What I've Been Reading Lately, Part I: Fiction

The last three novels I've read have all been big winners in my book, but they couldn't be more different. I thought I'd take a few minutes to share them with you.

The most recent novel I read was We the Animals, by Justin Torres. I didn't expect to like this slim debut novel but for some reason it kept tugging at me whenever I walked past it, so I finally decided to give it a go. And it kept me. It is fierce and concentrated and feral and heartbreaking, a child's view of family's struggles and relationships, presented in brilliant language. The New York Times called it "a strobe light of a story," while Vanity Fair called it "a gorgeous, howling coming-of-age novel that will devour your heart," and author Pam Houston called it a "musical tornado of a novel." It is definitely a wow. I look forward to more from this author.

Just before that I read another slim novel that had just won this year's Booker Prize for Fiction: The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. This intense, suspenseful novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about until he is presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. Who are you? How can you be sure? What if you’re not who you think you are? What if you never were? The review on NPR called it “an elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale about memory, aging, time and remorse." I thought it was spectacular.

The one before that was another debut novel, The Night Circus, a novel unlike any I'd ever read before. The author, Erin Morgenstern, is a visual artist, and in her writing she created worlds that I could see just as if I were standing inside of them. Generally I'm not big on books that involve the circus or magic. And this involves both. Sort of. And yet I found it both delightful and breathtaking. It involves a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors and who meet in Le Cirque des Reves, a Victorian nocturnal black-and-white circus. Here are some of the accolades reviewers have bestowed upon this novel and its author: "playful and intensely imaginative," "quietly, enchantingly perfect," "an extraordinary storyteller," "a beguiling, gripping read," "A literary Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride." I definitely recommend giving this one a go.

I'm also "reading" two audiobooks right now that I'm enjoying very much: one I'm listening to on my iPod when I walk and the other I'm listening to in my car when I drive. Sadly for the former -- and for my ability to fit into my clothing -- lately I've been spending more time with the latter book. I blame the weather and the lack of daylight.

The walking book is Pulitzer-Prize winner A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age. It took me a while to get going on this one, because it bounces around a bit in time and in point-of-view, so it takes a while to get a handle on all of the characters and their relationships. But now I'm really enjoying it.

The driving book is The Stranger's Child, by Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping, multi-generational novel that opens in England in 1913. “At once classically literary and delightfully, subversively modern." This book is so entertaining that I find myself manufacturing reasons to drive my car -- something I don't do that often, since I can easily walk just about everywhere I need to go -- just so I can continue to listen to this delightful book.

Novels that I'm considering treating myself to when the holiday rush moves past and I can focus again include The Art of Fielding, 11/22/63, Wish You Were Here, Matterhorn, Pearlmann's Silence (by the author of Night Train to Lisbon) and The Corrections (yes, I admit, I've haven't read it yet, but I enjoyed Freedom).  The novels I'm most looking forward to being published in 2012 are Truth Like the Sun, the newest from Jim Lynch (The Highest Tide, Border Songs), which is due out in April (just in time for the store's 20th anniversary celebration!), and Dora: A Head Case, a novel (due to be published summer 2012) by Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the stunning memoir The Chronology of Water.

Ah yes, so many books, so little time. Tomorrow I'll talk about recent, current, and forthcoming nonfiction reads.

Nancy Pearl Interviews the Author of The Passage

The Passage is one of the hottest summer reads this year -- now if only our weather would cooperate and produce some hot summer weather! I think this might be the next novel for me; it's always so hard to choose from the many great reads at hand. I'm just finishing up a nonfiction book by an American female foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan (more on that later), so I think fiction will come next.

To pique your interest, here's an interview with the author of The Passage (Justin Cronin) by Nancy Pearl. By the way, Chris who works at Broadway Books gives The Passage a big thumbs up. You can click here to read a little more about the book.

Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up

It's Short Story Month!!

Happy National Short Story Month -- for another week! I'm a big fan of short stories. Lately the big thing seems to be connected stories, or a novel told in short stories (think Olive Kitteridge). Not that it's a new thing; Jhumpa Lahiri did it beautifully in Interpreter of Maladies (which won the Pulitzer Prize, as did Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout) and again most recently in Unaccustomed Earth.

Sometimes people who think they don't like reading short stories just need some good suggestions. A good source for stories is the annual Best American Short Stories. The current edition (2010) was edited by Richard Russo, and the 2011 version, which will publish in October, is edited by Geraldine Brooks. I also like 20 Under 40: Stories from the New Yorker. Also try the annual PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: The Best Stories of the Year.

Here are a few more suggestions for you: ANYTHING by the following masters of the short story form: Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, and Anthony Doerr. If you're in the mood for novels in short stories or linked short stories, try the two I mentioned above, as well as The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, Day for Night by Frederick Reiken, Madonnas of Echo Park by Brandon Skyhorse, and Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga, who wrote The White Tiger.

Here are some other good collections: Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by local writer Mary Rechner; You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard, who just read here last week; Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom; The Boat by Nam Le; Gryphon by Charles Baxter; Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien; Last Night by James Salter (the last story always gives me chills); and Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith.

There's a whole bunch more, but this list should get you off to a good start. Happy reading!

Shteyngart Wins UK Comic Lit Prize

Gary Shteyngart has just been announced as the winner of this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, the first time an American author has won the prize. Shteyngart, who was born in Leningrad and emigrated with his family to the US in 1979, won the prize for his novel Super Sad True Love Story, published last year in hardcover and just recently out in paperback.

The satiric novel is set in a post-literate, consumption-obsessed, hypersexualized America. The main character, Lenny Abramov, is a 39-year-old Jewish New Yorker who works as a Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator for a multinational corporation that sells immortality to High Net Worth Individuals.

Shteyngart is the author of two previous novels, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, and Absurdistan. He has been named one of Granta's Best Young Novelists and the New Yorker's Best Writers Under 40. He received his degree in politics from Oberlin College in Ohio and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College of the City University of New York. He currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, the UK's only literary award for comic writing, was established in 2000 and named in honor of the great writer PG Wodehouse. The prize is sponsored by Champagne Bollinger, established in 1829 and still independently owned and run. (We love independent almost as much as we love champagne!).

Shteyngart will be presented with the award, as well as  a jeroboam [FYI: a jeroboam is a very big bottle, which holds the equivalent of four bottles of champagne -- very tasty, but challenging to pour] of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and a set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection, plus a locally bred Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, at Hay Festival on 4th June. (Although it seems to be up for debate whether he actually receives the pig or that a pig is just named in his honor. Either way, it's clearly a big deal.)

The other finalists for this year's prize were Manu Joseph for Serious Man, India Knight for Comfort and Joy, Sam Leith for The Coincidence Engine, and Catherine O'Flynn for The News Where You Are. Last year's winner was Ian McEwan for his novel Solar. Previous winners are Will Self, Marina Lewycka, Jasper Fforde, DBC Pierre, Michael Frayn, Jonathan Coe, and Howard Jacobson.

Here is an interview of Shteyngart by Jon Meacham on the PBS show Need to Know:

The Passage in Paperback Today!

Justin Cronin's blockbuster bestselling novel The Passage goes on sale in paperback today. The book, the first in a trilogy, is a sci-fi end-of-the world vampire-laced thriller. Cronin is an award-winning author of literary fiction (The Summer Guest, Mary and O'Neil, etc), a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and a professor of English at Rice University in Houston. Needless to say, this book was a bit of a departure from his previous writings. "With every book I write I always want to do something different," the author says. But the real inspiration for The Passage was his eight-year-old daughter, an avid reader way beyond her age level, who told him she was afraid his books were boring. Not that she'd actually read his previous books; her judgement was based on the book covers and jacket flaps. She suggested that Dad write about a girl who saves the world. And with that the seed was planted.

The Passage hit the streets in hardcover to great acclaim. Horror-meister Stephen King said, "Read this book and the ordinary world disappears." And Jennifer Egan, author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, had this to say: The Passage is the literary equivalent of a unicorn: a bona fide thriller that is sharply written, deeply humane, ablaze with big ideas, and absolutely impossible to put down." Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles was skeptical about the whole vampire thing: "But by the third chapter, trash was piling up in our house because I was too scared to take out the garbage at night. It's a macabre pleasure to see what a really talented novelist can do with these old Transylvanian tropes."

Of course, Hollywood came calling pronto, with film rights going to Ridley Scott. Cronin won't be involved in writing the screen play, but he is consulting with the team, giving them insight into what's to come in the remaining books of the trilogy. Condensing an almost-800-page book into a two-hour movie is a different skill, the author says. He's content with writing the novels.

"The first rule of writing," says Cronin, "is the same as any job: You must show up." It also helps to have kids. "One of the best things a writer can do is have children, because not only do they give you lots of material they make sure that whenever you sit down at the keyboard you get something done. You have to get something accomplished."

While The Passage is part of a trilogy, Cronin says it's important for him that each book is a strong novel on its own terms. At its heart, he says, The Passage is a road novel. The second book, The Twelve (due out in 2012) will draw a lot from espionage fiction. The concluding novel, The City of Mirrors, will be a war novel, a clash of armies, and is scheduled for publication in 2014.

If you're looking for a good meaty, engrossing book to kick off your summer reading, you won't go wrong with The Passage -- out today in paperback.

Kevin Desinger to Read from Debut Novel

In Kevin Desinger's debut novel, The Descent of Man, we meet Jim Sandusky, a quiet wine steward who lives in Portland with his wife, Marla. One night they wake to hear two men trying to steal his car. Jim makes a bad decision and ends up over his head, mired in a sinister situation and estranged from his wife.

The unfolding events of the story challenge the reader with a number of ethical issues that lead to the recurring question, “What would I do if faced with a similar situation?" The book is a suspenseful page-turner that will force you to consider how quickly it can all go bad and spiral out of control.

Author Bob Shacochis said this about Desinger's novel: "There are books that you can't put down, and there are books that won't go away even after you put them down, the force of their moral conundrums haunting the stories of our own lives. The Descent of Man is a spectacular showcase for both literary virtues—the riveting tale of a modest but perfect life under assault, and a resonating challenge to our own self-knowledge, the authenticity of that knowledge, which can only be confirmed through crisis." 

Kevin Desinger spent his first seventeen years in Coos Bay, Oregon, finished high school in Fairbanks, Alaska, and worked summers on the Alaska Railroad to pay for college. After graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he moved to Portland, where he has lived for the past thirty years. In the '80s he wrote for Willamette Week, the Oregonian, and a number of regional publications.

Desinger will read from his new novel at Broadway Books on Tuesday, May 10th, at 7 pm. We hope you can join us for the event.

Trailer for The Help

The  movie based on Water for Elephants premieres this weekend. Now here's the trailer for this summer's likely blockbuster-based-on-hit-novel: The Help, which premieres in August. Will you see these movies or stick to the written versions?

Books from Mitchell and Egan in Paperback

Almost every day here at Broadway Books we chortle with glee (seriously, we chortle; come see for yourself) as we pull open boxes of new books that make it seem like our birthday or some other fabulous gift-giving holiday almost every day of the week. It's particularly exciting when hot books arrive in their gleaming, newly published, trade paperback format, because that is the most popular format with our customers and with book clubs.

This week a couple of treasures arrived in paperback form: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.

A Visit from the Goon Squad recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and it made the longlist for the 2011 Orange Prize (the winner will be announced June 8th). It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the LA Times Book Prize and was named to numerous publications' "best of" lists for 2010.

The imaginative and intricately crafted novel is a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories that move back and forth in time from the 1970s to a point in the near future, with time as a goon that inflicts its damage. The stories feature kleptomaniac Sasha; her boss Bennie, punk rocker turned music producer; and his sleazy mentor Lou.

Ron Charles of The Washington Post calls it a "deeply humane story about growing up and growing old in a culture corroded by technology and marketing." Janet Maslin of The New York Times says that Egan is "such a piercingly acute storyteller that the exhilaration of reading her outweighs the bleak destinies she describes.

Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. Her previous books include The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, and The Keep.

Mitchell's epic novel centers on an earnest young clerk, Jacob de Zoet, who arrives in Japan in the summer of 1799 to make his fortune and return to Holland to wed his fiance. But his plans are shaken when he meets the daughter of a Samurai. Set in Dejima, an artificial island created as a trading outpost in Nagasaki Harbor and designed to keep the West at bay, the novel tackles intercultural relations, trust and betrayal, racial and gender boundaries, the search for identity, and finding unexpected love in a changing world. 

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Dave Eggers called the book "An achingly romantic story of forbidden love...a novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between [that] confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive." Publishers Weekly described it as "dense and satisfying" with "literary brawn and stylistic panache." The book was awarded a 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was named one of the best novels of the year by numerous publications.

Mitchell, who lives in Ireland, is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, Number9 Dream, Cloud Atlas, and Black Swan Green.

We've got oodles more great new books on our tables -- the bowing table legs and our frequent chortling are evidence of that! Come and see. We're open every day of the week!

We Think Women Rock!

The Orange Prize for Fiction is the UK's only annual book award for fiction written by a woman. The prize was established in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women throughout the world and to promote it to the widest range of readers possible. It is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman in the English language, regardless of her nationality.


The long list for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced today, and it includes nine debut novels. The list includes the author of the newly released hot novel, The Tiger's Wife (Tea Obrecht) and the winner of the just-announced National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (Jennifer Egan). Here are all the authors on the long list:


•Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Sudanese; 3rd Novel
•Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate) - British; 10th Novel
•Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador) - Irish; 7th Novel
•The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi (Bloomsbury) - Indian; 1st Novel
•Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber) - British; 6th Novel
•A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) - American; 4th Novel
•The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury) - British/Sierra Leonean; 2nd Novel
•The London Train by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape) - British; 4th Novel
•Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre) - British; 1st Novel
•The Seas by Samantha Hunt (Corsair) - American; 1st Novel
•The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber) - British; 2nd Novel
•Great House by Nicole Krauss (Viking) - American; 3rd Novel
•The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone (Chatto & Windus) - American; 3rd Novel
•The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Serbian/American; 1st Novel
•The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking) - American; 1st Novel
•Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile (Serpent's Tail) - British; 1st Novel
•Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Chatto & Windus) - American; 1st Novel
•The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent's Tail) - British/Nigerian; 1st Novel
•The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (Harper Press) - British; 4th Novel
•Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape) - Canadian; 1st Novel

This year's five-person judging panel includes the novelist Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring, etc). The short list will be announced on April 12, with the awards ceremony to be held on June 8. Bettany Hughes, Chair of Judges, said "It was a huge tussle to get the list down to twenty, but what we have is a gorgeous, widely varied longlist - we'll certainly enjoy re-reading each and every one as we make tough choices to select the Orange Prize shortlist for 2011."


Last year's winner of the Orange Prize was Barbara Kingsolver, for her novel The Lacuna. Previous winners of the prize are Marilynne Robinson, Rose Tremain, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Zadie Smith, Lionel Shriver, Andrea Levy, Ann Patchett, Valerie Martin, Kate Grenville, Linda Grant, Suzanne Berne, Carol Shields, Anne Michaels, and Helen Dunmore.

The UK-based Guardian offers jacket covers (European), descriptions, and reviews of all of the books on the Orange Prize long list.

PS: We hope you get a chance to check out our window display this month in honor of March being National Women's History Month -- with this year's theme being "Our history is our strength."

John Keeble to Read Tonight

John Keeble is the author of four novels and the nonfiction book Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pulitzer nomination for his Village Voice piece "Black Spring in Valdez," and an Emmy nomination for To Write and Keep Kind, a documentary film on the life of Raymond Carver. His short stories, interviews, and essays on political and ecological topics have appeared in a variety of anthologies and periodicals, including Outside, Left Bank, Story, and Prairie Schooner.

John's novel Yellowfish was reissued in a new edition by the University of Washington Press in 2008, and his novel Broken Ground has just been reissued as well. Tonight he joins us at Broadway Books to read from Broken Ground.

Set in the high desert of eastern Oregon in the 1980s, the novel uses the construction of a "prison for profit," in which alien captives are incarcerated in secret, as the basis for a story with deep political, mystical, and -- for its time -- prescient implications: the impingement of American imperalism on its own native territory.  Lynn Sharon Schwartz called the book "a social fable for our time," and Barry Lopez described it as "deftly evoked" and "consistently engaging."

Educated at the University of Redlands, University of Iowa, and Brown University, John has taught at Grinnell College and Eastern Washington University, where he founded the Master of Fine Arts Program and is now Professor Emeritus. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University and on three occasions held the Coal Royalty Trust Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. He now works with long-distance Master of Fine Arts students as an associate faculty member at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

He was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and raised in Saskatchewan and California. For thirty years he has lived with his family in rural Eastern Washington, where he and his wife raise hay, free range chickens, and organic grass fed beef cattle.

John read at Broadway Books when Yellowfish was reissued, and we're thrilled to welcome him back to the store. We hope you can join us tonight at 7 pm!

Gemma Whelan to Read from Debut Novel

Gemma Whelan, an Irish-born theatre director and educator now living in Portland, has recently published her debut novel, Fiona: Stolen Child. In the novel, Fiona Clarke, an Irish writer living in New York, has been running from her past since she left rural Cregora, Ireland, for boarding school. That past finds her, many years later, when her thinly veiled autobiographical novel is optioned for a movie. Working as the film’s consultant, Fiona unearths deep secrets, relives childhood trauma, and connects with an estranged family thrust back into her life. As her history opens upon her, Fiona must stop running and confront her secret shame: her long-held sense of responsibility over the death of her little sister.

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Whelan directed more than sixty stage productions and was founding artistic director of GemArt and Wilde Irish Productions. She is also an award-winning screenwriter and film director.  In an interview, Whelan noted that screen writing is more controlled, that in writing her novel she had to learn to let go and trust the process, letting her characters become who they are. She graduated from Trinity College (Dublin) in English and French and has graduate degrees from UC-Berkeley in Theatre and from San Francisco State University in Cinema. She moved to Portland in 2008.

Whelan has taught at numerous colleges and conservatories, including UC Berkeley, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, and Mills College -- all in the Bay Area -- and at Pacific University, Portland Actors Conservatory, and PSU in Oregon. She has also taught theatre and film in Singapore and lead theatre tours to Ireland and England.

Gemma Whelan will read from her debut novel Tuesday, March 8th, at 7 pm at Broadway Books. We hope you can join us! The event is free and open to the public.

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Nominees for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have just been announced:

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
• Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule
• Eric Puchner, Model Home
• Brad Watson, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

This year's judges are Laura Furman, William Kittredge, and Helena Maria Viramontes, who read approximately 320 novels and short story collections to determine the finalists. The winner, "first among equals," will be announced on March 15, and all will be feted in an award ceremony on May 7. You can read more about each of the finalists and their books by clicking here.

The PEN/Faulkner Award was established in 1980 by National Book Award winner Mary Lee Settle and was first awarded in 1981. Her goal was to create a national prize honoring literary fiction of excellence, juried by writers for writers, free of commercial concerns. The prize was named for William Faulkner, who used his Nobel Prize funds to establish an award for younger writers, and PEN, the international writers' organization. The award honors the best published works of fiction by American writers in a calendar year. Three judges, all writers, select five books from among the more than 300 works submitted (there are no submission fees). Last year's winner was Sherman Alexie, for War Dances. The finalists were Barbara Kingsolver (The Lacuna), Lorraine M. Lopez (Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories), Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs), and Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor).

West of Here -- and a Bonus!

I'm having fun reading a new novel, West of Here, by Jonathan Evison, set in the fictional Olympic Peninsula town of Port Bonita, in America's last frontier. The novel travels back and forth in time between the late 1800s and 2006, as Port Bonita travels from its hopeful, forward-looking genesis to its contemporary sad-sack town. Evison paints a vast canvas with gorgeous descriptions of the northwest and a wide array of characters. It's a book I'm finding hard to put down (which makes work a challenge) because I want to know what's going to happen next with each character.

Here's what one reviewer had to say: "Evison bravely sets out to conquer big stories and big themes, and the result is a daring, gorgeously structured, and deeply satisfying expedition of a novel. West of Here deftly connects lives and centuries, pipe dreams and fierce realities, the sensibilities of the modern with the storytelling punch of the classic." (James P. Othmer)

And one of my favorite writers, Jim Lynch (The Highest Tide, Border Songs), calls it a "creative bonanza of a novel," and says Evison writes "with a big, playful heart."

Evison's debut novel, All About Lulu, was published in 2008 to critical acclaim, winning the Washington State Book Award. In 2009, he was awarded a Richard Buckley Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Algonquin editor Chuck Adams (Water for Elephants, A Reliable Wife, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England) has called West of Here the best novel he's worked on in more than four decades of publishing. In his teens, Evison was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Born in San Jose, California, he now lives on an island in Western Washington.

In the contemporary Port Bonita, characters often gather at the Bushwhacker bar and knock down a few beers, usually a Kilt Lifter. How would you like your very own Kilt Lifter beer glass? We have a handful at the store, and will happily give you one with each copy of West of Here that you purchase. How's that for a deal?

Here's a brief video documentary by Mark McKnight in which Evison discusses his writing process.

Heidi Durrow Back to Portland to Read at BB!

We are so excited to be hosting Heidi Durrow next Tuesday, January 11th, at 7 pm for the Portland premiere of the paperback edition of her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky! Heidi grew up in Portland, attending Harriet Tubman Middle School and Jefferson High. We wrote about Heidi's book when it first came out in hardcover from Algonquin Books. Here's what we had to say. The book is a coming-of-age novel, wrapped in a bit of a mystery, and an examination of society's ideas of race, class, and beauty. But mostly it is just a beautifully written page-turner of a book. Oh, and did I mention it's set in Portland??

Barbara Kingsolver, who selected the manuscript for the Bellwether Prize, described it as a "breathless telling of a tale we've never heard before. Haunting and lovely, pitch-perfect, this book could not be more timely." Author Caroline Leavitt said the book is "as exquisitely written as a poem." Recently The Oregonian named it one of the best books of the year -- one of many publications to recognize the book.

Heidi is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. But her website summarizes her background best: "I'm a former corporate attorney, a former journalist, a former Life Skills trainer for NBA and NFL athletes, a podcaster and a festival producer. I'm a coffee drinker, an avid user of bendy straws (yes, with the coffee). Oh, and I'm a writer."

I've had the pleasure of chatting with Heidi a couple of times at book events. Here is a brief video clip from the first time we met, in which she tells us why we'll like her book. And you know what? She was right!

We hope you can come for this event on Tuesday. Heidi is one of the most delightful authors I've met, so I'm sure we're all in for a good time. Come early if you want a seat -- we're expecting a big crowd!

Water for Elephants Movie Soon

The endlessly popular book Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen, is close to hitting the big screen. The movie is set to premiere in the US on April 22, with a cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, Christopher Waltz, and Hal Holbrook. Just in case you haven't read the book yet (odds are slim), it's told from the perspective of Jacob Jankowski, now in his 90s and living in an assisted-living facility, about his experiences as a young man during the depression. After his parents are killed he drops out of veterinary school and gets a job with a third-rate traveling circus, tending to the animals. The book has a wonderful cast of circus personalities -- including Rosie (played by Tai) the elephant, who only understands commands in Polish -- and the story is made real through the accurate historical details.

Sara Gruen is an author who is known for her in-depth research and attention to details in her writing. In her most recent book, Ape House, she spent years researching linguistics and the bonobos and in particular the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa:

"During the course of my research, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Great Ape Trust -- not that that didn't take some doing. I was assigned masses of homework, including a trip to York University in Toronto for a crash course on linguistics. Even after I received the coveted invitation to the Trust, that didn't necessarily mean I was going to get to meet the apes; that part was up to them. Like John, I tried to stack my odds by getting backpacks and filling them with everything I thought an
ape might find fun or tasty -- bouncy balls, fleece blankets, M&M's, xylophones, Mr. Potato Heads, etc. -- and then emailed the scientists, asking them to please let the apes know I was bringing "surprises." At the end of my orientation with the humans, I asked, with some trepidation, whether the apes were going to let me come in. The response was that not only were they letting me come in, they were insisting. The experience was astonishing -- to this day I cannot think about it without getting goose bumps."


If you haven't read Water for Elephants yet, you've got plenty of time before the movie opens. A friend of mine listened to the audiobook version and gave it a big thumbs up. To whet your appetite, here is a trailer from the forthcoming movie.

Day 5: The Most Talked-About Novel of the Year

For Day 5 of our 24 Days of Books we're going to talk about the year's most-talked-about novel, Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. Love him or hate him -- or any emotion in between -- discussion of Franzen and his book have been all over the media since the book was published in August -- including a shot of Franzen on the cover of Time Magazine, the first novelist to be featured on the cover since Stephen King ten years ago. We picked today to talk about Franzen's book because tomorrow he will appear on the Oprah Show, which is significant for reasons that I'll cover in a bit. Freedom is Franzen's first novel since The Corrections, which won the National Book Award in 2001 (it was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Critics Circle Award, among others).

The awards have been less forthcoming for his newest novel, but it has still received great acclaim. The New York Times Book Review, which just picked Freedom as one of the Top Ten Books of 2010, called the novel "a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life."

The novel, about Walter and Patty Berglund of St Paul, Minnesota, their kids, their marriage, their successes and failures, is one "long, juicy, scathing, funny and poignant indictment of contemporary American life."

I did not read The Corrections when it came out, despite the rave reviews. Who knows why. But I decided to read Freedom early, before all the shouting started. And I loved it. So much so that I bought and now intend to read (after the holiday craziness subsides) The Corrections. Freedom is a big beefy juicy novel that I found completely engrossing, even if the characters weren't always completely likable or the plot lines always convincing. I still found myself missing the characters when I was done reading the book.

So, to get back to the Oprah story I alluded to at the beginning of this post: In 2001, when The Corrections was all the rage, Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club and invited Franzen to appear on her show. The author expressed -- in print and in interviews -- that he wasn't completely taken with the idea, and his invitation was rescinded. Fast forward to 2010, and, as Oprah's talk show winds down its run, she gave him another shot, choosing Freedom for her book club and once again inviting Franzen to appear on the show. This time he unhesitatingly accepted the offer, and tomorrow we'll see how their get-together came off. I'm guessing it won't be another ambush shellacking, as when author James Frey and editor Nan Talese appeared on Oprah's show -- at least let's hope not!

For the lover of contemporary fiction in your life, Freedom would be a good bet.

NYT Picks Top Ten of 2010

Yesterday The New York Times presented its choices for the top ten books of 2010, five fiction, five nonfiction (the article will appear in the print edition of the NYT on December 12th). I can't imagine winnowing a whole year down to ten books, and I'm sure the process involved heated discussions and perhaps even a fisticuff or two. And now that the newspaper has presented its list, what surely will follow will be billions (ok, maybe dozens) of comments along the lines of "how could you possibly have picked/omitted that book?" Personally, I agree with some of the choices, disagree with a couple, and -- mostly -- find myself with an increasingly large stack of want-to-reads. Here's the list; what do you think?

FICTION

• Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
• The New Yorker Stories, Ann Beattie
• Room, Emma Donoghue
• Selected Stories, William Trevor
• A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

NONFICTION

• Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, Jennifer Homans
• Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, Stephen Sondheim
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson

One last note about this list: several of these books were already becoming increasingly hard to get; now that they've hit the NYT top ten list they are likely to become even more scarce, so if you're thinking about one or more for a holiday gift, call or come see us soon!

Mary Rechner Reads Tuesday Night

We hope you can join us on Tuesday, November 2nd, at 7 pm to hear local author Mary Rechner read from her collection of short stories: Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women, published by Propeller Books. In these nine short stories, Mary brings a frank, humorous, and ultimately illuminating narrative voice to the subjects of sex, marriage, family, and work. Her characters strain against expected behaviors and received opinions about emotional life.

Mary's fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including Kenyon Review, Washington Square, Propeller Quarterly, and Oregon Literary Review. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The Believer and The Oregonian. She received an Oregon Literary Fellowship in 2006. Mary is also the director of Writers in the Schools, a program of Literary Arts. WITS places poets, fiction writers, essayists, graphic novelists, and playwrights into Portland-area high schools, where they teach creative writing. Mary grew up on Long Island and currently lives in Portland.

In a blog posting for the Wordstock Festival, Mary wrote that her stories "usually begin with a kernal of the actual" and then she goes about creating from there, using her life as the impetus for her fiction. "That's essentially what fiction is for me: exploration. I'm particularly interested in what it means to be a woman today. I know that sounds cheesy...but the options women have are relatively new, and our constraints are often confusing when they are invisible and internalized." She also noted that she is "braver in fiction than in real life," and that she feels "rushed when reading online. Paper relaxes me." We feel the same way!

You can read another great inteview with her on the NW Book Lovers website -- and we say it's great not just because she lists Broadway Books as a tie for her favorite indie bookstore! (But we're pleased and proud nonetheless!)

Debra Gwartney, author of Live Through This, had this to say about Mary's book: "Rechner writes with startling acuity, delving into singular lives with the full-hearted knowledge that to love means to be besieged, to love means to suffer, but that, in the end, to love is the only way to truly be alive." Karen Karbo, author of (most recently) The Gospel According to Coco Chanel, says "Mary Rechner's astounding, perfectly wrought stories of what it means to be a modern woman are witty, provocative, and honest enough to make you gasp." And Brad Kessler (Birds in Fall) calls her a "plucky, mischievous writer."

Who would want to miss out on this fun night?? Come early and grab a good seat. The fun starts at 7 pm. Think what great gifts signed copies of this new book would make!

Launching Brian Doyle's First Novel

I'm just going to come right out and say it. We LOVE Brian Doyle. Truly. He's read at the store copious times in the past with his nonfiction writing. And he was a big hit introducing Robin Cody at the launch of Robin's book Another Way the River Has last spring. So we are so thrilled that we now get to talk about Brian Doyle's first novel, published by one of our favorite publishers, local-ish Oregon State University Press. And we are especially thrilled to be helping Brian launch his new book tomorrow night at The Mercy Corps Headquarters in downtown Portland.

Mink River, Brian's stunning fiction debut, brings a small coastal Oregon town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people. In the wet hamlet of Neawanaka there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garralous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. Readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why, said of Mink River "In its sights, setting, insinuations, flora and fauna, his tale is quintessential North Coast, but in its sensibility and lilt this story is as Irish as tin whistles -- and the pairing is an unprecedented delight....I've read no Northwest novel remotely like it and enjoyed few novels more."

In her review of the book for Shelf Awareness, Valerie Ryan, owner of The Cannon Beach Book Company, wrote this about Mink River: "Brian Doyle loves words; big words, small words, fancy words, plain words, exotic words, domesticated words, adjectives, verbs and nouns especially, and because he loves words he piles them up in great juicy heaps of phrases and paragraphs and sentences and pages and whole books and makes delicious stories with them, stories about impossibly possible events and a talking crow who loves football and cares for a nun in her last days, bringing her bits of fish, dusting her room with his wings and getting drunk on wine with her, and people with unusual names, and then he tells us why they have those names because he is a first-rate storyteller who has a story to tell in this book but also digresses into disquisitions on the bicycle and Puccini and Irish lore galore and frequent quotes from Ecclesiastes and William Blake, another writer who burns 'always with this hard, gemlike flame,' and occasionally interspersed with bursts of Italian or Latin or Gaelic, and all of this with the wonder of a child, the soul of a poet, the compassion of a saint, the pen of an angel, the imagination of an inventor and the wisdom of a sage."

Joseph Bednarik reviewed the book for The Oregonian: "Mink River, the shimmering new novel by Portland writer Brian Doyle, is the best way to get to Neawanaka. Actually, it's the only way -- and very much worth the trip....The strength of the novel lies in Doyle's ability to convey the delicious vibrancy of people and the quirky whorls that make life a complex tapestry. He is absolutely enchanted by stories, with the zeal and talent to enchant others."

Brian is the author of ten previous books, including The Grail, Thirsty for the Joy, and Epiphanies & Elegies. His essays have been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland.

We hope you can join us Tuesday night at 7 pm for what is sure to be an inspirational and entertaining event, full of laughter, delicious words, and wonderful storytelling. Mercy Corps is at 45 SW Ankeny, at the corner of 1st and Ankeny near the Burnside Bridge (and at the Skidmore Fountain MAX stop).

The Finkler Question Wins Booker

Looks like the betting parlors of London will win back the money they lost last year when odds-on favorite Wolf Hall won the Booker. Today, Howard Jacobson was named the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his comic novel, The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury.

Said to have "some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language," The Finkler Question has been described as "wonderful" and "richly satisfying" and as a novel "full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding." The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship that explores what it means to be Jewish today -- a witty novel about a friendship between a radio producer and a philosopher.  Ron Charles of The Washington Post said "no other book has given me such a clear sense of the benevolent disguises that anti-Jewish sentiments can wear."

London author and columnist Jacobson, a prolific writer of comic novels mostly about Jews and Jewish identity since 1983 has been longlisted twice for the Booker Prize -- in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now -- but has never before been shortlisted. The winning selection was a small triumph for humor in fiction, an argument that Mr. Jacobson made in an essay in The Guardian last Saturday:

“There is a fear of comedy in the novel today – when did you last see the word ‘funny’ on the jacket of a serious novel? – that no one who loves the form should contemplate with pleasure,” he wrote. “We have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature.”

Listen to David Sax on NPR's "You Must Read This" talking about The Finkler Question here.