Friday, 6/13 at Accent on Books: Sarah Addison Allen

Western North Carolina is home to an unusually large number of fine writers, but few have made a bigger splash on the national scene recently than Sarah Addison Allen. Her novel Garden Spells, published last year, spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and won her a legion of admirers from throughout the country. Her next book, just out, is called The Sugar Queen, and Accent on Books will be hosting Sarah on Friday, June 13, at 6:00 PM, to read from and talk about her new work. Like her earlier book, The Sugar Queen is a novel of magic, romance and humor in a North Carolina town, and early reviews have indicated it is every bit the equal of Garden Spells.

By the way, the plot of Sarah's new book includes her main character discovering that someone has been secretly living in her closet. That could never happen in real life, right? Well, actually, it has just recently happened in Japan. More here.

Whose house this was, I now well know

You'd best behave yourself if you're in the vicinity of Middlebury, Vermont, for this is a town that definitely tailors the punishment to fit the crime when they apprehend perpetrators. When 28 people, mostly teenagers, recently broke into a farmhouse where Robert Frost used to stay, and trashed the place during a wild party, the local authorities sentenced them to -- study the poetry of Robert Frost. Naturally, media reports of the incident couldn't help but refer to this as a case of "poetic justice." The person chosen to mete out this punishment was Frost authority Jay Parini, who proceeded to discuss two poems with the young lawbreakers: "The Road Not Taken" (about decision-making, appropriately enough), and "Out Out," a poem about a youth fatally injured in a sawmill accident.

I suppose only time will tell if the young delinquents mend their ways. Or become fans of Robert Frost.

More on this story can be found here.

This assumes, of course, they know how to read.

Barack Obama may be reading Zakaria, but what should the presidential candidates be reading? The "New York Times Book Review" posed this question to a wide variety of authors, and, as might be expected got a wide variety of interesting answers. My favorite passage in the article, however, did not have to do with specific book suggestions. It was this, from Scott Turow:

"I have met all three presidential candidates, two quite briefly, but I know that each exhibits an acute literary sensibility as measured by the standard that most authors secretly employ: they are familiar with my work. (At least they said they were -- they are politicians, after all.)"

"Books? They're over on the pool table."

This coming Saturday we may see more of our regular customers outside the store than in it. That's because we will be taking a large portion of our religion section to display at the "Ministry Summit" of the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina, which is being held at Asheville's First Baptist Church (ecumenism in action!). This is a somewhat revamped version of an event that's held every year, and represents one of our largest out-of-store projects. Undoubtedly we'll see lots of familiar faces; Episcopalians are great book buyers. The usual location for our display is a room filled with pool tables and drink machines near the gym; a bit incongruous, perhaps, but it seems to work.

So if you go to the Ministry Summit on Saturday, be sure to stop by our book display. And, if you don't, why not go by Accent on Books and say an encouraging word to -- and perhaps buy a book or two from -- whichever one of us is holding down the fort there.

Paula Gunn Allen, 1939-2008

Another writer who passed away last week was Paula Gunn Allen. Like George Garrett (see previous post) she was a versatile writer who deserved to be better known. However, Allen, of Sioux/Laguna/Lebanese descent, came from a very different background and subsequently dealt with quite different issues in her writing.

Byron, my co-worker and fellow blogger, wrote an appreciation of Allen, which included one of Allen's powerful poems. It can be found here .

George Garrett, 1929-2008

A number of years ago at a booksellers' convention, I was part of a large audience waiting to hear an author speak when I noticed a distinguished looking gentleman seated near me holding a book which I assumed he was in the middle of reading. However, it turned out to be the writer George Garrett, and his book was one that he had recently finished writing.

It seemed somehow appropriate that this extraordinary teacher and man of letters was sitting unnoticed among a crowd of booksellers waiting to hear someone else speak. Although he received tremendous acclaim over his long and varied writing career, Garrett, who died last week at the age of 78, never quite received the renown of such contemporaries as Walker Percy and Reynolds Price. On the other hand, while a few of his novels had some commercial success, it was not enough to make him well known to the reading public. However, as a writer and a professor -- mostly at the University of Virginia -- George Garrett had a career lasting almost 50 years that can only be described as distinguished and admirable. He is survived by his wife, three children, and many grateful readers and former students.

More about George Garrett can be found here.

So Many Books...

Is the pile of unread books next to your chair getting smaller? With hot weather upon us, are you afraid you'll run out of summer reading? Do you fear you're reading books faster than publishers can issue new ones?

If so, you can probably relax. According to R. R. Bowker, the company that publishes Books in Print and issues ISBN's, a total of 411,422 new titles and editions were published in this country in 2007. That number included a sizable increase in "non-traditional titles" published through new technologies such as print-on-demand. The total number represented a 39% increase over the previous year, with the largest percentage gains coming in fiction and literature titles, and the largest decrease in business and personal finance.

Last year's new publications brings the total number of titles in print in this country to 670 million billion zillion. Or something like that.