Wild Things the Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult
News
New Owner for American West Books
Josh Mettee has sold American West Books, Sanger, Calif., which supplies books to chains such as Costco, Sam'due south Social club, Whole Foods and Barnes & Noble, and other retailers, to Christopher Robbins, who joined the firm four years ago.
Mettee has headed the company since 1993. "I'd just turned nineteen and was in my first twelvemonth of college when I took over a defunct regional wholesaler," Mettee said. "It's been a great run for 24 years, and I'm looking forward to new challenges."
Robbins was previously CEO of Gibbs Smith, the Utah publisher, and is founder and publisher of independent press Familius.
Mettee volition plow his attention to Hummingbird Digital Media, in which he has a controlling involvement. The 2-year-old company is, he says, "democratizing e-book and audiobook retailing" by supplying organizations, including bookstores, publishers, nonprofits and others, free turnkey platforms for selling digital books.
St. Louis's Novel Neighbor Expands Next Door
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| Adjacent Door at the Novel Neighbor | |
Founded three years ago, the Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo., near St. Louis, has expanded and at present has an event space called Side by side Door at the Novel Neighbour.
Owner Holland Saltsman has envisioned the store "as a place that will foster community and encourage people to shop local. The store'southward workshops, camps, and small events have been very successful--and the new space volition let for even more creative programming and events to be offered."
'Great britain'southward Rudest Bookseller' Sells Bookshop
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| Bloomindales | |
Known equally "United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland'due south rudest bookseller" and "the Basil Fawlty of books," Steve Bloom, owner of Bloomindales in Hawes, has sold his store and left the business organization, Richmondshire Today reported.
Bloom, who admits to being "medium to low rude," received widespread criticism before this twelvemonth for charging a 50 pence (well-nigh 65 cents) fee for browsing in the used store. 20 complaints nearly that and his full general beliefs were lodged with the local parish council, but Bloom continued to require the fee. Townspeople said he was rude in other ways as well.
"I promise that none of the people who take been trying to bulldoze me out are claiming any kind of victory, because it isn't," Bloom said. "I have left of my own complimentary will.
"Information technology got very difficult sitting in my shop listening to people talking about me as the man who charges 50p entry," Blossom continued. "I will non miss the moaning. I'd be sitting there and have to listen to people saying 'This is the store that was on the news' and 'He's the one who charges entry just to look at his books' and it gets to me.... I gained a certain notoriety and I suppose much of it was of my own invention just I don't have regrets."
B&N Opens at Youngstown Country University
The new Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Youngstown State University campus, Youngstown, Ohio, opened yesterday. WKBN News reported that the store stocks "textbooks, YSU dress, school supplies and a department dedicated to books for the full general public, similar to what can be institute in any Barnes & Noble." The store also features a Starbucks café.
A grand opening is planned for August when students return to campus for the fall semester.
Obituary Note: Stephanie Wolfe Murray
Stephanie Wolfe Murray, a co-founder of Canongate who "completely transformed" Scotland's publishing manufacture, died June 24 in the Scottish Borders, the Scotsman reported. She was 76. While at Canongate, Wolfe Murray published Alasdair Gray'southward debut novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, and Jimmy Boyle's autobiography, A Sense of Freedom, written while the author was nevertheless in prison house. She was also instrumental in the founding of the Scottish Publishers Association and was on the founding board of the Edinburgh Book Festival.
Wolfe Murray, the daughter of a Liverpool solicitor, had no formal training in publishing when she and her husband, Scottish journalist Angus Wolfe Murray, joined the manufacture in 1973. Canongate began with the publication of a collection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories and a novel written by Bob Shure, a friend of Wolfe Murray and her hubby who had been having trouble getting his volume published. The couple worked in an office on Edinburgh'south High Street and named the company subsequently Edinburgh'due south Canongate area.
After separating from her hubby, Wolfe Murray took accuse of running the company on her own. In addition to Lanark and A Sense of Freedom, she published Charles Palliser'due south novel The Quincunx, forth with the work of lesser known writers and poets, and according to the Scotsman she was most proud of "reviving onetime, and often forgotten, Scottish works equally Canongate classics" and "developing the Kelpies series of Scottish children's books."
Post-obit her retirement from Canongate in 1994, she turned her attention to charity work; around 2000, she spent two years in Kosovo rebuilding homes and giving humanitarian aid. She is survived by husband, with whom she reunited some 30 after their separation, and their iv sons.
Notes
Image of the Mean solar day: Mysteries at the Fountain
On Sunday, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Va., hosted a "cozy mystery event" panel word moderated past owner Kelly Justice (far right). The participating authors were: Maya Corrigan, The Tell-Tale Tarte; Sherry Harris, A Cheerio to Buy; Mollie Cox Bryan, No Charm Intended; and A.J. Herbert, Murder with Macaroni and Cheese. All are published by Kensington.
Happy 20th Altogether, BookStacks!
Congratulations to BookStacks, Bucksport, Maine, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year as a neighborhood institution that "has become a destination for locals and visitors to expect for a new novel, to chat over coffee or to simply pet [possessor Andy] Lacher's true cat Leo," the Ellsworth American reported.
"I idea I would accept been able to retire by now," said Lacher, whose shop features a window sign that says: "Books/ Pretty Expert Coffee/ Magazines/ Newspapers/ Wi-Fi Hot Spot/ A Improve Bottle of Wine." (The store began selling wine in 2013.)
Having survived chain and online competition for two decades, he observed: "To a really good, serious businessman, this would say 'Become out! This doesn't brand sense, you're losing money, Andy.' But I'm not a good, smart businessman."
Despite his modesty, Lacher purchased the building BookStacks inhabits in May and is optimistic about the future: "It's obvious to me this summer'due south going to be our best summer ever. Equally Bucksport takes off, as the tide rises, and so will I.... I want it to continue. I truly want this to go along."
Bookstore Cat of the Day: (The Smashing) Catsby
Posted yesterday on the Facebook page of new and used bookstore Second Edition Book Shop in Davie, Fla.: "My sweet CEOkitty and I recently spent an afternoon with SouthFlorida.com. I retrieve he fabricated them feel welcome."
SouthFLorida.com noted that Catsby "has more than 33,000 followers on Instagram. Danielle Whatley opened her first shop in 2003, and moved to the electric current location in 2013. She rescued Catsby near four years ago."
Personnel Changes at Harper Wave/HarperCollins
Effective July 31, Yelena Gitlin Nesbit is joining Harper Wave/HarperCollins equally senior director of publicity. She has been at Rodale Books for 9 years, most recently equally executive managing director of strategic development & communications.
Volume Trailer of the Day: The Emperor'due south Ostrich
The Emperor'south Ostrich by Julie Berry (Roaring Brook Press).
Media Heat: Joshua Green on Fresh Air
Today:
Fresh Air: Joshua Light-green, writer of Devil's Deal: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (Penguin Printing, $27, 9780735225022).
Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Ruth Ware, writer of The Lying Game: A Novel (Gallery/Scout Press, $26.99, 9781501156007).
Too on GMA: Andrew Solomon, author of Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the Earth (Scribner, $20, 9781476795058).
Dr. Oz: Bob Arnot, writer of The Coffee Lover's Diet: Alter Your Java, Change Your Life (Morrow, $26.99, 9780062458773).
Fresh Air: Billy Bragg, writer of Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the Earth (Faber & Faber, $29.95, 9780571327744).
Awards: Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement; ITW Thriller
Colm Tóibín has been named the winner of the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Honor, which recognizes authors for their consummate body of work.
"Colm Tóibín'south piece of work invites readers to contemplate the deep sadness of exile--from mother or brother, from nation, from oneself--to sympathise how accidents of geography and family shape identity, and how quirks of circumstance tin can harden or soften hearts," said Sharon Rab, founder and co-chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. "The surprising turns in his fiction and nonfiction that illustrate the longings and complexity of his characters, fifty-fifty those whose actions nosotros may deplore, remind us of our shared humanity and offering the possibility of reconciliation or simply of understanding, which are the first steps to making peace."
Tóibín commented: "Through fiction, we larn to see others. The folio is not a mirror. It is blank when I starting time to write, but it contains a version of the world when I finish.... Good sentences offer united states a way to imagine life in all its strangeness and ambiguity and possibility, alert united states to the power of the imagination to transform and transcend our nature, offering us a blueprint not only for who we are merely for who nosotros might be, who nosotros might become."
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Winners of the 2017 ITW Thriller Awards, presented at ThrillerFest XII, are:
Best Hardcover Novel: Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (M Cardinal)
Best First Novel: The Drifter past Nicholas Petrie (Putnam)
All-time Paperback Original Novel: The Body Reader by Anne Frasier (Thomas & Mercer)
Best Short Story: "Large Momma" by Joyce Ballad Oates (Ellery Queen's Mystery Mag)
All-time Young Adult Novel: Steeplejack past A.J. Hartley (Tor Teen)
Best E-Book Original Novel: Romeo's Way by James Scott Bell (Compendium Press)
ThrillerMaster: Lee Kid
Literary Argent Bullet Honor: Lisa Gardner
Thriller Legend Accolade: Tom Doherty
Petty Curse Books and Close Plenty for the Angels
"It doesn't fit into an easy niche," said Paul Madonna, cartoonist, creator of the comic strip All Over Coffee and author of the upcoming novel Close Enough for the Angels. Arriving on September 5 from Petty Expletive Books, Close Enough for the Angels is Madonna's first novel and tells the story of a failed artist who has been a "i-hit wonder twice over." The book explores the nature of the creative procedure and is a blend of artistic media, with more than than 100 ink-on-paper illustrations of locations in China, Japan and Thailand interspersed throughout the novel.
"It's non a graphic novel, it doesn't come up from the comic world," explained Madonna. His comic strip, which ran in the San Francisco Relate from 2004 to 2015 and was published in two collections by Metropolis Lights Booksellers & Publishers, was likewise a sort of hybrid, blending poetry and ink-on-paper drawings in the conventions of a comic strip. He added that for much of his career, he has been creating things that "no ane knows what to call."
At the heart of Close Enough for the Angels is Emit Hopper, who found sudden, fleeting success start as a musician in the 1980s and and then as a literary darling in the 1990s. Xx years on, he is the possessor of a laundromat and has largely given upwardly on his creative dreams. The story opens as Emit's lover Marie has been missing for more than than a yr. He takes a sudden journey to southeast Asia, and from there the narrative jumps between different stages of Emit'south life and career while he unravels a mystery tied to a personal tragedy. The illustrations sprinkled throughout the novel, meanwhile, don't just summarize scenes in the text.
"In a classic illustrated novel, you read on 1 page a scene of two people sitting at a cafe with the sun setting. You plow the page, and there is a motion picture of 2 people at a cafe with the sun setting out the window. That to me is redundant," said Madonna. He explained that the drawings in his book are a distinct function of the story, and though they are paired with the text in a tonal, emotional way, they don't simply replicate what the reader has just read.
"It's non obvious why nosotros're reading this chapter and seeing this paradigm," he said, adding that figuring out why a particular image is tied to a particular part of the text is something of a small puzzle for the reader to effigy out.
Madonna began working on the project in 2010, and what he thought would be a 2-year project turned into a vi-yr project. He kickoff visited southeast Asia in 1999, and after falling in dear with the region, "vowed to myself I would always go back and brand something there." When Madonna was in the process of publishing his first All Over Coffee collection, he initially had a hard time of it, with publishers saying they loved his piece of work just wouldn't publish the book because they thought information technology was regional and would sell only in the Bay Area. While nigh of the art in All Over Java did feature San Francisco, Madonna found that label frustrating, because he was receiving letters from and shipping fine art to readers all over the world. City Lights, which Madonna said understood that his work would have wider appeal, eventually published All Over Java and its follow-up, Everything Is Its Own Reward, but even though the latter collection featured drawings of more than a dozen cities, it was all the same considered past many to be a "San Francisco book."
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| Paul Madonna (l.) and Andrew Weiner. | |
"That frustrated me," remarked Madonna. "I decided the side by side one was not going to be a San Francisco volume."
When it came to publishing Close Enough for the Angels, Madonna once again had some difficulties. He recalled that conventional publishers shied abroad from the big number of images in the project and were daunted by how expensive it would be to produce, and publishers more experienced with graphics did non want to take on a novel. He eventually decided to create 50 handmade copies of the volume, to be sold as loftier-cost art objects. Spurred on by that success, and while discussing the project over dejeuner with friend and Abrams sales representative Andrew Weiner, Madonna and Weiner decided to publish the book themselves. They created a two-person publishing company, Petty Curse Books, with one project: Close Enough for the Angels.
"Information technology was a actually interesting procedure," said Weiner. "The challenge was to find someone who could arrange a single book."
Weiner and Madonna found their way to Graphic Arts Books and Publishers Group West. Graphic Arts Books volition distribute Close Enough for the Angels and host the book within its catalogue, and Ingram Publisher Services sales reps voted to accept art from the book featured on the IPS catalogue cover. Added Weiner: "It'south been a really cracking working human relationship with them."
Shut Enough for the Angels volition launch with a party at the Bindery, the satellite events space of the Booksmith in San Francisco. From at that place, Madonna will make a number of stops in the Bay Area and forth the West Coast, with some visits to other parts of the country besides. And Madonna has no shortage of futurity plans: his start solo museum show is opening in 2018, and for that he's writing an autobiographical volume well-nigh the creative procedure, and he's been pregnant to do a 3rd All Over Coffee collection for a while. And if Close Plenty for the Angels proves popular, he has two more books nigh Emit Hopper in heed. Said Madonna: "The hope is it will get enough attention and involvement, so that I can continue running with those side by side two books." --Alex Mutter
Book Review
Review: Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature equally an Adult
Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children'south Literature as an Adult by Bruce Handy (Simon & Schuster, $26 hardcover, 336p., 9781451609950, Baronial xv, 2017)
"It should go without proverb that the best children's literature is every bit every bit rich and rewarding in its concerns, as honest and stylish in execution, as the best adult literature," Bruce Handy writes in the introduction to his debut, Wild Things. However, children's books, especially picture books, are frequently snubbed or dismissed by adult readers and critics, though they are "also as complicated, stubborn, contradictory, and mysterious" every bit any novel written with a grown-up audition in mind. In Wild Things, Handy, a veteran cultural critic and a longtime lover of children'southward literature, presents an intelligent, thoughtful and oftentimes funny critique-cum-defence of kid lit in general and a few classics in particular.
Beginning with Goodnight Moon (so ubiquitous in American nurseries that Handy dubs it "gear," like a stroller or pacifiers), he explores the cultural forces that shape these beloved stories and their large, underlying existential themes: Beatrix Potter's fauna tales; Maurice Sendak'southward fever-dream picture books; Dr. Seuss'southward zany, rhyming early readers. Handy read many of these as a boy and rediscovered them when his ii children were young, but his keen eye is rarely sentimental; he includes thumbnail biographical sketches of the authors and asks insightful questions about what makes their stories tick. Few critics would think to compare The Runaway Bunny to Portnoy's Complaint, only Handy gets abroad with it--partly because of his obvious please in the erstwhile, which he calls "as incisive a treatise on the parent-kid bond" as Philip Roth's novel.
Handy'southward chapters are arranged in a rough chronology, from very early picture books to a few stories for older children, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder'due south Picayune House serial and East.B. White's masterpiece, Charlotte's Spider web. His affiliate on "Ramona Quimby, American Pest" is peculiarly enjoyable: Handy, similar Beverly Cleary herself, is delighted past Ramona because "life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next." He explores Cleary's oeuvre of titles well-nigh ordinary suburban children, who are "as complex, vivid, and atypical" every bit any characters with more dramatic life stories, and admits to a sneaking sympathy for Ramona--pest tendencies and all.
Throughout Wild Things, Handy draws on attachment theory, ecology concerns, religious questions, the teaching of literacy and other big, "grown-upward" ideas. Simply the true joy lies in Handy's honey for children'southward lit and his unabashed insistence that information technology holds treasures for even the most cynical of grown-ups. Like the books information technology champions, Handy'due south is surprising, wise, highly entertaining and thoroughly satisfying. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
Shelf Talker: Cultural critic Bruce Handy presents a wise, witty exploration of children's literature and its lasting entreatment for adults.
The Bestsellers
Acme-Selling Self-Published Titles
The bestselling self-published books terminal week as compiled by IndieReader.com:
1. Unsafe by Milo Yiannopoulos
2. His Plough (The Turning Serial Volume 3) by JA Huss
3. The Knocked Up Program by Lauren Blakely
4. Steal by Rachel Van Dyken
5. Subsequently All by Karina Halle
half dozen. Kiss Me Cowboy by Various
7. The Workhouse Childredue north by Lindsey Hutchinson
viii. Pandemic by A.Thou. Riddle
ix. Silent Child by Sarah A. Denzil
10. Beautiful Error by Vi Keeland
[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]
Source: https://www.shelf-awareness.com/theshelf/2017-07-18/review:_wild_things:_the_joy_of_reading_children_s_literature_as_an_adult.html
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