The Green Apple Core

Beauty is Truth, that's all I know

2012-01-30T10:41:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001 I slaved over a persuasive, compelling shelf talker for my first ever contribution to the store’s “Staff Favorites” display: Paula Begoun’s Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me.

Noone bought the book.

But, with a fresh breeze of enlightened curiosity blowing through our well-groomed readership, this is the perfect time to re-introduce Begoun’s deliciously comprehensive compendium which reviews the bogus claims and empty promises of 30,000 skin care and makeup products.

I’ve cultivated my life-long commodity fetishism for skin care technology through beauty blogs, cosmetic trade publications, those free department store cosmetic counter pamphlets, and Avon catalogue back issues.

But, none of those sources compare to Begoun’s truly subversive Don’t Go... which, if her confrontational message gets out, threatens the whole $29 billion cosmetics and toiletries industry, unfortunately, the news gathering that it’s generous ad budget supports (20% of the sector’s net sales, by one estimate), and a manicured and exfoliated army of magazine editors.

Begoun, a 25-year consumer reporting veteran, has compiled a concise, accurate efficacy rating system, and cosmetic ingredient dictionary, which sheds light on the silly “anti-gravity,” and “age-balancing” potions by cult brands with loyal consumer infatuation that have been repeating their lies so long some people believe them.

The book covers cleansers, toners, granular scrubs; eye creams; cuticle softeners, callous removers, anti-cellulite creams, lip plumpers, sunless tanning, night creams, flight creams, acne treatment, pre-shave oils and more.

Begoun (with Co-Contributor Bryan Barron), uses pointed, no-nonsense adjectives for luxury products like “mundane, out-of-date, exceedingly standard,” or “There is no logical reason to consider this product.” Likewise she often calls the prices of these so-called miracles in a jar, “ludicrous, obscene, and out of whack.”

You’ll usually find a used copy of Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me in the Red Delicious Room’s “Fashion and Beauty” alcove along with a super glamorous collection of books on tattoos, designers, and modeling, (and Gardening, ho hum).

We've Got Friends in Far Places

2012-01-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

A bookseller can dream.

When we first launched our Apple-a-Month Club subscription service in October, it was with a mix of excitement, trepidation, and, to put it bluntly, low expectations. Admittedly, this was a defense mechanism, so that each new subscription would thrill us rather than the small numbers of people who blindly trust our taste feeling like a slight.

Instead, the number of new subscriptions that came rolling in over the holidays made us feel overwhelmingly flattered and just darn proud of how loyal and great Green Apple customers are. The biggest indicator of this is the reach our little subscription service already has -- whether you're subscribing because you've moved away from San Francisco and miss our dusty index card s or trust us to recommend the perfect new fiction book for your best friend/grandma/pen pal who's never even been to Green Apple, that's pretty cool.

Also pretty cool would be a giant wall map with thumbtacks where each subscription is going. I want to make one of these. That way, when they make a feature film about the making of the world-famous Apple-a-Month club in which we'll all get zingy dialogue and a super intense soundtrack by Trent Reznor, there can be a montage to carry us through the month of December where we'll be putting little pins in:

Carrboro, North Carolina
Oberlin, Ohio
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Gresham, Oregon
Fairfield, Texas
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Oakland
Los Angeles
Healdsburg
Mountain View
Davis
Cupertino
and just up the street in San Francisco, California

...and then some. Pins in a map. Montage. The stuff (my) dreams are made of.

This is all to say that January's Apple-a-Month Club pick, which by now should have reached all of the corners of the land for which it was destined, was Invitation to a Voyage by Francois Emmanuel.

The characters in this collection of linked stories are, as all characters are, on quests. But the quests herein take place in the smallest of spaces -- a detective's search for the inner truth of a person, the footsteps of an aging cartographer, everyone's desperate dialing in search of the click that means you're home. Emmanuel's writing, an ode to Baudelaire with echoes of Kafka and Borges, is both so precise and so vague as to attain something like universal meaning, spurring the reader into their own such reveries even as they tumble into those on the page. You're invited; you should go.

We hope you like it.

(To subscribe...)

Gsquid, fulfilled

2012-01-26T11:02:00.000-08:00

I went to college in the middle of nowhere. In the library I found the legendary cosmopolitan newspaper, The Village Voice. In the back pages were the comics, including Lynda Barry's Ernie Pooh's Comeek. It blew my mind! The troubled and resilient children, the awkward cadence of their excited speech, the deft illustrations of their wild spazz-athons, and her disgust at the (then) mostrecent war--it all kept me excited for the next week's installment.

Years later, living here in the big city, I would check used bookstores and thrift stores for her out-of-print collections. At first, I had some successes, but as the years went on the supplies dwindled. Supposedly, Drawn and Quarterly was to reissue her complete works. I kept waiting. At the end

of 2011, extracted from corn-based packing peanuts in receiving, I saw it. Blabber Blabber Blabber - Everything Vol. 1 had arrived! Pre-da

ting her work for The Voice, this comics here were drawn during her days at Evergreen College and feature more desperate and confused adults than wild and reckless children. Of course this edition is beautiful. The best is still to come, this is just a taste!

Growing up in the suburbs on the East Coast, I would take the bus to bigger towns to rummage through scary-looking cassettes, searching for a powerful musical experience. I found it in a number of Bay Area and California thrash metal bands--Metallica, Exodus, Slayer, and Megadeth, among many other acts of lesser notoriety, if not quality. While I did grow older and wiser, my love

of this mid-80s scene remains a part of my life to this day. I made the international metal signal (pinky and forefinger up--the devil's horns, the goat, whatever) when we got our copies of Murder In The Front Row (Bazillion Points). Brian Lew and Harald Oimoen put their ears, equipment, and livers on the line to document the above mentioned titans of thrash (and tippling!) Especially close to my heart are the shots of Debbie Abono, a middle-aged woman who managed many second- and third-tier acts of this era. Teenagers Possessed shot their album photos in her backyard, and the dry golden hills offset the blood and flames nicely. I would like to have seen more bands who aren't as famous (Blind Illusion!), but we can wait for Volume Two. Liner notes of sorts add context and history. Praises due!

Desks: where it all begins

2012-01-23T11:12:00.001-08:00

Name that writer's desk:

A Dispatch from the Kids' Section

2012-01-21T16:25:00.000-08:00

Today's post comes from Ashley, with some thoughts on young adult recommendations, the joy of discovery, and that of sharing in it.

so the other night it was a little on the quiet side in the bookstore, and i was merrily working on the mezzanine shelving and rearranging the kids and young adult book sections. there were two other people on the mezzanine with me, a woman with her middle-grade school age son. they were chatting about books that he has read, liked and disliked, and how his mother was willing to get him something new if he could find something that interested him. of course, i politely interjected that i could give some suggestions if they wanted. after all, i may be a bit older, but spending pretty much full-time elbows deep in that section i have a fairly good idea of what the kids these days are into. it’s like that saying: “never trust a skinny chef.” i also happen to have my master’s degree in children’s book illustration from a certain university in the city, so i like to think that helps a little bit as well. as we started chatting, he mentioned that he liked steampunk stories like Leviathan by Scott Westerfield, so i suggested Candleman by Glenn Dakin. when he brought up Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, i suggested he take a look at The Unwanteds by Lisa Mcmann. now, you may be thinking right now, “well, he was just being a bookseller that evening.” no, there was more to it than that. after they left i remembered when i was younger and how my mom would take me to the bookstore and offer to buy me whatever caught my eye. how she always payed close attention to my rambling accounts of the science fiction storylines. how she expressed genuine interest in the robot and alien characters that i was so absorbed with. and how i couldn’t get myself out to the car and buckle myself in fast enough when she asked if i wanted to go to the bookstore to get a new book. i will never be able to thank my mom for those special times that we had together, but watching those two leave the store, books in hand, excitedly reading the descriptions from the dust jackets, sharing a moment, however brief and seemingly inconsequential, just, you know, you don’t see that too often these days. but how those moments and memories stick with you after so many years.

Ugly Books

2012-01-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

"An indescribable joy always rushes out of great books, even when they speak of ugly, hopeless, or terrifying things." -- Gilles Deleuze

I'm reading a book called Assisted Living. It was just published by the envelope-pushing Dalkey Archive (for example, see this and this and this), was written by a Swedish author using the pseudonym "Nikanor Teratologen", and, even in our age of gratuitous violence and unapologetic vileness, is proving itself to be full of outrageously cringe-inducing moments. Without ruining the plot--however tenuous it may be--it's fair to sum up the novel as being a parade of debauchery, rape, sacrilege, pedophilia, racism, murder, and more. Name the vice and you'll likely be able to open a page at random and find an instance of it.

It's an ugly book.

Appearances aside, Assisted Living may represent a subtle critique of liberal democracy and the free market; it may expose the lurking dangers of fascism; it may be an outlandish commentary on the perennial battle of the generations; its excesses may even prove to be so cartoonish as to be a lampoon of such writing. I'm certain arguments can and will be made for all of these interpretations and more, but in the moment of reading, I find myself wondering: Why?

Not so much why write an ugly book, but why read it? To modern ears, it may sound naive to speak of the redemptive qualities of art, but I wonder if we've really moved beyond thinking that a book (or any piece of art) should serve a purpose, whether moral, instructional, or purely aesthetic. (And, despite its vileness, Assisted Living does have its literary qualities.) If we accept this as a valid question, what are we to make of books like this? Why do we read them? More personally, why do I read them?

I read ugly books.

The cartoonish violence and excesses of Assisted Living may not be my typical fare, but the works of some of my favorite writers--Thomas Bernhard, Michel Houellebecq, and Angela Carter to name a few--can certainly be ugly other, possibly more damaging ways. After all, we're desensitized to violence pretty early on, whether through Tom & Jerry or Mortal Kombat, but the kind of bleakness in the work of these authors is altogether of a different, more corrosive variety. For instance, I've found that I need to allot myself several months between readings of Bernhard; otherwise I find myself on edge, depressive. I don't think this is an uncommon reaction to his work.

So why do I continue to read them? Because I prefer my humor black? Do I think that cruelty and violence are capable, in art, of shocking me into a more grounded awareness of the world? Or that works like this will rattle my complacency or awake me from my dogmatic slumber? A punch in the face does provide pretty indisputable evidence of being alive.

This raises the question, of course: do we need an occasional jolt of ugliness (in the form of a bludgeoning book like Assisted Living) to keep our desire for endless beauty in check? Is ugliness necessary?

By our friends at Type Bookstore in Toronto...

2012-01-19T14:15:00.000-08:00

The Best Books We Read 2011...One Old, One New.

2012-01-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

In my last post The Best Books We Read 2011 I mentioned a lot of books that could have been my favorite of the year. I decided that two deserved special mention. The Land Breakers, a novel written by John Ehle in 1964 that remains- sadly- fairly unknown and Wunderkind the first novel by Nikolai Grozni, a Bulgarian-born, child-prodigy pianist who earned his MFA at Brown.

If you have never heard of John Ehle I am not surprised. Most of his books are out of print and though his wife and daughter are both well known actresses, he seems to have slipped into a literary underground. So, when a couple of us were at the NCIBA to talk to Michael Ondaatje about his latest novel The Cat's Table, when he asked us what we were reading (I mentioned Wunderkind) and I told him I had been reading a lot of Southern literature that he told the Random House people there that he's been wanting Random to put out John Ehle's books for years; mentioning specifically The Land Breakers. So I tracked down the small press, Press 53 out of Winston-Salem, NC and got a copy, read it, and was floored by this huge novel that focus on the settling of the Appalachian mountains. The characters, the tragedies, and the hardships are captivating and beautifully written with a knowledge of this area that is second to none. Ondaatje also mentioned the Harper Lee quote, who rarely did any blurbs or reviews, "Exciting... masterful storytelling." And she is not wrong.

As for new, I read Wunderkind. I carried this book around for a couple of months before I actually delved into it. I loved the cover (I'm a sucker for a good cover) and had read the first few pages a few times and saw that it was going to be good. But I was reading Faulkner, and nothing short of Faulkner seemed to be what I wanted to read. Then one night I started Wunderkind. I did not stop from that point on. Reading Grozni's characters (specifically the protagonist, Konstantin the rebellious piano prodigy) and his insight into the world of private music school and classical music became obsessive reading for me. The were chapters that I reread before continuing on and then tracked down the classical pieces that were the titles of each chapter. This is a powerful and gripping novel that opened up my understanding of life behind the iron curtain, music and what it means to be music and not just love it.

These are two books I think everyone should read and most importantly tell others to read.

By the book

2012-01-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

There's a bibliomantic meme spreading around the internet (or at least Tumblr) that states the following: "Open the closest book to page 45. The first sentence will describe your sex life for the following year."

Naturally, I played along, opening The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster (thinking that with a title like that, there's got to be something good in store) to page 45, wherein I found the following sentence:

Once the girl is labeled an Eskimo (more precisely, a native of slightly less ferocious Labrador), her strangeness dissipates and her assimilation takes on greater value.

Seems like 2012 is going to be... hot? Weird? Both? ("... her assimilation takes on greater value.") Maybe I need more exciting bedside reading.

But some of the people I informed of the meme seem to be on their way to much less ambiguity (and, possibly in the case of the next quoted sentence, more profit) in their sexual future. For instance, the first sentence on page 45 of that classic culinary standby, Joy of Cooking, supplies one reader with the following:

Informal opportunities for comparisons abound: Walk-around tastings are increasingly popular, often as fund-raisers.

Another, er, culinary delight, which I was told of by one of our sales reps this morning, comes from Simonetta Agnello Hornby's novel, The Nun:

"Ah, how I love swordfish," Annuzza murmured, licking her wrinkled lips, certain she could already taste it.

As I was typing this, I explained the meme to a Green Apple employee shelving nearby. Perhaps unluckily, he was holding a India Calling, which informs him rather literally that:

The dependency scares you, as a needy lover's demands scare you, for it suggests a bottomless pit of giving that will devour you if you give in just slightly and allow yourself to care.

And, finally, another friend happened to have David Burns Feeling Good at hand, and was told unequivocally,

You are lonely and you decide to go to a social affair for singles.

I could do this forever. But now it's your turn.

Edmund White, an appreciation

2012-01-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

by Green Appler Kevin Davis

This month I’m celebrating the publishing event of Sacred Monsters--a collection of Edmund White's “New York Review of Books” essays--and Jack Holmes and his Friend, a romance novel heavily informed by White’s pre- and post-Stonewall Manhattan life.

I have lived vicariously through this pioneer of gay sensibility in literature, who is also a generous, astringent critic with a monumental breadth of literary knowledge, entrenchment in high culture, and even friendships with late 20th century East Coast artistic luminaries.

White, who chairs Princeton’s Creative Writing Department, has lived a rarefied life by his pen in places like Rome, Key West, and the Ile Saint-Louis by cultivating wealthy patrons and grants.

In Monsters, White breathtakingly weaves criticism with biographical details that illustrate the wider story behind 20 artists and writers--Isherwood, Mapplethorpe, John Rechy, to name a few.

In his review of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, a standout, White recalls the death of his lover in Morocco’s Atlas Mountain harrowingly wrought in his The Married Man.

Mr. White, who is 25 years my senior, first educated me at age 16 at San Diego’s Fashion Valley mall Waldenbooks on Christmas Eve, when I read his pointed instructions on the, to me, exotic gay men’s ritual of cruising.

He appeared again in timely fashion, to illuminate both our shared community and his own authentic, intricate emotional exploration when I read The Beautiful Room is Empty at age 27 in (former rare book dealer) Dr. Jack Collins's Queer Lit class at City College. The specific resonant events White illustrates from his young adulthood, are not so appropriate for this family medium though.

Today I still read White like those guys paint the Golden Gate Bridge. I read from one end of his memoir trilogy-- A Boys Own Story, Beautiful Room, and Farewell Symphony -- to the other, and back again. The consequences for me of foolishly opening a White title at bedtime is bleary sleep deprivation upon awakening. I am spellbound, entranced.

I’m not an open-minded, well-rounded reader, though. I tried Hunger by Knut Hamsun, a White progenitor who shares his exquisite cognitive honesty, only Hamsun operates in Nowheresville, Norway instead of Manhattan’s Chelsea Neighborhood, or Venice, and has no leather bars or casual sex to speak of.

I believe if one is lucky enough in life to discover one sympathetic artist applying his talent to elevate the customs and relationships of one’s tribe, well, that’s all I need.

Mr. White played a role in a mortifying event from my halting arts reporting “career.” I was given an open-ended 20 minutes of phone time in connection with a review I wrote of White’s 2006 memoir, My Lives. I crafted sweeping, informed questions, to convey my respect, and then out of nowhere, he turned the tables and asked, “Do you write?”

Flustered, I guffawed merrily. No, I don’t write in the sense that this Guggenheim fellow, and French Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, writes. But, tragically, I responded with one of those tactless, horrifying non sequiturs I’ve been guilty of many times which I now recall like a grisly slow-motion accident. I responded blithely, “Gosh your voice is so effeminate,” and laughed again.

Well, it really was high pitched, not the timbre I expected from one of the Great Men of Letters.

The newly created Magnus Books published Sacred Monsters under the aegis of esteemed longtime editor Don Weise, formerly of Carroll and Graf. Weise, who chose all the collection’s essays, was recently one of “Out” Magazine’s 100 most powerful gay people.

Book of the Month: The Orphan Master's Son

2012-01-09T12:11:00.000-08:00

It doesn't arrive until tomorrow, but The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson is Green Apple's Book of the Month for January 2012. Why, you may ask?

Or here's Kevin Ryan's shelf talker:

Adam Johnson has said (I’m paraphrasing) that not every writer has a story to tell, and that not every person with a story to tell has the skill to write it, so writers must tell their stories for them. In The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson tells the story of Pak Jun Do, raised in a North Korean orphanage. Citizens in the DPRK not only don’t enjoy freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, they truly don’t have access to freedom of thought, closed off as they are from the outside world and force fed a steady diet of propaganda. This brilliant, thoroughly-researched novel imagines life in that country, from citizens forced to “volunteer” to carry goats to the roof of their apartment building to be raised for food, to the horrors of the gulag, where dying prisoners are drained of their blood. But far from being a mere documentary of life in the DPRK, this is a hugely entertaining, often hilarious novel of assumed identity, casual cruelty, and collective delusion. Includes perhaps the greatest love scene ever to be written in jingoistic propaganda (“At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding.”).

It arrives Tuesday, January 10, and you can buy it here or in the store. And here's the eBook version, if that's how you roll.

On Not Reading

2012-01-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

For being an easily distracted person, I've always sought out somewhat distracting environments in which to read. Some of this impulse is nostalgic -- reading to the sound of a football game on TV or clattering dishes, for example, are comforts from childhood -- and sometimes it feels necessary to have the extraneous noise to tune out to give me incentive to narrow my focus.

Last night, though, while reading what is so far a very good book in such an environment, I suddenly sat up straighter with a startled feeling, like I'd just come around a corner in my own brain and caught myself doing something that always makes me feel guilty. People don't often admit to this, but they do it too, right? I realized that for at least a few pages, I hadn't really been reading.

The practice that I'm referring to is different from drifting off while reading, staring at the page thinking other thoughts. I was, actually, moving my eyes from line to line. Probably every sixth sentence entered my brain in a real, resonating way. I turned the pages at my regular pace. I wasn't really listening to anything going on around me. I wasn't thinking about anything else in particular, just occasional thoughts coming and going, like they always are. I was simply reading without reading.

I'll be honest: this happens a lot.

This confession would probably confuse some of the people who think of me as a reader. I've often been told how absorbed I appear by books, how specifically and passionately I speak about them, how much I seem to enjoy reading, and it's true -- there are few things in the world I like more. But, just like sometimes we read to escape, sometimes to learn, sometimes to entertain, I think we must admit that sometimes we read just to be reading, and that this sort of reading is not an exclusive mental activity. There is shame in this, like we're doing it wrong, right? But is this kind of reading less valuable than any other? I enjoyed the experience, I felt satisfied with my progress in my book (which, no, I will not name, lest I recommend it here sometime in the future and, despite my pleas that you understand this phenomenon, you think that I'm a faker and the book must be boring) and put it down with a desire to pick it up again soon. I'm not going to re-read those sentences I missed. I didn't need them. The ones I did need found their way in. Am I alone here? Or is this what reading is, and the part that I've been doing wrong is feeling like I'm always supposed to be doing it better?

Best-selling books of 2011

2012-01-02T13:40:00.000-08:00

Here are the ten best-selling books at Green Apple for 2011 (with links to eBooks, just in case you're tying to fill up your new device).

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (young adult fiction, soon to be a movie). eBook
A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire by George Martin (the fantasy series adapted for HBO). eBook
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (was it the free beer and tacos or just the pent-up demand for Murakmai's magnum opus?). eBook
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Green Apple was mentioned by name in the advance reading copy, only to be heartlessly edited out, alas). eBook
A Clash of Kings by George Martin (as above). eBook
Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit (we love when an eclectic university press book hits the top of our charts).
Bossypants by Tina Fey (no one had ever heard of her until we started handselling this, right?). eBook
Just Kids by Patty Smith (the Pulitzer didn't hurt). eBook
A Storm of Swords by George Martin (yep, another one). eBook
A Feast for Crows by George Martin (and another). eBook

Since George Martin nabbed four spots, let's list one more, eh?

11. Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach (proving that even if you can read a PDF free online, you still want the book. Or that parents today are horrible monsters).

No predictions for 2012, except maybe that this great book, which I'm currently devouring, will be much talked about. Now back to the stack of forthcoming books. . . .

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T17:33:00.001-08:00

We send you out into the night and into 2012 with our top ten bestselling Staff Favorites of the past year. Thank you for continuing to shop at Green Apple. We look forward to sharing some new favorites in the year(s) ahead.

With an honorable mention to a plucky favorite that missed out by a few copies to the Eliot Weinberger book above. (Though we're open for 3 more hours if anyone wants to see Barbara Comyns' novel crack the top ten...)

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

I read far fewer books in 2011 than I have in quite some time. I was busy and restless. Frustrated, I started and quickly stopped a record number of titles. In the end, I did manage to finish some, and on the whole they left me quite satisfied. I fell in love with a classic that I was prepared to hate, savored yet another reprint by one of my favorite authors, finally read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Tom McCarthy, and drooled over many, many, many fantastic cookbooks. Thus, it may go without saying that the two books I’ve chosen to highlight here are among several favorites from the past year. Surprisingly, these books have central themes that were (luckily?) somewhat foreign to me: death, Jesus, two types of hospitals, and schizophrenia, respectfully. Read on to find out more.

Us, by Michael Kimball is an understated, yet incredibly intimate story of aging, illness and death. The premise is quite simple: a man awakes one morning to find his wife beside him, no longer breathing. What follows is a complex story of the grim reality of what happens when we are met with mortality—that of our loved ones and of ourselves. While, by nature, the subject matter isn’t the endorphin releasing, warm-fuzzy type that I tend to look for in places other than books, this novel is an exceptionally tender portrait of the harsh realities of human existence, and of love. This book will make you think. I might make you feel a little crazy and a little sad. But it is completely worth it.

*Us is currently on our shelves, despite what our website may say. Call to reserve a copy, or come in to see it for yourself.

One of my other favorites from this year was the NYRB reprint of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. I picked this up because the premise was just too intriguing to ignore. In the late 1950’s, three schizophrenic patients in the Michigan state hospital system shared one very distinct characteristic. They each claimed to be Jesus Christ. Social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought these patients together at the now demolished Ypsilanti State Hospital, where he performed experiments and studied the group for a number of years. Though this is nonfiction through and through, the larger than life personalities, and the pure emotive qualities of the three Christs are certainly the stuff of novelists’ dreams. From a psychological standpoint, this book provides a fascinating explanation and interpretation of the basic functions and modalities of identity and individuality. More than that, the three Christs call into question the very meaning of the term ‘mentally ill’, and the ways in which individuals, physicians, and the state view, treat, and interact with those diagnosed as such. By the end of the book, I found myself wondering exactly which players in this bizarre situation truly saw themselves as Christ; the schizophrenic patients, or the doctor who attempted to manipulate, by morally questionable means, the lives of three men deemed by the state to be clinically insane.

December's Apple-a-Month Selection, Revealed

2011-12-29T11:00:00.000-08:00

As the dust starts to settle from the holiday madness, there's finally time to unveil our December Apple-a-Month Club selection, Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press). Anyone who subscribed by December 5th got this smart, poignant, and funny novel in the mail mid-month, and by now even those who were forced to let it sit under the tree for a few weeks have had the chance to dig in, so we'll share our pitch for the book (penned by Sparks) with the rest of you:

Ben Lerner's debut novel is a smart and ironic account of cultural, linguistic, and personal dislocation. Chronicling the rather unextraordinary adventures of a young American poet in Madrid (there under the false pretenses of writing a poem about the Spanish Civil War), Leaving the Atocha Station is a comedic portrait of the artist as a bundle of failures. Much more than an attempt to understand what poetry means in the early 21st century, Lerner's novel is an attempt to figure out what it means to be human.

December also brought a jump in new subscriptions, many of them gifts, which is basically the best Christmas present we could have asked for (combining a few of our favorite things, after all: reading new books, picking good books for you to read, and surprises). Those folks can be on the lookout for the next new fiction title of our choosing in the mail in mid January. Don't even think about trying to get us to tell you what it is. Even though we totally already know. Not even for a bribe, unless you have a really really good bribe. Bribery attempts will be graciously accepted.

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

Kevin D.'s pick:

My favorite book of 2011 arrived just under the wire on our free advances shelf in November. As with Thomas Frank’s last book, The Wrecking Crew, I’m telling everyone to read his newest, Pity the Billionaire (available in January), a harrowing, scrupulously sourced and footnoted report delivering an incisive examination of, as he puts it, the “purified market populism of the right-wing renaissance.”

Frank offers astute insight into what motivates the naïve and xenophobic Tea Ninnies aiming to “take our country back,” fearing burdensome, invasive regulation toward modest small business owners thus rallying for toothless oversight by the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and SEC, much to the delight of fund managers at JP Morgan.

Frank delivers a seething survey of the “funhouse mirror of contemporary conservatism” where unions “oppress” workers and what’s left of the middle class became a cheering squad for paid-for politicians and the industrialist Koch Brothers, all aided by the stealth astro-turfing machinations of Dick Armey, and Glenn Beck’s socialist-baiting histrionics.

Democrats whistle as workplace unionism dwindles, while a bizarrely aloof President Obama capitulates and compulsively offers olive branches to Rep. John Boehner and his bullies.

The last, chilling, four-page chapter, “Trample the Weak,” foresees a future where the market-minded moneyed interests, no longer fearing incorruptible government agencies, are free to call highways and parks--wasteful subsidies, and FEMA and Medicare are just the unfortunates’ power grab from big government.

This is not bedtime reading unless you enjoy getting both fired up and terrorized before bed.

May late 2011 foretell a great 2012

2011-12-26T14:23:00.001-08:00

In the spirit of reflection, we look back on why 2011 was such a landmark year at Green Apple Books.

Was it:

Border's closing at Stonestown?
our GroupOn and Scoutmob and Google offers?
our incredibly capable and friendly staff?
eBooks on our website?
our new inventory system?
our section development in LPs, children's, young adult, cooking?
the new flooring on the mezzanine and in the red delicious room?
the literature in translation section?
our new t-shirt designs?
our new subscription service?
our website re-design?
our better use of Facebook?
the used books we sell at the Beachside and Devil's Teeth?
our ClemenTime event with the Bold Italic?
our (more or less) amusing videos?
more people are understanding the power of shopping locally?

We certainly tried to evolve without losing our heart and soul--a fine selection of quality new and used books in all subject areas. Because no matter what we do, it takes a few hundred people coming in the door and buying books each day to keep Green Apple alive.

So thank you, readers of San Francisco and beyond. Thanks for keeping Green Apple not just around, but vibrant. Like I said in February when the first round of Borders closings were announced, no one should shop at Green Apple out of charity or pity, but because we offer you something you want. You mold the retail landscape with every purchase; vote wisely.

In 2012, we have a few more tricks up our sleeve, including a majorly cool machine. We can't wait to see you in 2012 (starting with free coffee on New Year's Day--open 11am to 7pm).

Until then, thanks, as always, for reading!

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

In the Poetics of Space, one of the most achingly perfect books I read this year, Gaston Bachelard writes the following, which applies almost exactly to the best book I read in 2011:

Every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, the third reading... give us, little by little, the solution to this problem.

Although I haven't found the "solution" to the problem that inspired Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, each voyage--I read the book three times in succession this summer, after reading it initially, and a little skeptically, in 2008 when it was first reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press--brought me closer to some essential truth about the prickly dilemmas inherent in human relationships and cohabitation.

The plot of Unguentine is as deceptively simple as a creation myth and has the flavor of one as well: Mrs Unguentine (always Mrs) recounts her seafaring adventures--which are simultaneously her domestic adventures--with her husband, Unguentine (never Mr), a man who "grew nauseous upon land" and so took his wife to sea, fitting out a barge with increasingly elaborate gardens and mechanical devices. In time, the pair become famous in port cities across the world, their home in turn a curiosity, a place of ill-repute, a smuggler's ship. The notoriety eventually dissipates, leaving their self-contained ecosystem a world unto itself; all the better as far as Mrs Unguentine is concerned--even if her good riddance has something wistful to it.

Into deeper and lonelier waters the Unguentines then sail. In an episode that will resonate with anyone who has found him or herself in a relationship that seems to have gone off course, Mrs Unguentine discovers a blank map by which, it seems, her husband is steering. (A map that alludes, possibly, to another.) Silence grows between the couple just as the trees Unguentine has planted grow to render clear navigation impossible. Ages pass, time stops; the barge becomes more and more isolated. Unguentine and everything familiar disappears, then possibly reappears.

What Crawford has managed in this slim and perpetually overlooked book (of just over 100 pages) is marvelous. As with the best allegories, those that lend themselves to multiple and endless interpretations, Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine can be read literally--as a seafaring tale, a creation myth, the story of an unusual marriage--and rooted around in for deeper meaning, each reading revealing just how dense, under its reflective surface, the novel really is: an amalgam of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Ulysses' journeys, Ahab's quest...

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977 (graphite on paper)

Near the end of the book, Mrs Unguentine wonders, "what would it be like to live without the presence of the sea?" which seems to me a question that perfectly embodies everything I love about this novel. It's a straightforward, if complicated, question and one that brings a reader to a similar precipice: what would it be like living without the presence of a book like this?

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

2011 was, for whatever reason, a year of literary obsessions for me. On a few occasions this took the form of re-reading the same book over and over (which I did with this one, this one, and this one. Don't ask.) Themes have also taken hold, like my current curiosity about the mythology and impact of the Brontes, which has resulted in a reading stack consisting of this, this, and this.

But the most surprising and wonderful literary fixation I developed this year hadn't happened to me for quite some time: I discovered and developed a voracious appetite for the works of a single author, and for a few months straight, every time I put down one of her books, my fingers itched for another. I would entertain the idea of reading something different, pull a book from the shelf and place it next to my bed with the best of intentions, but when it came time to open one I'd find myself grasping for that distinctively orange Penguin spine. For this is the year I became an Angela Carter addict.

I'd been reading around Carter for a while, despite knowing that she was up my alley. Then one day I finally picked up the short story collection Saints and Strangers and, leaning against a shelf at Red Hill Books, read the opening paragraph of the opening story: a description of the oppressively humid summer weather which some say resulted in the famous Lizzie Borden axe murders. The subject matter alone hooked me, but it was the breathtaking sentences, each one draped atop the previous in a featherlight perfection that downright chills even as it makes you sweat, that really made me weak in the knees. And so my summer of Angela began.

Those that I loved most were her short stories, some collections of which have gone out of print but are all available in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter. If this body of work has a theme, I could only describe it as hauntings. In The Bloody Chamber, the eeriest qualities of fairy tales are expounded upon to the point where they resonate with an uncanny familiarity that is nothing like the Beauty and the Beast you consciously know. My two favorite collections, Saints and Strangers and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, echo with distinctively American mythologies of tragedy, piousness, fate and ruin -- a particularly unruly set of ghosts to pin down. Even the collection Fireworks, unique in the fact that most of the stories therein are narrated in the first person by a contemporary voice that could be Carter's own, wrestles with the phantoms of self -perception and the narratives constructed in day-to-day loneliness. What's truly remarkable is that despite the familiar terrain of her subjects -- fairy tales, well-known lores, and the most basic struggles with personhood -- almost every sentence in this book astounds.

Having devoured Burning Your Boats, I moved on to her novels, which feature writing just as impeccable as their immersive, magnificent plots. My favorite of these was Wise Children, the story of stage sensations Dora and Nora Chance and a hilarious and clever nod to good old Shakespearean comedy ("tragedy that happens to other people"), which probably contained hundreds of winks to the Bard of which I understood like four. But that was okay, because I like books that make me want to be smarter (why else read?) and because the story has every great premise and lives up to them all: fiercely independent and quick-witted old ladies, multiple generations of twins, cases of mistaken identity, paternity mishaps, a real wedding, a fake wedding, revenge, a donkey costume, births, deaths, and everything in between -- and it all takes place in one day (with many a dive into murky memory). It was Carter's last novel before her death in 1992, and it's the literary equivalent of high-kicking off the stage to a fireworks show, hook and fat lady be damned.

I can think of no better end to a hell of a year than on that note.

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

As we did last year, we'll be running a series of posts featuring our staff members' selections of their favorite books read in 2011. Forgive our presumption, but we're booksellers: most of us can't limit ourselves to just one book.

Jeff's picks:

"A masterful work of sensation and criminal violence, this title is one-stop shopping for many of the greatest true crime cases in American history. The legendary baseball analyst's synthesis of thousands of frequently lurid and trashy books has resulted in this 500 page tome. James goes light on the gory details, but managed to keep me enthralled throughout. One of the best books I've read this year."

"The patient wanted her doctor's attention. The doctor wanted to be the next Freud. The author wanted a bestseller. Expertly guided by the doctor, the doped-up and delusional patient provided a spectacularly gruesome and almost entirely fictional narrative, which the writer honed into a mammoth bestseller, Sybil. Ms. Nathan answers the question which seems mystifying today--how did these two shysters (and their subject) successfully perpetrate such a fraud? I loved the author's previous work and this book also captured my heart."

Independent Bookstores as Amazon Showroom?

2011-12-15T16:22:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com has been much in the news of late. They created quite a hullabaloo recently with their price comparison app. It would seem that Amazon is not content to be the largest retailer in the world, it wants to be the only retailer in the world. And given the way they treat their vendors, it would seem that they would not be kindly overlords if they were in fact to gain the world domination they seek.But then I came across this article in the NYTimes, and it got me thinking that they might be making a mistake. Here is the main point:

Bookstore owners everywhere have a lurking suspicion: that the customers who type into their smartphones while browsing in the store, and then leave, are planning to buy the books online later — probably at a steep discount from the bookstores’ archrival, Amazon.com. Now a survey has confirmed that the practice, known among booksellers as showrooming, is not a figment of their imaginations. According to the survey, conducted in October by the Codex Group, a book market research and consulting company, 24 percent of people who said they had bought books from an online retailer in the last month also said they had seen the book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore first. Thirty-nine percent of people who bought books from Amazon in the same period said they had looked at the book in a bookstore before buying it from Amazon, the survey said.

So dig that- If Amazon succeeded in shutting down all of their bookstore competition, their sales would go down! Maybe it's time for Amazon to start helping us out with the rent. It's in their own best interest.

Titter for the toys for tots: Sat. 17th 2-4pm

2011-12-14T13:30:00.001-08:00

You may have heard of him before, but you have never heard him like this. . .

He's the coolest dude from the chilliest climate on the Southest Pole. . .

Sometimes when he drinks too much egg-nog he does Christopher Walken impressions. . .

If you bring in a toy (or make a $ donation) for the SFFD Toys for Tots program he'll let you sit on his lap - he'll tell you a dirty joke - he promises not to touch you. . .

We didn't have a single complaint last year, so we invited him back again. . .

Appearing at Green Apple Books on Sat.17th 2-4pm:

SANTA CLAUS

(or will franken)

the tuesday interview: gene luen yang

2011-12-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

[thanks, as always, to royalquietdeluxe for this]

I first read Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese when I TA'd a children's lit class as a graduate student and was, without reservation, completely blown away. He lives here in the Bay Area and right after that I had a chance to hear him read at SFPL and then again, this summer, I head him read as part of The Diversity in YA Tour. He strikes me as genuinely curious and is thoughtful and creative in ways that inspire my own work.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Gene Luen Yang: I've got three different projects going on right now.1. I'm doing a graphic novel continuation of Nickelodeon's popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender for Dark Horse Comics. I'm writing and a Japanese art team named Gurihiru is drawing. I'm a huge fan of the original cartoon, so I'm very excited about this. Of all the main characters, Zuko is my favorite. I relate to his struggle to do -- or even know -- what's right.

2. I'm writing a superhero comic for First Second Books. Sonny Liewis handling the art. The story is set in Chinatown in the 1930's. I can't say much more about the project at this point, but I'm super-excited about this one, too.

3. I'm writing and drawing a graphic novel about The Boxer Rebellion for First Second Books. I've been working on this one for years and years, ever since American Born Chinese came out. The Boxer Rebellion was a war that occurred on Chinese soil over a hundred years ago. At the time, the Chinese government was incredibly weak so the European powers were able to set up concessions all over China -- pieces of land that the Chinese government had no control over. A group of poor, illiterate teenagers from the Chinese countryside decided to take things into their own hands. They performed rituals that called down ancient Chinese gods to possess them. Then, emboldened by the gods' superpowers, they marched through China killing foreigners and Chinese Christians. There are many parallels between The Boxer Rebellion and what's happening in the Middle East today. Of all the projects I'm currently working on, this one is closest to my heart.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

GLY: I have to confess, I'm pretty comics-y. I read a lot of comics and I am primarily inspired by other cartoonists. My musical tastes are lame. I mostly like pop music from when I was a teenager (late 80's, early 90's -- Rick Astley is totally underrated, as are the Fine Young
Cannibals). Even my movie tastes are comics-y. Like pretty much every other cartoonist, I love Studio Ghibli movies.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

GLH: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. As for prose books, I love Silence by Shusaku Endo.

RQD: What are you reading now?

GLY: I'm reading a collection of Father Brown short stories by G.K.Chesterton. I recently read The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. (I really wanted to read the Steve Jobs biography, but my library didn't have it so I settled for the biography of another Silicon Valley
tycoon.)

As I mentioned already, I also read a lot of comics and graphic novels. Comics that I've read in the past month or two: Picket Line by Breena Wiederhoeft, My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Merrick, Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol, a
volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that I borrowed from a friend, Chris Giarrusso's G-Man with my kids, and the new Wonder Woman comic from DC Comics.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

GLY: I read a lot of comic books. :) I also loved Orson Scott Card, Lloyd Alexander, Judy Blume, Clifford Hicks. Remember Clifford Hicks' Alvin Fernald books? I *loved* them when I was a kid. I wanted to be Alvin. I seem to be the only one, though. Nobody else my age knows what I'm talking about.

I remember reaching the end of the J section at my library and feeling lost in the adult section. That's when I latched onto comics. There wasn't much of a YA section when I was growing up.

Illustration: Still from Studio Ghibli via Cartoonbrew

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

As with most of us here, it is hard to narrow down the best book I read in 2011. But amid all the Faulkner and Bolaño, the DeLillo the Ondaatje, a new collection of Ambrose Bierce from Library of America, the latest from César Aira and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and a new found favorite, The Land Breakers, (my new staff favorite that was recommended to me by Michael Ondaatje) by John Ehle. In all that fantastic reading and more I have narrowed it down to a new collection of classics and a new beloved author; Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm (TASCHEN) and The Armies (New Directions) by Evelio Rosero.

The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Leave it to TASCHEN to make the magical world of fairy tales that much more magical. They have pain-stakingly collected twenty-seven of these beloved Grimm fairy tales, newly translated for book lovers of all ages, paired with stunning vintage illustrations from the 1820's to the 1950's. Each story is separated and decorated with intricate silhouettes that were commissioned just for this edition. This is the perfect gift for children and adults alike to cherish these classic tales. For the art lover in you, TASCHEN has chronicled the artists and their history in the back of the book making this more than your typical collection of fairy tales. This book has also been Brain Pickings #1 pick for best illustrated children's and picture books of 2011.

The Armies by Evelio Rosero

Evelio Rosero has quickly become one of my favorite authors and Anne McLean one of my favorite translators. I picked up Rosero's latest short novel Good Offices and couldn't put it down. It is a dark and satirical look at the Catholic church, the politics of Colombia and the perceived worth we put on human life. And yet it is funny. The main character is a hunchback who is extremely smart and perceptive and not your typical Catholic hunchback. After finishing Good Offices I immediately (against my normal reading practices) read the first novel of Rosero's that New Directions translated in 2010, The Armies. This book kicked my ass. I have passed it on to others, and the response has been unanimous - this is a haunting masterpiece of writing and translation - everyone should read this book. Again Rosero writes of a small town in Columbia, this time it is a town caught in the middle of a war. Soldiers, paramilitaries, and guerrillas treat Bojayá and it's people as if they are nothing but a receptacle for their violence. Despite the violence and atrocities this book contains, you are constantly held by the stunning imagery and voice that Rosero brings to The Armies. This is the best book I read in 2011.

Meet Our Neighbors: Jersey's edition

2011-12-11T16:20:00.000-08:00

[Here's Green Appler Kevin Davis with a story on our newish neighbors]

In our continuing endeavor to entice East-of-Stanyan-Street-dwellers to spend a day in the Avenues, may we introduce Jersey’s Sandwiches one block north of us at 6^th Avenue and Cornwall.

Erick Morton, who owns the store with his wife Shannon Gnatek, curates his selection of ingredients: Charlie’s Pride brand navel cut pastrami, Carando brand Genoa salami, Dutch Crunch from South City’s Ofiesh family bakery outlet, freshly ground horseradish, homemade Russian dressing, freshly made pesto with roasted pine nuts, Chevrine brand goat cheese, Tillamook cheddar, crumbled Maytag pungent blue cheese, imported fruity and complicated Emmental Swiss cheese.

“It’s either that or not have Swiss cheese,” says Morton. “I’m kind of a nut about it. My food costs are out of control. I won’t serve anything I’m not proud of.”

“My starting point was friends and acquaintances,” says Morton, who developed his recipes through trial and error, seeking advice from contacts in his six years bartending at Beach Chalet, the old Broadway Street Enrico’s, Presidio Heights’ Spruce, and most recently the TenderNob’s Fly Bar. “I’d pick the brain of whatever chef I was working with.”

Jersey’s complex and time-intensive spicy chicken, for example, is brined in vinegar, then marinated in olive oil, rosemary, thyme, shallots, and garlic, which Morton then serves slathered in tangy chili pepper Sriracha aioli sauce.

Morton, 35, who grew up in the Manhattan suburb of Ramsey, New Jersey, poaches his meatballs in his own marinara sauce, and roasts the Angus beef and hormone-free turkey in the morning at Divisidero Street’s Solstice Restaurant.

The tiny Sixth Avenue storefront seemed a fit for both his small

convection oven and budget, without involving deep-pocketed partners.

“I saw the space available and it seemed affordable without getting a bunch of loans, just using personal savings to get a foot in the door,” said Morton, who has an SJSU Masters in Education.

Jersey’s has become an “industry spot,” said Morton, drawing a chef from Ligurian eatery Perbacco, a Michael Mina manager, and 23^rd Avenue’s Pizzetta crew.

“That our customers are chefs, servers and bartenders, people in the know, who know what good food is, it’s high praise when people in the culinary industry like what we’re doing,” said Morton who lives with Gnatek across the street from the Masonic Street MUNI barn.

Royal Oak, Michigan, native Shannon Gnatek, 34, left waitressing at the casual Bell Tower Bar and Restaurant at Polk and Jackson to help at Jerseys full time, and before that waited tables at Union Square Morton’s Steakhouse for sometimes big personalities like Hulk Hogan.

“I dropped a bottle of wine on his foot,” says Gnatek who is taking a break from studying at 17^th and Capp Street’s Shelley Mitchell Method Acting School.

Gnatek, who quit drinking two years ago, is currently reading Daniel Okrent’s prohibition history “Last Call,” which she was motivated to purchase by a Green Apple shelf talker.

Morton counts Orwell, Palahniuk and Suzanne Collins as favorite authors, but was most recently impressed with Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.

“It will piss you off,” says Morton, who honeymooned with Gnatek by visiting 23 countries in eight months.

Jersey's is at 200 6^th Avenue at Cornwall. Call ahead to avoid waiting: (415) 221-0444

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011-12-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

Martin's picks:

"My favorite mystery of 2011. Not only has Block written a great, gritty novel, he's done it around the 12 steps of AA, which also makes this a compelling account of the difficulties of early recovery."

"My favorite nonfiction book of 2011 was, without a doubt Lost London by Philip Davies. It is almost literally a door into the past: photos of London, most taken before WW1, of buildings and streets that are no more, that have either been torn down to make way for the new or destroyed during the blitz. There are some haunting images in here. None of the photos are less than interesting, and some are incredible for the glimpse of daily life in Victorian and Edwardian London."

The Best Books We Read in 2011

2011-12-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

As we did last year, we'll be running a series of posts featuring our staff members' selections of their favorite book(s) read in 2011.

David's pick:

"The small giant of modern literature. The plot, on its surface, is simple. A family in a quiet college town. A disaster strikes. Fear spreads. And, as it must, life goes on. But this is not a disaster novel. Around this form, DeLillo meditates on our relationship with fear, death, and the delusions of society. His prose is so clear and the way he handles his themes so gentle that far from bleak this book is a fascinating and insightful observation of our world. The barn scene itself is an iconic moment in literature. For good reason, this book has influence writers for over 25 years. One of the best novels I read in 2011 and in a long time."

The Best Books We Read in 2011

2011-12-07T14:08:00.000-08:00

First up, Pete, who selected books in four categories.

Fiction

"Our May Book of the Month. It's a well-paced novel of the gold rush days, two messed up brothers, a fair amount of violence, and an undercurrent of dark humor. A fun read from start to finish."

Nonfiction

"This is the riveting story of Jim Jones and the People's Temple. Scheeres (Jesus Land) took advantage of newly released documents and weaves well the tale of an idealist preacher, the accumulation of his followers, his devolution through drugs into paranoia, and how he leads nearly a thousand souls to mass suicide. I started this book wondering just how any parent could poison their own child, and left with that hole in my heart filled with caution instead of curiosity."

Cooking

"This is a collection of healthy and vegetarian recipes that are perfect for weekday meals. Nothing too complicated, but everything more surprisingly yummy than you think it'll be. For those who want to cook quickly and healthily, this is a gem of a cookbook by a local author."

Kids

"It's hard to say what I (and my 5YO twins) love about this one. It's funny and quirky, and I like the drawings. I know I sound like a five-year-old, but, well, I know you are but what am I?"

[This is a book several Green Applers really, really enjoy.]

the Tuesday Interview: Peter Orner

2011-12-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

[thanks, as always, to royalquietdeluxe for this]

I used to carry my copy of Peter Orner's Esther Stories around with me in case I ever got stuck somewhere without something to read. I could open it up to any page and just fall in. Then I heard he was going to read at Dog Eared Books, so I packed in with a bunch of other people and followed along with my book in my lap. Now he has this amazing new book, but he still feels like our own neighborhood storyteller.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Peter Orner: I have a new novel out, so I wish I could say I was working at the moment. I think I'm in the process of saying goodbye to characters I've spent so much time with. They are slowly fading away to me and having lives of their own as they get read (or not read) by other people...What interested me for so many years (the book took about seven) was how my people seemed constitutionally incapable of learning from the past.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?
PO: The South African artist William Kentridge I find him amazing; his huge imagination, the way he uses history and politics in his work.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
PO: A novel by great Nebraskan novelist Wright Morris called Plains Song, I re-read it every year. This and Moby Dick. And also the sea stories of Alvaro Mutis.

RQD: What are you reading now?
PO: Right now I am reading The Book of Ebenzer Le Page, one of the strangest novels I've ever come across, and loving it. Its about a guy on an island off the UK who remembers nearly every single detail about his life. I can't get enough of it.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?
PO: The Phantom Tollbooth. I often think about it at least every day, how easy it seemed in that book to pass from one reality to another. When we're a kid and we read a book like this, we almost take it for granted. These days it's like I'm wandering around looking for that weird and wonderful tollbooth. Where did it go?

Drawing: William Kentridge via Duckrabbit Speaks

December's Book of the Month: Moby-Dick in Pictures

2011-12-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

There are as many interpretations of Moby-Dick as there are splintered harpoons in the white whale's scarred skin, all of which tell a different story, none of which tell quite the whole story. Matt Kish's interpretation takes the form of an illustration for every page (all 552 of 'em) and is both a singular reading of Melville's epic and a piece of monumental art in itself. Like all imaginative readers, Kish creates from his voyages in search of the whale his own vision, referring back to the original, but full of its own mythology and the cultural influences of the 150 years since the publication of the original. As such, Moby-Dick in Pictures provides us with a fresh way of viewing a classic (and is likely to become a classic in its own right), reminding us that great literature both acts upon the present and is reimagined by it.

As ever, our Book of the Month is guaranteed.

The Future of the Bookstore

2011-12-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

There has been a bit of a buzz amongst booksellers about this recent Dan Clowes New Yorker cover. It would seem to disparage bookstores not only for carrying all sorts of knick knacks and gewgaws aside from books, but for pushing the books farther to the back of the store.

Now, it is a nearly universal fact that bookstores are carrying all sorts of "sidelines" that you wouldn't have seen in a "bookstore" 10 years ago. Even City Lights is selling onesies (very cute). At Green Apple, we've added all sorts of toys and games and puzzles to the mix over the last few years. When Raymond Carver lived in the neighborhood in the 1970's, he didn't ponder whether to add a refrigerator magnet or some finger tentacles to his purchases. But a business has to do what a business has to do to stay in business, and if finger tentacles help keep the lights on, then bring on the finger tentacles.

But Mr. Clowes does have a point, I believe. With the advent of e-books, there is much discussion (see here and here) about the future of books and bookstores. As more and more people read their books digitally, which is inevitable, then whither the bookstore. I'm not going to make an argument for the many positive things a bookstore brings to a community. I just want to stick to the reality that they are endangered. Every single person doesn't have to buy a Kindle to make the neighborhood bookstore go the way of the typewriter shop, just enough of them so that it no longer becomes a viable business to sell books for a living.

Which brings us to my answer to the question, what will become of the bookstore? As digital reading slowly (or quickly) replaces the reading of paper books, those sidelines will continue to expand and multiply, until what we consider a "bookstore" will actually be a gift shop or a clothing store or some other type of general merchandise emporium that also happens to have a good selection of books. How long this will take is anybody's guess. My personal guess is that it will be much slower than some people think, as readers generally have a strong attachment to the physical book. The analogy would be to vinyl records compared to compact discs. Audiophiles still love their vinyl, and at Green Apple we are selling more vinyl now than we did ten years ago. Compact discs, nobody has an emotional attachment to, and apparently there is talk that production of compact discs will cease all together in the next year of two. I think it will be a long slow transition from bookstore to store with books.

Cat's Outta the Bag

2011-11-30T19:05:00.000-08:00

November marked the first month of our new Apple-a-Month Club, a subscription service wherein you can receive a hand-picked (and eyeball-read) new fiction title in the mail once a month. Our hands are doing the picking, our eyeballs are doing the reading, and all you've got to do is check the mailbox and hug your postperson (or resist the urge) when they bring you a pretty little package like this in the mail.

And, now that November's subscribers have had the chance to be surprised by their new book and our handwritten shelf-talker, we can tell the rest of you that our inaugural Club selection is In Red by Magdalena Tulli, a beautiful new little translation from Archipelago Books.

The heart of Magdelena Tulli's novel is the imaginary Polish town Stitchings. Reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous Macondo (in One Hundred Years of Solitude), Stitchings serves as setting for an array of darkly fantastic events: from a girl who refuses to acknowledge her death to the home of a man destined for a bullet that's circled the earth for years, Tulli's town offers the ultimate pleasure to readers: the impossible made believable. As such, we felt it was the perfect place to start our Apple-a-Month Club.

Want in? Why wouldn't you. If you're interested in subscribing for 3, 6, or 12 months, please do so by December 5th to get your first book in the mail about a week later. Got someone on your holiday shopping list who you want to surprise closer to Christmas? Purchase a subscription by December 18th and we'll send the recipient a card in the mail to let them know they're getting an awesome gift, and they'll get their first book in January.

the Tuesday interview: Lucy Corin

2011-11-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

[thanks for this goes to royalquietdeluxe]

Lucy Corin is the author of The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) and Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). She's currently at work on a novel about a hundred very small apocalypses and a novel about the brain. Her stories have appeared all over, including American Short Fiction, Ploughshares and Tin House Magazine. I'm pretty thrilled she's RQD's first interview.

RQD: What are you working on now? What's interesting to you about these characters?

LC: I'm writing a novel. Just yesterday, actually, I started a "character chart" to track the things I know so far about the characters, b/c I don't get interested in already-imagined characters so much as who they start being as I accumulate pages. So what interests me about these, is that I am developing them in relation to each other (trying to see how they counter and balance each other in the story) and struggling with fully imagining them the way I am writing them (rather than what in my life they spring from). I'm focusing on 2 characters who are obsessed with two possibly mad people, and trying to find the personhood within the context of madness is the point of writing the novel. There's a way that even including madness in the world of a book can dehumanize people/characters, and that's what I'm struggling with.

RQD: Who are some of the visual artists you're thinking about now in relation to your work?

LC: I spent some time looking at Marcel Dzama last year, and James Casabere photos of models of housing developments, and Simon Evans' maps. Going to SF MOMA today!

RQD: Is there a book or story or poem that you return to over and over?

LC: White Noise, Lolita and "A Good Man is Hard to Find," are probably the "most reread" things.

RQD: What are you reading now?

LC: Zeno's Conscience and Promethia

RQD: And as a kid, what were you reading? Did they impact your work? How?

LC: Incredibly important. My mother read me wonderful inappropriate things as a kid: James Dickey (The Sheep Child-- very formative!), Poe, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas...ee cummings (here is little effie's head whose brains are made of gingerbread...) she read me things she was into that were musical-- I remember how important musicality was both to her sense of what would appeal to a child and what the point of literature was. She also told me stories about British Royal history... the Stuarts and the Tudors and Anne Boleyn. It was great melodrama. I didn't learn to read until I was maybe 7 (dyslexia) but as soon as I could read I read intensely. Anne Frank was the first whole book I read by myself- I think I was 8. I wrote a poem about it. Z for Zaccharia (sp? author O'Brien?) was an important YA book for me. At 13 it was all about Jim Carroll's Baskeball Diaries.

"Winnipeg Standoff" Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner

A slipcased sea

2011-11-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

With the exception of a year in the Midwest, I've spent all of my adulthood living at most a few miles from a coast. Yet even when I could hear the Atlantic's staticky, nor'easterly roar from my bedroom window in New Jersey or now, when on clear days in San Francisco I can see the Pacific from the roof of my building, I've always wanted a tangible object to keep close by.

We all know people who collect shells or stones or driftwood. (I remember very distinctly my grandmother's homemade shell-filled lamp.) I'm a book person, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I've always desired to have the sea between the pages of a book.

Until now, though, I've never acted on that desire, maybe because I felt caught between the atavism and the consumerism of the impulse (as if any object, especially a photograph, can properly capture The Sea), or because I've never quite found the perfect book, despite there being no shortage of such collections. Besides, let's face it, there is also a lot of sentimentality about the sea; romance as well, but rarely romance that doesn't devolve into hackneyed phrases and imagery.

This book, though. This is the one. It's full of romance that steers clear of the dangerous shoals of sentimentality; it's got grandeur and shipwrecks and symbolism; it evokes the real sublimity and ordinariness of of the sea, while managing to permit it its dream quality. It's also got a slipcase. (A slipcase, I say!)

Francis Mortimer, The Wreck (1911)

Adolf Fassbender, Crashing Wave (c. 1930)

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Black Sea, Ozuluce (1991)

the Tuesday interview: Kara Levy

2011-11-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

I met San Francisco writer, Kara Levy at a Peter Orner reading at Dog Eared Books through another writer friend, Cora Stryker. The reading was for JoyLand Magazine where Kara is the SF/Bay Area editor. Later, after another reading, we talked about what we say when people ask, "what do you write about?" Kara sometimes says, "sickness and the body." Well, they don't usually ask again after that.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Kara Levy: Right now I'm working on a novel — it's a sort of humorous adventure novel that follows a self-proclaimed journalist-turned-Professional-Sick-Person on an unlikely quest to find a cure for Crohn's Disease. Crohn's Disease isn't curable (yet), but the novel involves a fake medieval-style pilgrimage, battle reenactments, a few infidelities, some madcap teenagers, and a lot of capes and baubles in the characters' quest to see if it could be. It's as much about these characters' quest to find a cure for something incurable as it is about their beliefs (or lack thereof) that the impossible could be possible, through belief or friendship or will or something we can't even understand. As an optimistic skeptic, that's a theme that interests me a lot. I'm also polishing up my finished story collection, Doctors of the Natural World, which examines issues of illness and the body too. In that book, the recurring question seems to be, "What choices do we make after the body makes choices for us?" I spend a lot of energy trying to convince people it's not depressing. I guess you'll just have to read bits of it to believe me.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

KL: I feel like I've been hugely influenced by standup and screen comedians: Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Lucille Ball, George Carlin, and so on. There's so much more than humor behind those performances — and performers — than meets the eye. I'm really interested in comedy for what it can do to express real things about our experience, sometimes more than theater or performance that purports to be serious. I also love medieval art, particularly architecture. You'll see a lot of that showing up in my novel. Is it appalling to say that I wrote a whole story in my collection while listening to an Akon song on repeat? Truth: That happened. Akon knows things.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

KL: Oh, geez, so much. Lorrie Moore's Self-Help is inescapable for me. I think I have two copies of it, for some odd reason. I also love Andre Dubus's story "Fat Girl," and go back to that often. I've reread Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler many, many times and I always learn something new, particularly about structure (which is not a strength of mine). In recent years I've found myself often revisiting a Wells Tower story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." It's the title story of his collection, and I think it's so brilliant. It's the perfect storm of humor and pain and character and story. He takes the unfamiliar and makes it so familiar it's almost disorienting. I wish I could figure out how to write anything even closely approximating it.

RQD: What are you reading now?

KL: I'm reading Eric Puchner's Model Home. A friend recommended it to me, and I'm really enjoying it. I also just started Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts, also on a friend's recommendation. I find fictional-style retellings of history fascinating. It reminds me a little of a book I loved in high school, Alison Weir's The Six Wives of King Henry VIII. I remember thinking it was such a revelation that history could be communicated so compellingly. (No offense to my high-school history teachers, who were also, of course, totally compelling.)

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

KL: As a kid I loved Roald Dahl, but I don't think I realized until much later in life just how dark he really is. I also liked the Madeline l'Engle books, and then, when I got to middle school, I decided on A Separate Peace as my favorite book. Tortured, woeful Funny! Common theme: I reread it as an adult and was like, Wait, what? I think I saw impact as a different thing back then. The impact was a lot, lot less reading it fifteen years later. Sometimes it's interesting to go back and revisit things you've always held up so high, you know? Sometimes they're just as you remember them, but for different reasons, and sometimes the distance shows you how much your taste has changed, or your threshold for certain types of narratives.

Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

2011-11-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a new book recommended by staffer Kevin Davis:

Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

In the early 90s, (We were the “Twentysomethings,” We were on the cover of “Time Magazine”), I’d see this ethereal young man around town named Justin Bond who looked exactly like the weak-chinned, moon faced thieving gypsy girl in Georges de La Tour’s 1630 painting, “The Fortune Teller.”

I also thought of the local pale androgyne upon viewing that scene in the film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” when the American solder, Luther, viewing Hansel sunbathing nude in East Germany says, “Damn Hansel, I can’t believe you’re not a girl. You’re so fine.”

I’d see Bond working at the Eureka Branch Library, at Queer Nation meetings wearing a mod black zip-up Adrienne Vittadini mock turtleneck, and at A Different Light bookstore on Castro Street (back when it was a real bookstore and de facto community center co-owned by Norman Laurila, managed by Richard Labonte and staffed by up and coming artists like Darrell Lynn Alvarez, activists like Tommi Avicolli Mecca, and authors like Betty Pearl, and not the poppers-selling gay airport gift shop the store became). Bond even had a sadly brief tenure as a columnist for the LGBT “Bay Area Reporter.”

Anyway, I’d see Justin and think, what’s his story.

Well, guess what? Mx Justin Vivian Bond, (she invented that prefix herself), now a 48-year-old cabaret singer/songwriter and performance artist who has entertained everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Sydney Opera House, has written a coming of age book all about her middle school affair with a cute ruffian, as well as polymorphous Boy Scout troupe shenanigans, a warm tribute to her hysterical former beauty queen mother, and the angsty challenges endured by the misunderstood, delicate-featured boy with ADD.

Although the story is slight and uneven, I so related to Bond’s sad effort to become invisibly butch, as opposed to the goddess she considered herself to be, after being denied the glamour of wearing frosted watermelon lipstick to school.

There’s a reason this book has been blurbed by everyone from Michael Cunningham to Sandra Berhhard.

On Reading, Recommending, and Being in a Room With Joan Didion

2011-11-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

When I was fifteen years old and a reluctant new resident of California, my favorite teacher put a warm photocopy of Joan Didion's essay Los Angeles Notebook in my hands. The essay is Didion's psychological inquiry into the phenomenon that is the Santa Ana winds, which were blowing (wafting, careening) through Southern California at the time. The piece, in stunning, precise, aching language, stated something that I deeply felt: these winds make people totally nu ts. But it meant something more to me, too -- that this place that seemed like an amorphous sprawl of cloudless 70 degree days did in fact have some extremity to its climate, a collective lore, and for lack of a better term, a soul. I wrote an essay about that essay, probably pretending to do so begrudgingly but secretly thrilled and electrified by the opportunity to pick up and examine each piece of the language. My relationships with the winds, with California, with reading and with writing were never quite the same.

Ten years later, nearly to the week, I was lucky enough to hear Didion speak as part of the City Arts and Lectures series at the Herbst Theater on Tuesday night. I had read more of Didion's writing in the last 10 years -- mostly her essays, though I also spent a strange weekend with The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about the sudden and unrelated losses of both her husband and daughter (a difficult book to make it through, though I didn't realize quite why until she offered one explanation to the theater the other night -- "the sentences in that book don't track" she said, an effect she said was inadvertent and makes it hard for her to read them herself now, but which of course mirrors the way dealing with grief is like a constant strain to get from one feeling to the next, a clumsy armful of moments). But I hadn't given a whole lot of thought to the significance of her early influence on my reading, writing, and psyche until on a whim I gave my brother a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem -- the collection that houses Los Angeles Notebook -- for Christmas last year. He was 18, had just moved away from California. It seemed timely. Since then, at the wise suggestion of a coworker who found me huddled in a corner re-reading the book when I was supposed to be shelving it, I've put Slouching Towards Bethlehem on our Staff Picks display -- and every time I see it sold, I hope it's been given as a gift.

(An equally timely digression: one of the best things about giving a beloved book as a gift is that the recipient is sort of obligated to have a conversation with you about it at some point, so the book is given back to you in the form of their re-telling. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised to get the call from my brother expressly to say that he loved it, and even more surprised that the essay he had latched on to -- On Self Respect -- was one I had practically forgotten was in the collection. I re-read it immediately, tickled and a little humbled by the rediscovery and the fact that it was my kid brother who'd pointed me to it.)

When Didion walked on stage at the Herbst theater, it all seemed to come together: that stapled printer paper that both justified my California malaise and forced me to examine it, the satisfaction of putting it in someone's hands to whom it might matter, the culmination of a decade of reading and writing in California that wouldn't have been the same without the tiny person on the stage below (she's really tiny).

Now that I've come to the part where I intended to recount key points of the talk, I feel it slipping from my grasp. Which is fitting: when talking about why she had turned down a request to do an interview for a blog speculating about the political future of our state earlier that day, she said that, not having written speculatively on the subject before, she feared it would be an incomplete thought -- "but that," she said "is the nature of a blog, I suppose" (zing!). In addition to reading from and speaking to her newest book, Blue Nights, she spoke matter-of-factly about when she doubts her own abilities as a writer ("every day") what makes a good relationship with an editor ("they think you're just wonderful") and ended every answer during the Q&A portion with the wry challenge "anyone else?"

But the part that stood out the most to me was her response to a question about what she hopes students get out of her work when assigned to read it in class. I scooted to the edge of my seat. "I don't know what they get out of it," she said. "I hope they get a sense of the possibility of language to tell the story all by itself."

Yup, Joan. That's what I got.

"Anyone else?"

Ho ho ho; 19 gift ideas

2011-11-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

or, the depths to which we will go to keep your business.

Here are the 19 things all on one web page. Or browse everything online or in our store. Ho ho ho.

Device Advice for reading digitally

2011-11-16T14:29:00.000-08:00

UPDATE:

We heard from a customer that--to our stunned disbelief--with the brand-new Amazon Fire Kindle, you are able to buy eBooks from a variety of sources (like Green Apple), not just from Amazon, as has been the case since Amazon's very first e-readers. We will confirm this and update our device advice soon. Here's the excellent app we recommend for your Nook, Kindle Fire, or other Android-based device--it's based on the popular BlueFire reading app, so it's top quality.

If this is true, you'll be able to read eBooks bought from any seller on that device, which could be very good news for Green Apple and its loyal customers, as most eBooks we sell are priced exactly the same as at other competitors. We'll be back soon with an update.

Super thanks to loyal Green Apple customer Lovestampmom for pointing this out.

the Tuesday interview: Elana K. Arnold

2011-11-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

[thanks, as always, to Erica at royalquietdeluxe for the weekly interview]

Elana K. Arnold's book Sacred is coming out in Fall 2012 and I can't wait. She's one of those people (Like Lindsay Leavitt) who writes books, raises great kids and is funny and down to earth and you sort of want her to be your best friend.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Elana K. Arnold: Right now I’m doing the research for the sequel to SACRED, my first novel, which Random House/Delacorte is publishing next fall. SACRED and its sequel entwine Kabbalistic mysticism and provocative romance. So I’m reading lots of texts, trying to deepen my own understanding of this complicated and ancient topic—Kabbalah, that is. I love my protagonist,Scarlett because she’s flawed and somewhat broken but determined to heal and grow. Also, both SACRED and its sequel deal with horses—Scarlett is an avid rider—and I love writing about horses.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

EA: My first love, even outside of fiction, is books. I love memoir; David Sedaris thrills me, John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye was wonderful, Temple Grandin is amazing. When I listen to music it’s often James Taylor. His voice brings me back to my childhood since my parents always listened to his music, too. And I have a guilty fascination with celebrities… not necessarily as ‘artists,’ but as human beings.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

E: Easy. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman is always nearby. Everything by John Irving, particularly A Prayer for Owen Meany. And Paul Auster’s books—namely The New York Trilogy—probably because I’m still trying to figure it out.

RQD: What are you reading now?

EA: Aside from texts about the Kabbalah—Arthur Green’s A Guide to the Zohar and Daniel C. Matt’s Essential Kabbalah—I’m revisiting mystery novels (a sort of pleasurable research). There are competing stacks of Agatha Christie and Harry Kemelman on my table. And I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild; I preordered it.

RQD:What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

EA: Anything I could get my hands on. Anne of Green Gables and Gone with the Wind were huge for me, I devoured all of Christie’s books, and was fascinated by Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex But were Afraid to Ask (which I found in my grandmother’s library!). All the Pretty Horses and Cowboys are my Weakness taught me that you could write about horses without being insipid. I read literary fiction—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Rand—and trashy bodice-ripper romances. I was an indiscriminate reader. I think the result is that as a writer I smash together everything I love, highbrow and lowbrow alike.

Two Titles for your Vets Day Reading List (for the price of one)

2011-11-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

In honor of Veterans Day, we are pleased to announce (with gratitude to Grove/Atlantic for the ability to do so) a topical buy-one-get-one-free sale. This weekend (as in, right now through Sunday) if you buy a copy of Karl Marlantes' What It Is Like to Go To War, you'll also get a free copy of Matterhorn, his Vietnam war novel (and a former Green Apple Book of the Month) for free. Both an excellent literary deal and a hearty stack of timely and related reading material for the coming winter months, these two books both deal with the physical, political, and emotional effects of war -- Matterhorn from a fictional perspective, and What It Is Like to G0 to War a deeply personal and thorough non-fiction account of Marlantes' own experience as a veteran. The memoir, in which Marlantes struggles with trauma and navigating his relationships upon his return home (at one point even seeking absolution in a meeting with mythologist Joseph Campbell), professes itself to be both a personal reconciliation of sorts and a call to citizens and legislators to better understand the consequences of war for the individual. And if you've been waiting to read Matterhorn (a book we liked so much that multiple Green Applers endorsed it last year), or were considering giving it as a gift, well, what better time?

the Tuesday interview: Nova Ren Suma

2011-11-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

(thanks to Erica over at royalquietdeluxe for this interview)

I bought Nova Ren Suma's book, Imaginary Girls, because I loved the cover (I love covers) but when I read the first three pages, I slammed the book shut. Damn this book is good. I saved it for my SF/NY flight and as soon as I got settled, I started in again. I didn't look up. I didn't watch the movie. Five hours went by and I was completely transported.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Nova Ren Suma: I’m working on a few things—all in different stages—so my head’s a mess right now. My next YA novel coming out with Dutton (release date still to be determined) is a ghost story, in a way, and sometimes the pieces I write for it deeply disturb me. WHO wrote that? I think. And then I realize… Oh, that was me. The characters in it, these girls with frightening fates, have been haunting me for the past year. I’m interested in rescuing them from what they have to face, and I think they’re interested in pulling me in with them.

RQD: What art or artists (not fiction, but theatre, painters, music, etc.) interest you?

NRS: There is a photographer who’s fascinated me for years. I first discovered her photographs in a college photo class, when we were studying self-portraits, and she’s been my favorite artist ever since: Francesca Woodman. It’s a very sad story (she committed suicide at age 22), and in her beautiful black-and-white images—many of which are of herself—you can see how stunningly talented she was. There’s so much said in these images, by the way she blurs herself out and hides within the frame, by what’s shown as well as what’s not shown. I can’t even articulate how much I love her photographs.

I’m also drawn to female musicians—to a certain kind of voice (always honest), and a storytelling quality in songs. I have such a crush on Amanda Palmer… she’s amazing. And I’m a huge fan of Chan Marshall, Karen O., PJ Harvey, Emily Haines, and Alison Mosshart. I’d listen to, and write to, any song they sing.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

NRS: There are some books I’ve read again and again and will continue to, probably for the rest of my life. One is a novel called The Last Life by Claire Messud; I’m obsessed with it. Another is Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr. Then there are the short stories, the Alice Munro collections and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (which I’ve been known to read aloud to others, especially his story “Dirty Wedding,” which, just… wow) and Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun and the brilliant fairy-tale retellings in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

RQD: What are you reading now?

NRS: I’m reading some YA manuscripts I must keep secret… but I’m loving what I’ve read so far. I also believe in using tempting books as motivators, so my reward for finishing the proposal pages of my next novel and turning them in to my agent will be 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s new novel, which promises to be very magical.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

NRS: I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. When I look back, I see that the books that most impacted me were the novels I found on my mom’s bookshelves. She was—still is—an avid reader. Seeing her read and love books all throughout my childhood certainly shaped me as a person and ignited this dream in me to write my own books one day. When I was about twelve or thirteen I borrowed her Margaret Atwood books: Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale. They opened my eyes to what kinds of stories I could tell. They showed me that stories about girls could be books, too. I decided I’d grow up to be a writer very soon after that.

Photo: Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots,

Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 on view at SFMOMA

November's Book of the Month: Luminous Airplanes

2011-11-04T10:47:00.001-07:00

Here's our pitch to get you to read our latest "Book of the Month" pick, Paul La Farge's Luminous Airplanes:

Paul La Farge's latest novel is, essentially, a chronicle of failure: it's about airplanes that never make it off the ground; a religious sect who awaited an uplifting rapture that never came; and what turned out to be the false promise of the dot com boom, when it seemed the sky was the limit for the possibilities of emerging technologies. Although a book of failures may not promise the most inspirational reading, La Farge manages, through his winsome narrator, to humorously and deftly weave together these (and other) strands to create a picture of the turn of the 21st century--set right here in San Francisco--that feels as true and fantastic as the world itself. Be sure to also explore the immersive online text that accompanies this splendid novel.

As usual, we guarantee your reading satisfaction.

Lock the doors, unplug that TV, it's NaNoWriMo!

2011-11-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

Today is the day, noble scribes. . . it begins!

Now in it's 13th year, The National Novel Writing Month is a tough as nails challenge, a grueling marathon, and if you complete it, a success worthy of writing books about. Oh, wait, that's the whole idea, isn't it?

Indeed. In a nutshell, NaNoWriMo is a month-long kick in the pants, encouraging budding novelists to commit themselves to beginning (from scratch), and finishing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Feh. . . you kids got it easy this year; if I remember right, wasn't last year's goal 60,000 words? But, I may still be living in a fantasy. . . Still, for those of you who are better with letters than you are with numbers, let me break this year's goal down for you: to reach 50k words in the month of November, you'll need to pump out 1,666 words a day, every day. I couldn't do it, but last year some 37,500 folks did - just look at how this movement has exploded:

Annual participant/winner totals:

1999: 21 participants and six winners

2000: 140 participants and 29 winners

2001: 5000 participants and more than 700 winners

2002: 13,500 participants and around 2,100 winners

2003: 25,500 participants and about 3,500 winners

2004: 42,000 participants and just shy of 6,000 winners

2005: 59,000 participants and 9,769 winners

2006: 79,813 participants and 12,948 winners

2007: 101,510 participants and 15,333 winners

2008: 119,301participants and 21,683 winners

2009: 167,150 participants and 32,178 winners

2010: 200,500 participants and 37, 500 winners

So good luck to all of you who accept this grand challenge - I'm in! Just remember, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. In other words, Just Write It!

the tuesday interview: Andrew Sean Greer

2011-11-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

thanks to our friend Erica at royalquietdeluxe!

I still find it surprising when writers I admire say yes to my interview requests. Andrew Sean Greer is one of those writers. He's our writer, a Bay Area writer, and he's always struck me as someone you'd like to have around, someone who, as he says, is "game for a mysterious adventure."

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Andrew Sean Greer: I'm finishing the third draft of a novel called "Many Worlds" that is a literary novel set in multiple universes. As for these characters, I finally get to have some people with a sense of humor!

RQD: What art or artists have an effect on your work?

ASG: Poetry and painting has the greatest effect on me; poetry because they are doing the hard work down in the mines, and what they bring up always inspires my own work, and painting because there is something about the intensity of the painted flat surface that mesmerizes and moves me outside all reason. I find portraits to be fascinating. But for intensity, something like Cy Twombly or Serra's recent show of drawings at the Met really do it for me. Big overpowering movement. Cleverness does nothing for me; emotion is all I'm interested in with art. That probably goes for fiction as well.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

ASG: Now I don't return to things because I love them; I return to them because they help my writing. These are related but not the same. And I'd say Proust and Grace Paley and Wallace Stevens. They always knock my socks off and get me going.

RQD: What are you reading now?

ASG: I'm reading Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

ASG: I read antique children's fiction--you know, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and Tom Sawyer, and the Boxcar Children and all that--that gradually turned into fantasy and science fiction and then turned into philosophical fiction by high school like Camus. Strangely enough, I still find those old books satisfying in ways that sci fi and even Camus are not, anymore. I think it's the quality of the writing and characterization. And the sense of people game for a mysterious adventure!

Drawing: Richard Serra "Late September" 2001

a lazy blogger's links

2011-10-30T14:34:00.000-07:00

I have nothing original to say today, but these are a few of my favorite things of late online:

Chip Kidd discussing his process on designing Murakami's 1Q84 cover.
this weekly list of diversions for kids called "Because the Sunday New York Times Doesn't Have Comics."
a NYT piece answering this: "When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?" In short? Yes. Barely.
Our peers in DC at Politics and Prose have a swell FB page that gleans advice on good living from famous authors.
Finally, on our own FB page, there's quite a lively discussion of literary Halloween costumes (though thankfully no Virginia Woolf suggestions. Yet).

Now go read a good book (like the one I'm enjoying now, Peter Orner's new novel Love and Shame and Love).

One Q Eight Four!

2011-10-28T12:12:00.001-07:00

When you're raffling signed copies of Haruki Murakami's long-awaited epic 1Q84 at a midnight book launch party, you obviously pull the tickets out of an empty case of Sapporo.

Check out some pictures of the event on Knopf's tumblr and at the Citrus Report.

And thanks for coming out, everyone! Let's do this more often, eh?

a lovely, bookish Spike Jonze video

2011-10-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Has everyone seen this yet? It's a short and lovely stop-motion animation set at Shakespeare and Company, the vaunted English-language bookshop in Paris. Enjoy.

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

Or click through to see it bigger; it's worth it.

the Tuesday interview: Hannah Moskowitz

2011-10-25T09:52:00.000-07:00

[courtesy of our fine friend at royalquietdeluxe]

There's something about Hannah Moskowitz. She's sorta funny and real. She's written these wonderful books that all the reviewers call raw and poetic and they're right. And she tweets a lot. I started with Break, about a boy who sets out to break every bone in his body. But of course, there's Invincible Summer and you can preorder the hardback of Gone, Gone, Gone now.

RQD: What are you working on now? What interests you about these characters?

Hannah Moskowitz: Right now I'm working on another draft of (what is currently titled) Marco Impossible, my next middle grade book. It's told from the POV of the best friend of an openly gay 13-year-old, so I get to play with a lot of stuff that you don't usually see in MG. There's kissing.

RQD: What other art or artists play a role in your work?

HM: Tom Stoppard, definitely, as far as plays go. Motion City Soundtrack, Death Cab for Cutie, and Bright Eyes for music.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

HM: Indigo's Star by Hilary McKay. I have no idea how many times I've read it.

RQD: What are you reading now?

HM: Right now I'm working on Now Playing, the sequel to Stoner and Spaz, but it's taking me a while because I'm an English major and I have to read a lot for school. My reading-for-pleasure time is very limited during the school year. It pretty much sucks.

RQD: What did you read as a kid?

HM: I read a TON of Middle Grade from a very early age; my mom used to read it to me when I was very young. And since I still read it, that's the age group that feels so timeless to me. There's a part of me that will always be twelve, I think.

Album cover: Death Cab for Cutie Narrow Stairs

Announcing the Apple-a-Month Club

2011-10-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here's your chance to spend less time shopping and more time reading

We want you to visit the store. We stay open late and often and are always happy to see you. But we realize that for a lot of you, there are factors that might make it difficult to visit the Inner Richmond. Whether your schedule is too full, or your commute too long, or you've moved away (do you miss us? we miss you), we understand that getting here can sometimes prove challenging.

With that in mind, we've started a new subscription service, the Apple-a-Month Club, in which we, your ever-diligent Green Apple staff, scour piles of new fiction releases to find the perfect paperback to send directly to your home each month (for 3, 6, or 12 month installments).

We're casting our nets far and wide in our search for a book we feel so excited about that we want to send it out into the world: one month the book might be a page-turner from an author we wish more people read; the next might be a new translation or an overlooked small press gem. Whatever the case, we'll send you (or the lucky recipient of a gift subscription--hint, hint) the book and a handwritten card as to why we've chosen as we did.

For more information and to order a subscription in any of the available installments, please visit our subscription page.

[Photo: Andre Kertesz]

the tuesday interview: hila shachar

2011-10-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks to our friend Erica at RoyalQuietDeluxe for this:

I met Dr. Hila Shachar when I started blogging in 2008. To me she represents so much of what I find in the bloggers I love -- like Porter and Hollister Hovey, like Vic or the ugly earring -- a relentless curiosity. As I've followed her career, I've been interested in how she channels this restless aesthetic into her work.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Hila Shachar: My fictional book has been sidelined in the past year as I’ve been working on a separate, academic book I have under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. I’m close to finishing this book, which will be published next year. It’s called Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company. I basically examine various screen adaptations of well-known novels, from the 1930s to the present times. I find this topic fascinating because I’ve always been interested in those narratives that we choose to tell again and again, in different media.

RQD: What art or artists have you been thinking about?

HS: I’ve always been fascinated by Maira Kalman’s and Sophie Calle’s work. There’s something about their perspective that resonates with me. Maybe it’s the way they approach the things we take for granted. I’ve been deeply influenced by directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Jacques Rivette. Their cinema is interrogative and unsettling; it asks questions and seeks to undermine myths. That’s the kind of work I’m interested in. As for music, Kate Bush has influenced me a lot. When I first listened to her album The Kick Inside it was literally like a kick inside. I think it was the first artistic encounter I had with a woman being unconventional. I’d like to create writing that is the equivalent of her music.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

HS: Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Fever 103°’, Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ and Irving Feldman’s Holocaust poems. Feldman’s poems in particular remind me of both the power and limitations of words. He creates double worlds through his poems, in which language is ineffectual in expressing experience, but is also simultaneously necessary to articulate that which has been lost. I guess you could say that most of the books and poems I return to are quite extreme in a sense. I’m most interested in writing that sinks its teeth into you, I don’t like skimming on the surface of things.

RQD: What are you reading now?

HS: I’m re-reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. Both hit me so hard the first time I read them, I needed to return to them a second and third time.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

HS: I read everything as a kid. Remember Spot the dog? I loved him. I also loved Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. But the book that made the biggest impact on me was Wuthering Heights. I didn’t understand much of it as a little girl, and I first read it through a Hebrew translation (I grew up in Israel), but it left a mark on my mind. I think this mark had a lot to do with Cathy. Her rebellious spirit and inability to be pinned down to a single meaning just seemed so right to me. I loved the novel so much that I devoted my PhD to it, and I’m now writing a book on its screen adaptations.

Photo: Still from Kieslowski’s "La Double Vie de Veronique"

Used book gem!

2011-10-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

Among the thousands of books we see over our buy counter each week, there's always a gem or two. Here's my favorite of late:

litquake...Litquake...LITQUAKE!!!

2011-10-06T20:53:00.000-07:00

Oh yea, it's on!

Join me this Friday at The Verdi Club for the dirt-cheap opening night party of San Francisco's Litquake Festival, now celebrating its 12th spectacular year. 'The Devil's Lexicon : Litquake's Nod to the Dark Side of Literature' kicks-off at 8pm, and there will be cocktails, so let's keep this one strictly 21UP, ok, you devils?

And speaking of 21UP, this year's Litcrawl on October 15th (fills me with civic pride every time) will debut the Litquake Book Bar, a mobile, interactive installation on a trailer that aims to entertain and engage San Franciscans by conducting live interviews with authors, artists, and musicians in parking spots around the city. So there's that. . . in addition to what, 300 readers in over 50 venues peppered along the Valencia corridor? Many of which are also bars! So massive in fact, that this year's Litcrawl has its very own website: http://litcrawl.org/sf/schedule/ . Did you click it? Pretty massive, huh?

Don't worry, the middle isn't just filler either - instead, days and days of top-notch talent from all over the world will descend upon the Bay Area every day and night of the week from October 7th through October 15th in dozens of venues. Overwhelming, sure, but fret not; here's the plan from Litquake, and a few suggested high-lights from our most recent Green Apple Newsletter.

I'm excited. I'm kind of afraid. I need to go now and save my energy - but please say "Hi" if you see me, or any of the other Green Applers that you spot around town lending our hands to this huge undertaking. And thanks Jack, Jane and Elise for what promises to be another stellar season!

the Tuesday interview: Lindsey Leavitt

2011-10-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

brought to you in partnership with Erica Lorraine Scheidt of royalquietdeluxe.

Don't typecast, Lindsey Leavitt is not all tiaras. First of all, she's wry. Really wry. And it's hard to be wry in a tiara. And I loved her new book, Sean Griswold's Head, which is literally, about Sean Griswold's head.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Lindsey Leavitt: A contemporary YA that comes out in Winter 2013 called AUTHENTICALLY VINTAGE. I'm only about halfway through the first draft, so I'm still getting to know the characters, but I am loving writing from the main characters point of view. She's a mix of breezy and bitter, and I love exploring those conflicting emotions throughout. Her relationship with her sister is also important in the story, and since my little sister just moved nearby for the first time in our adult lives, it's been fun "researching" that relationship more.

RQD: Tell me about other influences.

LL: Oh man. The I-now-feel-inadequete-because-I-don't-have-a-muse question. I have nothing. Um, I have pictures my daughters colored for on my office walls. I stare at those. And lately I've switched off between Jimmy Eat World, Adele and Simon and Garfunkel when I write. A lot of time I'll just listen to one song on repeat over and over again to try to feel a certain mood. Since I write for teens, a lot of those songs are from my late nineties adolescence.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

LL: This probably makes me cliche, but I've read Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count. Reading Jane Austen is like eating cookies, comfortable, familiar and delicious.

RQD: What are you reading now?

LL: I just barely finished Sweethearts by Sara Zarr and like every Sara Zarr novel, I adored it. She is one of the greatest voices in young adult fiction right now, hands now.

I'm also reading Unfamiliar Fishes by Sara Vowell (digging Saras lately). Her books are like having your most charming friend sum up the history class you ditched, with lots of asides and tangents.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

LL: Lots of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, dozens of Newbery winners. When I think back on those books, it's the characters I remember, and try to keep that in mind as I write. Then in Junior High I discovered the high concept creepy goodness of Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike. Those stories are very different from my humorous and or heartfelt stories, but I think I learned a lot about infusing tension and pacing into a story.

Never!

2011-10-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

Found this in a copy of An Anteater Named Arthur by Bernard Waber:

For a man that never wanted to be born, Tristram Shandy has aged quite well.

2011-10-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

Tristram Shandy turned 250 this week. Consider this a roast of sorts.

"Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."

- Samuel Johnson

"The man Sterne is worth 1000 Pedants and commonplace-place fellows like Dr. J[ohnson]."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature."
- Viktor Shklovsky

Tristram Shandy is the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century."
- Italo Calvino

"[I]t is my best text."
- Javier Marias, on his translation of Tristram Shandy into Spanish

Tristram Shandy is "the best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty Years, bad as it is."
- David Hume

What's wrong here?

2011-09-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

We all know what a villain is, but a villian?

There are some things worse than being stuck inside on a hot day

2011-09-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

It's hot out today.

Sweltering.

Even in the Inner Richmond. If I were smart, I'd have called in sick today. I'd be sipping PBRs on that great hipster lawn known as Dolores Park, book in my hand and tiny dog in my lap. But I'm here in the cool calm confines of Green Apple Books, buying and selling books. It ain't so bad at work after all. It's far worse out there:

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[Guest post courtesy of Kate!]

tuesday interview from royalquietdeluxe

2011-09-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

the tuesday interview: andrea seigel

Families are weird. Andrea Seigel gets that. She writes these pitch perfect imperfect characters navigating a sort of it-only-makes-sense-if-you're-related-to-us family dynamic. I found her book, The Kid Table, because Meg Rosoff recommended it and, well, she hasn't steered me wrong yet.

RQD: What are you working on now?

Andrea Seigel: Right now I'm working on screenplays more than books, so I'm writing a script about a new suburban community that starts up out in the desert and the teenagers that attend its very, very small high school. The main character is romantic to a fault even though she's never really had a serious love in her life- extreme romanticism has always interested me because of the divide between the way romance plays out on TV and movies and even in your head, and then the forms it might actually take in your real life. I'm also interested in the idea of a group of people who take a lot of meaning from the initial smallness of their group, which makes it special, and then following to see what happens when more and more people start to come in and dilute that club.

RQD: What about other influences?

AS: The album "Late For The Sky" by Jackson Browne wrecks me, but it also puts a really clear universe into my head, and if I could translate the feel of some of those songs into writing, I'd be amazed with myself. Thomas Kinkade is a big one for me. No, just kidding. There's a photograph by Matthew Spiegelman called "Reconstruction Florida" that I've loved and wanted for years, but can't afford. Oh, and Ralph Lauren's furniture. When I look at ads with rooms staged with his stuff, I get this feeling like I could get a ton of work done if I could just be inside them.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

AS: I'm not really big on returning to things because I don't have the patience for it, but the two books I can say that I've uncharacteristically read through more than once are Catcher In The Rye and John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire. Catcher because I'll pull it out to soothe myself with the existence of a really popular book that's loose on plot, and Hotel because Irving is so intensely great at plotting (I'm not) that I like to go back and marvel at how that book is put together.

RQD: What are you reading now?

AS: I just got Meg Rosoff's new book There Is No Dog in the mail, so I'm starting on that today.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

AS: As a littler kid I read a ton of Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew. I'm sure they had something to do with my favoring getting to know a character over everything else because I kept returning to series- I was more interested in tracking friendships and relationships than I was in whatever dilemma was contained within whichever individual book. And I'm sure that led right into my adult attraction toward soap operas, serial shows, and Us Weekly. I like the intricacies of personalities and smaller interactions more than I care about big external events.

2012 calendars are here

2011-09-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Each year, we anticipate that our calendar sales will decline a bit. Doesn't everyone use Google's calendar or some other electronic version? But you, beloved Green Apple customers, keep buying them. Thanks for proving us wrong year after year.

Well, we bought plenty again this year, about 900 different calendars in all. There are:

page-a-days (to learn a language, have a daily laugh, or inspire you);
weekly and monthly and daily planners, from pocket versions to big, handsome editions;
and wall calendars, from tiny to huge.

The themes and images of these calendars reflect, of course, the diverse interest of our customers, from nature to eastern religion, San Francisciana to humor, sports to children's images.

As always, the selection is best now, as we don't re-order calendars, so come on in and get ready for 2012.

Moving Along

2011-09-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

There are no words to describe Green Apple and yet too many at once. They're all over the shelves alphabetically by author or piled on the floor. At Green Apple I read. The selection is maddening. Over my years wandering the store I've amassed an absurd horde of books on all manner of topic, books to sprain and tangle my already convoluted world views. Books on what a political body should be, on what cigarettes do to the mind. Books on feral children, Trappist monks, racist jokes, history of color. And of course as I collected them I read them. I read on milk. I read on Tintin's literary value. Theory of perspective, perception, suicide, cycling, and mother nature as a stone cold bitch. Poetry by Charles Simic and Hanshan. I understand Schrödinger's Cat now and my room is littered with collections of comics, European porno, Japanese horror and fervent American nihilism. I haven't even mentioned the novel after novel after novel of elation, depression, eccentricity or ennui.

These books speak for themselves, but the curated amalgamation speaks for the store, as expansive as the human condition. Big and fat and dense. This place is the best.

Sadly, deep within the core of my crappy body rests old Trundle, the verb, capital T. Move right along like mankind. Okay? Four winters ago I was supposed to hitchhike my way to Philadelphia, but when a job opportunity at my then and still favorite independent bookstore in San Francisco arose I was waylaid. That was fine though. It was worth every minute. Green Apple Books has been far more than a paycheck for an overpriced apartment, but at once an anthropology course, cocktail party, and archaeological excursion. There are few places like Green Apple left in the whole world, a labyrinthine catacomb of information and entertainment, and from what I read in the papers maybe fewer every day. There are a million reasons to stay but, though I will miss it, I still quit.

This song can play me to the door. Let's call it graduation. Bye.

Colophonic Spree

2011-09-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

I feel your pain, bro.

One of my least favorite tasks at the store is sorting piles of books to be returned, a chore that more than any other feels equal to some of the cruel, eternal punishments dished out by those inventively sadistic Greek gods. Shelving is likewise never-ending, but is at least alleviated by constant novelty. Shuffling books around the display tables in an effort to keep things fresh and interesting appeals to the Tetris-lover in me. But sorting returns is a downer.

It's not merely that I have a soft spot for those underselling books that, having been given a fair chance on our shelves, are now to be banished to the dusty gloom of publishers' warehouses. I'll occasionally feel a twinge of remorse--I should've tried harder to convince people of your worth, poor, abandoned Marcel Schwob!--but you can get pretty callous in this business.

The hardness of my heart notwithstanding, what I intend to write about today are publisher's colophons, which are the first and quickest means I have of whittling down these ever-growing piles of books labelled with that kiss of death: TO BE RETURNED. When I find our returns sorting table creaking under the weight of hundreds of books that have failed to catch enough readers' eyes to stave off damnation for at least another few months, my quickest recourse is to roll up my sleeves and begin the sad process by plucking books from the piles by sight. To do this, I scan the spines for distinctive colophons.

It's a lamentable fact, maybe, that this is if not the only, then at least the most common time I pay attention to colophons. Because there is an art to the colophon that I appreciate as a bibliophile. (I remember as a younger reader scanning the shelves at my local, now defunct, Borders for the first image below, assuming that anything New Directions published was worth my attention.) But as a seasoned bookseller, I'll admit to using these identifiers more practically.

But! Wait! Please don't assume I provide the following logos simply because they are instantly identifiable and save me a few minutes when I'm playing book undertaker. A colophon is not necessarily a black spot signaling doom. Those below are a few that I find charming, distinctive, or seminal.

The old New Directions colophon

The new New Directions colophon

A classic classic

A classic-er classic

It's true: owls think they're smarter than us

One fish (F), two fish (S), three fish (G)

For more colophons from the 1940s and '50s, visit The Design Observer.

And, to offset the risk that I've inadvertently created a subconscious association in your mind between a book's doom and the colophons pictured above, I'm including a completely gratuitous video of a cat stalking a few green apples. Enjoy!

We've got an exciting new guest!!!

2011-09-16T16:40:00.000-07:00

This week we have Mark Childress interviewed by Bay Area writer, Erica Lorraine Scheidt. Erica interviews emerging and established writers on her blog, Royal Quiet Deluxe. Her novel, Uses for Boys, is due in Fall 2012 from St. Martins Press, and we at Green Apple are thrilled to have her contributing to 'The Core'. If you enjoy her pieces here (as I'm sure you all will), please let her know by following her on Twitter or liking her on Facebook - you know the drill!

So now, please begin the most recent installment of Erica Lorraine Scheidt's 'The Tuesday Interview', today, on Friday:

Thanks to author Lynn Freed I was lucky enough to meet Mark Childress at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley a few years ago and he was everything you'd think he might be if you've ever readhis books: funny, gracious and a hell of a storyteller.

From Mark: I know so many writers are superstitious about talking about work in progress that it has become a cliche, but hey I guess I am living that cliche. I find that if I pre-tell the story I’m trying to tell, to my friends and those nice people who care enough to ask, at some point I have already “told” it and the juice goes out of it that you need for the writing of the scenes. Does that make any sense?

CONTINUE READING 'THE TUESDAY INTERVIEW with MARK CHILDRESS at Royal Quiet Deluxe

Life Lessons

2011-09-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

The last week has brought in some exciting new-in-paperback releases (like this one), one of which is Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl. I haven't read beyond the first couple of pages, and I must admit that I'm not sure if I will any time soon -- my current "to read" stack is piled just high enough that I can put off learning any more about the writer I grew up reading voraciously for now.

That lack of expertise fully disclosed, I've heard plenty of things about the man second-hand, rumors which this biography verifies on its jacket copy alone. I've heard that, while spinning his delectable worlds of joy and whimsy, he was also, albeit in good company, a rather vocal racist, extremely anti-semetic, and an unabashed misogynist. I also read, as a child, his autobiography (which is (hardly) for children), revealing the dark and often abusive environment in which he was raised which no doubt hardened him into a person who doesn't think that people are very good.

These can be rather sad realizations to have about the writer who propelled my sense of wonder through my early chapter book reading years when I devoured every Dahl book I could get my hands on at the school library, the old hardcovers with the plastic-encased dust jackets, with the slightly orange pages and their slippery heft. However, these biographical facts are also not particularly surprising when I think about the important things Roald Dahl actually taught me about the world in those years, which are 1. the world, and the people in it, can be horrible. and 2. there is always the possibility, even in the most horrible and banal of lives (categories into which most lives fit for most of their duration) that magical things will happen.

To illustrate this, and because it was fun, I've put together a brief list of:

Things I Learned From Roald Dahl Books
In honor of the recent release of his biography in paperback.

1. How to poach a pheasant from your landlord

"First of all, you dig a little hole in the ground. Then you twist a piece of paper into the shape of a cone and you fit this into the hole, hollow end up, like a cup. Then you smear the inside of the paper cup with glue and drop in a few raisins. At the same time, you lay a trail of raisins along the ground leading up to it. Now the old pheasant comes pecking along the trail, and when he gets to the hole he pops his head inside to gobble up the raisins and the next thing he knows he's got a paper hat stuck over his eyes and he can't see a thing. Isn't that a fantastic idea, Danny? My dad called it The Sticky Hat."

-from Danny the Champion of the World

2. Lying works really well and sometimes gets you hitched.

Dahl's characters lie their asses off and are met with brilliant success all the time. But here I'm thinking of the plot of Esio Trot, in which an old man who is in love with his old lady neighbor wins her affections by realizing her heart's desire, which is for her smaller-than-average pet tortoise to grow. He claims to do so with a magic spell, but in fact does so by gradually replacing her tortoise with other larger and larger tortoises from the pet store. She's thrilled. They get married. The original tortoise ends up living on a farm with some other girl. This story has no moral. It ends quite happily.

3. It's okay to make your grandmother disappear if she's really unpleasant.

"By then, Grandma was the size of a matchstick and still shrinking fast. A moment later she was no bigger than a pin...then a pumpkin seed...then...then...

'She's gone! She's disappeared completely!'

'That's what happens to you if you're grumpy and bad-tempered,' said Mr. Kranky. 'Great medicine of yours, George.' "

-From George's Marvelous Medicine

4. Never let your guard down around an adult with power and a sharp object.

or: How to stop someone from snoring

"None of us dared to sit up in bed, but all eyes were on The Matron now, watching to see what she would do next. She always had a pair of scissors hanging by a white tape on her wrist, and with this she began shaving thin slivers of soap into the palm of one hand. Then she went over to where the wretched Tweedie lay and very carefully dropped these little soap flakes into his open mouth. She had a whole handful of them and I thought she was never going to stop."

or: How tonsils are removed without anesthesia (or: what doctors mean when they say they "want to look at your nose")

"The tiny blade flashed in the bright light and disappeared into my mouth, and the hand that held the blade gave four or five very quick little twists and the next moment, out of my mouth came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood.

'Those were your adenoids,' I heard the doctor saying."

-Both from (the autobiographical) Boy

5. In the very unlikely event that your parents are kind and wonderful people, expect the worst.

"Then one day, James's mother and father went into London to do some shopping, and there both of them got eaten up by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo."

-from the first paragraph of James and the Giant Peach

6. ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!????

I don't even know what to say about this one, but it seems worth noting that in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More there is a short story called The Swan, in which a bully gets a gun for his birthday and forces a boy named Peter who likes birdwatching use it to shoot a swan in the heart, and then the bully cuts off the swan's wings and ties them to Peter's arms, and Peter, horrified at the atrocity he would commit to save himself and completely bereft, tries to fly out of a tree, and then his mother comes and cuts the wings off of him, THE END.

What do you have to say to that, guy who takes a rainbow and mixes it with love and makes the world taste good?

7. If you're a little girl who reads a lot and your family doesn't understand you, you definitely have magic powers.

I'm still waiting.

August best-sellers at Green Apple

2011-09-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what other Green Apple devotees are reading? Well, here are Green Apple's top ten books if August 2011 (with links to books and eBooks where applicable, just in case you want to actually buy a book from us now).

Game of Thrones by George RR Martin (paper or eBook: $8.99)
The Help by Kathryn Stockett (paper, $16.00 or eBook: $9.99)
Clash of Kings by George RR Martin (paper or eBook: $8.99)
Lucky Peach, Issue 1 (not really a book; magazine $10.00)
Giants Coloring and Fun! (paper, $3.99)
Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (paper, $14.95 or eBook $9.99)
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (paper, $8.99 or eBook $14.99)
Storm of Swords (paper or eBook: $8.99)
Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach (hardcover, $14.95)
Dance with Dragons (hardcover, $35.00 or eBook $14.99)

Tonight at Green Apple: Chef Christy Morgan (Also: Food)

2011-09-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do and no food in the fridge for tonight? Swing by Green Apple at 7PM to catch chef Christy Morgan in a discussion about her new cookbook, Blissful Bites: Vegan Meals That Nourish Mind, Body, and Planet. Morgan shows readers how to make healthy, delicious, animal-product free meals without a lot of effort. And if you don't believe it, come taste it -- Morgan will be bringing samples of her delicious treats for the audience to enjoy as they hear her presentation on the importance of plant-based diets and eating local, organic, seasonal foods, followed by a Q&A. There will likely be enough to go around, but these things can get crowded in our cozy Granny Smith Room-- so if you want to guarantee yourself a seat and some food at the presentation, all you have to do is pre-order the book that you're going to want anway after you taste Morgan's cooking. We'll take pre-orders right up to 6PM.

Platform, Publication and Death

2011-09-07T15:23:00.000-07:00

After last week's Zinefest in Golden Gate Park I took a moment to swing by The Great Overland Book Company where this sign (above) made me chuckle aloud... then a moment later I it reminded me of a blub I'd read somewhere a month or two ago, that FOXCONN had picked up the contract for Amazon's new tablet/e-reader thingy... hm. Well, why not? They already assemble and produce The Kindle, and if you've already got the right candidate for a job then you should just go ahead and keep 'em around full time. It just makes good business sense.

You know FOXCONN, right? Personally I'm on the brink of an obsession, largely due to the fact that it is so difficult to glean much concrete information on the company itself. They tend to shun reporters from what I've gathered thus far and it's not hard to imagine why. The location itself sounds like the setting for some bizarre sci-fi novel in translation, a walled compound more akin to a labor camp than a workplace, with a history of worker dispute, deadly accidents and on site suicide (fourteen in 2010). Did you know that prolonged exposure to mercury promotes psychosis, hallucination, delirium and suicidal tendency? What a grim realization to make while downloading a "jazzy" anthology of Garison Keillor curated poetry (selection!).

My love and excitement for the handcrafted publication stoked that day at Zinefest, but the important and foreboding message at the bookshop was an abstract reminder of exactly what the polar opposite can be, and the means behind its production. Funny because one of the zines I picked up, Cabeza by Aaron Kaneshiro featured a Mac's "loading" image incorporated into the background on one page. I'm told that synchronicity is everywhere. Still, how did we ever excessively complicate something so simple as reading a good book?