Tomorrow the trade show for NEIBA (New England Independent Booksellers Association) starts in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s a chance for booksellers and publishers to come together, talk about upcoming books, gossip, etc. Imagine a smaller, homier version of BEA.
I’m having dinner with a few authors on Friday night: Rudolph Delson, author of Maynard & Jennica and Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else. Being the good bookseller that I am, I’m trying to read both books before meeting them. That’s only fair. I finished Delson’s book last night and started Hunt’s. They are very different books. M&J is a modern love story told through the voices of 35 different people, while invention tells the story of an unlikely friendship between an elderly Nikolai Tesla and a young chambermaid in the hotel where he lives.

A great trailer for Shalom Auslander’s forthcoming Foreskin’s Lament.

The Harvard Coop—not to be confused with independently owned Harvard Book Store—called the police last Thursday on three students who were collecting information for a student run textbook website after they refused to leave. The Coop claims it’s intellectual property. Also, though the police showed up, no one was forced to leave. How very civilized.

The Huffington Post posted about the Harvard Coop asking the student when they saw him writing down price information on textbooks. Except the picture they include is the wrong store! They’ve got a picture of my store, the independent one, not the Barnes & Noble managed one.

Yes, it’s confusing with the names. I have to explain all the time that we are not in fact the official Harvard University textbook store. But we’ve been around for 75 years, so we’re not likely to change the name anytime soon.

• Barnes and Noble exposed! A student was asked to leave the Harvard MIT Coop after writing down prices of several textbooks. the best part is that no where in the article does it mention that the Coop is run by Barnes & Noble. People are often shocked when I tell them that—often people who have lived in the area for years. It’s not a state secret that B&N and Follett run the majority of the bookstores in the country. I think there is only one college campus bookstore in the Boston area that is still independent.
• More Shalom Auslander is always a good thing.
• I agree with Scott at Slushpile about Peter Sacks’s whiny essay. Cry me a river.
• Levi Asher’s online symposium on book pricing is fascinating.
• Ed has jumped wholeheartedly onto the Remainder bandwagon. This is what Alex, a fellow bookseller at my store, had to say about it:
  

  This weird, wonderful novel latched onto my brain for the duration of the week I spent reading it. I found myself very directly reminded of its nowhere man narrator as I clambered up the stairs to my apartment at the end of each workday –- reminded of his emerging obsession with identifying and capturing authentic, meaningful, everyday moments. Readers, actors, artists, and observers of all sorts will find something to brood upon in this story of a man who has lost his memory in a violent accident. He is provided with nearly infinite resources to repair his fractured reality; what results is surreal.

• Ed also has a rundown of the panel report on the crisis in book reporting. James Marcus also has posted about it.

Ah, the Mamas and the Papas.  I returned from a weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia late last night in time to watch the Sox lose to the Yankees. That’s okay. I’m not going to let this ruin my birthday. Monday birthdays are odd. So far it feels like a regular day, except for the lovely sweet-smelling, pink tulips sitting next to me on the desk.  I read Richard Russo’s new book The Bridge of Sighs (on sale next week) on the plane ride there and back. I expect this book will get some glorious reviews. I have only a few small reservations about it, but it’s still quite a damn good book. I think Mameve Medwed’s review in yesterday’s Globe somewhat off the mark. She makes the story seem too simplistic, but she’s correct when she says “whatever the scale of their lives, Russo’s characters – the stars and the walk-ons – are gorgeously drawn. The writing is always in service of illuminating them”.

• That Shalom Auslander—even when he writes about sex, he’s good.
• Somehow I’m not surprised at the books Knopf turned down publishing. They’re still one of the gold standard of publishing, quality-wise that is, so why are people shocked that they made their share of “mistakes”. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but considering how much crap is being published these days, I wish more publishing houses were as discerning as Knopf used to be. (thanks Bookslut)
• The newest issue of the Quarterly Conversation is available, with essays by Garth Hallberg and Scott Esposito, reviews by Sarah Weinman, Callie Miller, and Matthew Cheney amongst others.
• I’ve just discovered that Mary Beard has a blog. She’s a well-know Classicist, who’s always doing interesting things. One of the things I appreciate about her most is her desire to get everyone excited about Classics (trust me, start talking about how much fun Herodotus is at a dinner party and see how fast it takes for everyone to stop and stare at you) again. It’s not an elite academic study anymore.
• Last November, five publishing bigwigs gathered at The New School for LWC}NYC, a literary writers conference organized by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and conceived by literary agents Judith Weber and Nat Sobel. The conference, for MFA and post-MFA writers of literature, is aimed at journeymen and women, determined craftspeople who have finished their apprenticeships but who have yet achieved master status. There’s another conference this November 8 to 10th. The Virigina Quarterly Review has helpfully put the podcast of the event and the transcript online.
• I got the same email as Ed and The Literary Saloon regarding the embargoed information about the Heinz Awards, though I ignored it. Good for Eggers I suppose. I was more interested in that two, yes two, Cantabrigians also won: Dr. Donald M. Berwick, Cambridge, Mass., public policy award. Berwick has worked to ensure that health care institutions better coordinate patient care and implement improved quality controls; Hugh Herr, Cambridge, Mass., technology, economy and employment award. Herr, a double-amputee and researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was given the award for his advances in rehabilitation technologies that help improve quality of life.
• I finished a book late last night which even though is not coming out until next March I wanted to go ahead and mention. Did you know that James Howard Kunstler wrote fiction? I didn’t. I know him from The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere. Our PGW (I’m still going to call them that even though Perseus has taken over. I still call Hachette Little Brown after all) rep called on me last week to sell the Winter 2008 list. Grove Atlantic has this lovely novel by Kunstler called World Made by Hand. Imagine a more personal, less post apocalyptic and dark version of The Road (sorry, the comparison will be inevitable). Set decades in the future, the oil has finally run out and catastrophe after catastrophe has broken apart the world. But it’s not full of roaming bands of catamites and Mad Max-esque thugs. Small towns have gone back to the old ways of living off the land without electricity and machines. I found it fascinating partly because the author does such a good job of keeping it realistic. Whereas The Road invokes an epic struggle ala The Odyssey, World Made by Hand brings to mind Hesiod’s Works and Days. I found it absorbing and difficult to put down.

Reading this essay by Michael O’Donnell on the NBCC blog today, I thought to myself, here is someone writing in a more clear way almost exactly what I feel about book review pages. I haven’t had a chance to wade through Steve Wasserman’s lengthy article on the death of book reviews. I’ll try to write some more after I finish reading it.

Who knows when that will be. Work is crazy, what with students coming back to town and our event season getting underway. My job is full of keeping on top of tiny little details. I constantly read reviews to see what the demands might be. I call the publishers to track down shipments or to double check publication dates. I create lists of books for the various rotating displays in the store. I’m in the middle of creating a brand new section for the store. Plus we re-carpeted last week, which meant someone had to stay over night. I was here from ten on Thursday night until 5 am Friday morning. All of this is to say that though I may not be posting a lot these days, I’m still reading, still amongst the books everyday. I’ll tell you one book right now that I loved that I haven’t seen in any of those Best Books of the Fall lists—Yannick Murphy’s Signed, Mata Hari. Who knew a book could make you rethink Mata Hari? The entire time you’re reading, you feel bad for her as she goes back and forth in time telling her story. I know there’s so many good books coming over the next few months—I haven’t seen as rich a season in many years—but read this one too.

Bostonist has a nice interview with local favorite Junot Diaz. I had no idea that there were so many Diaz fans out there. I thought I would have to work pretty hard to get his book out there, but people seem to be clamoring. The reviews started rolling in this weekend, most reviewers commenting on the length of time between Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We’re lucky enough to have a reading with Diaz this Wednesday, September 12th. He’s certainly getting himself out there. He deserves all of the accolades—this is truly a wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read this year.