PowellsBooks.Blog

This isn't the best day to begin my stint as guest blogger at Powell's. After last night's binge — Xanax, a few IPAs, numerous cans of PBR, a jar of something alcoholic called Ginger Love, and several progressively stronger borrowed cigarettes (I don't normally smoke) — the writing promises to be foggy. But as they say in show biz (see, my writing brain isn't functional, so I'm going with cliché), the show must go on.

The reason for this binge drinking was that last night was the culmination of my book tour, and, to celebrate it, I put on an event at Dante's Inferno called Literary Gong Show. I was the host of the event and had dressed myself in a tuxedo and a floppy-collared, bright-yellow, pleated tuxedo shirt that I unbuttoned to the navel. This was intended as an impersonation of Chuck Barris, the '70s TV host who hosted the actual Gong Show, but I think I just looked like an aging writer in a cheap, untailored tuxedo who didn't know to button his shirt and couldn't afford a bow tie.

The Gong Show event was the end ...

[Editor's note: Please join us at our Burnside location tonight at 7:30, where Lois Leveen will be presenting her new novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Click here for full event information.]

Wayyyyy back in October, I found out my novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser would be published on May 15. But it was only a couple of weeks ago that I began to wonder what I would actually do on May 15. And, for that matter, on May 14, and on May 16. I had no idea. So I asked some of my friends who are published authors.

Heidi Durrow (author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky) told me that the day her book came out, she had a "gussy me up day": she got her hair done, and also her nails and toes, to be ready for her book launch party. But then she panicked that no one would show up. Ten minutes before the reading, only a dozen people ...

Fear of a red tractor. That is what keeps a novelist up at night.

Remember the good ol' days when barber, surgeon, and dentist was a single occupation?

Okay, maybe those days weren't so good. But at least back then, the dentist was probably too busy to be a literary critic, too. My dentist, however, is another matter.

Last year, while giving my molars the once over, the dear old DMD told me about a book he'd been reading. A book he really liked. Until he got to a description of "a red John Deere tractor" sitting in a field. He immediately put the book down, never to finish it. Because, as he put it, "everyone knows, John Deere has never made a red tractor. That was put in there by some New York editor."

Only a West Coast dentist can make a New York editor sound like such an unseemly villain.

Authors — and our editors — are always trying to add specificity to our descriptions, to make things more real. Except that when you get that "real" detail wrong, you have blown ...

Leni Zumas's debut novel, The Listeners, hit us like a bolt of lightning. Arch, witty, intelligent, impressionistic, hypnotic, and above all dazzlingly written, we couldn't put this deeply moving and disquieting book down. Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask, raves, "Just listen to The Listeners. You'll hear the prose of one of our most exciting young writers. Zumas has already proven herself a remarkable maker of short stories. Now she has sustained and heightened the exhilaration of her writing in this striking novel." And Miranda July writes, "Leni Zumas understands your quiet agony and describes it with such wry, unflinching familiarity that even the gory details ring true." So, together with our neighbors, independent publisher Tin House Books, we created an exclusive hardcover edition of The Listeners (with an embossed purple octopus on the cover, which is probably our favorite detail). And Leni (which, by the way, is pronounced laynee), who's a local author, was wonderfully funny and gracious when she came in to sign our books.

"We're giving you a French flap," my publisher said.

"That's fantastic!" I said.

Then I immediately Googled "French flap."

Which it turns out is not, as I feared, some new variant on a Brazilian wax.

A French flap is a fancy-pants design in which the cover includes an extra folded bit on each side, which gives the publisher more room to tell you about the book, and gives you a built-in bookmark to fold into place. (Unless of course you decide to read the book in one sitting, in which case, I'm sure you can find some creative use for your flap page).

The French flap says, exquisite physical object. But, being bilingual, it also says pas trop cher. A French-flapped tome is not only elegant, it's less expensive, less heavy to schlep around, and less of a space-hog on your bookshelf than a hardback.

Yes, I said it. My book, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, is not coming out in hardback. This is the kind of news that until not long ago ...

Describe your latest book.
It is titled Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, and it is coming out in May from Doubleday. This is the first ever autobiography of Clarence Birdseye, the man who developed the frozen food industry. Birdseye could be called a foodie in that he thought about food constantly. Every letter he wrote was describing a meal he had recently enjoyed or an interesting dish he had sampled. But, born in 1886, he was a 19th-century foodie. Born at the height of the industrial revolution, he believed that industry would make food wonderful. He constantly thought of ways to industrialize food. He even worked with farmers to make their products more suitable to industry. His dream was for high quality fresh food to be made available to everyone. He saw this as a growing movement in the world. He imagined his native New York food self-sufficient, growing its produce hydroponically on roof tops and freezing it to have throughout the year.

He was a curious man in both senses of the word, interested in absolutely everything, and in how to improve it. But ...

To an author, librarians are superheroes. First, they are incredible sources when we are researching and writing. Then, they are vital connectors for helping readers find our finished books. And if librarians in general are superheroes, Nancy Pearl is the superduperhero, the librarian so cool she has her own action figure. So when Nancy Pearl defines the four elements that make a person fall in love with a book, who wouldn't listen?

Story. Character. Setting. Language. Pearl calls these four elements doorways , "because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book." And since books take us places, I figure we might as well carry Pearl's four-door metaphor into sedan-land. That way, I can hotwire it and take it for a blog-entry spin.

Here's what Pearl means by her four doors:

A book heavy on story is a page-turner, and we fall headlong into its can't-wait-to-find-out-what-happens-nextness. What in graduate school I was taught to call narrative desire and what in ...

I didn't know I was going to be a novelist.

Or a Civil War Enthusiast.

So how did this happen?

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — I was a geeky academic-wannabe, sitting in my grad school library, reading a book of women's history. Buried in the book's 300 pages were a few paragraphs about Mary Bowser. Born a slave to the wealthy Van Lew family of Richmond, Virginia, Mary was freed by Bet, the headstrong (guess what that is code for) Van Lew daughter and sent North to be educated. But Mary returned to the South and, during the Civil War, became a spy for the Union... by pretending to be a slave to the family of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Wait a minute — I thought the Civil War was boring. A seemingly endless list of dates, battlefields, and names of generals we had to memorize in high school. Who knew ...

Some six or seven years ago, I heard a story about an employee of a coastal restaurant who beat a one-legged gull to death with a stick out back of the establishment. Apparently the gull served as the establishment's mascot, and for whatever reason, if sociopathic behavior can be said to have logical reasons, the employee bashed the bird to death.

The man who recounted the incident to me heard about it from an eyewitness who later called the police. An investigation ensued, but the perpetrator wasn't arrested, even though killing a gull constitutes a crime under federal migratory bird law, punishable by a maximum fine of $15,000 and a maximum prison sentence of two years, depending on the offense.

The tale of the senseless and horrific murder of a gull has never left my mind. I can also never forget driving behind a pick up truck and watching a male driver purposely swerve into the shoulder of Highway 20 and kill a gull. Who are these people? What happened to their moral development? What books do they read to their children? If I had had my cell phone with ...

I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it incredibly honest, messily lovely, and so damn smart — a really deep, intelligent, generous, funny look at life and purpose, which never relied on easy answers. It made me want to go on a pilgrimage, and it made me think differently about forgiveness. I haven't been so impressed with a memoir or travel book since Geoff Dyer — and as much as I love his work, A Sense of Direction frequently felt more thoughtful and self-aware than Dyer's books sometimes can. Thank you so much for publishing it; it genuinely moved me.

—Jill Owens, in an email to the publicity director at Riverhead Books

A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's account of three pilgrimages: the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain which has become secular and fairly popular; a circular pilgrimage, the 88 Temples of Shikoku in Japan; and a trip to Ukraine for Rosh Hashanah with his brother and father. It's also a sharp-eyed and extremely funny meditation on desire, discipline, friendship, work, family, ...