New Author Events!

Our Events widget has been updated with tons of upcoming readings and signings. There's even a puppet show coming to the store!

Don't miss Sherman Alexie signing books this Friday!!!!

(No, Daniel Handler won't be there. And authors won't have any more apocalyptic visions... hopefully)

The 2009 Booker Prize goes to. . . .

Congratulations to Hilary Mantel. Her latest book, Wolf Hall, just won the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Here's a link to the Booker's synopsis. And the New York Times story and review.

We had ordered just one copy which is due to arrive next week. But we'll order a big pile. Just call the store if you want to us to reserve you one and call you when it arrives.

If you're interested in the runners-up, the list is always a good guide to the best fiction published each year. It's here.

Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!

A sleepless night or two ago, trying to bore myself to bed, I stumbled across this site. It's an archive of literary inspired work (well 99.9% literary), an amalgamation of various illustrators and designers depicting favorite authors, characters, etc. From the top there there's Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi's Hunter S. Thompson, Scott Campbell's Jules Verne side by side with his imagination, and Mike Mignola's Dracula.

The site itself is organized by both subject and artist, easy to navigate and easy to waste time on. Really I could post tons of favorites and go on and on about what I like and why, but instead I'll just leave everyone with this image of Jim Davis. Explore for yourself and enjoy.

From Pittsburgh...My Airplane Read

Hey everyone. I have just landed in Pittsburgh, PA, and I thought I would post before I hit the sack, seeing as I have to hunt though warehouses for remainders at 8am Eastern tomorrow.

So here is the book I just finished on the plane.

For awhile now I've seen the beautifully designed cover of José Luís Peixoto's book The Implacable Order of Things with "Winner of the Jose Saramago Literary Award" at the bottom. I have twice picked the book up, read the back, and immediately put it back on the shelf.

The description of this book does it a huge disservice.

Yes, there are "a pair of twins conjoined at the pinky, a 120-year-old wise man, a shepherd turned cuckold by a giant, and even the devil himself," but--as the back of the book states--these characters are far from an "oddball cast."

These are deeply complex and sorrowful characters who seek the meaning of love and life. There is something refreshingly ordinary about each one. Though unique, they are also simple townspeople dealing with the trauma of love and death, of family and loneliness.

This novel is like a river. The repetition and story wind in and out of generations like currents. If Luís Peixoto is not yet known as one of the best writers from Portugal, if not the world, this young writer soon will be.

A Sunny Day In the Richmond?

It's a slow day here at the Green Apple blog, since it's beautiful out. Hope you're out and about in this sunny weather! Hit up the Bluegrass Fest in the Park! Give Emmylou and ol' Billy Bragg my regards!

And now: a picture of a cat reading. Enjoy.

Everybody Poops

Though it may be a bit on the smelly side, poop is the topic of today's post. It's kind of gross, not very cute to look at, but everyone poops (Taro Gomi agrees with this last statement) and Green Apple, surprisingly or not, stocks quite a few books about it. What inspired my musings on this topic stems from reading probably the best...taking-a-dump scene I've ever come across in literature. Poop and literature, you ask? Yes, it's true.

Stefano Benni's Timeskipper tells the story of a young boy who is lucky to have a duoclock, or the ability to speed time up or down into the future or the past as he pleases. About three pages into the book, Timeskipper describes this scene as he hop-skips down the hill to school (and my apologies if anyone finds the following too lewd):

The cloud-man smiles at me straight away, and it is clear that only a god could smile like that. Then he squats down on the hillock, silhouetted against the light, surrounded by heliotrope and chicory, and tugs down three or four different varieties of trousers and underpants, and then he starts taking a crap. And not just any old crap, the mother of all dumps: it looks like an anaconda unwinding, or kernels of corn pouring out of a combine harvester, or warm polenta being tipped out of a huge pot; it's a spectacular triumph of lukewarm shit, and when it spreads out on the ground it unleashes an immense and aromatic mist of steam, and the more he craps the more the steam spreads, settling onto the meadow and the trees and fogging up the shells of the snails. And still he craps, a volume of shit that is just unbelievable, while the dog looks over at me as if to say, ah, this is nothing and by now you can't even see the man anymore, just a huge cloud of steam with a rainbow running through the center of it. From the mist comes a labored, rapid panting that means he is still shitting, and birds fly around the cloud, chirping festively (Benni, 16).

A rainbow? Birds chirping festively? I bet this just ruined your appetite for polenta! Even though your appetite may be ruined, one must admit that Benni's described act-of-crap paints quite the picture.

A big seller at the store is What's Your Poo Telling You? (courtesy of Chronicle Books), which has an illustrated description of at least two dozen dookies and discusses what can be learned about health based on what ends up in the bowl.

Want to know the history about poop? Take a look at Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable by Nicola Davies. According to Davies, "hippos navigate by it, sloths keep in touch through it, dung beetles eat it." The inside cover of this book should also be noted, as it's the most magnificent shade of poop brown.