PowellsBooks.Blog

• A Time to be Firm: On the twentieth anniversary of John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, the bestselling author reflects on the past:
  

  Wynwood Press, a small company in New York, bought the manuscript a year [after it was finished] and printed 5,000 copies of A Time to Kill — at a length about a third shorter than the original manuscript — in June 1989. Grisham ordered 1,000 himself.

  Wynwood didn't have marketing muscle, so Grisham concocted his own book tour.

  "I had this scheme where I would throw a party in my local library and the whole town would show up and I would sell a lot. I have pictures of kids climbing on stacks of A Time to Kill." But when the party was over, he still owned most of the copies.

  It's always nice to remember that so many of the trillion-selling blockbuster novelists started out humbly, as well. Grisham's next book, a story collection titled Ford County Stories, due out this fall, returns to the fictional Mississippi town that was the setting for A Time to Kill.

• Absolutely Too True: A Chicago-area public school has decided not to yank Sherman Alexie's young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian from its summertime reading list for incoming freshmen, despite some objections by parents.
  

  Alexie's semi-autobiographical account of a 14-year-old Native American boy who leaves the reservation where he's grown up to attend an all-white high school received the National Book Award in Young People's Literature in 2007. It was selected this past spring by the English faculty at the public high school as required reading for incoming freshmen. Last week, however, seven parents both petitioned the school district's school board to pull it from the reading list and contacted regional media to air their complaints. According to a report in the Daily Herald, a newspaper serving suburban Chicago, the parents objected to the book's "descriptions of masturbation, racist language, graphic depictions of sex, and references to bestiality."

  All of which just make me (and, no doubt, the students) want to read the book even more.

• Toy Stories: This isn't necessarily book-related, but it's ingenious nonetheless — and the ALF bit at the end earns it a permanent home in my crooked heart:
  Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

Book News Round-up:

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics author Marisha Pessl picks "a few titles full of adventure" for the Book Beast.
• Betting that newfangled eBook trend is going away soon? After Apple sold more than a million of its new 3G iPhones in just three days, I urge you to save your money. Expect many more eBook apps on the way!
• Speaking of trends that won't go away:
  

  The Twitter revolution continues apace as two 19-year-old college freshman just sold "Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less" to Penguin.

  Set teeth to Grind, Envy Level 17.

• NPR recommends Peter Abrahams's newest YA novel: "Like his excellent and undervalued novels for adults (and his superb Echo Falls series for children)...Reality Check is reality-based, character-driven and riveting."
• NPR also takes a look at the "Mad" Art of Harvey Kurtzman:
  

  Retrace the strands that led to a lot of current American satire — including The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show — and sooner or later you end up at Harvey Kurtzman....Now, in The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, Denis Kitchen explores the life and art of the famous satirist, weaving together the story of Kurtzman's career with a collection of the artist's images and illustrations.

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Brockman is the head writer for the daily Book News posts on the Powells.com blog. In his free time he's hard at work on his fictional memoir, which changes titles daily.

The views and commentary posted by Brockman are entirely his own, and are not representative of the whole of Powell's Books, its employees, or any sane human being.

Books mentioned in this post

1. 
   $16.99 New Hardcover add to wish list

   The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

   Sherman Alexie
2. 
   $10.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

   Special Topics in Calamity Physics

   Marisha Pessl
3. 
   $2.95 Used Mass Market add to wish list

   A Time to Kill (20th Anniversary Edition)

   John Grisham
4. 
   $9.95 Used Hardcover add to wish list

   Reality Check (Laura Geringer Books)

   Peter Abrahams
5. 
   $40.00 New Hardcover add to wish list

   The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics

   Denis Kitchen