#bea13

20 things most people dont know about me part2 #michlit @sylviahubbard1

  I did the first 10 in this link and then to get myself comfortable to do major periscope I decided to do all of them in a video while also answering viewers questions. (more…)

Wiley at #BEA13 Kicks Off Tomorrow, May 30

Hoboken, NJ (PRWEB) May 29, 2013

Attendees at BEA will be able to visit and receive hands on social media assistance from resident Wiley Social Media “Scientists” at the “Social Media Learning Lab” located at stations throughout the Wiley booth (1838, 1839) May 30th – June 1st. Wiley “Scientists” will be available concurrent and following signings and presentations by Authors, Digital Classroom…

From A World of New Titles: Editor’s Picks | BEA 2013, Margaret Heilbrun's picks from this year’s Book Expo America.

The facts of life

Oh, dear. BEA is over. I am sifting through the fall/winter books I learned about there, pondering what to highlight for further attention—and I’m trying to steer away from my usual ruts. I must not select books on evolution again. I must not yammer on about silent film stars. I must not gleefully report on a new biography of an Enlightenment philosopher. I must get a grip—speaking of which, I will not discuss the evolution of the hominid precision grip from the power grip of other apes.

I will not mention that new book coming in October from the University of Chicago, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, by Henry Gee. And I’ll decline to expound on Russell H. Tuttle’s Apes and Human Evolution (Harvard Univ., Feb. 2014).

You can avoid those subjects, Margaret (talking to oneself is an evolutionary feature unique to humans), can’t you? Dance around those subjects, if you must, but select more widely. Come to think of it, the very subject of selection intrigues me—and I don’t mean just natural selection!

For some years, I worked as a librarian/archivist at a combined research library and history museum and curated some exhibits there. The library and museum behaved according to their species: the library to grant unmediated access to its collections, the museum to select particular items and interpret them for visitors through the labels and the juxtaposition of objects.

I’m intrigued by a couple of forthcoming titles related to the politics of museum display and interpretation. Who Owns America’s Past: The Smithsonian and the Problem of History (Johns Hopkins), by Robert C. Post, curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, comes out in October. He writes of the shift at the Smithsonian, over the years of his work there, from producing collection-driven shows with modest labeling to “concept-driven” presentations, even including props, as if a history exhibit were a department store window display.

We’ve all been known to play Three-Card Monte with our facts now and then, switching the hold we have on them from power grip to precision grip at will, while professing an obligation to honor the truth. Many of us like “reality shows” on TV, even as we suspect the producers of those shows of having a grip on “reality” different from our own. When we walk through a museum exhibit, what kind of reality do we assume we’ll encounter?

In Assassination and Commemoration: JFK, Dallas, and the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (Oklahoma Univ., Jul.), Stephen Fagin, associate curator and oral historian at Dallas’s Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, writes about how that museum has reckoned with its mission to memorialize and interpret a national tragedy while coping with a city’s years of shame over its place in the narrative.

Another forthcoming title reminds me that the contouring of “reality” is not a new phenomenon. Before the days of television, the Internet, and social media, Hollywood was determining its approach to Hitler’s rise in 1930s Germany. Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Belknap: Harvard Univ., Oct.) surprises in its revelations of the accommodations that the major studios made with Hitler (an avid film fan) and his henchmen. Should it surprise us that Urwand found scant archival records of this relationship in the studios’ archives but found the paper trail in Nazi archives overseas? Owing to Urwand’s research trail, his book doesn’t much overlap with Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (Columbia Univ.), which came out in April.

Funny how this whole question of interpretation leads me helplessly back to the subject of evolution, specifically the question of evolutionary science versus creationism. I’m glad to see that Donald R. Prothero’s Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future (Indiana Univ., Sept.) and Edward Caudill’s Intelligently Designed: How Creationists Built the Campaign Against Evolution(Univ. of Illinois, Nov.) will address the repercussions to be felt by all of us when a few work to subvert scientific facts.

Well, Margaret, you’ve done it! You’ve stitched together your thoughts on some fall titles—which reminds me: Ohio University Press has a book coming out early next year that looks to be both fascinating and beautiful. It’s Aimee E. Newell’s A Stitch in Time: The Needlework of Aging Women in ­Antebellum America (Jan. 2014). While girls created samplers in order to learn their stitches, using simple facts (those again) for practice, by embroidering their names, birth dates, and so on, older women, Newell explains, expressed much more with their embroidery, crafting samplers as a means of coping with experiences and sharing something deeper of themselves.

From A World of New Titles: Editor’s Picks | BEA 2013, Annalisa Pesek's picks from this year’s Book Expo America.

One book at a time

The book review editor’s work is a balancing act: keep up with the imagination and stay up on the facts. So in a way, BEA is a chance for editors to rest—at least the imagination has less to consider—and the aisles aren’t so different from those in the LJ bookroom. We meet humans instead of emails and see publishers show off in their branded booths. Mostly, BEA is about introductions to books and ­people.

It’s impossible to say when I was first introduced to W.H. Auden (1907–73), but the influence of his poetry reached me again when I took home the galley of the new Princeton critical edition of Auden’s paramount poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Jun.), edited by Alan Jacobs. These verses (later set to music by friend and composer Benjamin Britten) document Auden’s return to the Christian faith of his childhood, revealing his understanding of and relationship to the divine.

I was enticed by a related forthcoming title from Princeton: What Auden Can Do for You (Oct.) by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith (“No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series). In this poignant and very personal book, McCall Smith accounts for his deep admiration of Auden and the life-changing impacts of his poetry, offering the reminder, “Where we are when we read something can make all the difference.” Meanwhile, in his The Augustinian Theology of W.H. Auden (Univ. of South Carolina, Aug.), Stephen Schuler delves into Auden’s theological insights and the influence Augustine had on Auden’s spiritual revelations and the development of his literary methods. Schuler’s examination of the poetry of these years is in stride with that of Auden’s literary executor, Edward Mendelson, the series editor of the Princeton “W.H. Auden: Critical Editions.” You’ll find out more about that in my conversation with Mendelson about Auden, scheduled for LJ’s August issue.

From A World of New Titles: Editor’s Picks | BEA 2013, Mahnaz Dar's picks from this year’s Book Expo America.

Old friends and new

One of the best things about attending BEA is meeting old friends. But I wasn’t just reconnecting with colleagues; the upcoming release of Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy (Knopf, Oct.) meant the chance to get reacquainted with the woman whose dating and career woes more than prepared me for my own life as a “singleton.” Standing in line for author Helen Fielding’s autograph, my fellow BEA-ers and I speculated about the identity of the “boy.” The steadfast but snarky Mark Darcy? Charming bad boy Daniel Cleaver? From what I do know, it seems that our heroine is fretting over the pitfalls that texting have brought to the courtship world, which suggests that Bridget and her seemingly perfect match, Mark, are not basking in connubial bliss.

Speaking of old acquaintances, I can’t wait to see what lies in store for the protagonist of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (Scribner, Sept.). Danny Torrance, the five-year-old blessed (or cursed) with uncanny psychic abilities in King’s classic work of horror The Shining, is grown up but still haunted by his memories of the ghostly Overlook Hotel and the legacy of his disturbed, alcoholic father. The adult Dan has taken a job at a nursing home in a small New Hampshire town, where he uses his preternatural talents to provide comfort to the dying.

It’s impossible to avoid cats in the book world, from library cats to Grumpy Cat getting ready for his close-up at BEA. John Bradshaw’s Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet (Basic Bks: Perseus, Sept.) is ideal for anyone who’s ever wanted to know more about our feline overlords, like how they became our constant companions and why so many of them are in the habit of bringing their owners small dead animals.

Best known for creating the memorable cover art for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, graphic designer Chuck Kidd has written Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design (Workman, Oct). While this title on the concepts behind design is targeted at children, it’s a fun and creative volume that will appeal to adults, too.

Though I’m a bibliophile at heart, several new titles rekindled my passion for my second love: rock and roll. At over 700 pages, Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon’s All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles Release (Black Dog & Leventhal, Oct.) is an ambitious compendium that amasses information on each of the Fab Four’s recordings, from the technical to the trivial (for example, Paul McCartney wrote “I Saw Her Standing There” in 1962 about his then girlfriend Iris Caldwell, whose sister was part of another rock group, Rory Storm & the Hurricane, which included Ringo Starr). I’m particularly looking forward to the stories behind Let It Be, the last Beatles album to be released, whose production caused a lot of strife and angst among the four.

But wait—there’s more! In When They Were Boys: The True Story of the Beatles’ Rise to the Top (Running Pr., Jul.), music reporter Larry Kane (one of the few journalists to travel with the Beatles) examines the band from a new and unexpected angle: exploring how the four first met as teenagers.

From A World of New Titles: Editor’s Picks | BEA 2013, Wilda Williams's picks from this year’s Book Expo America.

Vive la France!

With few celebrities (with the exception of Grumpy Cat) at BEA 2013 to distract me, I could concentrate on the serious business of scoping out my picks of the show. I didn’t realize until I took my biblio-booty home that there was a French flavor to my selections.

First catching my attention was Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat (Gallic, dist. by Consortium, Sept.). Winner of the Prix Landerneau Découvertes and Prix Relay des Voyageurs, this delightful “1980s fairy tale for adults” is the story of how a black felt hat belonging to French president François Mitterand transforms the lives of those who possess it. Its gentle satirical humor reminded me of Jacques Tati’s classic films, and, no, you don’t have to know French politics to enjoy this novel. At the LJ’s fifth annual Librarian Shout ’n Share, Kansas PL’s Kaite Mediatore Stover enthusiastically advised fans of The Elegance of the Hedgehog not to miss Laurain’s book. The American Booksellers Association has also included the title in its fall “Celebrate Debut Authors with Indies” promotional program.

We move into much darker territory with Pierre Lemaitre’s twisty thriller Alex (MacLehose: Quercus, Sept.). Praised in Europe for his Hitchcockian plots, the award-winning Lemaitre makes his English-language debut with this devilish tale about a young woman snatched off a Parisian street. But as Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven investigates the kidnapping, he learns that this girl is no ordinary victim. This intense crime novel asks “who is the predator and who is the prey” and will remind many readers of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; interestingly, Lemaitre’s English editor also edited Larsson.

Next year marks the centennial of the start of World War I. Jean Echenoz, one of France’s most distinguished writers, takes the “war to end all wars” as his subject of his novel 1914 (New Pr., Jan. 2014). Opening on a summer day in August 1914, this brilliantly compressed (at 128 pages) yet powerful book follows five Frenchmen, two of whom leave behind a young woman who waits for their return, as they leave for the trenches of northern France and the unthinkable carnage that awaits them.

I love travel memoirs, the more exotic and extreme the better. And what could be more extreme than spending six months alone in a cabin in Siberia with your closest neighbors a day’s hike away? Winner of the Prix Médicis for nonfiction, The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga (Rizzoli Ex Libris, Sept.) recalls Sylvain Tesson’s experiment in isolation and solitude on Russia’s Lake Baikal with only his notebooks, his books, and many bottles of vodka to keep him company: “I’d promised myself that before I turned forty, I would live as a hermit deep in the woods.” Besides chopping wood for his stove, fishing, and skating on the lake, Tesson spent a lot of time reading from his carefully selected library of 70 titles. “When you have misgivings about the poverty of your inner life, it’s important to fill that void in a pinch,” he writes. A philosophy with which I agree ­wholeheartedly!

From A World of New Titles: Editor’s Picks | BEA 2013, my picks from this year's Book Expo America.

Fish tales

This year was my second ever BEA, and I already felt like a veteran. (I’d show you my war wounds, but they are all paper cuts.) Firmly declining the galleys that could otherwise be mailed to me, storing my day’s haul underneath a certain snack table at LJ’s Librarians’ Lounge, bringing my lunch with me, and, of course (most important), wearing comfortable shoes: I felt far less frazzled than last year. Unfortunately, I have not figured out anything to make the walk from the 34th Street C train to the Javits Center any more pleasant, but there’s always next year.

I found a lot to get excited about on the show floor. Two of my favorite writers, Jesmyn Ward (whose Salvage the Bones won a National Book Award in 2011) and Hilton Als (theater critic, The New Yorker) have books coming out this fall, respectively, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury, Sept.) and White Girls (McSweeney’s, Nov.). In the former, Ward examines the visceral costs of institutional racism and remembers five men she lost in four years. In the latter, Als collects 13 essays (12 previously published) that touch on Flannery O’Conner, André Leon Talley, Richard Pryor, and Malcolm X with a signature lyricism and personal bent that I’ve come to love.

Another book of essays I found, by O. Henry Award winner Thomas Glave, is Among the Bloodpeople (Akashic, Jul.). This collection is wide-ranging, moving from the Caribbean (Jamaica in particular) to Cambridge, England, and from poetry to sex to discrimination. I love this passage from “The Bloodpeople in the Language”:

Once upon a realm, in a far-off kingdom by the sea, there lived a small boy who believed that his elder sister knew everything. He believed that she knew the names and historical categories of snails (which she did), and the infinite personalities of trees (patient, impatient, skulking, among them), and how mustard leaves crept and crawled—crawled, and even walked—until taller plants could no longer ignore them, had to engage with them; and exactly what the ancient order of rainbows—rainbows well-known and those more elusive, that sometimes nourished secretive, determined sea creatures—have to do with words like homunculus, with words like crepuscular and even adamantine; with notions like space,consume, and unrendered.

The rest of the books that grabbed my attention are all fiction, a category I don’t often deal with at LJ (where I assign only nonfiction) but devour in my personal time. I found five novels and one short story collection to add to my pile, three of which seem to have an ocean theme. The lovely watercolor cover of Abby Geni’s The Last Animal (Counterpoint, Oct.)—part octopus, part jellyfish, part fish fin—immediately drew me in, and I’m staying to read “Captivity,” a story about an aquarium worker haunted by her brother’s disappearance.

Kathryn Davis’s Duplex, a surreal novel of 1950s suburbia, has another great sea passage about a group of girls—who call themselves the Aquanauts—who decide to live undersea, to “explore the parts of the ocean where human beings had never been before.” They imagined the whole world submerged, so “they could swim through the top floors of skyscrapers and into places like maximum security prisons and movie stars’ mansions and the lion cage at the zoo, places that had always been off-limits to ordinary people.”

My third ocean book is Janice Clark’s The Rathbones (Random, Aug.; see review p. 70), which was described to me as The Odyssey meets Moby-Dick meets The Addams Family, to which I say: give me that book. It also features a lovely family tree, illustrated by Clark herself. (I am a sucker for family trees.) I have a feeling that this one is going to be a lot of fun.

My last three novels fall into the nonoceanic category, but that doesn’t make them any less worthy. Karen Shepard’s The Celestials (Tin House, Jun.), about a group of Chinese workers in 1870s North Adams, MA, piqued my interest owing to a recent visit to MASS MoCA, a mill–turned–contemporary art museum, located there. Shepard, who lives in nearby ­Williamstown, drew from real historical events. After a strike by white workers, a North Adams factory owner invited Chinese workers to replace them, spurring nationwide protest and eventually the United States’ first major anti-immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. (Soho, Jan. 2014; see also Barbara Hoffert’s picks, p. 20), follows Nigerian-born, ­Amherst-educated, and money-pressed Ike as he plots the theft of a religious statue from his home village so he can sell it to a high-end art gallery in New York City. Ndibe’s portrait of the art world, and indeed of Western fascination with “exotic” objects, sears: “African gods are no longer in vogue,” one collector says blithely. “Three, four years ago, they were all the rage.… Then things—tastes—changed.… It just happens that African gods don’t excite collectors as they once did.”

A World of New Titles: Editor’s Picks | BEA 2013