Books Can Take A Licking

On a recent flight from Phoenix, I found myself sitting next to a young woman on her way home from Costa Rica. In the seat pocket in front of her, I noticed an inscrutable object- thick, yellowed, ragged. It took me a minute to figure out that it was a book, a paperback copy of Cadillac Desert. I asked her about it, and she explained that she had been mountain biking and backpacking, and that the book had taken some abuse: rained on, dropped in puddles, stuffed into a rucksack.

It got me thinking about a passage in Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. The book, he says, is a 500-year-old technology that hasn't been much improved upon in the intervening years:

"The book is a uniquely durable object, one that can be fully enjoyed without being damaged. A book doesn't require fuel, food, or service; it isn't very messy and rarely makes noise. A book can be read over and over, then passed on to friends, or resold at a garage sale. A book will not crash or freeze and will still work when filled with sand. Even if it falls into the bath, it can be dried out, ironed if necessary, and then finished....books require no special training to operate."

If this woman sitting next to me on her flight home from Costa Rica had brought a Kindle on her trip, she would have been out $359.00.

When Novelists Become Screenwriters

Local author/McSweeney's Emperor Supreme Dave Eggers and director Spike Jonze penned the screenplay for this year's highly-anticipated adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. Here is the trailer:



Then Eggers and his author-wife Vendela Vida (the fantastic novels And Now You Can Go and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) formed like Voltron and thought, "Gee, how could we be even more awesome??? Oh I know, we'll write a kickass quirky roadtrip movie with amazing character actors!" and so Away We Go was born, starring SNL alumnus (and former Rentals keyboardist) Maya Rudolph and The Office's John Krasinski, and directed by Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road, American Beauty):



Also out this year is City of Thieves author David Benioff's screenplay for Wolverine. I just had to throw that in.

4th Estate - This is Where We Live

I know, I know - it's after midnight and I am posting on the blog. But, c'mon! Watch this:

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

I want to go to there.
(Thanks, Aubrey!)

Rivka Galchen interview

Rivka Galchen's debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, relates the bleakly hilarious story of Dr. Leo Lebenstein, a man convinced from the first page (the first sentence!) that his wife has been replaced by a very convincing double. His troubled certainty leads him on a quixotic adventure to the literal ends of the earth for the truth behind his wife's disappearance.

Atmospheric Disturbances has been critically acclaimed, even by such luminaries James Wood (in the New Yorker), who called the work "an original and sometimes affecting novel, one that knows how to move from the comic to the painful, as the antic twilight of Leo’s insanity gives way to the darkest night."

In addition to being a New York Times "Notable Book" of 2008 and earning its author a nomination for the New York Public Library's "Young Lions Award," Atmospheric Disturbances undoubtedly pulled off its greatest laudatory coup by being selected as the Green Apple "Book of the Month" (and the focus of our 2nd Youtube commercial) last July.

Well, okay...

Our selection of the book as our guaranteed book of the month falls slightly below the praise heaped upon it by the higher literary powers, but we're proud of to have helped introduce our customers to the gracious and extremely good-natured Rivka Galchen. We'd like to thank her for taking the time to answer a few questions for the blog!

Green Apple: How do thinking like a novelist and thinking like a scientist differ?

Rivka Galchen: I think novelists perform a kind of dream-work on reality, and scientists a kind of reality-work on dreams. Or maybe the other way around. Depending.

GA: Does thinking scientifically demand that one view the world in an unusual way?

RG: I like to think of all the dilations of scale that happen in science: like geologists seeing ten thousand years as an itty-bitty spot of time, and physicists seeing an atom as a great big enormous thing. It’s like that enormous cherry in the spoon sculpture in Minneapolis by Claes Oldenburg, or those creepy miniature dollhouse works they have at the museum in, is it Philadelphia? Kansas City? Both probably. My husband has long claimed a desire to be a xenobiologist. He’s quite an overachiever in terms of not seeing the world from a traditionally anthropomorphic point of view. He also sometimes wishes he were a machine.

GA: I’m kind of an idiot, so I feel it’s permissible for me to use the parallel worlds theory as an excuse for being late to work. Can you briefly explain the theory in a way that will allow me to sleep in for ten more minutes? In other words, is it possible that my excuse might hold water – in any universe?

RG: Let’s say you have a cat in a box, who either will or will not die of radiation poisoning, depending on whether a certain piece of Radium, say, did or did not decay…and until you open the box to ‘check’, the cat is both alive and dead, each of those outcomes is true, each in their own branching of spacetime, and what’s more important--caring for that cat, or getting to work on time? I think a nice excuse is as good as Basho.

But if someone really wanted to learn something about parallel worlds, and just read something very beautiful, my favorite essay that thinks it through is the late philosopher David Lewis’s “How many lives has Schrödinger’s Cat?” It’s one of the last lecture Lewis ever gave, he knew he was dying of renal failure, and he basically makes this argument for why the immortality seemingly promised by the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics would in fact be, if you follow his logic, tantamount to eternal suffering of unimaginable magnitude. Thus he makes this argument, hoping against immortality. And in this witty, wild, imaginative way. It’s kind of an amazing work.

GA: I read in an interview that you have two enormous photographs of Samuel Beckett in your apartment. Do you often consult with him? If so, what’s the best advice he’s offered?

RG: His hair is so great, and so are his wrinkles, and I know I’ll never be able to pull either off with the same kind of grace. On the cheesy side though: I’m a sucker for his: "Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail Again. Fail better."

GA: You seem to express delight in the aesthetic possibilities of certain scientific theories, and in the beauty or weirdness of their elaboration. (As opposed to the actual “truth value” contained within them.) Would you share some of your favorite theories that might not hold scientific weight but that are nonetheless wonderful?

RG: Yes, I’m a fan of the strong misreadings--of interpreting something maybe incorrectly, but in a way that’s interesting all on its own. Like St. Augustine having decided that children chatting a little nursery rhyme—take and read, take and read—were somehow sending him a message to finally accept the bible and become a Christian. As to scientific theories: for cuteness, I’ve never gotten over the theory of phlogiston, nor the plum pudding model of the atom. I’m also a big fan of 1970s quantum mechanics experiments that tried to figure out if the gaze of a dog, or a mouse, had the same effect on an electron as the gaze of a human. But maybe best and most beautiful of all is the paper that the great and persecuted Alan Turing wrote on Artificial Intelligence. He proceeds along forcefully dismissing all known arguments against assuming computers could one day basically have the same intelligence as ‘man.’ (And part of what’s central in his thought experiment is a weird and superfluously gender-bender-y game of pretending to be someone you’re not…it’s a super great paper to read, and can be found here:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/chess/related_materials/text/2-0%20and%202-1.Computing_machinery_and_intelligence.turing/2-0%20and%202-1.Computing_machinery_and_intelligence.turing-alan.mind-59.1950.062303001.pdf

So he dismisses pretty much any counterargument you can think of, but then ends by saying: Except for this phenomenon of ESP, which appears to be valid, and which, if it is, might topple all of our assumptions.

GA: I apologize for this sounding like it needs a punchline, but how are love and the weather alike?

RG: Sublime disasters? Also ordinariness? Incredibly predictable in a general way, and hopelessly uncertain in any given situation? I feel somehow embarrassed now, having said any of this!

GA: Were you consciously led to Leo Liebenstein or did he just appear, demanding a starring role?

RG: He came to me talking like turn of the century german Romantic. I told his agent I saw real potential in him, but also that he’d have to learn to ham it up, be nice to the midgets, and that also he’d need to put on a good twenty pounds. Also Nicholas Cage backed out of the contract. The midgets—we ended up cutting, it was seen as too Willow-y a move. Leo and I came to really respect one another, but it never became social.

GA: What is the best thing about having written a novel?

RG: Mailing it to my incredibly great high school English teacher. I’m such a nerd. I’m sure she has plenty of other stuff to read.

GA: And now some seemingly easy questions that promise to provide a glimpse into Who You Are, but really don’t reveal very much at all. Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?

RG: Maybe if Tolstoy had had a tremendous gambling debt, he could have been as good.

GA: Hardcover or paperback?

RG: Definitely paperback. But even better: tiny little paperbacks, like those pocket book sized books they make in Japan for taking on the train. Tiny, tiny, and with a cardstock little cover.

GA: Susskind or Hawking?

RG: It’s hard not to love best a physicist from the South Bronx.

GA: Late night or early morning?

RG: Early is like heaven. No one talks.

GA: Do you have a favorite rainy day book?

RG: Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton and Edwin B. Mullhouse; The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943-1954) by Jeffrey Cartwright by Steven Milhauser.

GA: What are you currently reading?

RG: James Tiptree, Jr: the Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

GA: What is a book that you feel not enough people know about?

RG: Anything by Jane Bowles. Especially Two Serious Ladies, A Better Angel by Chris Adrian, and The Horned Man by James Lasdun.

GA: I want to conclude the interview with a nod (ahem!) to Green Apple Books: Suppose you were forced to pick a favorite bookstore you’d never been to. Which bookstore might that be?

RG: The one that hides in a labyrinth of unnamed Chinese shops.

A new toy

We're a bookstore. A real bookstore: cramped aisles, creaky stairs, oddball sections. We use just about every available square inch to offer the widest and most carefully chosen selection of books. A couch would be nice, as would a window, but how many books would we have to part with to make that space? Books are our lifeblood.

But we like some other stuff, too. Like movies and music, canvas bags and magazines. And Lucha Libre Thumb Wrestling Masks. They crack us up. They're probably not exactly what most people need to spend $9.95 on during this economy, but aren't these the little indulgences that make packing a lunch five days a week worth it?

If someone as immature as us Green Applers has a birthday coming up, consider this important contribution to our quirky selection of non-book items.

We hope to not have a new video promoting our next book of the month starring these masks. But sometimes that's how we roll.

Super Cheap & Plentiful...

Frequently you will hear a Green Apple customer ask, “Why are these children's books so cheap?” This is the beauty of remainders (you know: all those cheap books piled in stacks on tables with the bright green stickers). So if you are interested in '"why these books are so cheap," read on. . . .

A Remainder comes in two forms:

The Remainder, which is mostly publisher's overstock that they want to move quickly. For example, if they still have a lot of hardcovers of the latest Sue Grafton mystery but it's coming out in paperback, they need to make space for the next one. These sales are usually negotiated in bulk to a remainder company who specializes in wholesale books.

The other form is Hurts. Hurts are books that have been returned to the publisher by stores (usually big box retailers) and thrown into to large tubs called skids. These are then sold to a remainder wholesaler who pays by the skid, not knowing exactly what they are getting. They know the publisher, whether they are paperback or not, but that's about it. The remainder company then sorts these skids at their warehouse.

As the remainder buyer, I then go through these warehouses or trade shows or lists online to find the best possible books at the best possible price so that we can pass the savings on to you. . . .

Just in, Children's Remainder Paperbacks for under $4:

Little Polar Bear – $2.49
Mad Libs (Assorted Titles!) – $1.98
The Country Bunny & the Gold Shoes – $1.98
City by the Bay – $3.98
The Cable Car & the Dragon – $3.98
Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble - $2.98

Last Evenings on Earth

I feel a little like a bench player getting mop-up time in a blow-out by praising Roberto Bolano at this point, but after having spent the past two weeks reading racing through his early work published by New Directions, I am brimming with fervent enthusiasm for the man Susan Sontag summed up as "The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world".

If you were put-off by the sheer bulk of The Savage Detectives or 2666, one of his shorter works provides an ideal starting place. My recommendation for the uninitiated (or those who wish to delve deeper into Bolano's universe) would be to pick up his collection Last Evenings on Earth. The stories comprising this volume contain all of the themes of his later work - an obsession with poetry; madness and violence; casual love (with anything but casual consequences); literary feuding; and a brooding melancholy hanging over every action or inaction. The difference between these stories and Bolano's larger works rests in their concision and their heightened sense of power.

Not much happens in a Bolano story: a narrator (often Bolano's alter ego Arturo Belano or simply B.) travels, bumps into people, drinks in seedy bars, reads books of minor poets. The plot doesn't drive the stories, it's a vision of the world, the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary: a crystallization of vision.