Hardcover Fiction Sales -- Ideas to Ponder

Hmmmm. Let's see. What hardcover novels should you pick up at 25% off this weekend during our splendtacular (splendiferous and spectacular) sidewalk sale this weekend? Today we just got in the new mystery by James Lee Burke. Or perhaps you're more in the mood for The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels (author of Fugitive Pieces). Or perhaps you want a debut novel, say Last Night in Montreal, by Emily St. John Mandel, or Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke. Maybe you've been dreaming of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Nancy Drew meets Harriet the Spy for grownups), by Alan Bradley (with two more installments of Flavia books under contract -- yippee!). Or have you been eager to read the new book by Shadow of the Wind author, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game, also set inBarcelona? The latest from Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet, etc), The Little Stranger? Or perhaps you have your heart set on two books getting a lot of great buzz lately: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (a supernatural puzzler involving the Salem witch trials) by Katherine Howe, or The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (the story of a 12-year-old genius cartographer) by Reif Larsen. Maybe you're in the mood to laugh yourself silly with Christopher Moore's Fool, a spoof on King Lear as only Moore can tell it. Or maybe you've been drooling over the book Roberta and Jennie have been raving about: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, the epic novel set primarily in Ethopia and the US. We've also got new hardcover fiction from Phillip Margolin, Chuck Palahniuk, John Grisham, Janet Evanovich, Laurie King, Glen David Gould, Alice Hoffman, Elizabeth Berg, Charlaine Harris, David Baldacci, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz, just to name a few. Or maybe you've decided to use our big sale to make a dent in your holiday shopping: Signed copies of Border Songs, the new novel by Jim Lynch (The Highest Tide) for all of your friends and family. Oh, choices, choices. And these are just a few of the many you can pick up for -- did I mention it already? -- 25% off this weekend only!!! And don't forget about all the great specials we'll have out on our sidewalk: most will be $4 each, or 3 for $10. Come early for the best selection!! Friday & Saturday we're open from 10 am to 7 pm, and Sunday we'll be here from noon to 5 pm.

Hardcover Fiction 25% Off -- and More!

This weekend, July 17-19th, is the annual Northeast Broadway Sidewalk Sale! We will have a wonderful selection of titles available on our sidewalk for $4 each, or 3 for $10. A portion of our sale proceeds will go to our ongoing causes, Literary Arts and the NxNE Community Health Center. This year we are also offering ALL hardcover fiction -- including mystery, sci-fi, and young adult/middle readers, along with general fiction -- at 25% off. There's no limit to the number you can buy! This sale only applies on the three days of the sidewalk sale, and it doesn't include special orders. Come early for the best selection. While you're here, check out the great sales at other participating merchants on Broadway, enter to win prizes (including a free night's stay at McMenamin's Grand Lodge), listen to bands, check out the Greyhounds available for adoption at Furever Pets, and enjoy ice cream from the Umpqua Bank roving ice cream truck. A fun weekend for all. We look forward to seeing you!

Winners of 2009 Thriller Awards

The Association of International Thriller Writers announced the winners of the 2009 Thriller Awards at a ceremony in New York City Saturday night.

Best Thriller of the Year went to Jeffery Deaver's book The Bodies Left Behind. Deaver's book is an epic cat-and-mouse chase filled with Deaver's patented twists and turns, where nothing is what it seems, and death lingers just around the next curve on a deserted path deep in the midnight forests of Wisconsin. The Bodies Left Behind, available now in hardcover, will be published in August in paperback.

Tom Rob Smith won the Best First Novel Award for his debut novel Child 44, set in 1950s Stalinist Russia, where the only crimes acknowledged to exist are crimes against the state. In this setting of fear, paranoia, and brutality, war hero and MGB officer Leo Demidov hunts for a serial child killer. Child 44 is available in paperback now. Smith's second Demidov novel, The Secret Speech, was published in hardcover in May.

Katrina from A to Z

My brother and his wife and kids live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is a few hours west of New Orleans and quite close to the Gulf of Mexico. When Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita came through, it was a pretty scary time -- especially with Rita, since the eye of the that storm passed almost directly over Lake Charles. Although they lost every tree in their yard and sustained damage to the house, the good news is that no one was hurt or lost, and most of their belongings were undamaged. But I remember sitting in Portland glued to the news during both events, and being especially stunned at what took place in New Orleans following Katrina. In the United States? In our lifetime? It just seemed unthinkable.

Last week Zeitoun, the new book by Dave Eggers, arrived in the store. It tells the Katrina story and its unbelievable aftermath through the eyes of one family, the Zeitouns. Here's the book description below:

"When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous 47-year-old Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy an American who converted to Islam and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research - in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria."

Tulane History Professor Douglas Brinkley (and author of The Great Deluge, also about Katrina) says of this book, "Zeitoun is a poignant, haunting, etheral story about New Orleans in peril. Eggers has bottled up the feeling of post-Katrina despair better than anyone else. This is a simple, beautiful book with a lingering radiance."

I gobbled this book up. Experiencing Katrina through the eyes of an individual family really makes it all seem more real than the images I had watched on the TV news. Now I'm hungry for more. Reading Zeitoun reminded me that I have another book that I bought shortly after Katrina: 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, by Chris Rose, a New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist, which recounts the first four harrowing months of life in New Orleans after Katrina. It is described as a roller coaster ride of observations, commentary, emotions, tragedy, and even humor. So that's where I'm going next.

I'm particularly excited about two more books about Katrina coming out soon. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld, is a graphic novel that portrays both the undeniable horrors and the humanitarianism triggered by Hurricane Katrina by following six New Orleanians from the hours before Katrina strikes to its aftermath. That book will be published in hardcover on August 18th. The second book, which is out now, is coming out in paperback September 1: City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza, is a novel that tells the Katrina story through the eyes of two New Orleans families, one black and one white.

But until those two are published, I highly recommend reading Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, who has also written What is the What, a fictionalized telling of the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco.

Win Tickets to 2009 National Book Awards

I just learned about this cool thing that the National Book Foundation is doing. I've reprinted here the description of the project from their Website:

"To celebrate the 60th year of the National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation will present a book-a-day blog on the Fiction winners from 1950 to 2008.

"The blog will run from July 7th to September 21st, starting with Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm, ending with Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, and including works by Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Alice McDermott. Discover lesser known but equally talented National Book Award Fiction Winners such as Conrad Richter, Wright Morris, and Robb Forman Dew. Then return here, on September 21st, you will have a chance to select The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction and win two tickets to the 2009 National Book Awards, the first time in its history the Awards will open to a public vote."

When you click on an active book cover, you go to a page with information about the book and about the literary world that year. Very interesting. Visit every day for the next 77 days, and if you want to read any of them, give us a call and we'll see if we can order you a copy (if we don't already have it). Check it out here.

Guatemalan Blank Books

Sixty new blank books hit the store today. All are covered with colorful Guatemalan fabric and the pages are lined, making the books perfect for travel journals, diaries, recipes – whatever! The fabrics are so bright and the books are fair-trade. They are priced at $8 each. Grab a couple while you’re here!

2010 Calendars are Arriving!

We just cracked open our first box of wall calendars for 2010. Such a lovely selection! We received about three dozen titles today, and they’re all on display in the store. Beauties! We’ll be receiving more as the summer progresses, but for those who can’t wait to start counting days for the coming year, now is a great time to visit the store, before the favorites start selling out. We also have a handful of mini wall calendars, engagement books, and page-a-days for 2010, as well as the ever-popular August-to-August engagement calendars (this year's colors: black, pink, green, blue, purple, and red). Let's make a date!