More from The Tender Bar Author

We were thrilled to learn recently of a forthcoming book from the author of one of our all-time favorites, The Tender Bar. JR Moehringer has signed with Hyperion to publish a historical novel based on the story of the infamous bank robber Willie Sutton, who robbed 100 banks between 1925 and 1950 without firing a single shot.

"I've been fascinated by Sutton since I was a boy," Moehringer said. "My grandfather used to talk with some amusement, and some awe, about Willie 'The Actor,' about his disguises, about his commitment to non-violence. He was the Gandhi of gangsters. He was also a lover, a reader, a thinker, and a social critic ahead of his time: he detested banks. He thought bankers were the root cause of everything wrong with society. No wonder he became such a folk hero." 

The Tender Bar, Moehringer's first book (2005), is a memoir that tells of his life being raised by a single mom in Manhasset, New York, and the group of guys at the local bar who provide the father figures in his life. It's a beautiful story, beautifully written, from the point of view of the journalist that Moehringer became -- he actually went back and interviewed the people from his past for the writing of this book. When Moehringer went on tour for the book's launch, he took his mother on tour with him -- I got to meet both of them when they came to Portland, and they were delightful.

Moehringer earned a BA in history from Yale University and then became a news assistant for The New York Times. He spent many years as a reporter and then bureau chief for the LA Times, earning a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. In 2009 he collaborated with Andre Agassi for the writing of Agassi's memoir, Open. Agassi contacted Moehringer after reading The Tender Bar and asked him to work with him.

Moehringer's as-yet-untitled novel is scheduled to be published sometime in the fall of 2012 -- we can't wait!!!

Risking Ridiculousness

Thursday night (Oct 28) at 7, please join us to hear Guy Maynard read from his debut novel, The Risk of Being Ridiculous. I wrote briefly about Guy and his book earlier -- Guy and I worked together at Aster Publishing in Eugene about a bazillion years ago (but we've both aged quite well, thank you!).

The Risk of Being Ridiculous tells the story of nineteen-year-old Ben Tucker, living in Boston in 1969. The novel takes you on a passionate, lyrical six-week ride through confrontation and confusion, courts and cops, parties and politics, school and the streets, Weathermen and women’s liberation, acid and activism, revolution and reaction. And, of course, Love—as through it all  Ben feverishly pursues the long-shot desire of his life: Sarah Stein

Guy has lived in Oregon since the early 1970s (living in Massachusetts and Illinois before moving here). He was lead singer in a teen rock and roll band, was active in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, lived on a commune in southern Oregon, worked as a carpenter, and was a member of a worker-owned construction company.

After receiving his degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1984, he was editor of a small community newspaper and then worked at the previously mentioned Aster Publishing Company, working on a number of trade magazines in such fields as liquid and gas chromatography and geographic information systems. Since 1995 he has been editor of Oregon Quarterly, the University of Oregon magazine. He also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Oregon Humanities magazine. His essays and articles have appeared in several Northwest regional publications. Guy and his wife Shelley live in a 1930s-vintage house in the middle of Eugene. They have a grown son, Corey, who lives in Portland.

The book is published by Hellgate Press in Ashland. Started in 1997, Hellgate Press is named after the historic Hellgate Canyon on the Rogue River, which was the first river in the United States to be designated as a wild and scenic river: "We like to think that the books we publish reflect the rugged yet subtle nature of this incredible river canyon." 

Here's a blog post Guy wrote for Wordstock, in which he reveals his dilemma deciding what genre his book belongs to. Here is an article by Jamie Passaro for the Eugene Register-Guard, talking about Guy's new book, along with two other new books from Oregon publishers (one of which has a reading here next month). And here's a review by Ted Taylor for the Eugene Weekly.

Finally, a note on the book from one of our favorite writers and friends, John Daniel (author of Rogue River Journal and The Far Corner, among others): "Guy Maynard vividly evokes the passions and fevered tempo of those times [the 1960s]--the music, the weed, the hitchhiking, the fellowship, the idealism, the outrage, and the wildness in the streets--as the overwhelming need to do something, whether brave or foolish or both, ran headlong at the forces of civil order."

We hope you can join us for this sure-to-be-entertaining evening!

John Addiego to Read from New Novel

We  hope you can join us Thursday, October 14, at 7 pm to hear Corvallis author John Addiego read from his second novel, Tears of the Mountain. The novel chronicles a single day in one man's life -- July 4, 1876 -- along with a series of flashbacks that all lead up to an eventful Centennial Independence Day celebration in Sonoma, California. Over the course of this surprisingly pivotal moment in his life, Jeremiah McKinley prepares for the celebration and for a reunion with old friends and family. On a blog post for the Wordstock Book Festival that took place in Portland last weekend, John wrote about the genesis of the book's title.

Joanna Rose in her review of Tears of the Mountain in The Oregonian said "It's a rich story, whose characters argue and banter over religion, racism, sexism, classism and elitism." And Publishers Weekly wrote that fans of western fiction will appreciate the setting, fast pace, and Jeremiah’s sheer moral doggedness.”

John has published numerous stories and poems in literary journals and is a former poetry editor at the Northwest Review. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Emily, in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches students with special needs. He has published two novels with Unbridled Books and is currently working on his third. In 1999 he received a fiction fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts.

His first novel was published in 2008. The Islands of Divine Music is a novel of five generations of an Italian-American family finding its place in the New World. Against a backdrop of immigration, Prohibition, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the new millennium, five generations of the Verbicaro family make their way from Southern Italy to San Francisco as each character brushes up against some aspect of the divine.

In 2008, after his first novel was published, John had these thoughts about getting published: "I am one of those people who crawls out of bed every morning at five to write before reporting to the paid work that supports a family....There has always been this secret delight in trying to write something good, in discovering something that rings true, and I could no more stop writing than reading or eating dark chocolate. Forget about it....One other piece of advice: read good books. I meet writers who don’t read, or only read what’s popular, or stare at screens. Read the good stuff. There is really no other teacher."

Follett and Woodward Books Here Now

Two other big books go on sale today, one a historical novel and one an examination of Obama's decision making regarding the war in Afghanistan, the campaign in Pakistan, and the world-wide fight against terrorism.

Obama's War, by journalist Bob Woodward, draws on internal memos, classified documents, meeting notes, and hundreds of hours of interviews with key players (mostly men, of course) to tell the story of how Obama and his administration tackled critical decisions on the war. Secret debates, White House strategy sessions, and firsthand accounts of the thoughts and concerns of the president help to paint an intimate and sweeping portrait of the young president as commander in chief.

Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett, is the first book of The Century Trilogy. In his magnificent new historical epic (and I emphasize the word epic -- this first volume is close to a thousand pages), Follett (author of World Without End and The Pillars of the Earth) follows the fates of five interrelated families -- American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh -- as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage. Future volumes in the trilogy will follow subsequent generations of the same families as they travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth centruy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

David Mitchell's newest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is 479 pages long... By page 443 I was starting to panic because I realized I was nearing the end. By page 465, I was literally sweating, the sense of loss leaving me feeling hollow. And then came the end--page 479. It's not so much that the novel's ending itself was so explosive; instead I felt mournful about having to leave the world that Mitchell had created so vividly, so intensely, and re-enter my own mundane reality.

Mitchell is the author of several other spectacular novels including Ghostwritten, Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas, all of which are crafted with especially distinctive flavors and varied writing styles. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell introduces us to a real, but little-known, place in Shogunal Japan called Dejima. Dejima is a man-made island, specifically constructed for the employees of the Dutch East Indies Company to live and work on, allowing Japan a small, seemingly well-guarded window into the outside world at a time when the country was almost completely closed to foreigners.

In 1799, an earnest young clerk, named (you guessed it!) Jacob de Zoet, arrives at Dejima in order to clean up the account books and expose the rampant corruption that plagues the company's outpost. Jacob, smart yet naive, must contend with an intriguing cast of characters, including deceitful Japanese translators, jealous clerks, corrupt chiefs, a wily cook, a lazy slave, and one very grumpy doctor, as he finds his way in an unfamiliar world. Paralleling (and intersecting) his story is that of Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor who acts as midwife to the city's powerful magistrate.

The novel is rich with characters, dialogue and atmosphere, the plot tight and intriguing. Mitchell is a master of his craft; this is undeniable. He has yet to let me down, and I'll count down the days, like the remaining pages of a good novel, until his next endeavor.

New Jean Auel Book Announced!

Calling all Jean Auel fans -- you have less than a year to wait for the sixth and final book in her Earth's Children series! This week at Book Expo America Crown Publishers announced that The Land of Painted Caves will be published on March 29, 2011, thirty-one years after the first book in this epic prehistoric series. According to the publisher, the novel will see Ayla struggling "to find a balance between her duties as a new mother and her training to become a Zelandoni – one of the Ninth Cave community's spiritual leaders and healers." In a rare move in the publishing world, the book will be published simultaneously in all the countries in which it will initially appear, including the US, the UK, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Norway, Serbia, Spain, and Sweden.

Auel’s groundbreaking Earth’s Children series has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide, and more than 22 million copies in the US alone. The series began in 1980 with the classic The Clan of Cave Bear, followed by The Valley of Horses. In 1985, the third book in the series, The Mammoth Hunters, was the first hardcover novel to achieve a one million-copy printing. The fourth book in the series is The Plains of Passage, and the fifth and most recent installment is The Shelters of Stones, published in 2002.

Auel was born in Chicago and moved to Portland with her husband Ray when she was pregnant with their second child -- they eventually raised five children. The storyline for the series was born in the Multnomah County Library system, when Jean went there to do research for a short story and came home with stacks and stacks of books. The series is acclaimed for the prodigious research behind it -- both in libraries and in person -- as well as for its inspired storytelling and meticulous attention to detail.

The books are set in prehistoric Europe, in the Dordogne region of France. In 2008 Auel was named an Office of the Order of Arts & Letters by the French Minister of Culture & Communication. She has also received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Portland, from which she received her MBA in 1976.

Here is a link to a brief article by Jeff Baker of The Oregonian announcing the new title and offering more information about the author and the new book.