125 Water Street

Our Top Twenty Sellers of 2011

2012-01-11T11:11:00.002-05:00

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

4. Till the Cows Come Home by Carol Harvey Clapp

5. Madeline at the White House by John Bemelmans Marciano

5. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

6. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

7. The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published by Arielle Eckstut & David Henry Sterry

8. The War We Knew by Riverwoods

9. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

10. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

11. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

12. Diary of a Wimpy Kid #6 Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney

13. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

14. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

15. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

16. The Pocket Pema Chodron by Pema Chodron

17. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

18. The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen

19. Exeter, Historically Speaking by Barbara Rimkunas

20. Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo

It's nice to see a few local books in there, especially Til the Cows Come Home, The War We Knew, and Exeter, Historically Speaking. And a book that could really help local authors, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. Very cool.

my best of 2011--non-fiction

2011-12-21T16:09:00.012-05:00

non-fiction:

So the truth is that I read way, way less non-fiction than I do fiction. So I've chosen my top five (with one honorable mention) instead of top ten. And I don't tend to read traditional history or biography or anything like that. I'm mostly a memoir kind of girl. So keep that in mind.

A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres

You know that phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid?” Reading Julia Scheeres’ book about the Jonestown Massacre made me realize that one thing many of the residents of Jonestown were not doing in their final hours and minutes was “drinking the Kool-Aid.” So many of them were stuck in Jonestown—physically trapped, blackmailed, and deceived from the very beginning. They were overworked, undernourished, and totally cut off from the world. They weren’t the Jim Jones zombies that history has told us they were.

Scheeres’ account is fascinating and simply heartbreaking. Read her memoir Jesus Land too. You’ll understand why she wrote A Thousand Lives.

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

This is a fantastic follow-up to the story Fuller told in Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight. If Dogs was the story she had to get off her chest, then Cocktail Hour is the story her heart taught her to tell after many years wrestling. She seems to have really wanted to understand what the African experience was for her parents, and she lets them explain it in their own, inimitable style (her mom is hilarious!). She has come to a clearer understanding of what it all meant for them—living through wars, losing children, constantly moving, battling manic depression, all while desperately loving Africa and not feeling at home anywhere else in the world.

Expect more of the voice (so funny & stylish, yet cuts to the bone) you came to love in Dogs, plus the understanding that comes with age and acceptance.

Holy Ghost Girl by Donna Johnson
This is one powerful memoir. Donna Johnson spent her childhood, the sixties and seventies, traveling across the country with her mother and siblings and an evangelist named David Terrell. Her time with the big tent revival varied from the fervor of fellowship and larger than life miracles to hard-scrabble poverty, abandonment, and bitter disappointment.

If you have any experience with evangelicals, good or bad, you’ll understand the push and pull of this memoir. Johnson absolutely nails the desire to believe in something as great and mystical as the power to heal and the truly devastating way that belief can so easily break when hypocrisy and human weakness edge in.

This Life Is In Your Hands by Melissa Coleman

This is a lovely memoir about growing up on a homestead on the coast of Maine in the 70s, just at the beginning of the back to the land movement, out of which grew our modern day concept of organic, self-sustaining farming. Coleman's father is Eliot Coleman, considered by many to be the father of organic gardening. Melissa's early childhood was spent in carefree innocence, running wild with her younger sister Heidi. The magic is broken, however, when Heidi accidentally drowns. This tragedy, coupled with the difficulties of living off the grid, drives her parents apart.

This is not a whiny sob story kind of memoir. I can't emphasize that enough. Melissa writes with empathy and surprising strength about parents who so often chose the cause or their own feelings over her and her siblings. On top of that, this is meticulously researched and a truly fascinating portrait of the times. Stayed with me.

Your Voice In My Head by Emma Forrest

This is a simply heartbreaking memoir about the journey from sickness to health; a story about how that journey isn't always a straight line. Emma Forrest is a young woman, a writer, in NYC dealing with mental illness (cutting, depression, etc.) when she meets the man who will change her life: not a boyfriend or lover, but Dr. R, a gentle but firm therapist who helps her get a grip on life. When he dies suddenly, she most understandably goes off the rails. Her boyfriend throughout the book, who she calls Gypsy Husband, is actually the actor Colin Farrell. Trust me, after you read this book you’ll never look at him the same way again.

In beautiful, incisive writing, Forrest cuts to the core of what it means to want to get better so badly and yet need help to do so. This book could help a lot of women on their journey to wellness.

Honorable Mention:

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

I adored The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion's last book about the death of her husband, in the way that you can love a terribly sad book, and I was eager to read Blue Nights when I heard about it. But it was difficult to love this new book, about the devastating death of her daughter Quintanna. Her writing has the same freshness and emotional depth it has always had. But, and I never say this, part of me thinks I'm too young to fully appreciate Blue Nights. She's so aware of death and aging and how some things go and are gone forever. I think I'm just too young to go there. I think I'll just keep re-reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem to get my Didion fix from now on.

my best of 2011--fiction

2011-12-21T13:13:00.021-05:00

fiction:

For the first time, I've gone back through my reading journal to officially determine my favorite books of the year. As seems to be happening more and more every year, this was the year of the many-hyped novels. I read a lot of them (most before they were hyped...that's the beauty of getting review copies and reading the books before everyone else!) and many of them were truly wonderful (The Night Circus, The Art of Fielding, The Marriage Plot). A few I wasn't crazy about (State of Wonder, The Paris Wife). I think the truth is that a lot of the people who are doing the hyping have good taste--they know what they're talking about! At the same time, so, so many wonderful books are published each year to no fanfare at all. Luckily for me, my job brings these books to my attention.

I wrote up all of my favorites but two (The Art of Fielding and The Marriage Plot), mostly because someone else on staff wrote them up for the store, but also because they've both gotten such amazing reviews. Read those!

#1 most favorite novel of the year is...

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Cambell
I can’t wait for you to meet Margo. She is the beautiful, striking-looking tomboy of 15 who is the heart of this story. She is twisting up like a weed from childhood to adulthood, curious about her power over men while also longing for her mother who abandoned her. After several deeply traumatic events, Margo is left alone, on the river she loves in rural Michigan. In her grandfather's teak wood boat, she takes off upriver in search of her mother, in search of somewhere to belong. Realizing that she can't survive alone, she uses the men she meets for protection and companionship. Though she has the gun skills and guts of her hero, Annie Oakley, Margo is still a little girl in the end, needing a home and a love that won't ask questions and won't leave her.

I knew from the first page that Campbell's writing was exquisite, her cadence melodic and language deliberate. It only took a few more pages for me to be totally hooked.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Morgenstern has created a compelling, complete world with The Night Circus. From the lovely, intricate graphics inside to the interspersed circus attraction descriptions, reading this book was like parting the curtains of a tent at the circus

and entering. Every detail of the clothing, food, and attractions are perfectly described and the love story between the magicians is simply mythic. The plot is unspooled from two points in the story decades apart and as the dates get closer together, the feeling that something explosive is going to happen is truly palpable. Cinematic, unique, memorable.

This book is great for anyone who needs a little wonder in their life or for those who know that true love is always magical. And it lives up to the hype.

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
If you want to get all nestled into a good story with great characters you’ll actually care about, this debut novel is a great choice. Jude and Teddy are

The writing is wonderful and moving. Henderson writes about her characters like she really believes in them; her confidence in them, the way each character is a person and an idea, is quite Irving-esque. best friends living in a VT city (feels like Burlington) in the 1980s. They are teenagers doing the normal things teenagers do, playing in their band, doing drugs, and scrounging for money to buy drugs. Relatively speaking, they are two innocent kids. Until one night, when Teddy overdoses and dies. Jude is sent to live in the East Village with his father and the story just explodes from there. This is about music and New York and growing up and is just wonderfully done.

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
If you’re one of those people who loves a novel for its characters, for the beautiful, evocative writing, and despite the fact that “not much happens,” then I think you’ll love The Forgotten Waltz. Enright is one of our most talented wordsmiths; her books are absolutely to be cherished and savored. Logophiles rejoice: you’ll never find a cliché in a book by Anne Enright. This story, about a woman’s affair with a married man, has been done before and has been done poorly, but Enright handles it carefully--Gina, Sean, and their spouses are all real people, with real struggles. No one is romanticized or vilified. Anne Enright writes the real thing.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell

This is an awesome collection of connected short stories by Vanity Fair columnist (she writes the Hot Type column!) and Tin House magazine co-founder Elisa Schappell. Most likely, if you are a girl you will get these stories. Were you unsure of who you were in high school? Did you date the wrong person? Did you go to college? Did you maybe make a few mistakes? Are all your friends having babies? Do you have a weird relationship with your mom? The writing is lovely and sharp and clever and sad and beautiful. Give short stories a shot. They are difficult to write, so if they got published, you know they’re good. That’s my logic anyway.

Lightning People by Christopher Bollen

This book reminded me that small publishers today are making great books and their books deserve a second look. Lightning People tells the intertwined story of four transplanted New Yorkers, part of the lost and wandering Generation Y—Joseph, a superstitious sometimes actor whose handsome good looks get him his acting gigs, Delphine, his Greek girlfriend who hates her job as a zoo assistant so much she persuades Joseph to marry her for a green card, and siblings Madi and Raj Singh, second generation Indian immigrants struggling with their Indian identity (and much more, of course).

This is one of those novels where the characters’ paths cross drastically and passionately, like struck lightning. You know it’s bound to happen, since it often does in novels like this, but it’s still both magnificent & dreadful, managing to feel both surprising & fated. Fresh language, precise details, and realistic feelings (so much angst!) make this a great novel from a new talent.

There But For The by Ali Smith

This book is simply delightful. Here's the premise: at a dinner party, a man the host doesn't know very well (he's the plus-one of one of the guests) leaves the table, goes upstairs, and locks himself in the host's guest bedroom and refuses to leave. He stays there for months (don't worry, it has an en suite bathroom). Each section is told from a different character, all loosely connected to Miles, the man in the bedroom.

Ali Smith uses clever, delightful wordplay throughout (especially to do with the words "there," "but," "for," and "the"), but her greatest gift is the tenderness that she brings to what could otherwise be a silly tale. A jewel of a book; I loved every page.

The Family Fang
I just loved this novel about the dysfunctional family Fang. Camille & Caleb Fang are performance artists who conscript their children Annie & Buster (or Child A and Child B as they are known by the Fangs’ many admirers in the performance art community) at very young ages to take part in their pieces. Being forced to basically trick strangers over and over seems to take its toll on Child A and Child B. Annie grows up to be a nearly famous actress, and Buster a nearly failed novelist. This story is about the seemingly irrevocably damage family can do and how sometimes they’re the only ones who can make a person whole again. Just a note: this book isn’t as quirky as the cover makes it seem. It’s just good.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

2011-12-15T09:18:00.008-05:00

What if the movie studios (like big publishers) were driven out of business and all we had was people's YouTube clips of them jumping off their roof or giving makeup tutorials? I'm sorry, but I'm not going to the movies to watch YouTube clips, just like I'm not paying for self-published crap on Amazon, which may be our only option someday if Amazon has it's way and puts the publishers out of business by becoming a publisher itself.

So many of these self-published books are just not good enough. So many of them (and I would know, remember, I work in a bookstore; I see them everyday) are not edited or formatted properly, to say nothing of the rotten cover art and cheap, flimsy paper and binding.

Maybe the way a book looks isn't important to you, but I think it's important to a lot of people. I, like a good portion of people, am not interested in ebooks because I am a collector of the object of a book. My home library is a comfort and pleasure to me. I love being surrounded by books. And I love when they are beautiful objects, with satiny jackets, deckled edges, and a comforting heft in the hand. And the fact is, I have yet to see a book made by CreateSpace or iUniverse or whatever that meets these standards. They just look like junk.

But I do think it's great that so many people are getting to tell their stories, and I do believe that there are masterpieces that are being self-published today (just as masterpieces are found in the slush pile), but I don't want to live in a world where we have millions of happy, self-published authors and NO GOOD BOOKS.

If you read that leaked memo from publisher Hachette a few weeks ago, then you know all the work that publishers do to bring quality books to market. I'll summarize it here:

1. Publisher acts as CURATOR, finding the talent and nurturing them as they work. This includes wading through all the crap that is now being churned out with CreateSpace and finding the work that is actually good. It also includes editing by a professional editor, not someone's neighbor or husband or friend. People who have edited bestselling, award-winning writing--these are the people who continue to do the work of editing new material. They are good at it.

2. Publishers have the MONEY to fund the writer's work. Part of the reason that the books they publish are good is because their writers have time and money to write full-time.

3. Publishers have the network to DISTRIBUTE. They have sales reps who have actually read the books who then sell them to bookstores, online and off, independent and chain.

4. Publishers MARKET and PROTECT the work they helped build. They have a vested interest in the intellectual property because putting out books is all they do. They don't also sell TVs and Elmo dolls and Hunter boots and diapers. They just do books. And those books have to be good.

Amazon's efforts at taking down independent bookstores are just the tip of the iceberg. They want to take down the publishers too. And when they do that, when they are the only company making and selling books, and they are also making and selling gadgets and who knows what else, you have to know that the quality of the books won't be a paramount concern. And my guess is the price won't be so great then either.

Kate Whouley answers our Author Questionnaire

2011-10-24T16:31:00.010-04:00

Kate Whouley lives and writes on Cape Cod, in the home that inspired her to write Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved. A Book Sense Book of-the-Year nominee in the nonfiction category, Cottage for Sale received kudos from booksellers and reviewers, and is a popular selection for reading groups.

An avocational musician, Kate has played principal flute in the Cape Cod Conservatory Concert Band since 1995. "When I began working on the new memoir, I thought I was writing a book about the band and my personal musical journey. But as I began to write, I couldn’t help but notice that my mother was turning up on every page."

Many booksellers know Kate from her work in the book industry consulting with bookstores on design, renovation and other matters for her company Books In Common. Her latest book is Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels with Mom in the Land of Dementia.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

Alexander Maksik: You Deserve Nothing

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

Orhan Pamuk: Other Colors

Emberto Eco: Baudelino

Milan Kundera: The Curtain

Mavis Gallant: Paris Stories

2. How do you write?

My working life has been spent in the book business. I know the crush of books, the confusion of titles, the way that publishers push a few big books each season—mostly by established authors and celebrities. I know how difficult it is for any book to find an audience. I know that some folks believe that books and bookstores may soon be obsolete. When I begin to write, I must forget everything that I know about the marketplace for books, and choose, instead, to learn the truth of the story I am telling. I work in a separate silence—away from my desk, away from the telephone, and away from my desktop computer. Wherever I open up my laptop, I have a cup of hot white tea—and if I am lucky, a black and white cat—within arm’s reach.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

I was first published—at age fourteen—in a magazine for collectors of insulators—those little glass and porcelain knobby things that used to sit on the crossbars of telephone and electric poles. In the years since, I’ve written Hallmark cards, radio commercials, catalogue copy, publicity material, feature articles, personal essays, a long-running column in a bookselling magazine, and I’ve authored, edited and contributed to several professional books. Yet—and this may be because I have worked in the book business, too—I didn’t consider myself a “real” writer until my first memoir—Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved—was published. Around that time, I revealed this secret to a magazine editor. He corrected me: “Kate, you aren’t a writer. You’ve crossed over. You’re an author now.” Seven years later, I am still processing that information.

4. What are you working on now?

In the book tour whirlwind, I’m mostly working on showing up at the right place at the right time. But as the travel begins to slow down, I plan to return to a fiction project set in the ninth century. (When that one sees print, maybe I’ll be able to introduce myself as an author.)

5. Favorite recent find?
My cat, Mojo, although he found me. Formerly feral, he now enjoys the full privileges of Cat-of-the-House.

tidying the beside-the-bed-book-pile

2011-10-18T09:57:00.007-04:00

I know lots of people have stacks of books on their bedside table. I realize that's a thing. But if you work with books in any capacity (bookselling, publishing, editing, etc.), my guess is that you don't have a stack of books, you have PILES OF BOOKS. There is totally a difference. The difference is that a stack of books is manageable and normal and a GIGANTIC UNRULY PILE OF BOOKS quickly becomes unmanageable and a one-way ticket to crazytown.

Every few months I come to a frightening conclusion: there are too many damn books in the GIGANTIC UNRULY PILE and someday I'm going to jump out of bed and break my ankle or at least slip and get really annoyed. My test for this is when I notice Marc has to balance his hands precariously on the edge of the bed with his feet up against the PILE and leeeeeaaaaaan in to kiss me goodbye in the morning. No good will come of this: either he'll knock the PILE over or he'll just get too fed up with me and I'll die a spinster. So, not to be dramatic or anything, but last night it was time to tidy. Here's my scientific system: I create new PILES, hopefully smaller, but usually just more, which I then scatter about the apartment in a way that makes me feel like I dealt with them. Feel free to use my system with your own crazy book problem if you like.

Here are the PILES I create:
1. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY.
2. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because they look amazing.
3. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because I promised the sales rep I would.
4. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because they come out in 6 months and I want to be able to tweet about them and make people jealous.
5. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because they come out next month and crap how have I not read this yet? (in descending order of how quickly I can read them)
6. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because they are already out, and oh never mind I'm never going to get to them (but obviously I'm going to keep them = New Pile)
7. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because I read the first half and why the hell can't I just commit already?
8. Books I have to read IMMEDIATELY because I bought them and they are so beautiful and shiny and hardcovery, okay never mind, it's not in the cards, they'll just go in the shelving PILE.
9. And the tiniest pile: why did I bring this book home in the first place and how should I get rid of it?

The next day, I'll point to the smaller piles by the bed and say, "Look Marc, I tidied!" hoping against hope that he won't ask any questions about ALL THE OTHER PILES SCATTERED ALL OVER THE APARTMENT.

Joni B. Cole answers our Author Questionnaire

2011-09-23T14:01:00.011-04:00

Joni B. Cole is the author of the new essay collection Another Bad-Dog Book: Tales of Life, Love and Neurotic Human Behavior. (PublishingWorks). She (and her own bad dog) will be at Water Street Bookstore tomorrow (Saturday, 9/24) at 4pm to talk about her new book, writing and bad dogs.

“Joni Cole’s voice may be brutal, but readers, drawn to turn to the next page, will be rewarded: She is funny and so is her gutsy book.” – New York Journal of Books

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

I’m assuming you’re asking me about what bookish things are on my nightstand, and not the earring I took out last night and forgot to put back in, or my miracle face cream or dirty cereal bowl. At the moment my nightstand has on it David Baldacci’s paperback The Sixth Man (eager to start it!), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, an excellent book except that I hate reading it on Kindle. (I vowed after Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad I’d never buy another book on Kindle—it seriously diminishes the reading experience for me, so why did I make this same mistake?) FYI: fallen under the table is a hardcover of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. Loved that book!

2a. How do you write?

I teach writing workshops and consult with writers and give talks at conferences, so I have to fit my own writing in around that work schedule. But I make it a priority, preserving entire mornings or afternoons when I can, getting up at 4 a.m. when I need to, and making the most of all those fifteen- or thirty-minute windows of opportunity while I’m waiting in the car for my two daughters to finish their field hockey practices or piano lessons or whatever.

2b. Do you require a completely silent, empty room, or do you listen to music?

I can write in silence or with noise, if that noise is the buzz of a coffee shop or a bunch of kids running around downstairs. But I don’t like music playing when I write at my desk. That said, music does serve my creative process, because I get a lot of my ideas when I’m jogging and listening to my iPod. So I’d say the soundtrack of my new book is a mix of Maroon 5, Garth Brooks, Flo Rida, the Zac Brown Band, Kesha, Cat Stevens, Cher, Pit Bull, Josh Grobin….

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

Hmm. I can’t think of a particular moment. There are times when I am burbling with professional self confidence, and reread something I wrote and think, “Man, that was good writing.” But there are just as many times when I’m struggling to put something, anything, on the page, and think, “Well, I used to be a writer.”

4. What are you working on now?

Snippets of essays, an article I want to propose for The Writer magazine, blog posts for a an online magazine where I’m a regular contributor. I’m uncomfortably aware that I am not immersed in a new book at the moment, but that’s the creative process. It takes its own sweet time, but something will gel, likely another essay collection, as long as I show up at my desk.

5. Favorite recent find?

Two recent life enhancements: Lemon Cloud dessert and the FX original series “Justified.” As for exciting stuff, I’m truly excited about this upcoming “season” of promoting my book. It’s fun to see it in stores and meet readers and booksellers. I want to appreciate every moment of this.

Melissa Coleman answers a few nosy questions

2011-06-13T15:02:00.006-04:00

Melissa Coleman is the author of This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone, a new memoir about growing up on a farm off the coast of Maine in the 1970s. Her father, Eliot Coleman, was an integral part of the "back to the land" movement and one of the fore-fathers of organic gardening. She will be sharing her story at Water Street Bookstore on Tuesday, June 14th at 7pm (with Caitlin Shetterly).

1. Obvious Nightstand Question: I can't help but ask, what's on your nightstand/what are you reading now?

Just finished and loved loved A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It every bit deserves that Pulitzer. Also on the nightstand suddenly, it seems, are a number of books by authors I know or have met: another Pulitzer winner, The Emperor of All Maladies, a brilliant work by friend Siddhartha Mukherjee, Townie by Andre Dubus, whom I saw read/speak recently and he was amazing, and The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein, an excellent, clear-sighted debut by a friend here in Portland.

2. The "back to the land" movement seems to be having a 2.0 these days, with tons of cityfolk and otherwise setting up rooftop gardens, moving out to the country, shopping at Farmer's Markets, buying chickens. With your family's experience in mind, do you see any negatives in these trends? Would you caution people about taking on an experiment of the magnitude that your family undertook?

I see today's movement as much more sustainable, which is of course the goal. You can have your own garden AND electricity, you don't need to cut ties completely from the modern world. Back in the 1960s-1970s, a more extreme movement was required to break free of the status quo. There was only one farmer's market in Portland, Maine in 1971 and maybe one health food store. Today there are hundreds of farmers markets and health food stores across the state. It's a change that has built slowly to get to where we are today. My only advice would be that here is no one formula for how to live a healthy life, it's important to create your own version that works for you.

3. Your memoir feels so meticulously researched. You do a wonderful job of mixing the facts of what happened with your own impressions as a child of the time. Besides doing research on what was happening politically and culturally in the 1970s, did you interview your parents and other family members for the book? With your journalism background, did you treat them like any other interview subjects, or was it a more personal experience? I can imagine it could be therapeutic to get to ask all those questions and get the story straight, or maybe just really difficult.

Since my memories were limited, I had to fill in the rest of the details by talking to people who were there and reading a lot about the time. However, the research for this book never felt like research, it felt more like solving a mystery, figuring out the clues to what happened. I talked to my parents, extensively, our apprentices and neighbors, and the reporters who wrote about us. Most of the interviews felt like conversations between friends and family about a shared time, but I always circled back to the parts I needed to figure out. It did feel like therapy in some ways and I'm left with an understanding of the past that has left me at peace with it. I hope for the same for all of my family.

Caitlin Shetterly answers a few nosy questions

2011-06-10T14:12:00.005-04:00

Caitlin Shetterly is the author of the new memoir, Made For You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home about her journey with her young family across the country twice, in search of the safety of a good job, adventure, and the American Dream. She will be at Water Street Bookstore on Tuesday, June 14th to talk about her new book (along with Melissa Coleman).

1. The Obvious Nightstand Question: I always have to know, what's on your nightstand/what are you reading?

I just finished Townie by Andre Dubus III, which is a searingly beautiful, moving, and can't-put-it-down read. I was so involved in Dubus' world I couldn't wait to get back to it every evening. Now my husband is reading it and he is just as hooked and moved as I was. Now I'm reading an older book by my friend Terry Tempest Williams, called An Unspoken Hunger. It's made up of beautiful essays--more like meditations, really-- about the environment and our responsibility to it.

2. This one is from @Bethazon (awesome librarian/culture geek on Twitter): Once you knew you had a much larger audience than close friends and family, did you feel any more pressure or responsibility when writing your blog? when recording your radio pieces? Would you change anything you did?

The only thing I changed, shortly after my first audio diary went viral on NPR, was that I took my son's name out of the blog. Other than that, I wrote every blog as if I were writing it for my husband--and, indeed, I read each one out loud to him before I published it. And he listened to every radio piece before it was finalized. In my writing life, I often have Dan read things--he has a great sense of my voice, he keeps me fair, he helps me write what I mean to say and he supports me, unconditionally--this is a gift. He read my book many times and then, finally, at the very end I read the whole thing out loud to him over 5 very long evenings (we have a young child) and I went hoarse, but we made the book better that way, because books are also meant to be read out loud.

3. I realize that no one writing a book about herself has any intention or editorial permission to write about every single bit of what's happened in her life. But I recently read a memoir in which I felt the author left out huge chunks of her life, and it ended up feeling less than honest to me. Reading your book, I felt like you could have elaborated on so many different aspects of your story (time in Paris, childhood, time in NYC) but didn't, without sacrificing any of the honesty or transparency. How did you do it? How did you know what to cut and what needed to be said? Does that make sense?
This makes perfect sense. This is important for books--you need to trust the writer. You know, as an actor, when I was in acting school in NYC, I was taught a technique of acting in which you speak from the true place of a character--whatever that might mean in that given moment. You work true moment to true moment. I've, for better or for worse, in my life, always been a person who has spoken from that place--whether I'm playing me, or someone else--I try to tell the truth from where I sit. And sometimes people don't like that and sometimes they do. But as a writer you have to remember that to tell a good story, you have to ask yourself that question from the movie about Johnny Cash, Walk the Line, "If you were lying it that gutter dying and you had time to sing one song..." what would it be? When I sit down to write, I start with that question and then I follow my heart.

C.S. Lambert answers our Top Five

2011-04-20T13:11:00.012-04:00

C.S. Lambert is an expert on sea glass hunting and is the author of three books on sea glass: Sea Glass Chronicles, A Passion for Sea Glass, and the Sea Glass Hunter's Handbook. She will be sharing about her seaglunking adventures, giving tips on how to find great sea glass, and will be identifying your own treasures, this Saturday at the bookstore at 2pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

All the Best Rubbish by Ivor Noel Hume.

2. How do you write?

I write full-time, and I need relative silence when I’m working. I can’t write when my husband is digging through his CD collection in the next room, or when he is vacuuming, or when he is watching a horror movie so loud that I can hear it on the 3rd floor. I write primarily in my office and edit the following morning at the kitchen table with coffee.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

Several months after my first book came out, someone recognized me from my author photo. I was in a hardware store buying materials to build a fence.

4. What are you working on now?

A book on simple sea glass crafts; a murder mystery; a peculiar photo anthology.

5. Favorite recent find?

At an auction I bought a well-worn, well-loved rocking horse from the late 1800s.

What we learned from our listening session

2011-04-13T13:24:00.008-04:00

A big huge thank you to all the customers who came out Tuesday night to our 20th Anniversary kick-off/listening session. It was a great success. We learned a lot about what you love about Water Street, what you didn't know that we already do (we give a 20% discount for book groups--just ask!), and what you want us to do moving forward. We got some great ideas (kids' birthday parties in the store! customers annotating books on our website! more books in translation!) and some fantastic energy and enthusiasm for new projects. A few ideas:

1. Volunteer effort through Water Street Bookstore into the local schools to encourage reading. After a customer asked about what we are doing to energize the schools to promote reading, Dan talked about the 10 years he spent reading to 2nd graders once a week at Kensington Elementary. Though he has since stopped doing it, to focus more of his time in the store, he agreed that the store is a natural facilitator for a literacy project like this. Promoting reading grows readers, who support the store with their families and help to create a more educated citizenry-- good things all around. Several people spoke up to say that they are retired and would love to volunteer. Stay tuned (though in the meantime, Rockingham Community Action has a great literacy volunteer program, too).

2. "Exeter Reads." Lesley Haslam, director of adult education at Exeter Adult Ed, shared about "Dover Reads," a town-wide initiative to encourage everyone to read the same book and discuss, like a giant book group. Many cities and towns across America have successfully run these programs and Exeter seems like a perfect fit.

3. Help Exeter residents become more engaged in town politics. When Jill Sweeney-Bosa asked if the changes to Swasey Parkway and Water Street (both are becoming one-way streets to protect damaged culverts) would affect downtown businesses, many people spoke up with frustration at the lack of resident participation in the recent town election (in which a warrant article to fix the culverts did not pass, among others). As a community center for Exeter residents, making Water Street a forum for discussion and education about issues discussed at deliberative sessions and articles on the ballot seems like a perfect fit. It wouldn't be a matter of pointing people in one direction or the other-- increasing resident participation would be the goal.

4. You want to hear what ideas we have percolating. Jane Bernhardt asked what new initiatives and ideas we're working on. Though we had run out of time, we agreed that pitching our ideas to our customers in a town-hall style forum like Tuesday night's is a great idea. We are already hard at work on a list of ideas and programs to pitch in the coming months. Stay tuned.

One last note: We meant to talk about a few little things that our customers can do to help us stick around for another 20 years, but we ran out of time. Here are a few:

1. Come to our events! The more people who come to the events, the more events we can do with authors you're interested in. Once we prove to the publishers that we can draw big audiences, they'll start sending us more and more great authors.

2. Forward on our newsletter. Help us spread the word!

3. Order your book group books through us. We'll get them in, set them aside, and give you a 20% discount. Good deal!

4. Tell your kids' educators and other parents that we offer a 15% discount on books for the classroom (15% off books for any public place--libraries, waiting rooms, churches, etc).

5. Bring a bag. We'll always offer bags, but this is one of those little things that you can do to help us keep operations costs down.

6. Support your downtown businesses. We've got it all in Exeter-- gift shops, toy stores, candy stores, wine shops, clothing boutiques, book stores, sports/hiking equipment shops, jewelry stores, florists, a copy & design shop, antique stores and great restaurants. A healthy vibrant downtown is good for everyone! Thanks again for coming out to support us on Tuesday night. And stay posted for more 20th Anniversary events throughout the year.

Jean-Paul's Picks for May 2011

2011-04-13T13:19:00.011-04:00

Last Men Out by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin (Non Fiction, May 3rd) Story of the very last days, hours, and minutes of the last Marines to leave Vietnam when Saigon was overrun by the North Vietnamese troops.

Divergent by Veronica Roth (Fiction Young Adult, May 3rd) As promising as the Hunger Games series.

These Dark Things by Jan Weiss (Mystery, May 10th) Meet Captain Natalia Monte of the Neapolitan Carabinieri, discover Naples above -and under the ground, but watch out for the Camorra.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (Non Fiction, May 10th) Amazing story about an American Ambassador and his family in the midst of rising Nazi Germany.

The Snowman by Jo Nesbo (Mystery, May 10th) Be glad that the snow is gone ... Another great Scandinavian author!

The Jefferson Key by Steve Berry (Mystery, May 17th) One of the best in the "Cotton Malone Series."

Elizabeth Berg answers our Top Five

2011-04-11T14:43:00.033-04:00

Elizabeth Berg is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Year of Pleasures, The Art of Mending, Say When, True to Form, Never Change, and Open House, which was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 2000. Durable Goods and Joy School were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and Talk Before Sleep was short-listed for the ABBY award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, Berg is also the author of a nonfiction work, Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True. She lives in Chicago and her latest book is Once Upon a Time, There Was You. She'll be reading at the bookstore Tuesday, April 19th at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now? On my nightstand? Get ready! Tea Obrecht's The Tiger's Wife, Maeve Binchy's Minding Frankie, Alice Hoffman's The Red Garden, Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies, Eula's Bliss's Notes from No Man's Land (essays), Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Alex Munthe's The Story of San Michele. Needless to say, I like to read a lot of books at once. And I have a huge tower of books waiting to replace these. I'm a book pig; I just can't get enough.

2. How do you write? I've been writing full time since 1985. I like to write in silence, in my office. I jump up every now and then for this and that, but mostly it's pretty intensely focused. I usually write for about 4 hours straight.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer. I wrote truly awful poetry as a kid. At nine, I submitted a poem to American Girl magazine, which promptly rejected it. And should have. But oh, the tears. I guess I've always understood that writing is my vehicle for expressing things, and for coming to understand things.

4. What are you working on now? A non-fiction book that's a kind of fractured memoir mixed with my views on various aspects of life. There's a lot in there about dealing with aging parents, there are travel pieces and recipes, there are many confessions.

5. Favorite recent find? Amos Lee, Blood, Bones and Butter, a recipe for macaroni and cheese I found that doesn't have a bazillion calories, and a puppy I found online that I really want to adopt.

Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller

2011-02-07T09:40:00.006-05:00

I think a lot of people will be rejoicing at the announcement of another installment in the Alexandra Fuller canon. Penguin Press is calling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness both a sequel and a prequel to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. And it is simply fantastic. Fans of Don't Let's may find this hard to believe, but Cocktail Hour is Fuller at the absolute top of her game.

She continues on the subject of her family's life in Africa in the same riveting, deeply personal, highly accomplished style readers came to love in Don't Let's. And if Don't Lets was Bobo's story, her explanation for her love of Africa, then Cocktail Hour is her parents' story. She thoroughly interviews both of them and tells the stories of their parents and their grandparents. From Nicola's fiercely Scottish ancestors to Tim's bucolic family farm in England, we get a better picture of why they value land so highly, why owning a farm in Africa was their life's pursuit. Fuller captures both of her parents' voices so perfectly, allowing them to tell their stories (including their reactions to the publication of Don't Let's, what Nicola calls the "Awful Book.") in their own inimitable style. Perhaps through these interviews, and perhaps through an additional ten years of ruminating on the subject, Fuller seems to have come to a deeper understanding of what her parents experienced and what it all meant--living through wars, constantly moving, losing three children, and battling manic depression, all while desperately loving Africa and being unwilling to leave.

Fuller seems to have closed the loop that she left open with Don't Let's in an honest and satisfying way. You can feel how deeply healing the book must have been for her--not just the desperation to tell her story, like in the first go-around, but also the peace that comes with understanding your family and where you came from.

Coming in August from Penguin. While you wait, try Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. It's amazing. One of my favorites.

Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River

2011-02-02T15:17:00.004-05:00

I have a feeling that Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell is going to be for me this year what Anthropology of an American Girl was last year: a book I read in March that remained my favorite book of the year, my favorite to talk about, obsess about, and wholeheartedly recommend, for the whole damn year.

Once again, the main character is a young girl and the writing is beautiful and breathtaking, but the similarities end there. Margo, the protagonist of Once Upon a River, is a beautiful, striking-looking tomboy of 15 when we first meet her. She is twisting up like a weed from childhood to adulthood, curious about her power over men while also longing for her mother who abandoned her. After several deeply traumatic events, Margo is left alone, on the river she loves in rural Michigan. In her grandfather's teak wood boat, she takes off upriver in search of her mother, in search of somewhere to belong. Realizing that she can't survive alone, she uses the men she meets for protection and companionship. Though she has the gun skills and guts of her hero, Annie Oakley, Margo is still a little girl in the end, needing a home and a love that won't ask questions and won't leave her.

I knew from the first page that Bonnie Jo Campbell's writing was exquisite, her cadence melodic and language deliberate:

"Margo, named Margaret Louise, and her cousins knew the muddy water and the brisk current, knew the sand and silt between their toes, scooped it into plastic cottage cheese tubs and sherbet buckets and dribbled it through their fingers to build sagging stalagmites and soggy castles. They hollowed out the riverbanks, cut through soil and roots to create collapsing caves and tunnels...They built rafts from driftwood and baling twine. They learned to read upon the surface of the water evidence of distress below."

And after a few more pages, I was hooked on Margo. Just hooked.

Coming in July from W. W. Norton.

Welcome to the Year of the Tiger

2011-01-27T12:20:00.008-05:00

Okay, so technically, this isn't the year of the tiger. That was last year, Chinese-New-Year-wise. This year is actually the Year of the Rabbit. But if you're aware at all of new books coming out, you must have noticed the tiger trend. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (okay, fine, that last one came out in 2010).

Maybe this tiger thing has been a slow build for a while now. While reading Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife recently, my boyfriend's friend said, in utter seriousness, "Is that a book by Tiger Woods' wife?"

I look forward to a slew of books next year about rabbits. The Rabbit's Father, When I Married a Rabbit, My Mother, the Rabbit.

Or maybe I won't have to wait that long. When God Was a Rabbit, coming in May 2011 from Bloomsbury USA.

And yet, another reason physical books are better than e-books

2010-11-19T16:18:00.005-05:00

Imagine this scenario on (insert holiday morning of your choice). Instead of handing your loved one a beautifully wrapped rectangular package, you instruct them to open an email. I guarantee that this is how it will come off to them:

I love you so much and think you're so amazing and interesting that I downloaded this book for you. Here, let's look through it together under the (insert holiday decoration of your choice). We can turn the pages with this little clicky thing and look at how wonderful and beautiful the pixels are. I bet you can see how wonderful this book is and how much it means to me by looking at this desensitized, sterile, robot-like digital copy. It must make you feel so special that I spent $9.99 to download it for you while sitting on my ass on my couch.

Another reason physical books are better than e-books:

2010-11-15T09:53:00.004-05:00

If you're reading a book and you really hate it and you want to express how much you hate it, in a way that will make you feel better for all the time and/or money you spent on it while also making a physical statement of your very high yet appropriate aesthetic standards, you can throw it across the room. You could even break something with it, which would probably just make you hate the book even more. Either way, you can throw it and leave it on the floor where it landed flattened open with the spine breaking and the pages folding in a very ugly manner (if you have never done this because you are much tidier and/or mature than me, trust me, it's very cathartic).

What the hell do you do with an e-book you desperately hate? Delete it? Click and drag it into a trash bin? Sounds lame.

Dana Jennings answers our Top Five

2010-11-11T13:46:00.007-05:00

Dana Jennings is an author and assistant editor of the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, where he has most recently been blogging about his experience with prostate cancer. His new book, What a Difference a Dog Makes: Big Lessons on Life, Love, and Healing from a Small Pooch tells about the healing power of living with and loving his dog, Bijou. Originally from New Hampshire, Dana will be reading at Water Street Bookstore on Thursday, November 18th at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

I tend to listen to music in bed -- with my two golden retrievers, Moxie & Harry -- and i've been listening to a Starbucks collection called "Heading West: Songs for the Open Road." The artists include Patty Griffin, the Shins, Calexico, Old Crow Medicine Show, and other bands like that. This morning on the bus to work, I was re-reading a wonderful collection of poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser called "Braided Creek." It's a genuine conversation in empigrammatic poems.

2. How do you write?

I write in the morning. When I'm really focused on a book, I work at the dining-room table. If I'm just dreaming & doodling, I write at my local Starbucks. I write my first drafts in longhand, using Pilot's Precise V5 Extra Fine pen, and a range of Moleskine notebooks. I'm addicted to beautiful papers and leathers. After I write, I head off to my job at The New York Times, where I'm the asst. editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section. I also write for the paper.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

It was in third grade. A fourth grader named Cindy Clark, who now lives in East Kingston, showed my teacher, Mrs. Consentino, a story she had written. I watched this play out, and said to myself, 'I can write a story.' I went home that afternoon and started my "first novel": The Cannon Twins in the Robbery Mystery.

4. What are you working on now?

I'm doodling on a book called "Redneck Jew: My (Ahem) Spiritual Journey." It's about how a working-class hick -- me -- improbably converted to Judaism in his late 40s. And, yes, there will be Redneck Jew jokes in the book.

5. Favorite recent find?

Two music videos that I absolutely love that I constantly watch over & over on YouTube: "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show [reminds me of the Kingston carnival when I was a kid] and "White Winter Hymnal" by Fleet Foxes. Can't get that song out of my head.

What I loved about FREEDOM:

2010-11-10T11:25:00.004-05:00

This sentence:

"But [Jocelyn Zorn] had a fine, unsettling cool, an unflappability suggestive of irony, and was the sort of bitter salad green for which Walter ordinarily had a fondness."

This is an excellent sentence, and I like the idea of describing someone as a salad green. That's it.

Toby Ball answers our Top Five

2010-10-25T15:11:00.007-04:00

Toby Ball is the author of the new dystopian thriller, The Vaults. Michael Harvey, author of The Third Rail has this to say about it: “If George Orwell and Dashiell Hammett had ever decided to collaborate on a book, they might have come up with something like The Vaults…superbly plotted, stylishly written and entirely unique.” Find out for yourself tomorrow night at 7pm, and read his answers to our Top Five right now.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

I am reading a great book called The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. I look forward to my time with it each night. I also have the manuscript for my next book (titled Scorch City) and a signed copy of Jess Walter’s Financial Lives of the Poets, which will be my next read.

2. How do you write?

I work full-time and have a 13 year old son and 5 year old daughter. I essentially write from 8 until 10 each night in whatever peace and quiet I can find. I usually have some sporting event on silently in the background for something to distract me when I take an occasional break from banging on the keys.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

This is a tough one to answer. There are so many different moments when you feel like you are taking the next step: the first time you sit down to do some creative writing (this could be when you are four or five years old); when you decide that you are going to put forth the effort necessary to write something that you want to have published; the moment when you start working on a second draft – the beginning of the real work; the moment you get your first rejection from an agent; the moment when you get your first offer from an agent; the moment you sign a publishing contract; the moment that first book arrives in the mail. I’m not sure which of these moments was “the moment,” but each was a milestone in its own right.

4. What are you working on now?

I’m working on the third book in the loose series that began with The Vaults.

5. Favorite recent find?

This website has a list of what it considers the greatest magazine articles ever written along with links to each. It is very heavy on the past twenty years or so, but the ones I’ve read so far have been excellent. For starters, David Foster Wallace is consistently great and the two-part article on Mel Lyman was fascinating. Enjoy.

Elyssa East answers our Top Five

2010-10-15T14:12:00.011-04:00

Elyssa East is the author of Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. Don't miss her reading at the bookstore on Wednesday, October 20th at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

Lots of books and at least a years’ worth of New Yorkers that—let’s just cut to the visual.

It's like a landslide waiting to happen. And it has a tail of books and magazines that has spilled onto the floor. Sometimes I think of the books as an army attempting to conquer my sleep. In this they succeed, as I often wake up in the middle of the night and read.

And since you asked, in these piles are Da Zheng’s Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveler from the East, Erica Hirschler’s Sargent’s Daughters, The Paris Review Interviews Women Writers at Work, The 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, Richard Burtons’ The Anatomy of Melancholy (always on the nightstand), Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, Katheleen Kent’s The Wolves of Andover, Terese Svoboda’s Pirate Talk or Mermalade, The Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. I’m on a bit of a story bender right now so I’m definitely moving between the above collections a lot.

2. How do you write?

I would really like to have a sensory deprivation chamber to write in, but I’m not that privileged. I do like being by a window, as I prefer natural light, but can find it distracting. We have a view of the Hudson River and the Palisades and regularly see hawks and sometimes bald eagles out the window. I feel extraordinarily lucky to live in Manhattan and have a nature view with the occasional barge and tugboat passing through.

I teach creative writing at Purchase College. When it comes to writing, though, a lot of days I don’t get going until kind of late. It’s like I need to burn off some anxiety before I can start working. That, or I’m building up steam.

I adopted a dog a few months ago and she likes to nestle under my desk while I’m working and jump up to commandeer my hands for a petting session every so often. She’s helps take the edge off. Here’s her special under-the-desk spot and default mode of sleeping with a paw around one of her teddie bears.

I don’t often listen to music while working as I can get too swept up into it, but that really depends on where I am in my process. When I did listen to music while writing Dogtown I took in a lot of Bach Cantatas and one of my favorite pieces of music ever, Antonin Dvorák’s American Quartet. There was also some Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Os Mutantes, and Betty Davis on rotation. Plus, my fiancé happens to run an avant-garde jazz label called Pi Recordings, so I logged a lot of time with his beyond hip, fantastically weird music floating in from the other room.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

If I could say I had an a-ha moment it was while reading this gem, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, when I was in middle school in Georgia, but I couldn’t write worth a lick and I was one of those lucky people who had teachers that went out of their way to tell me that. Nonetheless, I had known that I wanted to be an artist of some sort, only I had no training in anything other than music—my mother was a piano teacher—and I thought that you just had to be born with some magic ability no matter what creative form you wanted to pursue. So my path from wanting to write to actually doing it and then doing it well enough to be published was akin to snow accumulating and turning into a glacier.

4. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new book, but I can’t say much about it except that it’s a novel about love, an unusual surgery, and a sanatorium. It’s too undefined to say more beyond that and I’m terrified it will flop. I’m also working another nonfiction book proposal about poets and artists during wartime and possibly an anthology about farm animals.

5. Favorite recent find?

The recent Charles Burchfield exhibit at the Whitney blew my mind.

Burchfield paints the sounds of things as well as their colors and energy. His work is wholly, oddly synesthetic and vibrates off the canvas like some strange insect beating its wings. Guernica Magazine, which just celebrated its sixth year, recently published some great photography, including these images by Jason Larkin from an Egyptian history museum. I’m very excited for the Nicolás de Jesús show at the Neuberger Art Museum. I love Mexican art and find De Jesús’s work to be hilarious. You can read it as skeletons making fun of the living or that though we’re all alive we’re somehow dead inside. It’s this reflexive paradox and the idea that the dead are not fully gone and that we are not fully alive that I love so much. And if I don’t catch the Zwelethu Mthethwa show at the Studio Museum of Harlem before it closes next week I don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself.

Shelf Talker: My Hollywood

2010-10-08T14:09:00.008-04:00

My Hollywood by Mona Simpson

I read Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here in high school. Since then, I have been under the impression that I hated it. I remember underlining sentences, but I didn't want to keep the book on my shelf (a big part of the reason was probably that it was a movie tie-in cover, and that I am a snob). 'That mother,' was all I could think; I just hated that mother (if you've read the book, you know what I mean-- she is manipulative and controlling and can't keep her promises). It wasn't until recently that I realized the fact that I hated that mother, that I so identified with and understood the daughter, meant that the book was a success. That I felt like I couldn't keep it on my shelf didn't mean it wasn't good, it meant that it was so well done that I believed it. It worked.

Mona Simpson's latest book, My Hollywood also worked. But unlike Adele in Anywhere But Here, I loved Lola and Claire in My Hollywood. They are the type of characters that you keep on hearing in your head, that are so real you almost feel like you created them, that make you feel you're the only one who really knows them. Lola and Claire live in LA in the latter part of the 20th century. Lola is a woman from the Philippines who is working as a nanny to pay for her children's college educations. When we meet her, she is on the last leg-- her youngest daughter is in medical school. She doesn't resent having to do this-- her children are her whole life, and this is just what a mother does for her children, to give them the best chance. Claire is the woman who hires her to take care of William who is told that, in LA, hiring a nanny is just what a mother does for her children, to give them the best chance. My Hollywood is about motherhood and surrogate motherhood; it's about LA and the TV business and the futility and hopelessness that exist side by side with comedy; it's about falling in love and failing at it and falling in love again. It's about the balance between your work and your life, between what you expect to happen and what really happens, between yourself and everyone else.

Simpson is a challenging writer. She asks you to understand her characters on the same level that she does. You're given the clues; you make the character yourself. This is the most powerful type of fiction, when a writer trusts her reader to create and love her characters as much as she does, but doesn't make it easy.

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

2010-09-21T15:56:00.004-04:00

Eleanor Catton has been short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize (and is one of five women out of the six people nominated) for her novel, The Rehearsal (earlier referenced as one of the books that has called to me). This is what I thought of it when I read it a few months ago:

This book has the feel of a mid-century all-girls school story, think The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but you quickly learn that it has a meta twist to it that makes it so much more than your conventional novel.

Two stories unfold together—a student and teacher have a relationship, and the whole school is abuzz. Several other students, including the girl’s sister, take sax lessons from the same woman, a Miss Brodie-like figure. They discuss the drama with her, and she seems to feed off their confessions, all the while hiding her own secrets from the world. Meanwhile, the drama school next door decides to use the account of the student-teacher relationship as material for their end of year play.

The dialogue can seem quite stilted at times, but keep in mind that the feeling the dialogue creates is very intentional. Every word and scene feels deeply intentional, in a way that almost feels creepy, like when the camera lingers on a closed door or fluttering curtain in a horror movie --you just know something is behind it.

Hilary Thayer Hamann answers our Top Five

2010-09-21T09:23:00.009-04:00

Hilary Thayer Hamann is the author of the novel, Anthropology of an American Girl (Spiegel & Grau). She will be reading and signing at the bookstore on Thursday, Sept. 23rd at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

Let’s see, there are about ten or twelve thousand books on my nightstand right now, so many in fact that I really ought to take a picture and e-mail it to you! It looks like a brick wall. And by no means does the quantity indicate my ability, just foolish, blind ambition.Lately, I’ve been interested in sparsely written fiction by women with strong underlying stories, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, a really great collection of her short stories, Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and The War. I’m curious about voice, about the possibility of establishing something idiosyncratic and unforgettable for the protagonist in a neatly written package. A lot of times what comes through a tight plot-driven book is basically the author (this is true of Jackson) in another guise, which is fine, because it’s economical. But I’m finding that, as a writer, I prefer a firmly shaped character to lead the way. I like motive and plot to reveal itself somewhat organically from the behaviors and preferences of the characters. I’ve also been doing research for my next book and so have been reading about the Vietnam era, lots of non-fiction books from the library and new works like Tim O’Brien’s excellent The Things They Carried and Karl Marlantes’ beautiful Matterhorn. I’m reading the O’Brien book to my kids (10 and 12). They are completely involved.

2. How do you write?

Following the May release of Anthropology of an American Girl (AAG) by Random House, writing became my full-time job. Prior to the release, I worked with them on the re-edit, going back and forth with the manuscript, and that took lots of time. Also, I’ve been involved in a family business for many years, which I have turned over almost entirely to my ex-husband. And, most importantly, as I mentioned, I have two young children, and one teenager in her second year of college, so my life is devoted to them and to giving them a balanced education and a happy home life. Sadly, there are not a lot of cool coffee shops where I live now, so typically I go to the public library every day and work there. Even if I feel I can’t write too many words on a given day, I know that I at least have to be with my ideas in solitude. I will read, listen to music, and organize my work. For most of the summer there was a lot of publicity happening for AAG, so I had to be ready to accept opportunities at the drop of a hat. I was working in the round, collecting and sorting, building character sketches, etc. I have one gigantic file of notes with alphabetized labels like: architecture, clothing, dialogue, music, names, scenes. This is the more or less organized dumping ground for all things connected to the project. I also have an image folder full of things from the period pulled from the web. I can play this on slide show sometimes. Last, I have a music playlist for each project. There is the AAG playlist, which I never return to now that it’s over, and I have a new one for the latest book. I build very eclectic lists that I gather meticulously, so my lists will have songs few people have ever heard of.

The song list from the book is:

Follow you, Follow me, Genesis
Can’t Find My Way Home, Traffic
You’re All I’ve Got Tonight, The Cars
Cow Cow Boogie, Ella Fitzgerald
Here I Am, Come and Take Me, Al Green
Who’s Gonna Be Your Sweet Man When I’m Gone? Muddy Waters
Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More, Allman Brothers
Turn the Page, Bob Seger
Jesus Met the Woman at the Well, Peter, Paul, and Mary
Rock On, David Essex
Bernadette, The Four Tops
Tell Me Something Good, Chaka Kahn and Rufus
Bennie and the Jets, Elton John
Mainstreet, Bob Seger
What’s Going On? Marvin Gaye
Hey You, Pink Floyd
Fire, Ohio Players
Let the Sunshine In, The Fifth Dimension
Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You, Four Seasons
Romeo and Juliet, Dire Straits
Point Blank, Bruce Springsteen
She’s the One, Bruce Springsteen
The Cisco Kid, War
My Cherie Amour, Stevie Wonder
How Soon is Now? The Smiths
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Bob Dylan (Judy Collins version)

But I listened to lots of other things that did not appear in the book (Coldplay, Pearl Jam, Beth Orton, Nina Simone, etc).

I will often work on something late into the nght, or will get up and work again. The best part about writing is when you are about “seven-tenths wet,” you know, like almost all the way in the water. Not wet enough to start retreating, but just immersed enough to have to keep plowing forward in order to survive. It’s when all your intent lay directly ahead. I am only about three tenths wet right now! I need the one voice to click in. Right now I have three in tandem, and I am waiting for one to take the lead.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

There are lots of these moments, and they come in a variety of ways. I remember being in high school and starting using journals for self discovery and self preservation. I kept these books for several years. I could have just left off there as many people do and felt that I was a writer. After all, I was writing. I got a lot of feedback on academic writing while in college and graduate school, and that was fun. I guess I was halfway through AAG when I wrote the “This is Where I Falter” scene, which falls halfway through the book between high school and college years. The book contains two distinct sections and in the middle I write in my own voice, asking for some sort of divine inspiration!

4. What are you working on now?

I am writing a few books. The main one is about my childhood in the Bronx. It was not a very picturesque landscape, but I was happy there. I want to study lower middle class security and risks. What constitutes a win, or a loss? Loyalty? Sacrifice, etc. A second is about my later life and the reversals in fortune that have occurred to me. I work on this every day. It is very much like journaling. I am also developing a book about teaching classic music, film, and books, and general media awareness to children.

5. Favorite recent find?

I actually have a great answer to this. It’s a website called “The Selvedge Yard” (http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/). It is a carefully curated home for high resolution photographs of fascinating design objects, sexy people, and cool tropes of the late twentieth century. You can find photos and essays on everything from Ford GT40 race cars to classic Schwinn Stingray bikes to the history of denim in Hollywood to the ancient art of Tebori Tattoo to amazing photos of the Rolling Stones, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Steve McQueen, etc. It’s awesome!

My super-gooey love for Our Tragic Universe

2010-09-10T15:09:00.005-04:00

I totally loved this book. Meg is a modern British girl. She is staying afloat thanks to a number of thankless jobs, including being a ghost writer for a teen series, teaching weekend workshops on the special and very particular art of ghost writing, and reviewing crappy books for the local paper, all the while at work on her 'real' novel.

This book is very philosophical-- you'll hear ideas about storytelling, the origin and end of the universe, and New Age theories on everything. Thomas allows her characters to talk a lot, possibly more than anyone would allow in real life, but it's okay here because they're smarter and more interesting than normal people.

Meg is the literary nerd version of Bridget Jones. She's smart and curious as hell, floating through her early 30s but determined to find her place. I like her because I see myself in her-- I think many of us 'transient 20-somethings' (or whatever the New York Times calls people who are trying not to turn into versions of their miserable parents) would. Funny, with a story I actually cared about. Not easy to do.

If you like the novels of Dan Brown, you might like ....

2010-09-08T15:57:00.016-04:00

Read all of Dan Brown and looking for more? Try these.

1. Cabal of the Westford Knight by David S. Brody

Did the Templar Knights ever reach the East Coast of the USA? A fictional but interesting action story, based on the findings of real artifacts and mysterious carvings found all over America. I call it "The Da Vinci Code for New England."

2. Steve Berry's "Cotton Malone series"

This series includes: The Templar Legacy, The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Betrayal, The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Paris Vendetta and The Emperor's Tomb (November). Cotton Malone, a bookstore owner in Denmark and a former US Justice operative, is always on the search for lost historical artifacts and treasures. With Steve Berry, you're sure to get a good dose of action combined with very interesting historical facts.

3. William Martin's Lost Constitution and City of Dreams

Peter Fallon, a Boston bookstore owner, brings the history of New England alive while chasing after historical documents that are either very important or valuable. Lots of local history and lots of action guaranteed.

4. William Dietrich's "Ethan Gage adventures"

This series includes: Napoleon's Pyramids, The Rosetta Key, and The Dakota Cipher. Ethan Gage is an American who some how ends up in Napoleon's army. Willy-nilly, Gage always gets involved in treasure hunts. Spectacular escapes, wild actions, history, and a lot of humor make those books very enjoyable.

Feeding the dystopian fever

2010-09-01T17:03:00.009-04:00

So you've finished Mockingjay. You're looking around, not sure what to do now that you don't need to worry about the fate of the world and everyone you've come to love (or maybe you just don't know what to read next--either way). Don't worry, we've got a few suggestions.

1. The Maze Runner Trilogy by James Dashner

This is one of those books that you won't need a bookmark for-- you'll read it in one sitting (or at least you'll want to). Thomas wakes up with no memory of who he is or where he is from. All he knows is his name. He finds himself being lifted in a metal box, and when the box opens, he is surrounded by other boys his age. Slowly he learns that they are stuck in the center of a maze, and that solving it is the only way out. Part Lord of the Flies, part Orwell, part fascinating mystery/thriller, with a little romance thrown in too. Absolutely addictive. Book two, The Scorch Trials, comes out October 12th. This was my favorite YA book from last year. And there is more to this story then just a maze--it promises to be just as large scale and political as HG.

2. The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking Series Book One by Patrick Ness

Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him -- something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn't she killed by the germ like all the females on New World? Propelled by Todd's gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.

3. Birthmarked by Caragh O'Brien

Set in the future in a world affected by environmental damage and political collapse, Gaia lives with her parents outside the Enclave, the gated community reserved for the rich and privileged. She and her mother are midwives, and must deliver a quota of babies to the Enclave each month. When her parents disappear, Gaia must solve the mysteries that surround her family and her community. This has adventure, mystery and a bit of romance. I couldn't put it down!

4. Epitaph Road by David Patneaude

Fourteen-year-old Kellen lives in a future in which 97 percent of the world's male population has been killed off by a virus. Women have taken over all governments and have relegated the remaining men to second-class-citizen status. Boys like Kellen have very few options. Something sinister is brewing, and an uprising of men who live independent of female rule coincides with a new outbreak of the virus. Kellen and his friends, Sunday and Tia, travel to the Olympic Peninsula to investigate and make sure that Kellen's dad, who lives in the colony, is protected from the virus. Each chapter begins with a haunting epitaph for one of the deceased. Most of these epitaphs express sorrow, but some are clearly for men who were abusive and are not missed by survivors. The story is fast paced, and the concept intriguing. The competent world-building allows readers to fully accept the book's premise. (School Library Journal)

5. Life As We Knew It trilogy by Susan Beth Pfeiffer

Miranda's disbelief turns to fear in a split second when an asteroid knocks the moon closer to the earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun? As summer turns to Arctic winter, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove. In her journal, Miranda records the events of each desperate day, while she and her family struggle to hold on to their most priceless resource—hope.

What are you reading after Hunger Games? Hmm?

Photo at top by Eva Skewes

Shelf Talker: Mr. Toppit

2010-08-28T16:52:00.004-04:00

As I wrote in my previous post, I'm am eagerly awaiting the release of Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton (The Other Press). I read it recently while on vacation, and this is what I thought:

This novel has a delightfully mid-century feel to it (even the font reminds me of an Iris Murdoch book), but has a lot to say about 2010: our rather embarrassing obsession with celebrity, rehab fascination, and even a take on the Oprah phenomenon. This book goes places you wouldn't expect, which is the best thing about it.

A British writer of obscure children’s books, Arthur Hayman, dies in the arms of an American tourist in London. The tourist, Laurie Clow, has a practically spiritual response to meeting Arthur and being with him at his death. She becomes an evangelist for his books, The Hayseed Chronicles, propelling them to Harry Potter-like popularity. As a result, the Hayman family, Luke, Rachel and their mother, Martha, reaps the rewards and challenges of being famous for doing nothing.

Elton has created some absolutely hysterical characters, particularly Lila, the obnoxious German illustrator of The Hayseed Chronicles who is like a mother bear protecting her cubs when it comes to the Chronicles.

I love paperback originals. Am I alone?

2010-08-28T14:00:00.000-04:00

Maybe the bookstore police will get me for saying this, but I just love to see books come out as paperback originals. And I've been thinking lately, could paperback originals save publishing? Or at least help a little bit?

The Other Press is a lovely independent publishing company that has been putting out beautiful trade paperback originals. Titles like The Glass Room and The Quickening have been great sellers for us. I think part of the reason is that though the authors are not big names, customers are willing to take a chance on a paperback that is less expensive. Every bookseller can attest to the number of times a stack of hardcover debut novels comes in, books that may be absolutely wonderful but don't receive much publicity, and are left to languish on the shelves untouched. Customers are hesitant to take a chance, when the chance costs upward of $30.

Certainly books from blockbuster authors will sell hundreds of thousands of copies in hardcover. And clearly we should not mess with that winning formula. But what about literary fiction from debut authors? I say bring on the paperback originals, especially when they are as lovely as the books The Other Press has been putting out. Giving paperback originals extras like exquisite covers, deckled edges and French flaps has transformed plain old paperbacks into collectible pieces of book art.

The AAP numbers recently released for June lend support to this idea. Adult hardcover sales are down 13.9% and adult paperback sales are up 0.9%. Paperback sales aren't up by much, but if they're not down that seems like a success in today's physical book-selling climate. I think everyone in the industry agrees that big changes are needed. And I realize that the profit margin is higher with a hardcover, and that there is a lot about publishing I don't understand. I also realize that there is some stigma for authors whose books aren't released first in hardcover (though this seems totally lame to me--does the binding really matter? Aren't we concerned about what's between the covers?). But with some tweaking, and maybe a change in perception, is a combination of more paperback originals to hardcovers a formula that could work? I think the idea merits more research.

I'm looking forward to selling two of The Other Press' new books when they come out this fall, Mr. Toppit and The Wrong Blood. These will be easy hand sells, because they're great books and, to be perfectly honest, because they only cost $14.95.

Our Deserted Island Top Five

2010-08-26T17:23:00.000-04:00

So, the age-old question: which five books would you choose to take with you if you were stuck on a deserted island? Three Water Street Bookstore booksellers give their answers.

Jeremiah

1. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

2. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

5. Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik

Jean-Paul

1. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
2. Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (releases 9/28)

3. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

4. The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart

5. Big History by Cynthia Brown

Stef

1. Three by Annie Dillard

This classic volume contains Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, and The Writing Life. Okay, sure, this is sort of cheating, but I'm using my 5 books wisely by bringing an omnibus! Annie Dillard is quite simply one of my top three favorite writers. In these books, I found paragraph after paragraph of the most fascinating, glittering prose I had ever read. Every blade of grass and star in the sky brings her wonder and joy. She lives her life in a way I could only hope to.

2. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction by Joan Didion

Again, I may be cheating here a little...but how could I choose between Joan Didion's wonderful essay collections? Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a watershed book for me. Reading it made me realize that the way words are hung together matters, that each individual sentence can be a whole world. I'll admit to heavy-handedly Didionizing my writing in college papers after discovering her, though of course I soon realized she's simply inimitable. I'll still pick this book up every once in a while when I just want to be quieted and moved by the written word.

3. A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving

My favorite Irving novel, and one of my favorite novels period, this wonderful book will always remind me of my family and my home. By the time I was in sixth grade, my parents and both of my brothers had already read it. The copy that was passed down to me is a bruised and battered paperback that I will never, ever upgrade.

4. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

All of Faulkner's great novels are deep reservoirs of meaning and tradition, but Absalom, Absalom! for me surpasses all the others. Each page uncovers secrets and clues that could never be fully picked up in a single reading.

5. Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

McDermott's lyrical prose will always comfort and calm me, and Charming Billy is my favorite of her novels. Her characters are universal figures--we know what they will do wrong before they do, we know how they love and lose, what they fight for and grieve for. Billy is a flawed and desperate character, and one that we cannot help but love. I've read this novel a half dozen times and never tire of it.

Lily King answers our Top Five

2010-08-22T18:36:00.000-04:00

Lily King answers our author questionnaire. She is the author of The Pleasing Hour andThe English Teacher. Her most recent novel, Father of the Rain, won the New England Book Award for Fiction. She will be reading and signing at Water Street on Thursday, August 26th at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin and Paul Harding's Tinkers. I'm a year behind on my contemporary lit reading.

2. How do you write?

I write while my children are school, from about 8:30-2:30 Monday through Friday. No weekends. No holidays. I write the first draft of my novels by hand in lined spiral notebooks, then type them bit by bit into the computer. I wish I could write with music in the room but I can't at all, though sometimes if I go to the coffee shop, I can handle the music there if it's not too loud. I have one cup of tea, usually around eleven in the morning, which is the highlight of my day.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

I loved to write all my life, but I don't think I allowed myself to believe I was a writer until my first short story was published in 1992. When I got a copy of that issue of Glimmer Train, I felt something shift.

4. What are you working on now?

I'm on my book tour now, and haven't been able to write for weeks, and I'm aching for my study and my cup of tea. When I can get back there, I'll continue working on a collection of short stories as well as a new novel I started when I was at an impasse with Father of the Rain.

5. Favorite recent find?

I was just on North Haven Island in Maine for a reading and I stayed at Nebo Lodge Inn. It was perfect: delicious food, wonderful staff, truly relaxing even though I was there for work.

Matthew Dicks on the Book Tour (Pt. 3)

2010-08-18T23:31:00.000-04:00

Matthew Dicks is the author of the novels Something Missing and most recently, Unexpectedly, Milo. He will be reading at Water Street this Saturday at 6pm. This is his third and final guest blog for us. Thanks Matt!

I thought I’d end this three-part series on book tours with some advice for readers who plan on attending an author’s appearances, as well as some advice for new authors preparing for their first book tour. But in the spirit of stories, one more story from my current tour.

Not all bookstores are alike. Some treat an author as a visiting dignitary, an emissary from the literary world. They meet and greet, they wine and dine, and provide introductions full of warm and loving adjectives. None of this is necessary, of course, nor is it even expected, but it’s nice when it happens.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was my recent appearance at a big box store. When I arrived at this particular store, I was greeted by a table about twenty feet from the doors, complete with a display of my books and a sign indicating that I would be “speaking and signing” at 2:00. It was 1:45.

After a five-minute search of the store, I eventually found a stock boy who used his walkie-talkie to contact the manager, who appeared five minutes later to greet me. She introduced herself, redirected me to the front of the store, and explained that she had set me up “right here.”

Right here was the same small table displaying my books that I had seen when I walked in. While there was a large space in the rear of the store for speaking engagements, the manager had inexplicably placed me in the shadow of the front doors, in the path of foot traffic.

While deciding how to handle this, I explained that I needed to use the restroom. When I returned a couple minutes later, the manager was gone and a group of a dozen readers had gathered around the table, waiting for me to speak. There were no seats for these people, nor was there any room for the seats either. I explained to my would-be audience that the manager would undoubtedly be back shortly and would arrange for some chairs or move our location entirely.

The manager never returned. At 2:00 a male voice came on the intercom to announce that I was in the store and would be speaking and signing in the front of the building.

The audience looked at me, I looked at the audience. And we all waited for about five more minutes, certain that the manager would return.

Finally, I gave up. At the behest of two impatient readers, we took charge. I turned the table around, moved two tables of books over, and commandeered a dozen chairs from the café. Audience members assisted in this reconfiguration, and by the time that we were done, we had carved out a suitable, though hardly ideal, space for the event.

Oddly enough, this worked out well. The forced teamwork and mutual disgust in the absence of assistance brought me and my audience together as one, all pulling on one chain to make this situation work, and I felt instantly accepted. I spoke for about thirty minutes and then answered questions for about forty-five minutes. And everyone bought a book.

The manager never returned. Not once. After the event was finished, people returned their chairs to the café and left. I saw the manager a couple times, hurrying this way and that, but she never approached me again.

I guess that once you use the restroom, you’re on your own.

Like I have said, you never know what to expect while on a book tour.

So in the spirit of preparing for the unexpected, allow me to offer some tips to readers and authors who might be attending or speaking at a book event soon.

First, for the readers:

1. Don’t be late. In fact, show up early and say hello. Authors are often asked to be 15-30 minutes early for an event, and there’s not much to do during that time. I’m always happy to chat with people prior to speaking, and it makes me feel good knowing that I have a new friend in the audience as I begin reading and telling stories.

2. Ask questions, and please don’t be afraid to ask questions unrelated to the book or even writing in general. As an author, I believe that anything and everything is fair game when it comes to the question-and-answer session, which is my favorite part of an author appearance. Want to know the name of my cat? Want to know what I routinely eat for breakfast? Want to know how my childhood plays a role in my fiction? All these questions are on the table, and a good speaker will be able to turn each of these questions into a story that will entertain the audience and provide a little more insight into the author as a person. Lately I’ve been giving away a prize for the oddest or most intriguing question asked, and I’ve gotten some whoppers!

3. Purchase a book, and if you’ve already bought a copy of the author’s book elsewhere, buy something else. Hosting an author event costs money, and more often than not, these events are free or the price of admission can be applied to a book. While authors are not generally paid for their appearance, bookstores incur marketing and promotional costs, expenses related to travel and lodging, and increased labor costs for the additional employee or employees who assist with the event. Make a purchase and support the store and its continued efforts to bring authors to your community. Hell, make three purchases. These are books that we’re talking about. If you’re attending an author event, you like to read.

And for authors who are just starting out:

1. Remain positive regardless of the circumstances. The story I opened with illustrates this point well. I stayed positive despite the bookstore’s failure to provide me with a suitable space (or even a few chairs), but a potential negative became a positive when the audience members and I joined forced to correct the problem. Whether you are speaking to an army of two hundred or a cluster of just four people, remember that everyone standing in front of you could be a reader for life, and they all deserve your best. And keep in mind that booksellers want to provide authors with large audiences, but sometimes it’s simply not possible. They do their best, so you must do yours, regardless of the circumstances.

2. Make an effort to bring people into the store by promoting the event as well. Use Twitter, Facebook, your website, an email blast or anything else to let potential readers know where you will be speaking. If you want an audience, do your part to ensure that one will be there to listen to you.

3. Bring a trusted friend to your first few appearances, and ask for honest feedback following the appearance. It’s extremely difficult to evaluate your own speaking performance, so having an observer who you trust is extremely beneficial, especially early on in your career.

4. Tell stories. As an author, I assume that you are a good storyteller, so use every opportunity available to you to tell a story. If I was asked about the name of my cat, I’d be sure to include the story about the time I accidentally started the dryer with him inside. If I was asked about what I routinely eat for breakfast, I’d be certain to tell an amusing story about my days of managing McDonald’s restaurants in addition to explaining that my breakfast of choice is an Egg McMuffin. Speak in stories whenever possible, and constantly seek ways of using audience members’ questions as an avenue into a story or personal anecdote.

5. Don’t spend too much time reading from your book. As one who frequently attends author appearances, I can assure you that most audience members are there to hear you talk about yourself and your book. Listening to you read a short, well chosen section of the text is great, but authors who spend even a third of their allotted time reading from their books are surely losing the attention of many audience members. Talk about the process by which you wrote the book. Talk about why you became an author in the first place. Talk about your most recent spat with your wife (provided that she is not in the audience as well). An author appearance is an opportunity for the reader to get to know you. If they like you, they will purchase your book and get to know your story on their own.
6. Tell more stories. I cannot emphasize this enough.

7. Don’t read your comments from a card or a sheet of paper. Speak naturally, make eye contact and smile. Relax. Take a public speaking class if necessary. No one wants to listen to you read a book report.

8. Self-deprecation is an undersold commodity in today’s world. Don’t be afraid to make fun of yourself and let your audience know how stupid you can be. Nothing is more endearing and amusing than a speaker who is willing to be honest and sincere. You wrote a book, so everyone already knows that you are reasonably intelligent. Do not spend your time trying to prove how smart you are. Instead, make every effort to be yourself.

Unless, of course, you are a jackass. Then pretend that you are someone else.

Good luck, and I hope to see many of you on Saturday, August 21 at 6:00!

Matthew Dicks on the Book Tour (Pt. 2)

2010-08-11T14:21:00.000-04:00

Book tours tend to be a series of unpredictable, wildly varying events that keep you on your toes. They are filled with highs and lows, but they are rarely, if ever, boring.

A weekend trip to my hometown last summer, while on my tour for SOMETHING MISSING, illustrates this well.

I had two appearances scheduled for this particular Saturday: The Blackstone Public Library in my hometown of Blackstone, MA and an indie bookstore down the road a bit in Uxbridge. I was also scheduled to appear at the public library in neighboring Millville later that evening, but when the Town Council reminded the head librarian, a former classmate, that events could not be scheduled simultaneously in their tiny town, I was bumped in favor of a pancake social.

Not so good for the authorial ego.

I was scheduled to appear with local author Stacy Juba, who was instrumental in setting up both events. Appearing alongside another author was something I did quite often last year and enjoyed a lot. Being a new author, I found that combining forces with fellow writer often provided for larger audiences and greater opportunities to make new friends in the writing community. I made a handful of new friends last year, and they have played important roles in my life as an author. Earlier this month, for example, I wrote a guest post on Stacy Juba’s blog to coincide with my own book launch, and the two blurbs on the back of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO are written by authors who appeared alongside me in Chester, Vermont earlier this year.

My wife often says that one of the unexpected blessings of my writing career has been the new and interesting friends who we have made along the way, and I couldn’t agree more.

The first appearance of the weekend, at the Blackstone Library, was full of notable highlights.

My high school English teacher, and the man who inspired me to become a writer, was the first to arrive at the library, and I was honored to be able to shake his hand and thank him for all that he did to change my life. He was joined by a handful of former classmates and friends, including my high school sweetheart, Laura, who I had not seen in years. When it came time to name Martin’s love interest in SOMETHING MISSING, I chose the name Laura as a nod to her, and so I was pleased to see that she was able to attend the appearance.

Wendy, the girl who I took to my sophomore semi-formal, also attended the event, and she came bearing a gift: a photograph of me from fourth grade, standing onstage and performing during our class’s end-of-year musical. This photograph was important for a couple of reasons:

First, I have very few photographs from my childhood, so every photo that I have is precious. To add even one image to the pile was very meaningful to me.

But this photo was especially important because it captured the moment leading up to my very first kiss, an onstage, choreographed peck on the cheek with Patti Catalano.

I remember the moment like it was yesterday. Weeks before the performance, our music teacher, Mrs. Carroll, had called upon me and Sean Trudel to perform a song and dance that would culminate with each of us dipping and kissing our dance partners. Mrs. Carroll claimed that she was choosing us for our high level of maturity, but Sean Trudel was the most poorly behaved kid in the class, so the maturity argument was nonsense and I knew it.

To this day I don’t know why I was chosen for this assignment.

Just moments after this photograph was taken (I’m the one in the white shirt with the red bandana), I dipped and kissed Patti Catalano onstage in front of friends and family, much to my horror and probably the horror of poor Patti, who was on the receiving end of my amateurish offering.

My first kiss, courtesy of Mrs. Carroll and her inexplicable decision to cast me for the part. And her equally inexplicable decision to have nine-year olds kissing onstage.

And all this from a book tour stop.

From the library, we proceeded to an independent bookstore about twenty minutes away.

Sitting in the audience at this appearance was another familiar face: Mrs. Allen, my middle school social studies teacher. Mrs. Allen was the person who inspired me to install a stage in my classroom after I spent my middle school days in her similarly-equipped classroom. She was a magnificent teacher and I think about her often in terms of my own teaching career.

And once again, she came to my rescue.

I was asked during the question-and-answer session about how I choose the potion of my book to read aloud to audiences, and I explained that the decision was a difficult one for me, so I routinely asked my agent and editor to help me decide.

“What if you were to choose without any help?” the woman pressed. “What would you have picked?”

“The last chapter,” I said, trying to keep from smiling. “That way I could’ve spoiled the story for all of you.”

The audience failed to react, apparently finding my comment significantly less amusing than I had envisioned, but after a moment of awkward silence, Mrs. Allen spoke up from the rear of the room. “He hasn’t changed a bit!” she growled, bringing the room to laughter and letting me off the hook.

This is where the things took a sour turn. When it came time to sign books, a woman in her mid-thirties pulled up a chair beside me and began talking to me about her life as a writer. Her book, her writing process, and her repeated attempts to get published. After several minutes, it became readily apparent that she was not the kind of person who fully understood the concept of boundaries and the needs of those around her. As the line of readers grew longer and longer, each waiting patiently for m signature, she leaned in closer and closer, attempting to abscond with all of my time and attention.

Eventually I offered to read the first ten pages of her manuscript, as I do for any writer who asks, and she agreed to send them along and finally made room for the next person.

Whenever I offer to read a writer’s work, I always make sure that he or she understands that it can take me a while before I get to the piece, depending on my schedule. At the time of this appearance, my school year was in full swing, report cards and parent teacher conferences were approaching, and I had just begun working on the final revision of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO. With this in mind, I explained that it could be a month or two before she heard back from me.

She said that she understood.

A month later, she politely inquired as to my progress via email, and I responded by explaining that with Thanksgiving approaching, I was hoping to read her pages during my time off. Unfortunately, I did not get to the piece during my mini-vacation, but I managed to read and comment on the pages during the following weekend, in between football games. On Monday morning, just as I was putting the final touches on my comments, I received an email from her:

Dear Matthew, please delete the e-mailed chapters. I am developing a zero tolerance policy for hollow promises.

Like a fool, I attempted to play off her comment as an obvious joke, explaining that I had actually just finished reading her pages, had enjoyed them a lot and had some comments ready for her.

Her response?

Dear Matthew...totally serious - and it has nothing to do with "read me, read me" mentality. It's the broken promises, from you and the long line of lip-servicers behind you. I am the type of person that can be taken at my word - and make every effort to fulfill a promise.. Please do not take the request to delete personally...I just no longer wish to expend expectation energy after the second (eighth, in some cases!) promise. You are a busy man. I understand completely that you didn't get to the chapters.

In addition to writing an interesting and humorous story, she is also apparently quite capable at delivering the passive-aggressive, backhanded compliment as well.

And yet I still gave her one more chance, explaining that publishing can be a difficult waiting game, and while I understood her frustration, the opportunity to receive a critique from a published author should not be disregarded. Even an author with as few credentials as me.

Her response:

Dear Mr. Dicks...please delete the three chapters... I still feel that you are deflecting accountability for your early November e-mail to "read it next week."

Note the change in salutation.

And all of this from a simple book tour appearance.

But for every negative experience come dozens of positive ones. Last weekend I spoke at RJ Julia in Madison, CT and I was once again surprised, this time by my former Manchester Community College English professor, who also came bearing gifts:

Two recommendation letters that she had written for me in 1997 that helped me gain admission to Trinity College and be named a member of USA Today’s Academic All American team. I knew at the time that the letters had been written, but until this week, I had never seen them. They were very kind, and they brought back many, many memories of my community college days.

Like I said, you never know what to expect while on tour. Mostly good, some bad, but always interesting.

Matthew Dicks' new book Unexpectedly Milo is available now. He will be reading and signing at Water Street Bookstore on Saturday, August 21st at 6pm. In the meantime, check out his blog where he's been known to write about such things as wheeled luggage, around-the-table photographs, and Jerry Maguire.

The Dreaded Started Book Pile

2010-08-11T13:10:00.000-04:00

The stack of started books next to my bed has grown to just under two feet tall. I'm not messing with you. That's a tall pile of books. Kind of dangerous, really.

These are books that I couldn't get into but don't want to give up on. And I'm not afraid to give up on books, trust me. I have chucked books across the room and left them there. That's not the issue. These are books that I know have potential to be great. They probably are great. But for some reason, they have not made it out of the Dreaded Started Book Pile. There are ARCs (publishing-speak for advanced reader copies) that I don't want to surreptitiously return to the bookstore (we have a policy that you aren't allowed to return ARCs...I guess they want to encourage us to read them, or they're worried that the place will collapse under the weight of them all. Either way.). There are new books I bought thinking I would absolutely love. There are books I've borrowed from the store to read and review (another perk of being an independent bookseller. It could also be seen as voluntary unpaid work. Either way.). There are books I started and actually liked but which, for whatever reason, got shuttled down the pile in favor of another book.

What does this precariously tall pile of books say about me? That I make bad snap judgments? That I take on way too much? That I lack the focus and sheer words-per-minute speed of the seasoned book reviewer? Or worse, that I just can't commit? Whichever reason it is, decisions need to be made. Some of these books will never be read by me. I just need to accept that. The pile must be winnowed down soon before it collapses like the leaning tower of books that it is and squashes my cat.

Matthew Dicks on the Book Tour (Pt.1)

2010-08-02T15:22:00.000-04:00

Matthew Dicks, author of the novels Something Missing and Unexpectedly Milo (Random House), writes in this guest post about the unique experience that is the book tour. This is the first of a 3 part series.

My book tour begins this week. Since this is my second book, I have a much better sense of what to expect while touring libraries and bookstores throughout New England and New York, which is to say that I have no idea what to expect.

When I first sold SOMETHING MISSING, my friends and family asked if my publisher would be sending me on a book tour. I said yes, feeling like a big shot and assuming they would, and while this was true, it was tangentially true. Book tours mean many different things to many different authors. As a first time author, it didn’t mean a lot.

Unless your books debut on the bestseller lists, it’s unlikely that your publisher is going to be sending you around the country on your book tour in today’s economic climate. The days of national book tours and high class book release parties hosted by publishers in New York City are a thing of the past. And according to authors who I have gotten to know over the past year, this shift in the way that the book industry does business turned out to be a good thing. One author I know whose publisher sent her on a three month, nationwide tour told me that her audiences averaged about ten people per visit. This proved to be quite depressing when she found herself three thousand miles from home, away from her family for weeks on end, only to be greeted by a handful of readers at each event. She estimated that the whole tour sold an additional five hundred books and was ultimately a waste of time and money.

The first stop on my tour was an indie bookstore about an hour from my home. My wife, my infant daughter and I headed down the road, not sure what to expect. While I had visions of dozens, if not hundreds of people crowding the bookstore in order to hear me speak, the number ended up being closer to a dozen, and had two of my students and their families not been kind enough to make the trip, I would have been able to count the attendees on one hand. Still, it was a good start for me. We sat in plush chairs in a rough semi-circle and ate cookies while I discussed my book and answered questions.

The one thing I have going for me is I enjoy speaking in public, which it not the case for many authors. I can also speak with relatively little preparation, so you never know what I might say while on tour. Three days before my current tour is set to launch, I have yet to even think about what I will be saying at this week’s appearances and have not found a passage to read from the book yet.

Feeling humbled by my debut, I headed to my next stop hoping that someone, anyone would be there to listen and maybe purchase a book. In between tour stops, I had listened to an author talk about how the only person to attend his first ten appearances was his brother. My brother disappeared three years ago (as he is wont to do from time to time), so I had no safety net.

Thankfully, there were more than two dozen people at my next appearance, and I say two dozen because it sounds significantly more impressive than the twenty-five people who actually showed up. And once again, things went well. I managed to make my audience laugh quite a bit and became a little more confident with this book touring business.

Hoping for somewhere between two and twenty-five people for my next stop, I was shocked to arrive at a library on the Connecticut shore and find almost two hundred people waiting for me. One thing I learned rather quickly: libraries draw large audiences almost every time.

The book tour continued for almost a year, and even though there were times when I would drive two hours to speak to six people, there was never a visit that I regretted. I spoke at bookstores, libraries, churches, high schools and even a nursing home. I attended more than half a dozen book clubs throughout the year, and oftentimes these living room events drew larger audiences than some of my bookstore appearances. I had the pleasure of appearing with other authors on several occasions, and in January I had the honor of appearing in Misty Valley Books New Voices series with four other authors, all of whom I am proud to call my friends today. Two of them wrote blurbs for the back cover of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO.

During my year of touring, I encountered some memorable people and experienced some odd and amusing situations. I met former teachers and friends, many of whom I had not seen in twenty or more years, and I managed to reconnect with my father, who I had not seen or spoken to for nearly as long. I met some bizarre individuals, was asked some strange questions and was introduced by the wrong name at least twice.

I’ll be contributing a post a week for the next two weeks, prior to my visit to Water Street Books, and in the subsequent posts, I’ll share a few of these more memorable stories with you.

I hope to see you all on Saturday, August 21 at 6:00! I look forward to meeting you all, bizarre and otherwise, and perhaps creating a few new memorable moments in the process!

Matthew Dicks

http://matthewdicks.com/ Read about my writing career and life at http://matthewdicks.typepad.com/ Become a fan on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/matthewjdicks Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MatthewDicks

The Nth Defense of Physical Books

2010-07-30T18:17:00.000-04:00

Dear Books,

I love you all. I do. But it has occured to me that the ones of you I'm fondest of, the ones that make me happiest when I think of you taking up space in my tiny apartment, are the ones that have called to me. I bought you for no other reason than that I absolutely could not live without you. I tried. I didn't buy you the first time I saw you. But I kept thinking about you. I hadn't heard good things about you (which is, by the way, bookseller parlance for "I have never seen that book before in my life, but I cannot bear to discredit my bookseller omniscience by admitting it."), hadn't read the ARC months earlier, hadn't seen you reviewed in the NYT. There was just something about you-- the stubbly texture of your cover, your smartly deckled edges, your elegant french flaps, the sharp relief of graphic color on color. By the time I had picked you up, it was all over. Something is out there by Richard Bausch, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt, Death is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca. You simply called to me. I had to answer.

Yours,

Stef

Deborah Blumenthal answers our Top Five

2010-07-30T14:19:00.000-04:00

Deborah Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and nutritionist who now divides her time between writing children's books and adult novels. She has been a regular contributor to The New York Times (including four years as the Sunday New York Times Magazine beauty columnist), and a home design columnist for Long Island Newsday. She'll be reading and signing her new picture book, The Blue House Dog, on Saturday, July 31st at 11am at the bookstore.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

The Liars' Club by Mary Karr and When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.

2. How do you write?

Writing is my full-time job, but that doesn't mean I work a 40-hour week. When I'm in the middle of a project and it's going well, I can work from morning until night. If I'm not in the middle of a project or I'm working on something that isn't going well, I waste enormous amounts of time surfing websites like Zappos.com and JCrew.com. Whether I'm productive or not, I always work in a quiet area.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

I married a writer – a reporter for The New York Times - and after that I began to think of everything in life as potential copy. I’m a nutritionist and my very first published piece was a New York Times story that my husband and I wrote jointly, about my attempts to convert him to vegetarianism. I wasn’t successful, but at least he stopped eating grilled franks with melted cheese.

4. What are you working on now?

More picture books and a YA novel.

5. Favorite recent find?

Definitely the lobster roll I had at the Beach Plum in North Hampton. In terms of books, I loved Sweethearts, a YA novel by Sara Zarr.

Elizabeth Dembrowsky answers our Top Five

2010-07-23T19:03:00.001-04:00

Elizabeth Dembrowsky has written and directed several plays, including one for the Samuel French Festival in New York City. A native of Stroughton, Massachusetts, she studied at Boston University and The Warwick Writing Programme in the UK. She'll be sharing from her new novel, My Monk: A Typographic Novel, on Monday, July 26th at 7pm at the bookstore.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

2. How do you write?

I write everywhere and anywhere. When I lived in England, I tended to keep a schedule but here in NYC I havent. I wrote about 1/2 of My Monk in offices around Manhattan while working as a temp. My new novel, I work on a lot at home but also when traveling- I am enjoying allowing the place to make its way into the story- an experiment I hope the readers will enjoy. I usually dont listen to music when I write (if I can help it), but for poetry I almost always do. My Confessions series were highly influenced by both R.E.M. and Madonna's album American Life.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

When I would be careful as I wrote my diary entries- sure the world would read them one day. Fortunately, they havent; a good thing partly because they are sooooo boring.

4. What are you working on now?

My second novel To Save One. I love writing this story and cannot wait for readers to tell me what they think of it.

5. Favorite recent find?

Semi-recent but I found a husband. Pretty wild- never thought I would find one but am thrilled I have.

Big thanks to two Exeter independent shops

2010-07-19T14:03:00.000-04:00

We had a reception here over the weekend with the American Booksellers Association, which was great fun. The board flew in from all over the country for their meeting, and we did the wine and cheese thing here Friday night. I just want to say a quick but enthusiastic thank you to two local Exeter shops for their help with the reception: La Cave a Vin and Hannah's. Laura at La Cave a Vin put together an amazing display of wine, cheese and fruit for a very reasonable price. She also carefully set up the table and made everything look lovely. And the wonderful people at Hannah's donated a big bag with hummus, tabbouleh and other treats if we put out their menus. Hannah's has both hot and cold items and a great dessert case. The people there are always incredibly friendly and accommodating. La Cave a Vin has wine and gourmet cheese, in a range of prices, as well as wine tastings and classes. La Cave is located at 103 Water Street and Hannah's is at 130 Water Street. Let's support our independent Exeter!

Random Shelf Talker

2010-07-02T19:11:00.000-04:00

Day For Night by Frederick Reiken

After I finished reading this novel, I heard someone describe the 10 chapters in the book as 10 short stories. Thinking about it that way after I had finished added another layer to this already wonderfully layered, complex, dreamlike novel.

Each chapter brings the reader to a new place, with a new character, and it is the reader's job to decipher what is important, what must carry over, what symbols to hold on to, which characters to listen to. It's a more complex way to read a book, but ultimately, so much more satisfying than a normal read.

Great writing, full characters, and a story with emotional heft. This compelling and fascinating novel will keep you guessing until the last page.

Cornelia Read answers our Top Five

2010-06-28T11:47:00.000-04:00

Cornelia Read, author of the novel, Invisible Boy, answers Water Street Bookstore's Top Five:

1. What's on your nightstand right now? 
Ah, my faux-Deco mirrored nightstands from Target up in fashionable Greenland... Well, let’s see:

Half a glass of Cran-Grape Crystal Light (pint glass with the PEA lion-rampant seal imprinted on the side, acquired last September for a buck from the sale table in the school bookstore.) And oh, how I wish it were filled with Guinness instead...

Nicotine lozenges (I quit smoking four years ago, but can’t seem to give up the alternative. Hey, it’s my last remaining vice. Um, well, other than sloth, lust, and being generally chaotic enough to have fully earned my ex-husband’s description of me as “the lightning rod for entropy in the universe.”)

A tiny bronze sculpture of a shoe with

mouse ears on it,

by my cousin Susie Read Cronin (image link).

Books:
Faithful Place by Tana French
Gatsby’s Vineyard by A.E. Maxwell
Hello Kitty Must Die by Angela Choi Life Sentences by Laura Lippman
Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell
A Bad Day for Pretty by Sophie Littlefield

2. How do you write?
From high school through my first couple of newspaper jobs, I used to listen to EXTREMELY LOUD music while writing. Sometimes it would be early Allman Brothers or Hendrix or The Violent Femmes, sometimes Puccini or Beethoven. I think ultimately it served as white noise—blocking out the noise of traffic and sirens outside my dorm rooms or apartments, neighbors throwing frying pans at each other.

Now that my brain is far older and feebler, I find music too distracting. The toughest moment of writing for me is the transition from my actual life to the butt-in-chair typing part, every single day. It always takes me at least an hour to get some momentum. If I were listening to music, I’m not sure I’d be able to make that segue.

Once I hit the sweet spot/writing groove, though, music would be beside the point—I’m oblivious to everything but (possibly) air-raid sirens. You could drive a clanking tank-tread bulldozer with a payload bucket jammed with shrieking monkeys into the center of my living room, surround it with several dozen Busby Berkeley kicklines of tap-shoed Rockettes, and drag Mahalia Jackson and Maria Callas in for a glass-shattering ABBA playlist sing-off, and the only time I’d look up would be when I got down to the dregs of my iced coffee and needed a refill.

I am blessed in that writing is my full-time job at the moment. I hope it lasts—publishing is the kind of racket in which you are well-advised to practice what I like to think of as “involuntary Zen.”

Career-wise, my Plan B is probably Wal-Mart in Epping. I figure I blew my chances at becoming an international jewel thief when I got fingerprinted one Sunday morning ten years ago in Belmont, Massachusetts, after having been pulled over for a DMV/proof-of-insurance snafu.
I burst into tears when they took my mugshot down at the police station, since I’d only run out of the house to buy milk and coffee cake at Star Market and was wearing mismatched socks with plastic garden clogs, ripped jeans, and my husband’s paint-spattered sweatshirt.
The stern older cop said, “Young lady, crying is not going to get you out of this!” To which I replied, “It’s j-j-just that if I’d... known you were... going to [stifled sob] take my picture, I would have b-b-brushed my hair.”
After that they felt so bad they let me wait in a detective’s office reading true-crime paperbacks until my husband showed up with twenty bucks to bail me out.
So, yeah: Wal-Mart. Plan B.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.
Probably when I wrote an essay on the injustice of jailing Angel Davis and the Christmas Carpet Bombings of Vietnam. I was in second grade. That was also the first time I used big-kid binder paper—the vertical kind, instead of the wide-landscape pulp stuff with room for a big picture at the top. My teacher Mrs. Boys told me I’d done a great job on the essay, but then again she taught us Russian folksongs so we’d “know what to sing come the revolution.”

That year I also had a poem published in a local little review, The Poetry Shell. This was a haiku, which unfortunately (as my mother pointed out) rhymed.

4. What are you working on now? 
Valley of Ashes, my fourth novel, set in Boulder, Colorado, in 1996. It’s chock-full of: murder, infidelity, autism, toilet-training young twins, arson, utterly annoying hippies, utterly annoying psycho conservatives, and why journalism doesn’t pay. I think it’s going to be THE feel-good book of 2011. Your mileage may vary...

5. Favorite recent find?

A hardcover 1936 auction catalog titled The Splendid Library and Collection of Historical and Literary Autographs of the Late Mr. and Mrs. William A. Read. I found it at Colophon Books on Water Street, here in Exeter--just in time to buy as a forty-seventh birthday present to myself.
William Augustus and Caroline Seaman Read were my great-grandparents (“small preppy world,” as my pal Muffy Srinivasan would say.) Before leafing through this catalog, I’d had no idea the two of them were book people at all.

He founded a Wall Street investment bank that came to be known as Dillon Read. This firm underwrote bond issues for New York City’s first subway line, Germany’s World War I reparations, the sale of Dodge Motors to Chrysler, several sketchy Latin American governments, and the Triborough Bridge.

The next generation had a fabulous time squandering his sizeable self-made fortune, but it’s this hundred-eighty-seven-page list of books and documents “the heirs” sold off in 1936 that most breaks my heart: highlights include the first four folio editions of Shakespeare, “highly important letters of George Washington and Benedict Arnold, and a remarkable collection of witchcraft manuscripts,” and a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Edgar Allan Poe, thanking him for dedicating The Raven and Other Poems to her.
There’s even Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of George Chapman’s The Whole Works of Homer (circa 1616), “bearing numerous notes in his hand... enclosed in a crimson full crushed levant morocco solander.”

The catalog’s foreword claims that “[T]he treasures and delights of a collection such as this... must be seen standing on shelves in noble battalions to be appreciated as the monument it is to the memory of two keen minds whose desire was to build a world of refuge and fill it with the most thrilling records of history and the most glamorous figures of literature.”
I leaf through this catalog, the last evidence left of this couple’s collection, and think “and their kids sold it all off in 1936—so you know they got top dollar. I mean, the height of the Depression? IDIOTS!”

It’s not as though my grandfather was short of cash, at the time. He used to have his chauffeur carry a fresh hundred-dollar bill at all times, so he could blow off paying tolls. None of the tollbooth cashiers in the Thirties could make change for a hundred.
That robber-baron bounty trickled down to my generation about as well as the fruits of Reaganomics did to your average migrant farm worker. As my protagonist/alter ego Madeline Dare would say: “My money is so old there’s none left.”

2010-06-24T13:22:00.000-04:00

The lovely Amy McCoy, author of the cookbook Poor Girl Gourmet and genius behind the blog of the same name (www.poorgirlgourmet.blogspot.com) answers our Top Five:

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

It appears that you've caught me at a very food-centric reading time; normally, there's only one food-related book in rotation at a time, but not so now. I always have a few books that I'm working on, and the current pile includes Paula Butturini's Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy. I heard an interview with Paula Butturini on NPR shortly after her book was released, and was intrigued by the fact that food played such an integral role in maintaining normalcy during her husband's illness; it's remarkable to me how important and unifying a role food can play in our lives, and how the act of creating meals (the shopping, the preparation, and then the enjoying) can provide a sense of meaning and accomplishment even in the most difficult times. I'm also reading The Oldways Table: Essays and Recipes from the Culinary Think Tank by Oldways founder K. Dun Gifford and Sara Baer-Sinnot. It's incredibly inspirational to read their approach to food, and to know that Oldways was founded well before eating whole, fresh, local foods was as accepted as it is today. And, speaking of ahead of his time, Wendell Berry's The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry is also in the mix; it's nice to be able to read a profound essay about our relationship to the land, work, and food before bed every now and again, and Berry never disappoints.

2. How do you write?

I am a write-in-quiet type. Generally, I tend to write most effectively in the afternoon, and I find that ideas that have been ricocheting around my head for days will suddenly gel when I'm doing the most mundane of tasks; washing dishes is the most common one during which I find myself ready to write, at which point, I need to dry my hands and get to the computer straight away. I generally don't have writer's block (this is likely due to the fact that I am not ever at a loss for the spoken word, either). I'm not yet a full-time writer, though I intend to change that in the near future. When I was writing the cookbook, writing was my full-time gig, both because of how quickly the manuscript had to be delivered (just over four months from the time it was picked up by Andrews McMeel), and also because that old day job of mine was nonexistent.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

I think I'm still getting used to this. When I was a child, and through my teen years, I knew I was a writer. During a writing class in college, the professor announced to the class, "If you don't write every day, you're not a writer." Sad to say what the state of my self-esteem must have been at nineteen years old, but I didn't write every day, and so I gave up on being a writer for quite a while. I took writing classes here and there as an adult, but usually without enough time outside of work to actually spend writing, so my writing was amateurish, as I would rush to get assignments done in time for class reviews. It was only once I was unemployed that I was able to dedicate the time to writing, and improve at it. Or, perhaps, return to where I was with it - in terms of confidence - as a younger person.

4. What are you working on now?

For the most part, I'm working on book promotion for Poor Girl Gourmet: Eat in Style on a Bare-bones Budget, though I do have a good-sized backlog of recipes burning a hole in my recipe notebook, as well as essays that must eventually get out of my head and onto my blog. I also have an idea for a second "Poor Girl Gourmet" cookbook, so, with luck, I'll be able to start work on that in the not-too-distant future.

5. Favorite recent find.

I love making jams and jellies, and don't normally buy them because I figure I can do a decent enough job on my own, but I recently found these jams - through Twitter (oh, and I'm pretty excited about Twitter, too) from a company called Sunchowder's Emporia. The woman who runs the company, Wendy, was downsized out of a job, took her love of cooking and turned it into this wonderful company with interesting flavored jams, like peach-lavender (which I use as a glaze for goat cheese-stuffed chicken legs) and zucchini-ginger. They're fabulous. In addition to Sunchowder's Emporia and Twitter, I love IceMilk Aprons, a small family-owned company out of Atlanta, making the loveliest heirloom aprons. I'm also pretty jazzed up about the Romano beans, less commonly known winter squashes (including Boston Marrow and Marina di Chioggia), and Armenian cucumbers (really, squash, but they're called cucumbers, presumably because they're eaten more like cucumbers - sliced and uncooked) growing in our garden.

Random Shelf-Talker

2010-06-22T09:43:00.000-04:00

Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

This book is so close to my heart that it is hard to properly describe it. Let me just say, I stayed up all night to finish it. By the morning, the pages were tear-stained and underlined with pink pen. Since finishing it, I've left it on my coffee table so that I can open it and re-read a paragraph or two whenever I feel like it. And I am typically a prodigious alphabetizer, so this is saying something.

Hamann's writing is dramatic and powerful in this intense coming of age story. Eveline Auerbach is a young middle-class woman growing up in East Hampton, New York in the 70s and 80s. She is a unique soul-- at times an artist, and at times a muse. She feels acutely the pull of expectations, but never lets go of her first, transformative love. Hamann is able to put her finger on something that is both deeply personal, and, in many ways, universal to the girl-into-woman experience. If you want to be swept up in a story, this is the story.

Reviewed by Stef Kiper

Poem of the Week

2010-06-21T14:39:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Green Apple Books for the idea of the poem of the week. Bookseller and poet Jeremiah Gould chose this poem by Kate Greenstreet (from Case Sensitive, Ahsahta Press, 2006).

I want you to see me

A crime had turned me into a phone. I tried to get sympathy from Michael
but he thought it was funny. It hurt to laugh, but I had to. My receiver
was transparent. I kept saying but Mike, I'm a phone. (I was still a person,
in a way. I still had my legs.)

It was on the level of having a terrible deformity, or only one purpose
(and not one I chose). I wanted him to care, but he was being so Mike.
There was a flag or something patriotic on me-- imprinted, near the dial.
Red and blue and the white of my transparency. I couldn't even be a
regular phone.

2010-06-18T19:15:00.000-04:00

I've asked Maren Tirabassi, a friend of the bookstore and one of our authors for Monday night's event, to contribute something for the blog. This is what she chose:

Midnight prayer before the wedding

God, I want the weather to be perfect, the food delicious, the music romantic, our relatives well-behaved and our guests sober enough to drive home. I want to look wonderful and have the photographs to prove it. I want to be poised and remember my vows and everyone’s names. I want old friends and new ones to mingle, and awkward feelings to evaporate in the first ten minutes. I can imagine every kind of catastrophe, including someone not understanding the “same gender” part of the “loving” in our invitation. I have run out of time, temper, tact and toothpaste and so, wonderful party-God, I put you in charge of miracles and ask only for a good night’s sleep. Amen.

This new guidebook for clergy, justices of the peace and the gay and lesbian couples who are choosing to be married in New England states includes a brief history of marriage, simple explanations of those who are uncomfortable sharing the benefits of marriage with everyone, common sense advice on family relationships and a wealth of ceremony possibilities. Espiscopal Bishop Gene Robinson wrote the foreword and former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Marie Harris has contributed seven beautiful poems for wedding services.

from All Whom God Has Joined: Resources for clergy and same-gender loving couples by Leanne McCall Tigert and Maren C. Tirabassi

Our first post

2010-06-15T15:42:00.000-04:00

We are devoting our very first blog entry to an author who is coming to the bookstore this Wednesday at 7pm. James Sullivan is the author of Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin. And thanks to the community blog at Newtonville Books for the author questionnaire idea.

James Sullivan answers:

Water Street Bookstore's Top Five

Q: What's on your nightstand right now?

A: On my nightstand: Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker -- Impressively well-written, much-more-sweet-than-bitter recollections of an oddball, baseball-obsessed childhood in Vermont, told through random images from the author's old baseball card collection. Each card is another madeleine... and I am a bit of a cookie monster! Baseball fanatic, too. Also: God Is Not One by BU professor Stephen Prothero, who makes reading about religion, dare I say it, fun. (Unlike the Monkees, I'm not much of a believer.) Endurance, Alfred Lansing's old book about Shackleton. And Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, by Peniel E. Joseph.

Q: How do you write? (i.e. Is it your full time job, or do you have to fit it in here and there? Do you require a completely silent, empty room, or do you listen to music? If you listen to music, what was the soundtrack for your latest book? etc.)

A: I am, believe it or not, a full-time, independent, freelance writer and author. Bringing home the bacon! (Even if it often feels more like bacon bits.) I have an office-slash-lair in the attic, to which I repair the moment my kids leave for school. I write (and social-network, and surf the web) furiously until they get home, and if possible, until dinnertime, or until someone needs me to throw some batting practice or bring the dog back after he's knocked open the screen door, whichever comes first.

I was a music critic for the SF Chronicle and my second book was about James Brown (The Hardest Working Man), so I listen to lots of music -- all over the map -- while writing. For Seven Dirty Words, I listened to a near-constant stream of Carlin routines (and watched all the HBO specials), of course. I also listened to a lot of music he enjoyed, from doo-wop (I bought a 45 of one of his favorite songs, Marvin & Johnny's "Cherry Pie") to folk-rock (like the Dillards).

Q: Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

A: First knew I was a writer when I read the Middlesex News sports section at age 10 or so, every day, religiously, especially the sports section, and then a few years later pored over the interviews in Rolling Stone. In each case, I could tell that I wanted nothing more than to be -- not the athletes and rock stars, but the writers who described what they did in such evocative language.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I'm working on my Twitter feeds and my sanity.

Q: Favorite recent find? (It can be a book, writer, film, restaurant, music, place, website, video, recipe, person--anything you're excited about.)

A: Favorite recent finds: "Modern Family." Psychedelic South African band BLK JKS. Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza. Gray hairs in my new goatee.