copy of Home....it's in my office somewhere.

Sarah Prineas: May 30, 2009 @ 2pm

Heads up!

The lovely Sarah Prineas, author of The Magic Thief and The Magic Thief: Lost, will be reading and signing her books at the Barnes and Noble in the Coral Ridge Mall at 2pm tomorrow (May 30). She's helping to kick of B&N's Summer Reading Program. Yay!!!!!

So come meet Sarah and stay for the Kick-Off Party at 4pm!