BEA Today!

I'll be leaving for BEA in about an hour, with one suitcase packed and one empty for all the swag I'm hoping to pick up. My wish list is as follows:

Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon: This is already available, but the authors will be there signing and I'm eager to meet them. I think this book will be a nice compliment with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, which as previously mentioned, I fell in love with. This is also a staff pick this month from Bonnie, you can read her recommendation here.

Silent in the Sanctuary by Deanna Raybourn: This follows Ms. Raybourn's first book, Silent in the Grave. I loved that one so much that I wrote a recommendation for it that got picked for BookSense (read it here)! I'm really excited to see this become a series.

Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta: A new book by an author who needs no introduction.

Oh hell, this is just getting too long--I have a train to catch! Others include a biography of Charles Schultz (called, easily enough, Schultz & Peanuts: A Biography), Jonathan Bean's solo picture book At Night, a novel by Brock Clarke with a great title--An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, a compendium of great food to try called Eat This! (as well as the new book from America's Test Kitchen, America's Best Lost Recipes), and young adult books Undercover by Beth Kephart and My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow. My love for trashy romances by Avon will be sated by new books by Kathryn Caskie and Sophia Nash.

I don't know whether I'll have the opportunity to blog during the madness coming up--I'll certainly try! If not, I'll be back with you either Sunday night or Monday. I need to catch you up on my appointment with my Simon & Schuster rep!

State of Massachusetts

This year Publisher's Weekly has been taking weekly in-depth looks at the state of book selling in each state; up recently was the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The last bit of the article is a profile of my boss, Marshall Smith. In his honor, we here at Brookline Booksmith love the flagrant use of the suffix -smith. Exhibit A: Our information desk, lovingly referred to as Infosmith. Exhibit B: Brookline Blogsmith.

Cookbook Remainder Alert!

I am so ready to go home, but I saw Bruno currently unpacking some fantastic cookbook remainders and I couldn't not spread the word. I don't know how Alie did it, but we have Ana Sortun's Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean for $14.99. Holy hell, I can't believe it!

Man, I was lucky enough to go to Oleana once, and I can vividly remember the heavenly deliciousness. I hope I'll have a special occasion that calls for a return visit someday soon. Well, that and someone willing to pick up the check...

Thinking of Fall...

Sorry to have been quiet, but it's getting quite busy here in the Brookline Booksmith basement as Fall Buying Season began in earnest for me today. Though hot enough to sweat while standing still outisde (my barometer for when it's too hot), I spent my day trying to figure out what you all will want to take home in November and December.

Going through publishers' catalogs is more like fun than work. Everything looks good, or, at least, it should if the publishers' marketing teams have done their jobs. Of course there are some things that even the most finessed blurb can't save, but those generally have their own comedic value. Unfortunately, then reality sets in and I spend a lot of time trying to suss out which books truly deserve space on our shelves and which only sound good. I don't want to get suckered by the equivalent of the kick-ass trailer that was way better than the movie.

Up first was Hachette, and today's big book was obvious--Stephen Colbert's I Am America and So Can You, which will be coming out in October. But here are a few of the other things that caught my eye:

Did you know that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonald's, Burger Kings, and Wendy's combined? The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee looks so cool. I'm eager for the discussion of Jews and Chinese food--my mother was honestly very worried that she did something wrong as I disliked both Chinese food and chopped liver (Just so you know, I now have a proper love for the former though I still can't stand the latter). Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until MARCH for this to come out. Grumble.

The fiction title that most intrigues me is Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, which takes the premise that the Greek gods are still with us, and living in a London townhouse. Little, Brown is describing it as Homer meets Jennifer Weiner, which makes me a bit nervous. I'm hoping more for Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson meets Curtis Sittenfeld's Hannah Gavener.

As for Alie, she is a girl who really knows her mysteries, and when I told her that Denise Mina's backlist was going to be reissued she was thrilled. So this will be the season of Denise Mina; starting in September her older books will be gussied up with pretty new covers and in February the paperback of The Dead Hour will be released as will her new hardcover, Slip of the Knife.

Up next? Simon and Schuster on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday I'm off to NYC for BEA--booksellers nirvana!

New Title Tuesday!

The big news today, which you probably don't need my little blog to tell you, are the new releases today from Al Gore and Khaled Hosseini, Assault on Reason and A Thousand Splendid Suns, respectively. I should probably be excited, but here's the truth--I never read Kite Runner or saw An Inconvenient Truth, and I can't say I plan to anytime soon.

So here's my alternate pick of the week:

An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege by Heidi Ardizzone

Belle Greene was an African-American woman born in the late nineteenth century. Passing as white, she became a librarian at Princeton University and was then hired (when she was only 20!) to be the librarian for J.P. Morgan. She then created and curated for him one of the most renowned private collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world (which you can see now that the Morgan is a public museum). Ms. Greene was also quite a saucy lady, with flirtations a plenty and an ongoing love affair with a married man. I think I probably would have skipped right over this book if I hadn't already been familiar with her. My friend Alan told me about Ms. Green when I was getting my degree in library science--he thought I would appreciate a woman who said (perhaps apocryphally) "Just because I am a librarian doesn't mean I have to dress like one!"

Guerrillas In Our Midst

Because I have never left my high school mentality of needing to know what people are saying about me I tend to Google "brookline booksmith" fairly often to see what pops up. Today Google Blog Search brought up the blog for these folks, the Guerilla Poetics Project (Perhaps part of the guerrilla nature of the group is to misspell guerrilla? Just wondering). It seems we have been targeted for guerrilla poetry, which I personally think is super-cool and makes me want to forget work and go through all our fiction and poetry to see if an operative has hidden any other gems. I read some of the broadsides online, and am impressed not only by the poetry (though I can't say I love them all, but I guess that's the prerogative of the artists' recipient) but the aesthetics of the prints as well. Now that I have outed them I'm afraid these little presents will disappear. Especially since I might represent the oppressive system. Secret operative, please keep hiding poems in our books! Stuff like this makes me love the possibilities of literature.

Collect Raindrops by Nikki McClure

Nikki McClure's calendars have hung in my kitchen so I was so thrilled when I saw a collection of her work in the Abrams catalog. Today our copies of Collect Raindrops have arrived! Ms. McClure creates intricate papercuts; her palatte is only black, white, and a single accent color. Her subjects are the natural world and us in it, and each image is accompanied by a directive--strengthen, swim with a friend, seek, respond, encourage. "Realize true riches" accompanies the image of someone picking tomatoes; the cover image is paired with the word "strengthen." This is art made for reflection, that makes you think but is not opposed to emotion as well.