Klosterman, Hodgman and Lardons

The word "lardons" on the menu of The Blue Star in Colorado Springs caused me a bit of concern at a Simon & Schuster author dinner last weekend. I was trying to find a meal that fit in with my dietary restrictions (I don't eat land-roving animals) and had settled on the scallops. However, the seared scallops, in addition to being served with creamed corn and pear relish, also featured Saint Germaine lardons. The word lard, or anything related to it, generally strikes fear in most vegetarian or semi-vegetarian hearts.

What was I to do? The shrimp came with pork, the special fish (a tuna) was sold out, and I was trying to avoid the summer squash cappelletti since I'd had noodles for lunch and summer was over. I conferred with my wife, and she guessed that lardons was a type of French cheese. I didn't believe her. Finally, I broke into the conversation at the table and said, "Does anyone know what lardons are? Saint Germaine lardons?"

I was met with quizzical looks from the dozen people at the table. Just as I was beginning to despair that I might have to rely on the waitress, who didn't seem to know that andouille sausage was not a vegetable, one of the dinner's featured authors, John Hodgman, came to the rescue. Hodgman, who many might recognize as the human P.C. in the Apple computer commercials, whipped out his iPhone.

Hodgman dramatically held up his iPhone for all to see and announced over his shoulder to the rest of the diners in the restaurant (who weren't paying any attention to our table), "I am using my iPhone."

Within seconds, Hodgman had our definition. "Small strips or cubes of fat or bacon. It's bacon," he said as he dramatically put his iPhone back in his pocket. I was disappointed. What was I going to eat? This dinner at the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller Association Show had already caused me more heartburn than usual for a trade show event, and now that I was in Colorado Springs, I didn't see a suitable entree.


Originally, I was supposed to go to a Random House dinner at The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs' fabled hotel. That invitation fell through in a terribly embarrassing fashion. After the rep proffered the invite, I asked him if it would all right if I brought my wife with me. She's accompanied me on dozens of these dinners over the years. He hemmed and hawed and said that he only had eight places and if an extra one opened up he'd be happy to invite her. In fact, he was relatively sure that a bookseller from Utah was going to cancel out on the meal.

I apologized for being a pain in the neck, but my wife, who is nearly eight months pregnant, wouldn't be too happy about being stuck in a Colorado Springs hotel room, while I went to dinner without her. My rep, who is actually the first person I ever bought books from as a new buyer in 1997, said he'd let me know as soon as possible if she could attend.


A few days later, I still hadn't heard from him when the Simon & Schuster rep called me and asked if I'd like to have dinner with Chuck Klosterman, the author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. I could hardly believe my luck. Klosterman has been a personal hero of mine ever since I read his article and interview with Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant in Chuck Klosterman IV. Anyone who would ask Plant why he sang, "I'm gonna give you every inch of my love," in the Zeppelin song "Whole Lotta Love," rather than using the metric system in the lyrics, was sure to be a hilarious dinner companion.

"When is the dinner?" I asked. The rep suggested Friday night, which was when I had my tentative Random House dinner. "Can Emily attend?" I asked. The rep said she would be happy to have Emily along. In fact, she was looking for more people for the dinner because they were scheduling it so close to the trade show that most booksellers already had plans.

Once I knew Emily could go, I said yes. I didn't call my Random House rep to see what was going on with his dinner. I didn't have the courtesy to tell Simon & Schuster that I needed to find out about another engagement. No. I just thought, "Dinner with Chuck Klosterman. I'm going. Thank God, I have a way out of the Random House party."

Well, I didn't get off the hook that easily. The phone rang early the next Monday morning and it was my venerable Random House rep on the line. "Arsen, imagine my surprise when I was in Utah last Friday and I ran into the Simon & Schuster rep. She said you were planning to go to her dinner," he said. I felt the blood rush to my head.

"I can explain. I was just about to call you," I said into his rueful chuckle. "I hadn't heard back from you and she had room for both me and Emily."

"Sure, sure," he answered in a perfectly calm voice. "Run off with Simon & Schuster. Take up with them. Here I was telling everyone that you and Emily were coming to our dinner."

I apologized profusely, and mercifully he let me off the hook with just a mild ribbing. Perhaps anger would have been easier to handle, because I still feel very guilty about the whole thing.



On Wednesday, just two days before the dinner, things got even more complicated. I was sitting down to buy the frontlist from my Penguin hardback rep when I got a call from the Simon & Schuster rep. She wanted me to know that Klosterman's friend, and fellow speaker at the Mtns & Plains author breakfast, John Hodgman, was also going to attend the dinner. Now, some astute readers of Kash's Book Corner might have already asked themselves: what was Hodgman, the author of the Penguin bestseller The Areas of My Expertise and the forthcoming Penguin title More Information Than You Require, doing at a Simon & Schuster author soiree?

Unfortunately, I did not think of the awkwardness of all of this and blurted out to my Penguin rep that I was going to have dinner with John Hodgman. Oh boy, that set him off.

"Shouldn't Penguin be setting something up with him if he's in town for dinner? Shouldn't I have something set up?" he asked incredulously. "I've got to deal with this." He was clearly agitated, and I could see that the sales call was going downhill quickly.

I implored him to do nothing. "I'm already in trouble with Random House for this dinner. I don't need any more problems. No one can know that I told you Hodgman was going to dinner with Simon." Grasping at straws, I suggested, "Perhaps you could get an invite. They're looking for people because they are setting it up so late."

Well, he never did get an invite because with the two marquee names attending one dinner, Simon didn't seem to have any trouble filling the table. It turned out to be one of the most amusing author dinners I ever attended.



Klosterman, a tall, gangly guy with a full beard and slightly messy hair, who seemed to have Red Bull coursing through his veins, held court on rock music and other topics. We briefly touched upon his new novel, Downtown Owl, but he seemed on much more comfortable ground discussing the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks. At one point during dessert, we were having a discussion about first concert experiences, and he recalled that his first show was seeing the metal band Ratt.

"I think I still have the ticket in my wallet," Klosterman said. He thumbed through his wallet and found a small ticket and looked at it appreciatively. "How much do you think it cost in 1989 to see this show?"

A bookseller from Durango, Colorado guessed $12.50. Klosterman was impressed with the guess and put the ticket down on the table. It was a show with three bands, and it cost less than $15. My, how times have changed.

Hodgman was more reserved than Klosterman but just as funny. I guess you don't get a regular role on the Daily Show if you can't entertain people. His humor was droll and often unexpected, but always clever. We got in a long discussion about the pros and cons of children's television with Hodgman passionately opposed to the new-look Sesame Street.

Hodgman showed his serious side in a conversation with Emily, a middle school teacher, about failing schools and highly recommended Paul Tough's new book Whatever it Takes. Tough profiles Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, and his efforts to not only educate poor children but to eradicate poverty by restructuring the educational system and providing radical levels of support to parents and families at home.

Perhaps the most humorous moment of the evening happened away from the table when I headed towards the bathroom. In front of the bathroom, I ran into a young female sales rep, who shall forever remain nameless. She was attending a different author dinner at the restaurant, and was just waiting there by the men's room. I asked her what she was doing.

"I saw Chuck Klosterman go in there," she said pointing to the door of the men's room. "I really want to meet him so I'm waiting for him to come out."

I wanted to tell her that she could just come over to our table and any one of the booksellers would be happy to introduce her to Klosterman, but I just couldn't ruin the moment for her by making it that easy. After all, she had worked up the gumption to follow him to the bathroom in order to get a private moment.


When my entree finally arrived that evening, I noticed what appeared to be shriveled beets or overly roasted red potatoes on my plate. I had ended up ordering the scallops, without the lardons. Just as I was about to try one of these strange looking beets, I heard Klosterman yell from across the table, "Hey, I think you've got my lardons."

I looked up, and he had a plate of scallops (actually just three scallops, good thing Simon & Schuster was paying) and it was free of the offending meat. We traded plates, but before Klosterman's food was back on the table, Hodgman was asking for a taste of the treasured lardons. He took one into his mouth, savored it and looked over at me.

"They're really good," he said with a devilish grin.

Woodward & Friedman

Bob Woodward and Thomas Friedman don't have quite the same ring as Woodward and Bernstein, but this September the two journalists have been linked. Both their new books came out on the same day and both were greeted by media coverage that was able to break through the wall-to-wall election news. Also, both journalists seem to maintain a dose of objectivity and neutrality in their books that is highly unusual in today's polarized book market, which routinely features partisan warriors like Ann Coulter, Al Franken, Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly.

Woodward's The War Within chronicles the Bush administration's "secret" history over the last two years--most notably the discussions around the military surge in Iraq. It is Woodward's fourth book on Bush and his cronies and it follows the damning State of Denial. Plan of Attack, published in 2004, is a more mixed view of the administration, while the sycophantic Bush at War, detailing the first few months after the 9/11 attacks, was the low-point of Woodward's career in retrospect.

When I saw the subtitle of the new Woodward book (A Secret White House History 2006-2008), I wasn't sure which was the more absurd idea--that someone in the Bush administration would still tell Woodward a secret after the publication of A State of Denial, or the hubris of Woodward himself in believing he's actually being told valuable secrets.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded, meanwhile, is Thomas Friedman's take on how global warming and America's wavering sense of national purpose are inextricably connected. Friedman's previous book (the blockbuster The World is Flat) has become the primer for many people on globalization. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, has a reputation as a somewhat fair-minded centrist. If he were a politician, he'd be the world's most unrepentant flip-flopper. He has championed every side of the Iraq War over the last five years. He was for it before he was against it three times over.

I was thrilled last Monday when these two books came out. September is usually a slow month at the store, compared to the tourist-filled days of July and August. Two huge sellers just might provide the spark we needed to extend the busy summer season a few more weeks, I hoped. We cleared off the cart directly across from the registers of the eight different books that were occupying it, and filled it up with The War Within and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. We flung the doors opened and waited for the frenzied masses to snatch up copies of the new titles.

Well, we waited and waited through the morning. I was particularly hopeful for the Woodward book because he had appeared on 60 Minutes the previous evening. Nary a customer came in inquiring about his book, but we did sell a couple of Friedman's in that first hour before I headed down to shipping and receiving to help out.

While I was down in S & R, I heard an interview of Friedman conducted by Terry Gross, the host of National Public Radio's Fresh Air. It was fascinating to listen to, although very familiar if you've heard Al Gore speak about public policy in the last few years. Friedman made a powerful case for the necessity of government leadership to free us from our oil dependency. He made a passionate argument that changing light bulbs and driving hybrid cars wasn't enough to lead us out of the morass that we are in.

He railed against John McCain for missing over a dozen votes on a critical bill to extend tax credits for alternative energy--the bill failed to pass by one vote (59-40) while McCain sat in his office and refused to cast a vote--and pointed out the absurdity of the delegates at the Republican National Convention chanting "Drill it! Drill it!" To Friedman, that's the worst thing that we could do in this situation. We don't have nearly enough oil to drill ourselves out of the problem. He talked about how happy the Saudis, the Venezuelans, and the Russians must have been to hear that chant instead of a focused attempt to develop alternative energy.

When Terry Gross asked him about this fall's election, that's when Friedman went from passionate crusader to shameful waffler. Barack Obama is saying all the right things and has great information on his website, according to Friedman, but The New York Times' resident mind reader doesn't think that it's really an important issue for Obama. Friedman's not ready to commit politically, even though the whole premise of his book is that bold, immediate, political action is needed. Friedman wants someone willing to take on the challenge of the leading the world to energy independence, but he's unwilling to rule out a man who couldn't even be bothered to vote on the issue. Friedman wants to leave the door open for McCain and Sarah Palin.

Still, at least people were talking about Friedman's book. A friend of mine sent me the link to the Terry Gross interview over the weekend and many other people, including customers, seemed generally interested in his idea of connecting our dependency on oil, the increasing globalization of the world, and the United States' propensity for getting into foreign policy disasters. He's offering people something new to think about.

The Woodward book, on the other hand, seems to elicit no interest from people in Boulder. Perhaps people don't want to hear how the brave and courageous President decided to implement a surge against the advice of many of his colleagues. Perhaps we are reminded of just how badly Woodward misjudged W in Bush at War and don't want to see him getting snowed once again. Perhaps we just don't want to look backwards at Bush anymore and want to move into the future.

In Boulder, the response to the two books is clear. We have sold 43 copies of the Friedman book, and just four of Woodward's. In fact, if Woodward's book doesn't turn around it will be one of the worst single buys in my 11 years as a front-list buyer. I brought in 100 copies based on the 134 hardback copies of State of Denial that we sold. I've never had to return 90% of a buy that big before.

Nationwide, it's not so cut and dry. I noticed this morning that Hot, Flat, and Crowded was the number 2 book on Amazon.com, while The War Within was number 9. Maybe there are just that many Republicans scanning Woodward's book to see if he published their dirty little secrets. But if that's the case, our sales won't pick up here at the Boulder Book Store.

Books That Made Me Happy This Summer

This post is supposed to be about what a pathetic summer
it has been in book selling. Sales were sluggish, the election stole away media coverage from books, there were no blockbusters, Kindle this, Kindle that, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure most of you could fill in your own depressing financial details.

My various titles for this entry included, "Summer: The Season That Wasn't," "The Dismal Season," "Where's Harry Potter When You Need Him?" and "Doesn't Anybody Read Around Here?" My abandoned lead paragraphs quoted T.S. Eliot, took potshots at Dick Cheney, bemoaned the Phillies season (hey, they are only two games out, despite not hitting), likened the AmazonKindle to kindling and even asked for readers to come and volunteer at the store until sales picked up.

No matter what I wrote, my finger kept pressing that delete key. The truth is that I'm just not that down about books right now despite the wounded economy and the mind-numbing Presidential race. I had an amazing summer of reading new and old titles. Many of my vacation days were spent sprawled out on beaches and couches enthralled by the prose of John Updike, Richard Bausch, Michael Frayn, P.G. Wodehouse and Rivka Galchen.

Even when I wasn't on vacation, I found myself running home to read after work. I read snippets of novels while walking down the street (that drives my wife insane), tying my shoes, cooking dinner and eating breakfast.

How could I write a depressing blog when there's just so much literature out there that invigorates me? How could I only dwell on the negative when books have been my sustenance for the past three months? I couldn't. Instead, I'll talk about what books I love and hopefully inspire someone out there to pick up a book (preferably at the Boulder Book Store) and read.

I've added a couple of lists to the left-hand side of the blog. I figure it's about time I learn how to use these fancy Blogger features. After all, I'm supposed to lead a seminar on how to blog at the regional independent booksellers show in a couple of weeks.

The first list is my favorite novels since 2000. The usual suspects are to be found, including Philip Roth, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, but hopefully a few of the more obscure picks like Percival Everett, Susan Choi and Judson Mitcham will spark some interest. The second is an annotated list of my favorite books of 2008 that also includes a few surprise picks, including the fantastic memoir by Michael Greenberg (I usually don't go for memoirs), Hurry Down Sunshine.

Here's a look at some of the books that really captured my imagination this summer:

Asia For the Price of a Paperback

I'm currently engrossed in Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace. The scenes Ghosh depicts of the teak business in the late 19th century are harrowing. It's hard to imagine elephants and men engaged in a magnificent struggle against nature in order to get the teak trees out of the mountainous forests of Burma. Ghosh humanizes history in the manner of a great movie without resorting to cliched or one-dimensional characters.

Earlier in the summer, I had the pleasure of meeting the dapper Ghosh at a party in Los Angeles. He was there to promote his new book Sea of Poppies. We were in a crowded restaurant with dozens of other booksellers and several other authors. I gravitated toward him, because I was trying to avoid the embarrassment of meeting debut novelist Rivka Galchen. In an earlier blog, I mentioned Galchen's fetching author photo as the most convincing reason to read her book. Despite my efforts to avoid her, my assigned seat turned out to be directly across from Rivka.

Ghosh and I exchanged pleasantries about the weather, London and book parties before I worked up the nerve to ask him about a scene in his previous book, Hungry Tide, that I was quite taken by. In the scene, two people strap themselves to a tree in a typhoon in order to survive. Only one lives through the night. Ghosh leaned in towards me and confided that he has been asked about that scene before. We talked for awhile, and I thanked him for introducing me to people and parts of the world that I could never see on my own.

John Updike Redux

The reading highlight of the summer was without a doubt John Updike's Rabbit Redux. I read one Updike novel a year, and I am reading them in order. I must say that this one was my favorite so far. The character of Skeeter, a black activist and small-time drug dealer, is immensely engaging, profane, comic and tragic all at the same time. I read an old hardback copy of the book that I found for $15 in Half Moon Bay, California in late March. I waited until my annual beach vacation in Cape May, New Jersey to crack open the 37-year-old novel. As the waves lapped at my feet, I was transported back to the turbulent summer of 1969.

Updike creates a rich world of jostling characters where whites and blacks are always on edge in the sleepy Pennsylvania town of Brewer. Rabbit's wife has left him for a used car salesman. Rabbit is far from lonely, though, because in addition to his 10-year old son, Nelson, he has taken in a beautiful white teenage runaway named Jill. She was foisted on him by a black co-worker who was scared that the presence of a white woman staying a black person's house might bring unwanted police attention. Things get really complicated when Rabbit starts harboring a young black man, Skeeter, who is wanted by the local police.

In the evenings, Skeeter lectures this ad-hoc family about the coming revolution. In Updike's vision, black power has infiltrated the white suburbs, drugs have found their way past the manicured lawns, and interracial sex is happening in the 1950s love seats. All of this occurs while Vietnam and the moon landing are constant sources of distraction and even amusement on the television.

Rabbit seems to tolerate everything, but he's an outsider, a conservative family man at heart. One of my favorite lines comes when Skeeter is preaching to Rabbit, the runaway, and Nelson about what will come after the revolution. Replacing the old order with something new fascinates Skeeter more than the inevitable revolution itself. Rabbit is only half interested in these night rants. "'And you're the black Jesus going to bring it in,'" Rabbit mocks. "'From A.D. to A.S. After Skeeter. I should live so long. All Praise Be Skeeter's Name.'"

In Rabbit Redux, you never quite know if a character's comments will be met with laughter or violence. It's a community of people that are on the edge. They are all just one word away from wounding each other. Somehow, Rabbit manages to muddle along and befriend the people you'd most think he'd offend. That tension between humor and aggression drives the whole work.

Peace in a Time of War

Richard Bausch's new novel, Peace, is an extraordinary and touching World War II story. It's a small book, really a novella, that conveys both the horrors of war and also what bonds people together. I found it to be thoroughly engaging. I read most of it on a plane ride, unable to put the book down even after we landed and people were heading into the terminal.

Bausch puts us on a mountain side in Italy during the German retreat of World War II. Three American soldiers are led up the hillside to scout the Nazi position in a driving rainstorm. They are led by an old man who may or may not be a fascist sympathizer. During the climb we come to know the three soldiers and how they got to this moment of their lives. They are continually debating whether to report their commanding officer, who killed a woman in cold blood just hours before the trio left on this mission.

Peace is essentially a chamber piece, with the four characters speaking to each other and also maintaining internal monologues. The men are haunted by both their good memories of home and their bad memories of the war as their mission wears on and the rain turns to snow. We come to know Captain Marson the best of all the characters, and it his how he handles his own ethical and moral dilemma at the end of the novel that truly makes this work one that resonates beyond its specific setting.

She Makes Portnoy Look Tame


Steerforth reprinted Fredrica Wagman's 1973 novel Playing House earlier this year. It would never have occurred to me to read this relatively obscure work, except that the new edition featured a foreword by Philip Roth. Roth is not a blurb slut or someone who writes a lot of forewords, so I figured this novel must be something special for him to take his time and single it out.

Wagman writes in an impressionistic prose, and it isn't always easy to figure out what's going on with her characters. The crux of the story is the narrator's childhood incestuous relationship with her brother. That relationship hovers over the rest of her life, but not in quite the way the reader would expect. Well, perhaps a seasoned therapist would expect it, but not me. Roth perfectly sums it up in the opening words of his foreword.

"It would appear from Playing House that the prohibition forbidding sibling incest is designed primarily to protect impressionable children against sex thrills so intense, and passionate unions so all-encompassing and exclusive, that life after the age of twelve can only be a frenzy of nostalgia for those who have known the bliss of such transgression."

Wagman's novel is an incredibly intense, almost feverish read about a woman's life that is spiraling out of control from the moment the incestuous affair ends. No one measures up to her memories of her brother. She nicknames her doting and steady husband, who would spare no resource to save her, The Turtle. Even her children are mere shadows passing through her life.

The siblings never renew their relationship after childhood, but each appearance of the brother leaves the reader with a queasy feeling. It almost seems as though things would be better for the narrator if they got together. Her efforts to replace the brother sexually take her to territory that Roth's most notorious character, Alexander Portnoy, never tread.

It's a disquieting read, to say the least. Probably one that I will never recommend to a book club. But one that made me think, pondering the nature of writing, madness and love.

Stories of Wifeshopping

For years, I was totally incompetent when it came to shopping for a wife. I desperately wanted a long-term relationship and yet I repeatedly dated women who had no interest in a committed relationship or at least not in one with me. These women and I were often ill-matched and our dates tended to end in long silences over lukewarm food as the conversations petered out. This was in the days before eHarmony.com.

My particular method of sabotaging relationships was to find a woman that was about to move away from Boulder and begin romancing her. As soon as I heard the words, "my lease is up," or "I've got a job offer in California," or "I head off to Georgia for graduate school in three weeks" I was there with flowers and reservations at the best restaurants in Boulder and Denver.

There was the Bulgarian who was about to move back to her home country. That relationship came to an end on the ski slopes of Copper Mountain when out of the blue she said "you will take me to rodeo this afternoon." This was not an Eastern European double entendre for "hey cowboy, wanna get lucky?" She literally wanted to stop skiing at lunch time so we could drive all the way back to Denver in a snowstorm and attend the National Western Stock Show. "It is so American," she said as I glared at her on the ski lift.

I wooed a beautiful saleswoman in an art gallery in the weeks leading up to her departure to take a post as a curator of small museum in Virginia. I realize now that it was probably for the best that she really did take that job. It was becoming exhausting pretending that I had the budget to spend $8,000 for an oil painting that looked like a smudge of grass, dirt and blood. I put her off by endlessly debating which smudge best exemplified the artist's obvious feelings of malaise about American life while she talked about how much the commission would assist her move.

I actually followed one woman back to her parent's home in a rural Pennsylvania town. During my first evening there, I walked up and down the burg's three streets and looked at the Christmas lights glimmering in the windows of the houses and the store fronts. There was no one else out on the streets, no stores were open, no signs of life except the decorations and the omnipresent glow of the television in every living room. I couldn't wait to return to Boulder, even if I was coming back alone.

Needless to say, I understand the hapless, lovelorn men in Steven Wingate's magnificent new story collection, Wifeshopping, which won the prestigious Bakeless Prize for short fiction. Wingate portrays men in the elusive search for love in these 13 diverse tales. In almost every story, his characters manage to betray themselves, breaking hearts (most often their own) time and time again. The methods of betrayal are myriad and remarkably creative.

"(I wrote) probably two dozen stories that were all clustered around this idea of searching for love, because I think both psychically and imaginatively I was really trying to figure out what the love thing was and how relationships worked and why they didn't work," Wingate said.

In the most poignant stories in the collection, it is long-term relationships that come to crashing halts because of a false move, an awful decision or just plain obstinance. The crisis is usually brought on by the narrator's emotional immaturity and inability to understand his own needs and desires.

In "Bill", the narrator is engaged to be married to a fellow law school graduate, Myra, when he develops a strange friendship with an old man at a flea market. He begins buying Bill's old clothing, much to his fiance's chagrin. With each old suit, new grievances emerge in the relationship. The fissures are opening before the reader's eyes and our stubborn narrator insists on carrying on at flea markets at his own peril. He's more defined by his ability to spot a good deal than by his capability of maintaining a meaningful relationship.

"We consider our ability to spot salvageable junk to be an almost genetic trait -- one that would undoubtedly pass on to my offspring whether their mother liked it or not. Myra had a problem with this. She bought what was fashionable and replaced it when it fell out of style, and viewed my family's hand-me-down habits as declasse. That's where she was wrong."

In many stories the men sacrifice their relationships for a quirky principle or an ideal that would seems ludicrous from the outside. Why are these men digging holes in the backyard when the pregnant women they love are stewing inside the house? Why are they ambushing their lovers with crazy relatives? They're fighting more to establish their own identities than for love.

"It's very easy to confuse the search for your own identity with the search for love. And I think most of the characters make that mistake to one degree or another," Wingate said. "I think a lot of flexibility is obviously required in a long-term relationship; some of these characters know that and some of them just aren't able to get beyond their own search for self."

Despite the similarity in themes between the stories, Wingate's pieces are remarkably varied in tone, plot and attitude. Each story is a world unto itself. His settings range from New England to Florida to Flagstaff. Most of the stories are written in the realist tradition, but one of the best ones "A Story About Two Prisoners," is a short experimental piece with a delightful twist. Also, Wingate's entertaining language and ultimately optimistic outlook infuses these stories with a lightness and a joy that belies their plots and characters.

"As a writer I have to entertain myself and keep myself happy, so working on a story over many, many drafts over many, many years, you have to get to know your character, you have to get to know their warts as well as the things that are funny about them and quirky about them," Wingate said. "Everybody's got their own humor and their own likability, and so finding that in my characters allows me to write them better than if I were to simply focus on one aspect of them."

There is one relationship that has a real chance among these stories. Clay has fallen in love with his widowed neighbor Lisbeth and her dog in "Knuckles." It's a tale of mature and patient love that spans months, rather then hours or days, but it has hit a snag. Each day Lisbeth takes her shaggy golden retriever to the park and he half stamps, half dances in the snow forming an "M", for her late husband Miles. Finally, Clay gets fed up with the routine and tells her "a dancing dog can't bring back dead people."

Lisbeth takes the dog away and leaves Clay's life and yet there is a bit of hope. Clay realizes his mistake. As she is leaving, Clay watched Knuckles, "the dog, who knew the score a lot better than I did, looked pleadingly back at me." A few weeks later he buys the dog a toy in his first efforts of rapprochement, which is a lot more than most of Wingate's men manage to do.

In Wifeshopping, there are no easy love stories. It's a lot like real life. Forming a relationship is tremendously rewarding, but it takes an ability to see beyond yourself, to be able to truly integrate another person into your world. Wingate writes about this process in a sensitive and humorous way that never becomes cliched or sappy. In the end, you believe there is hope for many of these characters despite their painful blunders.

After all, there was hope for me following all those false starts. My wife and I just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary and she's staying in Boulder.


Steven Wingate will be signing his book at the Boulder Book Store on Thursday, September 9 at 7:30 p.m.

Here's are the links to my video interview with Wingate and a very entertaining book trailer for Wifeshopping.

Say it ain't so, Chelsea

In one of the most insensitive, wrong-headed and self-important decisions that a publisher has made in the last 15 years, the small, independent and formerly progressive publisher Chelsea Green has managed to turn its prime book selling allies into enemies. Perhaps more amazingly, the press has managed to unite Barnes & Noble and independent book stores around the country in their ire at Chelsea Green's unfair business practice.

Chelsea Green has given Amazon.com a three-week exclusive on its new book The Obama Challenge by Robert Kuttner. The book was to be released on September 15th, but Chelsea Green thought it was too important to wait that long. Nothing less than the fate of the nation itself hinges on delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver buying a pro-Obama book, according to publisher Margo Baldwin. So, attendees will receive 25% off coupons for the book on Amazon when they arrive in Denver on August 25th. Kuttner's book, which details what Obama's policies should be after taking office, actually seems more fitting to release closer to the election.

What's so amazing about this whole deal is that Chelsea Green has a bold initiative to woo independent bookstores. The Boulder Book Store, along with nearly 40 other independents around the country, is a Green Partner with the press. The Green Partner stores are committed to buying their titles non-returnable, working with Chelsea Green on publicity and author events and for basically waving the same progressive flag as high as possible.

We were one of the first stores in the program along with Denver's great independent book store Tattered Cover. Did it never occur to Chelsea Green just how detrimental distributing 15,000 coupons for our prime competitor in our community could be? Wouldn't a true partner work on a way to drive that business into our stores? Or, perhaps more realistically, allowed us along with Barnes & Noble and Borders to compete on a level playing field with Amazon?

It's interesting that a press like Chelsea Green that has published so many progressive books, including Naomi Wolf's End of America and George Lakoff's Don't Think of An Elephant, would resort to backdoor dealings and cronyism that would make Dick Cheney proud. Instead of trying to live Barack Obama's message, which at its core is about fairness and opportunity, Chelsea Green went for a blatant money grab that would embarrass the most hardened Republicans.

Chelsea Green is blinded by their laughable hubris and the idea that somehow one book from a small press can really change the world overnight. In the end, they've inadvertently started a change in the publishing world that if it takes hold, will make the market a much more inhospitable place to the very stores Chelsea Green relies on to sell their quirky progressive books .

I'm not sure where we go from here with Chelsea Green. We've canceled our order of the book in protest, although if customers start requesting it, we will pick it up. We were planning to feature it on our recommended titles display. The future of our relationship with Chelsea Green is much more troubling. We've basically given them favored publisher status over the past two years. We've taken chances on many of their books that we wouldn't have from other publishers, we've accepted a non-returnable discount that is a few points short of what we'd really like, all in the hopes of making a small difference in our community.

We partnered with them because the books they publish match the political beliefs and lifestyle choices of our customers better than perhaps any press out there. They publish books about strengthening local communities and dealing with global warming. But their business practices and insensitivity (they still don't seem to realize how they stabbed their Green Partners in the back) belies the content of the books they publish. It makes it almost impossible to do business with them. At the very least, we will need to get out of our partnership with them. To do any less would be setting ourselves up for future pain. Say it ain't so, Chelsea.

Oates writes on JonBenet Ramsey

Note: The following article is reprinted from a story I wrote for the Boulder Weekly. The interview with Joyce Carol Oates was conducted by phone.


The JonBenet Ramsey murder case is one of the most written about crimes in the history of the United States. In the days, weeks, months and years since her Dec. 26, 1996 murder, JonBenet has been the focus of front-page features in every major newspaper in the country. The strangely lurid photos of the child beauty queen have appeared on the cover of dozens and dozens of supermarket tabloids. Magazines from The New Yorker to Vanity Fair gave the unsolved case serious treatment, as did hundreds of other mainstream publications.

JonBenet’s case has been the subject of at least six true-crime books, including the 1998 bestseller by Lawrence Schiller, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town. In addition to traditional print sources, the Web is also filled with speculation about the murderer’s identity. Typing “JonBenet Ramsey” into Google yields more than 535,000 hits, including more than 1,800 articles about the July 9 apology and exoneration of the Ramsey family by the Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy, based on new DNA evidence.

Into this whirling mass of words, speculation and rumors steps one of America’s top writers, Joyce Carol Oates. Her new novel, My Sister, My Love, is about the Rampikes, an upper-class, dysfunctional family, whose 6-year-old daughter, an ice skating prodigy, is brutally murdered in the family home. It’s a largely satirical examination of the culture that produces children’s beauty contests and of the tabloid media that feast on people’s lives. Oates refers to the setting as “tabloid hell.” Its narrator is the Rampikes’ son, Skyler, who is just 9 years old when his sister is murdered.

It’s not the first time that Oates has sought to illuminate one of the nation’s top news stories through her intense fiction. In her remarkable novel Black Water, she reset Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1968 Chappaquiddick accident in the early 1990s and told it from the perspective of the woman who lost her life in the car. She wrenched that tragedy from the realm of the political (much has been made of how it has influenced Kennedy’s career) into the world of human drama by focusing on the victim’s thoughts and memories as the water closed in around her.

“When I wrote Black Water, I wanted a character like Senator Kennedy,” Oates said. “I wasn’t writing Senator Kennedy. My character was much older. I’m looking for an equation in these true stories and trying to make it fiction. The characters are fictitious.”

When Oates set to writing My Sister, My Love, she began looking for the true story that might serve as a launching pad for the issues that she wanted to address. It wasn’t so much the grisly details of the murder that fascinated her, although she was familiar with them from writing a piece for The New York Review of Books reviewing the literature of the Ramsey case back in 1999. Rather, it was what the story said about contemporary America that interested Oates.

“I wanted to write a novel from the perspective of a young person from a notorious family, those families that are often in the tabloids and have reporters constantly following them around,” Oates said. “I envisioned a young person, an innocent person, in tabloid hell with no place he could go.”

She toyed with the idea of writing a novel from the perspective of one of O.J. Simpson’s children, and in fact Skyler’s fleeting love interest in the novel is the offspring of a professional athlete who was tried and acquitted of stabbing to death his ex-wife and her male friend. But in the end she settled on the Ramseys because she was intensely drawn to the drama of the children.

“At a certain point I thought of the Ramseys. I must have seen that little girl’s made-up face 500 times,” Oates said. “The photos of her in the beauty-queen outfits were everywhere for a long time. I know literally nothing about her brother Burke Ramsey. I didn’t look up anything. I wanted to write about a young man traumatized.”

Astute readers will almost immediately spot differences between the Ramseys and Rampikes. First of all, the Rampikes live in Fair Hills, N.J., and not in Boulder. Secondly, the mother, Betsey, is an ex-ice skater and is training her daughter to be a figure skater rather than a beauty contestant and dancer. Third, Betsey’s husband, Bix Rampike, is an ambitious young man in his early 30s just entering a high-powered career, while John Bennett Ramsey was 53 at the time of his daughter’s murder and was at the apex of a lucrative career.

Skyler’s narrative reveals a severely damaged person, both as a young child in the Rampikes house of the mid-1990s and in the present day as a 19-year-old recovering addict living in New Brunswick, N.J. The damage has been inflicted by his parents, Betsey and Bix. Oates does an amazing job of imagining what life must be like inside the family of a child prodigy. Almost everything else is shunted aside by the over-zealous mother, including Skyler, in the desire to make her daughter, Bliss, into a skating star. Bix, in pursuit of his career, is almost wholly absent from the lives of his children.

In the two years leading up to the murder, the children are shuttled from one ice rink to another. Both of the Rampike’s children are heavily medicated with psychiatric drugs, while Bliss is also given a regimen of performance-enhancing pills and shots. Skyler describes how his younger sister would perch on the edge of her bed because it would hurt to sit down after her shots.

“I’m very concerned with the pharmacological revolution among children,” Oates said. “A high percentage of children are medicated. You walk around a mall on the weekend, and so many of the kids you’ll see will be taking something. Many of my friends are on anti-depressants. I’m not criticizing it, but in children these drugs must be over-prescribed.”

Contemporary child-rearing comes under fire in My Sister, My Love as Skyler describes a horrific series of play dates in a tone of biting satire. These dates aren’t with children that Skyler likes; rather they are with the children of the town’s movers and shakers. Skyler is just a pawn in his mother’s social climbing. The kids play together in a totally unsupervised atmosphere, while the parents disappear.

At one of these playdates, Skyler and a classmate compare diagnoses. The classmate explains that he is a G.C.S.S. (Gifted Child Syndrome Sufferer), while Skyler can only counter that he is I.D. and I.A.D.D. (Incipient Dyslexia and Incipient Attention Deficit Disorder). The friend helpfully adds that Skyler just might be A.P.M (Acute Premature Melancholia), as well. Eventually, Skyler is prodded to try some of his classmate’s medicine and ends up having a hallucinogenic incident before almost being thrown out of the house.

“In the past, many of these things were just personality quirks,” Oates said. “People of genius have always had different personalities. I don’t think Einstein was normal at the age of 4. Many of the disorders in the book are real, and they are taken from my research.”

As Skyler continues to struggle for his parents’ attention, his sister Bliss is literally being smothered by it. Her workouts, her diet, her hair: all are closely monitored by Betsey. Oates describes Bliss’ skating costumes, largely modeled after JonBenet’s real-life outfits, in great detail. It’s a sickening catalog of inappropriately seductive items. If they weren’t based in fact, they would be written off as the grotesque fantasies of a child pornographer.

In these passages, Skyler’s narrative takes on the detached feeling of a news account of the event. It’s as if the details are too painful for him to remember in his own words. Here’s how he describes one of his sister’s greatest skating triumphs:“The All-American-Girl Ice Jubilee in Bangor, Maine, in early November where in a ‘Vegas showgirl’ costume of glittering white sequins and filmy white feathers, long tight sleeves with ermine-trimmed wrists, stardust in her ‘upswept’ hair and on her eyelids, and crimson-lace panties teasingly visible beneath, Bliss Rampike ravished both judges and audience with a skate-dance performance of that sultry-tango pop-American classic ‘Kiss of Fire.’”

Bliss’ death seems fated in My Sister, My Love. The ice skating star is becoming more and more disenchanted with her role in the family and on the ice. She is suffering from phantom pains and has just come off of a disastrous showing in her latest competition. Her mother is blaming her for the breakup of her marriage, and she can’t seem to learn even the simplest things from her tutors. She’s a portrait of melancholy, pleading for her brother’s help in the middle of the night when she wets her sheets. Still, she manages to attract a bevy of admirers.

“One of the passages is about how it’s so strange that people want some part of Bliss’ celebrity,” Oates said. “They just want to be near her. But she’s just a shy, insecure, unhappy child. When you get through the aura of celebrity, you often just find a wounded person that other people are using.”

Oates’ description of the night of the murder and its immediate aftermath is a haunting work of fiction. She wraps the true brutal events of JonBenet’s murder into the narration of an innocent child. Looking back on it from a distance of 10 years, Skyler still can’t make out the circumstances of the evening, although the reader will come away with a clear sense of who the murderer was in Oates’ version of the crime.

At night, before the children go to sleep, Bliss begs Skyler to draw a red heart on the palm of her hand. He knows his mother will be upset if he does it, but Skyler eventually gives in. We know that JonBenet was found with a red heart drawn on her hand. Later, Bliss wakes Skyler up and asks him for help, but Skyler doesn’t want to deal with his sister’s sheets again so he doesn’t get up. He’s also tired beyond his usual state because he was given an extra dose of medication. At one point in the middle of the night, he wakes up to find his mother working on a letter. He never seems to make the connection to his mother’s late-night writing and the ransom note.

He wakes up to his mother shaking him at 6 a.m., demanding to know where Bliss is, where he has hidden her. Skyler, wracked with guilt and shame and feeling the effects of too many drugs, doesn’t even know if he had anything to do with his sister’s death. Years later, this question still haunts him. The body is found by Bix in much the same way John Bennett Ramsey carried his daughter up from the basement of their home. The ensuing investigation also suffers the same flaws that occurred here in Boulder.

Once Bliss is dead, Skyler is shuttled between psychiatric institutes and boarding schools. Neither of his parents manages to establish a meaningful relationship with him. He only glimpses his mother in the tabloids or on afternoon talk television. His father, thoroughly absorbed in his career, mostly ignores his son. Bix Rampike, a former college football player, only reaches out to his son when giving occasional advice about what it means to be a Rampike man. In fact, Bix’s machismo, along with the macho world of corporate America that he inhabits, creates a wide gulf between the sensitive Skyler and his father.

“That corporate culture is more alive and well than ever under Bush,” Oates said. “I spent a couple of years looking at Fox News. Bix is a sort of Bill O’Reilly — a swaggering, macho, conservative Christian personality. It’s disturbing and alarming how these people come out of the woodwork in an era like this. In other times, the bigotry and misogyny would be there but hidden away a little more.”

Now, 10 years later, Skyler is compelled to write his story. He’s one of Oates’ odder narrators, which is saying a lot when you look at her varied career more than 40 years. His satirical story includes scores of entertaining footnotes and even a novella within the novel, which makes the 560 pages go fairly quickly. There are many stops and starts, and repeated scenes, as Skyler attempts to remember the pertinent events. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the narration is that Skyler is a completely real person. His tale and his world is an exaggeration of many of our society’s worst attributes, and yet the person in the middle of this alternate version of America is lovable and vulnerable.

“It’s meant to be emotional. He’s really struggling with his story,” Oates said. “He’s saying, ‘God I hate writing. I’m trying to make you feel something about these people in the tabloids.’”

In the end, Skyler finds some peace of mind and begins to reconstruct his damaged life. He begins to emerge from “tabloid hell” with the help of a down-to-earth preacher and some caring people.

“One of the answers is to return to simpler values,” Oates said. “Non-charismatic, basic religion on a very human level of helping one another is a start. We need to find community in a small group of people, not in celebrity. We need other people. You can’t look inside your heart all the time for the answers. You need a community.”

They Write About Books?

When it comes to reading book reviews, I'm a snob. I'm much more highbrow in my reading of critiques then I am in my taste of actual books. If the review does not appear in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books or a paper from London, then it doesn't really attract my interest. Conversely, I'll read just about any book if it features a great cover, touches upon the subject of baseball, involves super heroes or looks respectably risque.

I'm not sure how I got like this. Frankly, most of the writing in The New York Review of Books bores me, and yet I persist. Perhaps, in my addled head, I connect the dry prose with literary respectability. I admit that occasionally I'll read a review in another publication if it's by a writer that I enjoy. I make a habit of perusing the Denver and Boulder papers to keep abreast of what the local residents might be encouraged to purchase at our store. But for the most part, I'm not really that interested in what Newsweek, Time, or most anyone else has to say about books.

I figure if I look hard enough I'm liable to find a good review of just about any book out there. God knows that the publishers find plenty of positive reviews to quote for the paperback releases of their worst dogs. You can practically hear the book barking as you crack open the front cover and read the stirring praise from U.S.A. Today. No thank you. I'll stick to the tried and true for my reviews.

All of this began to change a few months ago, when a magazine of dubious pedigree appeared in our apartment. After a round of bitter marital recriminations, I finally came to believe that my wife's subscription to Entertainment Weekly was an unfortunate error. It seems that a couple of months previous, we had bought a magazine subscription as part of a school fundraiser from the daughter of a dear friend. We were reluctant to take on another magazine, but the student had been a flower girl at our wedding, and to refuse her anything was beyond my capabilities. The problem is that unread, or barely read, copies of The New Yorker, Harper's and Paste already clutter up our minuscule living room.

"No, no honey, you can't throw out that October, 2003 issue of Harper's yet," I plead, every time we try to clean the apartment. "I'm halfway through a fascinating article that debates whether Nader is going to run for President again, after the 2000 debacle in Florida."

Finally, after much humming and hawing and some nudging from our friend, we agreed upon a subscription to Sports Illustrated. I reasoned that at least I'd thumb my way through it in search of baseball news each week. I also pointed out that everyone knows that sports writers are the most literate and talented of all journalists, so perhaps even my wife might enjoy the feature articles. (Disclaimer: the author of this blog is a former sports writer.)

By the time Entertainment Weekly arrived, I had completely forgotten about our subscription to Sports Illustrated. Once we ascertained that a switch had occurred, we'd already received four issues of the wrong publication. What could we do? I suggested browbeating the absurdly cute flower girl into correcting the error and getting us the right magazine. My wife, who was eschewing all of our highbrow literary magazines in favor of Entertainment Weekly by this point, said that we just had to suffer through the subscription in peace and quiet.

Week after week, a parade of celebrities crossed the threshold of our door. One week it was Johnny Depp, the next it was Will Ferrell gracing the cover of the hideous magazine that had brought the tabloid world into the rarified air of our home. It wasn't until the cover featuring Ellen Page of Juno, that I broke down and cracked open the magazine. I admit that I just love that movie. Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed; the magazine was rife with gossip, inane features on celebrities and fawning palaver aimed at dreadful Hollywood fare.

However, I found a curious three-page section of book reviews towards the back. I was flabbergasted. The reviews were concise, well written and featured not just popular books but independent and intelligent titles. I don't recall the exact books that were discussed in that issue, but ever since I have scanned each issue of Entertainment Weekly for the reviews.

I started mentioning the book news and insights that I'd read in the magazine to reps and fellow booksellers. I'd get a few askance glances, but I'd push forward. Making my exposure as a reader of trashy magazines even worse was my habit of referring to the publication as "EW" It seemed that I was on overly familiar terms with Entertainment Weekly. This delighted a few of the people I worked with who were only too happy to catch me quoting a non-snooty publication.

My conversion to Entertainment Weekly, was completed this past week when they released a special double issue featuring the best movies, tv shows, albums and books of the last 25 years. I skipped past the other categories (although I couldn't help noticing that they named the mediocre Spiderman 2 the 36th best movie) and headed right to books.

It's a surprising, quirky and literate list. Cormac McCarthy's The Road earns the top spot and is joined by Harry Potter, Beloved, The Liar's Club and American Pastoral in the top five. It's not just the books they pick -- I personally don't agree with the selection of Philip Roth's American Pastoral, for instance. I'm not sure it's even his fifth best book of the last 25 years. It's the pithy comments that accompany each entry that really provide the hooks.

Here's the write up for #29, Bel Canto by Anne Patchett: "A South American embassy throws a birthday bash for a Japanese electronics mogul. A famed opera singer is on the guest list. The terrorists who swarm in through the air-conditioning vents are not. The diva's performance works miracles even with the terrorists, but it's Patchett who really sings."

I also like #16, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood: "After 1984 came and went without ado, we needed a new futuristic dystopia to haunt our sleep. Atwood obliged, dreaming up the Republic of Gilead, a grim theocracy where women are valued solely for their ability to bear children."

I'm not arguing that this is a definitive list of great books published over the last 25 years. There are some true hits (The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien, Blindness by Jose Saramago) as well as some books that were wildly popular (The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane) but have no business being on a list of new classics.

What EW does so well is to make books appear to be as entertaining as avid readers know that they really are. EW treats books with the same flippancy and zing that they treat movies and music. Anyone can enjoy a great record, and what they are saying in their book pages is that anyone can enjoy a great book. You don't have to be hyper-educated or part of a book club to pick one up. If you want to be entertained, here's some books that are great options.

In a strange way, I think EW does a better job with books than they do with movies and television shows. In the visual mediums, they are such an establishment force, that they have certain things that they must cover. They write about all of the major Hollywood pictures, no matter how unworthy of space they may be. Their book pages aren't as thorough, but they are free from establishment expectations. EW features first novels next to graphic novels, and the latest Janet Evanovich novel in the same issue that they have a full-page article on Ethan Canin's America America.

I used to think that these mainstream reviews didn't really matter much. Who reads EW or People for their book coverage? Well, People featured Nina de Gramont's The Gossip of Starlings a few weeks ago, and the book sold out at all the national distributors within days. Someone's paying attention out there. Perhaps there's really life beyond The New York Times Book Review for books and authors.

Now where did I put the EW featuring pictures of Angelna Jolie's tattoos? I didn't finish reading all of the book reviews in it. "Honey, what do you mean you threw it out?"