“Maureen McHugh wrote one of my favorite science fiction novels ever—China Mountain Zhang. This is something else. In Mothers & Other Monsters, McHugh offers unpredictable short stories. By turns funny and grim, she explores the relationships upon which her characters’ lives depend: between parents and children, brothers and sisters, boys and girls. We strongly recommend this collection for book club discussions.”—Néna Rawdah, St. Johns Booksellers, Portland
” . . . If you are planning your next trip abroad, you might want to check out what bugs live there. If you travel to Argentina, for example, watch out for assassin bugs. They bite you in the night, use your skin for a latrine and spread a disease called chagas to many of their hosts. Chagas can be fatal after some very uncomfortable symptoms run their course. (Some scholars think Darwin suffered from it.) There are horrible hornets in Hong Kong and death-stalker scorpions in Iraq. And all these bugs mentioned so far are just the ones that live outside your body.
Yeah.
It is estimated there are 200 million insects for each person alive on the planet, and Amy Stewart categorizes them for us in helpful sections, from destructive to deadly. As she says in her introduction, ‘Warning—we are seriously outnumbered.’ You can run, but you can’t hide . . .” —Susan Richmond, Inklings Bookshop, Yakima (excerpted from her review in the Yakima Herald).
I’m supposed to be reading Denis Duval, Barry Lyndon, and The Yellowplush Papers, looking for stuff to read aloud come July 18th, the 200th Birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray. (more…)
“Vogel pharmaceutical’s star researcher has gone rogue down in the Amazon. She hasn’t checked in with headquarters in two years. Anders is sent to fetch her, but his two-week project stretches into months, and then the horrible letter arrives disclosing his death. Details are brief. The head man at Vogel wants his star researcher brought back under his control. Marina heads into the jungle for her boss and the widow of her friend. At every turn she has big decisions to make. This is a fabulous book about keeping secrets, loyalty, adventure, love and betrayal. Quite a lot for one book, but the author is Ann Patchett, and she is more than up to the challenge.”—Deon Stonehouse, Sunriver Books & Music, Sunriver, OR
“Scott Huler’s On the Grid does for our neighborhoods what Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemna did for our dinners. Huler traces the journey our water, electricity and other services take to get to our humble faucets and light switches. His book is well-written and clear and also great if you have inquisitive children who keep asking why, why, why. Not only do you get some answers, but you can sound like Calvin’s dad when you talk to your kids.”— Laura Delaney, Rediscovered Books, Boise
“It’s just another day at the office as two men on horseback embark from Oregon City to the California gold country to kill a man who has offended their boss. They may be professional killers, but, first and foremost, Eli and Charlie Sisters are brothers, and their hilarious banter alone is worth the price of admission. The gripping adventure of an epic quest collides with brutal comic timing, and the shock of remorseless violence is countered by the fragile hope that a rough man like Eli could leave the murdering life behind, settle down with a nice lady and maybe even improve his dental hygiene in the process.”—Casey O., Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle
Here is a wonderful new (apparently first) book of short stories by Orozco, who teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. (more…)
Jamil Zaidi at BEA
Booksellers love to talk about the Next Big Thing—especially if they can be the first to get there. Because booksellers are, at heart, discoverers, always on the lookout for something new (or old) to unveil to their colleagues and customers. Book Expo America is where they go to plunder new territory.
Our colleague on the floor at BEA, which wraps up today, wrote to report this discovery morsel after running into Jamil Zaidi, who’s a manager at Elliott Bay Book Company and the president of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. “Just ran into Jamil on his way to the Random House booth to an author signing with Erin Morgenstern. Jamil received her book, Night Circus (due Sept.) as an ARC from Ruth Liebmann. It sat for a couple of weeks on his desk, and when he finally picked it up, he read it twice, back-to-back. He’d been to a cocktail party last night for Knopf and Doubleday. Margaret Atwood was there, Colson Whitehead was there, Harry Belafonte was there—and THIS is the book EVERYONE was talking about.”
We were happy to report that we already knew about the book, thanks to Emily Adams at Third Place, who had this to say recently on One Nightstand: “I fell in love with the mysterious and magical world of The Night Circus. When I finished the book, I just sat on the couch and stared at the cover, holding it in both hands, unwilling to let go, wanting the story to continue. Throughout the book I felt wide-eyed, dazzled, transported by vivid imagery to a world where anything is possible and not everything is as it seems.
(Kudos to the person who decided to put “Not for Sale. Violators will be Exsanguinated” on the cover of the ARC. How could I pass that up?)”
Thanks to Brian, Jamil and Emily for the buzz. The rest of us will have to wait.
“After twenty years of working in broadcast and Internet journalism, Napoli was deeply unsatisfied with her life. So when an encounter with a stranger brought her a chance to chuck everything and move halfway around the world, she decided that having a midlife crisis in the Himalayas made as much sense as doing it in L.A. Leaving behind acres of grid-lock traffic, she moved to a country without a single traffic light to help set up the kingdom’s first youth-oriented radio station. Once there, she found that living in a deeply religious society where happiness is more highly valued than material goods was just what she needed to come to terms with her own problems. . . .”—Terrell, Wide World Books & Maps, Seattle
Hedrick and bookseller employee, Forrest
We got to drop in on Iconoclast Books (Ketchum, Idaho) and its dynamic owner Sarah Hedrick on a road trip last week. Hedrick is about as welcoming a bookstore hostess as you could imagine (What’s that you’re drinking, Tully’s? Throw that out. How about something organic and local? A house-made chai?), and this quality, not surprisingly, makes her an excellent saleswoman. Observing that we were checking out her display of Out of Print T-shirts, she had us pegged. Did you see Pride & Prejudice? The soft v-neck with the peacock feathers? (Sold. Two actually.) Have you read this yet? She raptured about the forthcoming novel You Deserve Nothing (from Tonga—an imprint of Europa Editions, edited by Alice Sebold) by local boy/Iowa Writer’s grad Alexander Maksik until we were begging for her copy of the galley. (more…)
