Students from Grant Reading Tonight

I bet you're in the mood to listen to some talented young local writers tonight, right? If so, please join us at 7 tonight as students from Grant High School who have been working with writers Karen Karbo and Ryan Blackletter in Literary Arts' Writers in the Schools Program read from their work. This amazing program, which pairs professional and student writers for several weeks at a time is one of our favorite pieces of Portland's literary quilt. We hope you can join us to hear some of the best young talent around. Always a fun night!

ABA Indies Choice Book Award Winners

The American Booksellers Association has announced the winners of the inaugural Indies Choice Book Awards. Formerly the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, the new Indies Choice Book Awards reflect the spirit of independent bookstores nationwide through new categories and a broader range of winners and honor books.

The 2009 Indies Choice Book Award winners, chosen by the owners and staff at ABA member bookstores during more than four weeks of voting, are:

• Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction): The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (The Dial Press)
  
  
• Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction): The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead)
  
  
• Best Author Discovery: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Ecco)
  
  
• Best Indie Young Adult Buzz Book (Fiction): The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins)
  
  
• Best New Picture Book: Bats at the Library, by Brian Lies (Houghton Mifflin)
  
  
• Most Engaging Author: Sherman Alexie

"On behalf of independent booksellers across the country, we're proud to announce the first Indies Choice Book Award winners," said ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz. "Each perfectly represents the array of unique and thought-provoking titles championed by ABA members. We look forward to saluting the winning authors and illustrators at a very festive Celebration of Bookselling Luncheon at BEA."

Five Indies Choice Book Awards honor recipients were also named in each category:

Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction) Honor Books

• City of Thieves, by David Benioff (Viking)
• The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
• Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill (Pantheon)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
• Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)

Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction) Honor Books

• American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, by Steven Rinella (Spiegel & Grau)
• The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins (Knopf)
• Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir, by Michael Greenberg (Other Press)
• A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America, by Tony Horwitz (Holt)
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami (Knopf)

Best Author Discovery (Debut) Honor Books

• Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central)
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
• Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (Algonquin)
• The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block (Random House)
• White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

Best Indie Young Adult Buzz Honor Book (Fiction)

• Graceling, by Kristin Cashore (HMH)
• Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
• Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (Tor)
• My Most Excellent Year, by Steve Kluger (Dial)
• Savvy, by Ingrid Law (Dial)

Best New Picture Book Honor Books

• Louise, the Adventures of a Chicken, by Kate DiCamillo; illustrated by Harry Bliss (HarperCollins)
• Monkey and Me, by Emily Gravett (Simon & Schuster)
• The Pout Pout Fish, by Deborah Diesen; illustrated by Dan Hanna (FSG)
• Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox; illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Harcourt)
• Wave, by Suzi Lee (Chronicle)

Most Engaging Author Honor Recipients

• Michael Chabon
• Ann Patchett
• Jon Scieszka
• David Sedaris
• Terry Tempest Williams

Winners and honor books are all titles appearing on the 2008 Indie Next Lists, which launched last July, and on the Book Sense Picks Lists from the first half of the year. Most Engaging Author honorees are being recognized for being engaging at in-store appearances, as well as for having a strong sense of the importance of independent booksellers to their communities at large.

I'm happy to note that several of the authors selected for Most Engaging Author honor have appeared in Portland recently thanks to the efforts of Literary Arts -- and having heard many of them myself I can assure you they are well deserving of such an honor.

How many of these books have you read? Do you agree with the selections? Come on down and talk to us about them. We love to talk about all things books!

These Kids Can Write!

Writers in the Schools is a program of Literary Arts, a statewide, nonprofit organization that enriches the lives of Oregonians through language and literature. In 2007-2008, Writers in the Schools placed writers in 73 classrooms to lead semester-long writing workshops with students in nineteen schools: Sixty-one talented, inspired and brave Portland Public High School teachers working with 25 professional writers and more than 2,600 students. During this dedicated writing time, students experimented with poems, plays, fiction, creative nonfiction and graphic novels. They wrote about themselves, their families, their friends and the world we all share. A selection of their work -- honest, wise and funny -- has just been published in the anthology entitled I Once was Young and Strong: Writers in the Schools 2007-2008 Student Anthology, with cover art by Jeff Vorhies of Lincoln High School and back cover art by Emily Spearing, also of Lincoln High School. Mary Rechner directs the Writers in the School Program, and Broadway Books is proud to be a supporter of this great program. The anthology is available for purchase for $10 at our store.

Lunch with Calvin Trillin!

How would you (and a friend) like to have lunch with Calvin Trillin at a Vietnamese restaurant of your choice?? Literary Arts is offering a chance for you to do just that! Raffle tickets cost $25 each, or five for $100 and can be purchased at Broadway Books (cash or check only, please). Only 200 tickets max will be sold for each drawing, so your chances are good. The lunch will take place on February 17th, and Mr. Trillin will be speaking that night as part of the Portland Arts & Lectures series. Included in lunch -- besides his scintillating conversation -- will be an autographed book. Mr. Trillin's most recent book is Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme. He is also the author of the moving memoir about his wife Alice, entitled, not surprisingly, About Alice, as well as several other collections of essays (many about food) and collections of humorous political rhymes. The winning ticket will be drawn February 10th from the stage at the Elizabeth Gilbert/Ann Patchett lecture. As they say about the lottery, you can't win if you don't play!

Award-Winning Fiction - in Paperback!

Looking for some great award-winning fiction? Here are three top-notch suggestions for you, all recently published in paperback:
Pulitzer Prize: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz - a fierce, funny, tragic book that tells the story of a first-generation Dominican-American ghetto nerd, while bridging several generations and cultures.
Man Booker Prize: The White Tiger, Aravind Adigo - an unadorned portrait of India as seen from the bottom of the heap -- compelling and darkly humorous.
National Book Award: Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen - an epic masterpiece from his Everglades trilogy, a wrenching story of familial, racial, and environmental degradation, stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression.
Oregon Book Award: Bearing the Body, Ehud Havazelet - Corvallis-based Havazelet's first novel tells the story of widower and Holocaust survivor Sol Minsky and his two sons, Daniel and Nathan, portraits of people bearing the weight of their family.

Ken Kesey Award Winner

Just out today in paperback: Bearing the Body, by Corvallis author Ehud Havazelet. The book was just selected as this year's winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction in the 2008 Oregon Book Awards. It was also named a New York Times notable book of the year. We've got copies!