Thursday, October 29, 2009

Book of the Month Commercial #9: Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint!!


Be gone, Overwhelmed By Books Disorder!

Our November Book of the Month has its very own commercial. Why did it take so long to get a new commercial up, you might ask? Well, you might want to ask our star, Mr. Nick "I Ordered Two Fruit Baskets, Now Get Out of My Dressing Room" about that. Anyway, we're very excited about our new BOTM, Running Away by long-time staff favorite Jean-Philippe Toussaint.


Nick says of the book, "Toussaint's latest [translated] novel pulls the reader into a jet-lag reality of adventure and complications--this book moves--when an unnamed man goes on what he considers a vacation. He had only one small task for his girlfriend, which pulls him into the foreign land of Shanghai, then speeding through the night to Beijing. This novel is always immediate, yet it has a tender feeling. Toussaint's usual (albeit unusual) understanding of the human condition shines in Running Away.

A paperback original, too, so it's only $12.95."

You can't beat that with a bat!

Monday, October 26, 2009

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby...Scary Fairy Tales

It was the cover & title, I'll admit, that first attracted me to There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and the stories themselves did not disappoint. Though the cover touts these as scary fairy tales the stories are broken up into more exact & interesting categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs; Allegories; Requiems; and then come the Fairy Tales.

When the book was released at the beginning of the month, I realized it had been a while since had read the advanced reader copy the store had gotten. I browsed the first sentence of the first story, The Arm, & was transported back into the creepy & surreal world of
Petrushevskaya.

I think the back of the book says it perfect, "Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia
or anywhere else in the worldtoday."

These stories will surely delight anyone & are perfect for the upcoming Halloween. But really, any day is a good day for dark, scary tales...

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Covered Bandwagon


With all the hype circulating around the recently released film Where the Wild Things Are, I've decided that despite some of my mixed feelings on the sudden Sendak popularity explosion, I will post this and officially count myself on the bandwagon, for better or for ill.

Now of course there's the new Eggers book, The Wild Things . We all know about that I hope. It certainly stands out being that it's on display right as you walk into our store, and is only one of two furry books that we carry (and the other one is not child appropriate FYI). Well aside from that, fairly recently a number of artists collaborated to put together a small book of art & comics dedicated to Sendak's popular title. Sadly it's something that Green Apple won't carry- it's actually only been published as an additional booklet that comes with the free magazine VICE. Not a major fan of VICE myself, but I have to admit that this booklet they've attached to their most recent issue is pretty cool. Above and following are a few images lifted from it, created by some of the underground heavy hitters who contributed.

Artists from top to bottom of this post:
-Mark Todd
-Sammy Harkham
-Jordan Crane
-Matt Furie
-Josh Simmons
-Josh Simmons again (this one was rejected so he had to try again)