Where Have You Been???

Did you miss us? Sorry I've been gone for so long. After our last post ("An Embarrassment of Riches") you might have guessed that I've had my nose buried in all the great new books that have just been published, and that would be a pretty darned good guess. But, unfortunately, incorrect. The ugly truth is that Saturday was my birthday, and I took a few days to celebrate with friends and family. And a good time was had by all. Not to go into the gory details, but let's just say it included air hockey, putt-putt golf, and photo booths. And a modicum of alcohol. AWI to my friends.

But the upshot is I'm now back in action, and what do I find but even MORE great books making their way to the store, including the first new novel in years from Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, The Water is Wide, etc.): South of Broad. Not only do we have his new book, but we also have autographed copies! (And they're actually signed by Pat Conroy, not by me or Roberta.) Plus we have that wonderful new book by Seattle-based writer and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt (author of Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds), Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, that was just reviewed in The Oregonian. And we got in paperback copies of Toni Morrison's latest and much-lauded novel (A Mercy), one of my favorite short-story collections of the past year (The Boat, by Nam Le), and the second novel from Seattle author Stephanie Kallos (Broken for You), Sing Them Home. Last but not least, we have finally been able to get back in stock the book everyone's talking about, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, by Jeff Sharlet. And yes, it's in paperback, and yes, it will scare the pants off of you!

So, NOW I have my nose buried in a bunch of new books, and I'm happy to be back in the blogosphere.

Am Embarrassment of Book Riches

Wow! It's another one of those amazing weeks in the bookstore world in which A TON of great new books come in. Admittedly, when you're a book fiend like I am, EVERY week in a bookstore is a delight: new books and old make me breathless and giddy (and perpetually broke). But some weeks are particularly notable.

This week in the fiction jackpot we got in the latest novels in hardcover from Richard Russo (That Old Cape Magic) and Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice); The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb) and The Gargoyle (Andrew Davidson) in paperback; the eagerly awaited paperback edition of Eclipse, the third book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series; To Heaven by Water, a novel (paperback) by Justin Cartwright, the author of a novel I loved, The Promise of Happiness; and a novel I've been waiting for in paperback about Hurricane Katrina, City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza.

On the nonfiction side we got The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election, by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson; Imperial, the latest tome from William Vollman, taking us deep into the heart of the Imperial Valley in California (and clocking in at a mere 1200 or so pages); and Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, a thoughtful collection of essays on mindful eating drawn from more than thirty years of work by Wendell Berry, with an introduction by Michael Pollan ("Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture....But to read these essays...is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendell Berry hasn't already said, bracingly, before.")

Wow. What a week! And I've probably missed a few. I better get off the computer and get busy reading! I think next week will be another bookapallooza as well, so stay tuned....

Newest Novel from Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon, known for his dense, complex doorstopper novels, has now given us Inherent Vice -- a "hippie whodunit" set at the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in LA and featuring dopers, surfers, bikers, predators, and parasites, drugs and counterfeit money, setups and switchbacks, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang. Doc Sportello, stoned and skeptical and the proprietor and sole employee of LSD Investigations (Location, Surveillance, Detection), gets caught up in a bizarre and tangled kidnapping plot.

Check out the recent reviews of Inherent Vice by Vernon Peterson in The Oregonian and by Micheal Dirda in The Washington Post.

Pynchon's previous books are V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973) - for which he received the National Book Award for Fiction, Slow Learner (1984) - a collection of early stories, Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006).

Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize Winner

The Sherwood Anderson Foundation has announced that its Fiction Competition Award winner for 2009 is Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Bledsoe, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, read at Broadway Books when her last novel, Biting the Apple, was published. She writes both fiction and narrative nonfiction. The competition judges found her two entries "Girl with Boat" and "Enough" to be outstanding literary stories precisely because neither is "literary" or mannered but instead the author speaks with an honest human voice.

"Girl with Boat," winner of the 2009 Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction (to be published in that journal in Fall 2009), shows the conflict between loyal family love and the father's desperate, singular need to take them all to live in trackless Alaska. This is the story of the daughter's return, thirty years later, and of what she finds at the old homestead.

Bledsoe's second entry, "Enough," winner of the 2009 International Arts Movement First Prize for fiction, is set in Antarctica, "on the Ice," and depicts with unusual perception the conflicts, self-delusion, but nonetheless warm hopes humans take with them wherever they live.

Besides writing, the author goes sea kayaking in Alaska, backpacking in the Rockies, and skiing in the Sierra. She has been to Antarctica three times as a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Artists & Writers Fellowship, living and working at all three American stations--McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. She also lived at field camps in the Transantarctic Mountains. Bledsoe's work with geologists, biologists, and astrophysicists concerned studying penguins, seals, climate change, and the Big Bang.

Publishers Weekly gave Bledsoe's novel, Biting the Apple, a starred review. Cited as one of Bookmark's 10 Best Books of the Year, Biting the Apple is "an intelligent, introspective, and smartly sarcastic story about the shackles of the past, the pressures of a present built on falsehoods, and the promise of reinvention and renewal. . . ."

Her newest novel, The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica, will be out in spring 2010. The premise is that a galley worker, a geologist, and a composer have run away to jobs in Antarctica, each trying to escape a life that has become unbearable. Kim Stanley Robinson writes: "Lucy Bledsoe has written a beautiful novel about living in that extreme space; vivid and suspenseful, it really captures the feel of the Ice and the intensity of living and learning there."

Congratulations, Lucy, on the Sherwood Anderson Award honors! We look forward to having you read again at Broadway Books when your next novel comes out.

The Photographer: A Moving Documentary

In 1986, French photographer Didier Lefèvre left Paris for Afghanistan for his first major assignment as a photojournalist, accompanying a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) expedition to establish one field hospital and staff another. At that time in Afghanistan, war was raging betweem the Soviet Union and the Afghan Mujahideen. The photographs taken by Lefèvre on that three-month trip form the heart of a new book, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, a book that is part photojournalism and part graphic memoir. It is published by First Second Books.

A decade after his first trip, Lefèvre sat down with his friend and acclaimed French graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert to tell his story. Guibert based his writing and drawing of the book on their hours of interviews. Frederic Lemercier, a graphic designer, created the design for the book, and Alexis Siegel provided the translation and wrote the introduction. Together, the work of these four people tells the moving story of an arduous and dangerous journey undertaken by men and women intent on mending what others destroy.

Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, called this graphic documentary "a work of stunning originality and power....a truly inspiring piece of work." The book was first published in three volumes in France between 2003 and 2006 and was an immediate hit. It has since been published in eleven languages. The First Second Books American version came out last May. Before he died in 2007 (he was born in 1957), Lefevre traveled back to Afghanistan seven more times in an attempt to tell the stories of the people he could not forget -- despite having nearly died on his first trip there.

Do You Tattoo?

I hope you have tomorrow night circled on your calendar! Jeff Johnson will be at Broadway Books at 7 pm to read from his memoir, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink, recently published by Spiegel & Grau. Jeff has been tattooing professionally for eighteen years and is the co-owner of the Sea Tramp Tattoo Company, the oldest tattoo shop in Portland.

I must confess that my tattoo preferences tend to run more to the kind that you apply with a wet wash cloth and that last a few days, depending on how vigorously you scrub in the shower. It's probably a mixture of a commitment thing -- a tattoo I'm gaga over this week might become something that annoys the crap out of me in a year or two -- and needle-whimp-fear-of-pain thing, which I guess would make me either a bunny or a chudder (a customer on pain pills or a customer who barfs, respectively) -- most likely a chudder bunny.

I'm seeing more and more truly good looking tattoos these days. And it's not just bikers and gang members with tattoos. You see people of all ages and from all walks of life with tattoos -- even sweet little old ladies with tattoos. Maybe I could get some kind of bookish tattoo. Any suggestions? Maybe Roberta and I could each get the BB logo needled somewhere discreet. Not that we're old. Or sweet. But, my point is that tattooing seems to be going mainstream. Heck, even the Portland Art Museum is currently running an exhibition on the art of the tattoo.

Jeff's book has gotten tons of reviews -- local and national. You can read what Jeff Baker of The Oregonian wrote about Jeff Johnson and his tattoo world, or read the interview with Jeff Johnson in Time magazine. Katherine Dunn, author of the novel Geek Love and the recently published anthology One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing -- who clearly knows a thing or two about both writing and tattoos -- had this to say about Jeff's book: "Meticulously observed, savagely funny, and deeply compassionate....Jeff Johnson is a sharp-eyed master tattoo artist and an extraordinary writer....[his] own remarkable story weaves through this engaging and gritty examination of the world of tattoos. With lyrical punch and plenty of scabrous behind-the-scenes shenanigans, Tattoo Machine is an informative, intelligent delight." You've gotta love a book with scrabrous shenanigans, no? Hope we see you tomorrow night at the reading! (Tattoos optional.)

Jeff Johnson's Tattoo Machine

Portland tattoo artist and memoirist Jeff Johnson will be here on Tuesday, Aug. 4th at 7 pm to read from and discuss his recently published book, Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink, published by Spiegel and Grau in July. A professional tattooist for eighteen years, Johnson is the co-owner and operator of Portland’s legendary Sea Tramp Tattoo Company. Discussing everything from his days as an apprentice to some of the greatest inkers in the trade to the incredibly vivid nightly spectacle over which he presides, Jeff Johnson has written a sometimes riotous, sometimes harrowing, and always riveting memoir about what it means to be on the front lines of a global art revolution.