We've Got Friends in Far Places

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 cards 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

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

Name that writer's desk:

1.

2.

3.

A Dispatch from the Kids' Section

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

"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...

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

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.