Jackie's a HUGE Fan Of This Hilarious Children's Picture Book

Kids will giggle as they count all the animals that have frightened the monkeys off the pages. Full of fun reader interactions and keeps readers guessing until the very last page! Matching Mac Barnett's brilliant wit are Kevin Cornell's luminous illustrations, which will have young readers begging to count the monkeys all over again.

Jackie says:
"This is definitely NOT a bedtime book.  It involves giggling, yelling, and banging of pots, among all sorts of other wonderful things.  I took this book through a test drive when my "grands" came to visit me this spring, and it was silly and joyful success.  Mac Barnett is so very good at writing really engaging children's books, and I love Kevin Cornell's illustrations.   This book has firmly landed on my 'Fantastic Children's Books'."

Jill's Recommending:

The epic Wereworld saga continues as Drew Ferran—werewolf, leader of people, and the rightful king of Lyssia—battles the evil Catlords who seek to oppress the kingdom. As the war’s scope widens, Drew and his allies take the fight to the high seas. But just as many terrors await them on the water as on land, with pirates and scoundrels abounding and a host of previously-unknown werelords emerging to take sides in the war that threatens to destroy the Seven Realms. Called “Game of Thrones for the tween set,” (School Library Journal), the Wereworld series hits a new high in this fifth book!

Though he's only thirteen, Theodore Boone has spent more time in the courtroom than almost anywhere else, and there’s always a new adventure waiting. After being falsely accused of vandalism and theft, Theo is happy to finally be out of the hot seat, once more dispensing legal advice to friends and community members, when an exciting new case demands his urgent attention.

TC Tidbit: A Teasing Bit of the Intro of "Dr. Sleep", Read By Stephen King Himself

This Book Will Help You Kick Your But

 

A simple, engaging, and eminently practical guide to overcoming your weaknesses— your "Buts"—to achieve the career and personal relationships you want

Imagine a workplace where all the employees are aware of the things they do—or fail to do—that prevent them from being more productive and valuable. Imagine a company where everyone speaks openly and honestly about his or her weaknesses and is committed to strengthening and overcoming them. Imagine an environment where colleagues help one another become more efficient and less disruptive by speaking the truth about what detracts from the team's efforts and objectives. Imagine a place where the firm's most talented employees know exactly what they need to do to attain a leadership position.

This is no fantasy workplace: it can be your business if you listen to Joe Azelby and Bob Azelby, brothers and successful executives in their own right.
 
Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye will help all professionals find their individual BUT—whether it's a lack of skills, a distracting behavior, or a personality quirk that interferes with achieving success. Using road-tested techniques, Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye helps you examine your BUT, understand it, manage it, cover it, and most important, shrink it. It also enables managers to help their employees discover personal weaknesses and to learn how to deliver the direct, honest feedback every worker needs and deserves.

Finding your BUT can be tough medicine, but the Azelbys deliver it with a tasty spoonful of sugar. Get ready for success . . . get ready to Kiss Your BUT Good-Bye.

What A Wonderous Treat For The Eye AND The Mind

The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press) is a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind trilogy that brings classic literatures of the world together with legendary graphic artists and illustrators. There are more than 130 illustrators represented and 190 literary works over three volumes—many newly commissioned, some hard to find—reinterpreted here for readers and collectors of all ages.

Volume 1 takes us on a visual tour from the earliest literature through the end of the 1700s. Along the way, we're treated to eye-popping renditions of the human race's greatest epics: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey (in watercolors by Gareth Hinds), The Aeneid, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights, plus later epics The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales (both by legendary illustrator and graphic designer Seymour Chwast), Paradise Lost, and Le Morte D'Arthur. Two of ancient Greece's greatest plays are adapted—the tragedy Medea by Euripides and Tania Schrag’s uninhibited rendering of the very bawdy comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes (the text of which is still censored in many textbooks). Also included is Robert Crumb’s rarely-seen adaptation of James Boswell’s London Journal, filled with philosophical debate and lowbrow debauchery.

Religious literature is well-covered and well-illustrated, with the Books of Daniel and Esther from the Old Testament, Rick Geary’s awe-inspiring new rendition of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament, the Tao te Ching, Rumi’s Sufi poetry, Hinduism’s
Mahabharata, and the Mayan holy book Popol Vuh, illustrated by Roberta Gregory. The Eastern canon gets its due, with The Tale of Genji (the world’s first novel, done in full-page illustrations reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley), three poems from China’s golden age of literature lovingly drawn by pioneering underground comics artist Sharon Rudahl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Japanese Noh play, and other works from Asia.

Two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays (King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and two of his sonnets are here, as are Plato’s Symposium, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Renaissance poetry of love and desire, and Don Quixote visualized by the legendary Will Eisner.

Some unexpected twists in this volume include a Native American folktale, an Incan play, Sappho’s poetic fragments, bawdy essays by Benjamin Franklin, the love letters of Abelard and Heloise, and the decadent French classic Dangerous Liaisons, as illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

Volume 2 gives us a visual cornucopia based on the wealth of literature from the 1800s. Several artists—including Maxon Crumb and Gris Grimly—present their versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s visions. The great American novel Huckleberry Finn is adapted uncensored for the first time, as Twain wrote it. The bad boys of Romanticism—Shelley, Keats, and Byron—are visualized here, and so are the Brontë sisters. We see both of Coleridge’s most famous poems: “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the latter by British comics legend Hunt Emerson). Philosophy and science are ably represented by ink versions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. 

Frankenstein, Moby-Dick, Les Misérables, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment (a hallucinatory take on the pivotal murder scene), Thoreau’s Walden (in spare line art by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics fame), “The Drunken Boat” by Rimbaud, Leaves of Grass by Whitman, and two of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems are all present and accounted for. John Coulthart has created ten magnificent full-page collages that tell the story of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. And Pride and Prejudice has never looked this splendiferous

This volume is a special treat for Lewis Carroll fans. Dame Darcy puts her unmistakable stamp on—what else?—the Alice books in a new 16-page tour-de-force, while a dozen other artists present their versions of the most famous characters and moments from Wonderland. There’s also a gorgeous silhouetted telling of “Jabberwocky,” and Mahendra’s Singh’s surrealistic take on “The Hunting of the Snark.”

Curveballs in this volume include fairy tales illustrated by the untameable S. Clay Wilson, a fiery speech from freed slave Frederick Douglass (rendered in stark black and white by Seth Tobocman), a letter on reincarnation from Flaubert, the Victorian erotic classic Venus in Furs, the drug classic The Hasheesh Eater, and silk-screened illustrations for the ghastly children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter. Among many other canonical works.

Volume 3 brings to life the literature of the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, including a Sherlock Holmes mystery, an H.G. Wells story, an illustrated guide to the Beat writers, a one-act play from Zora Neale Hurston, a disturbing meditation on Naked Lunch, Rilke's soul-stirring Letters to a Young Poet, Anaïs Nin's diaries, the visions of Black Elk, the heroin classic The Man With the Golden Arm (published four years before William Burroughs' Junky), and the postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Raymond Carver, and Donald Barthelme.

The towering works of modernism are here--T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," Yeats's "The Second Coming" done as a magazine spread, Heart of Darkness, stories from Kafka, The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, and his short story "Araby" from Dubliners, rare early work from Faulkner and Hemingway (by artists who have drawn for Marvel), and poems by Gertrude Stein and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

You'll also find original comic versions of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, Flannery O'Connor, and Saki (manga style), plus adaptations of Lolita (and everyone said it couldn't be done!), The Age of Innocence, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Last Exit to Brooklyn, J.G. Ballard's Crash, and photo-dioramas for Animal Farm and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Feast your eyes on new full-page illustrations for 1984, Brave New World, Waiting for Godot, One Hundred Years of Solitude,The Bell Jar, On the Road, Lord of the Flies, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and three Borges stories.

Robert Crumb's rarely seen adaptation of Nausea captures Sartre's existential dread. Dame Darcy illustrates Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece, Blood Meridian, universally considered one of the most brutal novels ever written and long regarded as unfilmable by Hollywood. Tara Seibel, the only female artist involved with the Harvey Pekar Project, turns in an exquisite series of illustrations for The Great Gatsby. And then there's the moment we've been waiting for: the first graphic adaptation from Kurt Vonnegut's masterwork, Slaughterhouse-Five. Among many other gems.

TC Tidbit: Why Are Teens Reading Dystopian Novels?

Check out this interesting article by Francisca Goldsmith of the Infopeople Project, California.

Hank's Giving New Zealand Noir A Chance Here

Cemetery Lake begins in a cold and rainy graveyard, where Private Detective Theodore Tate is overseeing an exhumation—a routine job for the weathered former cop. But when doubts are raised about the identity of the body found in the coffin, the case takes a sinister turn. Tate knows he should walk away and let his former colleagues on the police force deal with it, but his strong sense of justice intervenes.

 Complicating matters are a few loose ends from Tate’s past. Even good guys have secrets, and Tate thought his were dead and buried for good. With time running out and a violent killer lurking, will he manage to stay one step ahead of the police, or will his truth be unearthed?

 Originally published in Paul Cleave’s native New Zealand in 2008, Cemetery Lake is the first novel to feature Theodore Tate, the “quintessential flawed hero” (Kirkus Reviews) from Collecting Cooper and The Laughterhouse. Full of the clever plot twists and sardonic humor for which Cleave has become known, it is at once a totally entertaining crime novel and an unforgettable drama about the universal battle against the darkness within.

Hank says:
"I've never been much of a fan of hardboiled mysteries, with the exception of Dan Simmons' Joe Kurtz books, but I decided to pick up this example of New Zealand noir and give it a try. In spite of another book I'm very excited to read coming my way in the middle of it, Cemetery Lake was compelling enough that I wanted to keep reading and find out how the story would end.

Theo Tate, an ex-cop in Christchurch, now struggling along as a private investigator has a wretched life to begin with, and it goes from bad to worse, and then to worse and worse and even worse than that, over the course of his investigation. I never let myself think "worst," because, well, who knows? After awhile, the situation started to strike me as weirdly comical, whether or not that was Cleave's intention. The plot involves various makeshift exhumations and burials, and Tate keeps being blamed for things he did not do, and not blamed for things he did do. Somehow, he manages to keep a step ahead of everybody else and unravel the whole mess, with one of his subsidiary antagonists receiving a satisfying, if offstage, comeuppance."

Jackie's Got A Few Recommendations For You

Period 8. An hour a day. You can hang out. You can eat your lunch. You can talk. Or listen. Or neither. Or both. Nothing is off-limits. The only rule is that you keep it real; that you tell the truth.

Heller High senior Paul Baum—aka Paulie Bomb—tells the truth. Not the "Wow, that's an ugly sweater" variety of truth, but the other kind. The truth that matters. It might be hard. It often hurts. But Paulie doesn't know how not to tell it. When he tells his girlfriend Hannah the life-altering, messed-up, awful truth, his life falls apart. The truth can get complicated, fast.

But someone in Period 8 is lying. And Paulie, Hannah, and just about everyone else who stops by the safe haven of the P-8 room daily are deceived. And when a classmate goes missing and the mystery of her disappearance seeps beyond P-8 and into every hour of the day, all hell breaks loose.

Jackie says:
"I had a sort of Period 8 in my own high school, so really hit a chord for me.  There are some fantastic conversations in this book, and a true mystery.  I had heard about Chris Crutcher before, but I hadn't read any of his stuff.  Now I'm a fan."

Book 2 of the Pure Trilogy

We want our son returned.

This girl is proof that we can save you all. If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages one at a time.

To be a Pure is to be perfect, untouched by Detonations that scarred the earth, and sheltered inside the paradise that is the Dome. But Partridge escaped to the outside world, where Wretches struggle to survive amid smoke and ash. Now, at the command of Partridge's father, the Dome is unleashing nightmare after nightmare upon the Wretches in an effort to get him back.

At Partridge's side is a small band of those united against the Dome: Lyda, the warrior; Bradwell, the revolutionary; El Capitan, the guard; and Pressia, the young woman whose mysterious past ties her to Partridge in ways she never could have imagined. Long ago a plan was hatched that could mean the earth's ultimate doom. Now only Partridge and Pressia can set things right.

To save millions of innocent lives, Partridge must risk his own by returning to the Dome and facing his most terrifying challenge. And Pressia, armed only with a mysterious Black Box containing a set of cryptic clues, must travel to the very ends of the earth, to a place where no map can guide her. If they succeed, the world will be saved. But should they fail, humankind will pay a terrible price . . .

Jackie says:
"This is the second book in the Pure Trilogy, and more and more secrets are revealed, both inside the Dome and out in the bad lands.  It has the same problem that any second book in a trilogy does--it get's you going and totally immersed in the world, then yanks you out with some many exciting things dangling.  But it's worth it, and well all know it.  A little bit of grumbling doesn't mean we didn't love every minute of it, right?"

Kira Walker has found the cure for RM, but the battle for the survival of humans and Partials is just beginning. Kira has left East Meadow in a desperate search for clues to who she is. That the Partials themselves hold the cure for RM in their blood cannot be a coincidence--it must be part of a larger plan, a plan that involves Kira, a plan that could save both races. Her companions are Afa Demoux, an unhinged drifter and former employee of ParaGen, and Samm and Heron, the Partials who betrayed her and saved her life, the only ones who know her secret. But can she trust them?

Meanwhile, back on Long Island, what's left of humanity is gearing up for war with the Partials, and Marcus knows his only hope is to delay them until Kira returns. But Kira's journey will take her deep into the overgrown wasteland of postapocalyptic America, and Kira and Marcus both will discover that their greatest enemy may be one they didn't even know existed.

The second installment in the pulse-pounding Partials saga is the story of the eleventh hour of humanity's time on Earth, a journey deep into places unknown to discover the means--and even more important, a reason--for our survival.

Jackie says:
"This is the second book in the Partial's series (the number of volumes not yet determined), and most of what I just said above works.  This one is almost worse because the reveals are SO shocking, I was stunned.  Wells knows how to throw in a doozy of a plot twist."

TC Tidbit: "The Leftovers" Becoming A HBO Pilot

Read more about it HERE.

More about the book the project is based on:

What if your life was upended in an instant?

What if your spouse or your child disappeared right in front of your eyes?

Was it the Rapture or something even more difficult to explain? 

How would you rebuild your life in the wake of such a devastating event?

These are the questions confronting the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Kevin Garvey, the new mayor, wants to move forward, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized neighbors, even as his own family disintegrates. His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the town’s streets as “living reminders” of God’s judgment. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a crooked "prophet" who calls himself Holy Wayne. Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet "A" student she used to be.

Through the prism of a single family, Perrotta illuminates a familiar America made strange by grief and apocalyptic anxiety. The Leftovers is a powerful and deeply moving book about regular people struggling to hold onto a belief in their futures.

"'Black Hole' is a beautiful, intricate story of friendship and compassion through adversity." --Topher

Winner of the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards

The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back.

As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.

And then the murders start.

As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.

To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…

Topher says:
"Looking at the art in this book nearly makes me cringe. One can’t help but think about the time and dedication put into each panel. Every brush stroke seems carefully calculated to put the reader in a position of discomfort. But I still can’t look away.

The artwork in Black Hole is vital to creating the mood necessary for the story. The book is set some time in the mid 1970’s, and follows several high school students through their uncomfortable adolescence. Burns certainly isn’t the first to cover this sort of territory, but he’s one of the few who manages not to belittle his characters in the process.

Burns raises the stakes beyond that of the typical awkward coming-of-age story by introducing a sexually transmitted disease, which slowly transforms kids into grotesque monsters. Such a metaphor might sound ham-fisted, but Burns sells the premise so well that I accepted it completely. Black Hole is a beautiful, intricate story of friendship and compassion through adversity."

Eric's Recommending:

FBI agent Manny Tanno is taking some much needed R and R at the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn. But when a death on the reservation cuts his vacation short, he learns that the secrets of the past have a way of stirring up trouble in the present.

As a scout for the legendary General Custer, Crow tribe member Levi Star Dancer kept a journal chronicling his exploits from the Battle of the Greasy Grass onward. Now, the missing journal has been found and the descendents of those mentioned in the account, including Levi’s own, want to keep their family secrets hidden at all costs…

Manny’s trip to the Crow Agency Reservation turns out to be ill timed when a reenactor of the Battle of Little Big Horn is killed right in front of him. It turns out the victim was the one who found Levi Star Dancer’s famed diary and was planning on selling it to the highest bidder. And while the dead body is hard to miss, the coveted book is nowhere to be found. Now, Manny has to watch his back while searching for a murderer and the missing journal, because this slippery killer will do anything to make sure the past stays buried.

A richly authentic epic adventure of rough-hewn men and courageous women, set in the hard country of the American Southwest frontier.
 
Hard Country is a rare and extraordinary story of one family’s struggle to settle and endure in the vast, untamed territory of New Mexico.

In the wake of the death of his wife as she gives birth to his son, and the killing of his brother on the West Texas plains, John Kerney is forced to give up his ranch, leave his son behind, and strike out in search of the murderous outlaws and a place where he can start over. He drifts south until he meets a man who offers him work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory and forever changes his life.

Spanning the years of 1875 to 1918, Hard Country is the Western reinvented and enlarged into a saga that above all celebrates the people and the land of the great Southwest.

TC Tidbit: The Atlantic Wire Offers Up A Great List of YA Summer Reads

Check them out HERE.

Here's a bit more about one of them, on our shelves now:

Knox was born into one of the City's wealthiest families. A Patron, he has everything a boy could possibly want—the latest tech, the coolest clothes, and a Proxy to take all his punishments. When Knox breaks a vase, Syd is beaten. When Knox plays a practical joke, Syd is forced to haul rocks. And when Knox crashes a car, killing one of his friends, Syd is branded and sentenced to death.
Syd is a Proxy.  His life is not his own.

Then again, neither is Knox’s. Knox and Syd have more in common than either would guess. So when Knox and Syd realize that the only way to beat the system is to save each other, they flee. Yet Knox’s father is no ordinary Patron, and Syd is no ordinary Proxy. The ensuing cross-country chase will uncover a secret society of rebels, test both boys’ resolve, and shine a blinding light onto a world of those who owe and those who pay. Some debts, it turns out, cannot be repaid.

A fast-paced, thrill-ride of novel full of non-stop action, heart-hammering suspense and true friendship—just as moving as it is exhilarating. Fans of Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, James Dashner's Maze Runner, Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series, and Marie Lu's Legend will be swept away by this story.

Pete Loved This Book So Much He Just Took A Vacation In Italy!!!

As a bookseller, I sometimes get flummoxed when a customer makes a request such as 'I'm just looking for a good book. What can you recommend?' Then all these wonderful titles jumble around in my head and I come up with nothing but 'Uh, go take a look at Jackie's Corner' {a display at TC Lodo}.  Well, I think I've found my 'go to' suggestion for customers  eager for that special good book. It has to be Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.  It's the kind of book you take on a trip and remember more about the novel than the vacation itself. 

Set in Cinque Terre, the scenic, cliff-side dwellings hugging Italy's northwest Mediterranean shoreline, the novel begins in 1962 when a beautiful American actress arrives by boat in need of a room at the local inn. This less than majestic inn is not on the main tourist route and has the innkeeper, Pasquale, wondering if there must be some mistake. Mistake or not, Pasquale and the actress strike up a fast friendship and share an incident that alters their lives for the next 50 years.

 

Beautiful Ruins is one of those rare novels that you can recommend to nearly everyone. I know I will.

 

--Pete

“Andy Sean Greer writes with an intelligent joy that encompasses a truly kaleidoscopic vision, reminding me of the work of Peter Carey and David Mitchell. This novel is beautifully sewn together.” ~ Colum McCann

1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the breakup with her longtime lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in different eras.

During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and alternate lives in 1918, where she is a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, which transforms her into a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's three lives are remarkably similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.

As her final treatment looms, questions arise: What will happen once each Greta learns how to remain in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to stay in which life?

Magically atmospheric, achingly romantic, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells beautifully imagines "what if" and wondrously wrestles with the impossibility of what could be.

TC Tidbit: 10 Literary Restaurants for Hungry Book Nerds Around the World

From the folks at flavorwire.com

Lucas Has Some Wyoming Connections To Both Of These Books

Still as exciting and meaningful as when it was written in 1902, Owen Wister's epic tale of one man's journey into the untamed territory of Wyoming, where he is caught between his love for a woman and his quest for justice, has exemplified one of the most significant and enduring themes in all of American culture. With remarkable character depth and vivid descriptive passages, The Virginian stands not only as the first great novel of American Western literature, but as a testament to the eternal struggle between good and evil in humanity, and a revealing study of the forces that guide the combatants on both sides.

Lucas says:
"When you call me that, SMILE!"
(from "The Virginian" by Wister)
"As a former resident of Medicine Bow, WY, I felt I owed it to my previous home to read the novel that made it famous.
Set in Wyoming ranch country where calling your friends a "Son-of-a-b****" is considered friendly, this is a story about a tall, dark, and handsome cowpuncher from Virginia who is the epitome of the western cowboy. The Virginian is a fair, honest, and level headed man who's spirit is as free as the wide open spaces of Wyoming. He is the envy and desire of the ranching community in which he lives. Can his spirit be tamed by an educated woman from the East? Can the Virginian keep his foes at bay long enough for us to find out?
Even if you haven't lived in Medicine Bow, this is a worthwhile read. This book gives insight to the origin of the American West's ideal of the independent spirit; the idea of being able to stand on your own two feet in any situation. The Virginian as a character was the beginning of a trend that influenced American media to the greatest degree, and for that, he is worth getting to know better."

Today’s gay man enjoys unprecedented, hard-won social acceptance. Despite this victory, however, serious problems still exist. Substance abuse, depression, suicide, and sex addiction among gay men are at an all-time high, causing many to ask, “Are we really better off?” Drawing on contemporary research, psychologist Alan Downs’s own struggle with shame and anger, and stories from his patients, The Velvet Rage passionately describes the stages of a gay man’s journey out of shame and offers practical and inspired strategies to stop the cycle of avoidance and self-defeating behavior. Updated to reflect the effects of the many recent social, cultural, and political changes, The Velvet Rage is an empowering book that has already changed the public discourse on gay culture and helped shape the identity of an entire generation of gay men.


Lucas says:

"If you are a gay man, you have probably noticed that there are some trends (good and bad) within our community that almost seem universal: tumultuous relationships, hypersexuality, unhappiness (even when it appears we should be happy), a good presentation of the self, high levels of educational achievement, addiction problems, good physical health, etc. The purpose of The Velvet Rage is to explain why these trends have appeared within the gay male population in the United States.

This was a particularly hard book for me to read because it pointed out behaviors that I have exhibited and touched on painful parts of my past to help me understand and overcome some of the damage I endured growing up as a gay person in rural Wyoming. I think that this is a helpful book for any gay man to read who was raised in a less-than-open environment."

 

PW says this book "delivers a rich and intimate tale of imperfect, well-meaning, ordinary people struggling to define themselves and protect the people they love."

 

Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, returns with a mesmerizing novel of family and identity, loyalty and deception, and the delicate line between truth and belief.

From an early age, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, knew that they were unlike everyone else. Kate and Vi were born with peculiar “senses”—innate psychic abilities concerning future events and other people’s secrets. Though Vi embraced her visions, Kate did her best to hide them.

Now, years later, their different paths have led them both back to their hometown of St. Louis. Vi has pursued an eccentric career as a psychic medium, while Kate, a devoted wife and mother, has settled down in the suburbs to raise her two young children. But when a minor earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the normal life Kate has always wished for begins to shift. After Vi goes on television to share a premonition that a devastating earthquake will soon hit the St. Louis area, Kate is mortified. More troubling, however, is her fear that Vi may be right. As the date of the predicted earthquake quickly approaches, Kate is forced to reconcile her fraught relationship with her sister, and truths about herself she’s long tried to deny.

Funny, haunting, and thought-provoking, Sisterland is a beautifully written novel of the obligation we have toward others, and the responsibility we take for ourselves. With her deep empathy, keen wisdom, and unerring talent for finding the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives, Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the most exceptional voices in literary fiction today.

Read an interview with the author HERE.

TC Tidbit: Gatsby Being Rewritten By The Other Characters In The Book

Take a look at this interesting new series at The Believer Magazine HERE.

Introducing Lucy Who Is Introducing Her New Love of Neil Gaiman

It takes a graveyard to raise a child.

Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family.

Lucy says:
"The hype surrounding Neil Gaiman and his upcoming visit to the Tattered Cover in Lodo finally got to me and I had to read something of his. I don’t know how I have missed out on him so far, but am so glad I have started to read some of his work. The past week I read both Coraline and The Graveyard Book, both of which are delightfully spooky and equally enjoyable for middle school students and adults alike. 

What I loved the most about The Graveyard Book was the array of ghost characters.   Their headstones introduce the ghosts to us and then, proof of Gaiman’s genius, he breathes life into the deceased. The characters Gaiman creates are so vivid and so unique. The main character is an orphaned boy, named Nobody, who is raised by the ghosts of the graveyard. Mr. and Mrs. Owens are his surrogate parents. They are utterly endearing in and of themselves. But also because they are such a reversal of the usual ghost character, as these two ghosts are a great source of love and nurturing in the book.

This book is a great introduction to Gaiman if, like me, you've never read him before but are curious about his legendary status.  It is also a wonderful book to read with a mid-grade reader or to even gift a 5th or 6th grader with.  Don't be fooled by the spooky title and introduction; this is a book with a great deal of heart and wonder."

Come To A Special Algonquin Book Club Night

On Wednesday, June 26 at 7:30 at our Colfax Avenue store, Craig Popelars, the Director of Marketing for Algonquin Books, will host a special evening for book club members and lovers of literary fiction. We'll have refreshments, and guests can enter to win $150 worth of Algonquin fiction!

The event features author Barbara Shapiro, author of The Art Forger.

AND Caroline Leavitt, author of Is This Tomorrow

Can’t make it to the signing? Request an autographed copy here: books@tatteredcover.com

TC Tidbit: The Word Is That Both the Movie and the Book Will Be Out In September!!!!

For more than fifty years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed.


No longer.


In the eight years since The Private War of J.D. Salinger was begun, and especially in the three years since Salinger’s death, the authors interviewed on five continents more than 200 people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record about their relationship with Salinger. This oral biography offers direct eyewitness accounts from Salinger’s World War II brothers-in-arms, his family members, his close friends, his lovers, his classmates, his neighbors, his editors, his publishers, his New Yorker colleagues, and people with whom he had relationships that were secret even to his own family. Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last fifty-six years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to never-before-published photographs (more than 100 throughout the book), diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, readers will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.

Saddle Up Cowfolk, Craig Johnson Is Riding Into Lodo This Coming Wednesday!

The inspiration for A&E's Longmire finds himself in the crosshairs in the ninth book of the New York Times bestselling series

The success of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series that began with The Cold Dish continues to grow after A&E’s hit show Longmire introduced new fans to the Wyoming sheriff. As the Crow Flies marked the series’ highest debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, in his ninth Western mystery, Longmire stares down his most dangerous foes yet.

It’s homecoming in Absaroka County, but the football and festivities are interrupted when a homeless boy wanders into  town. A Mormon “lost boy,” Cord Lynear is searching for his missing mother but clues are scarce. Longmire and his companions, feisty deputy Victoria Moretti and longtime friend Henry Standing Bear, embark on a high plains scavenger hunt in hopes of reuniting mother and son. The trail leads them to an interstate polygamy group that’s presiding over a stockpile of weapons and harboring a vicious vendetta.

Save The Date!!!

Come on down to our Historic Lodo store on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 7:30 pm and meet Longmire's creator Craig Johnson.  He'll be reading, chatting and signing book there.   This event is free and open to the public.  Just leave the six shooters at home. 

This Books Are Attention Getters

Takahiro O’Leary has a very special job…

…working for the Axon Corporation as an explorer of parallel timelines—as many and as varied as anyone could imagine. A great gig—until information he brought back gave Axon the means to maximize profits by changing the past, present, and future of this world.

If Axon succeeds, Tak will lose Samira Moheb, the woman he has loved since high school—because her future will cease to exist. A veteran of the Iraq War suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Samira can barely function in her everyday life, much less deal with Tak’s ravings of multiple realities. The only way to save her is for Tak to use the time travel device he “borrowed” to transport them both to an alternate timeline.

But what neither Tak nor Axon knows is that the actual inventor of the device is searching for a timeline called the Beautiful Land—and he intends to destroy every other possible present and future to find it.

The switch is thrown, and reality begins to warp—horribly. And Tak realizes that to save Sam, he must save the entire world…

A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love

Guaranteed to capture the hearts of everyone who truly loves books, The Bookman’s Tale is a former bookseller’s sparkling novel and a delightful exploration of one of literature’s most tantalizing mysteries with echoes of Shadow of the Wind and A.S. Byatt's Possession.

Hay-on-Wye, 1995. Peter Byerly isn’t sure what drew him into this particular bookshop. Nine months earlier, the death of his beloved wife, Amanda, had left him shattered. The young antiquarian bookseller relocated from North Carolina to the English countryside, hoping to rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries, Peter is shocked when a portrait of Amanda tumbles out of its pages. Of course, it isn’t really her. The watercolor is clearly Victorian. Yet the resemblance is uncanny, and Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture’s origins.

As he follows the trail back first to the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare’s time, Peter communes with Amanda’s spirit, learns the truth about his own past, and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was, indeed, the author of all his plays.

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science .Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as “poets”: adept wielders of languagewho belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.

Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is making a living running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school’s strange and rigorous entrance exams, where, once admitted, she will be taught the fundamentals of persuasion by Brontë, Eliot, and Lowell—who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. For in the organization, nothing is more dangerous than revealing who you are: Poets must never expose their feelings lest they be manipulated. Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.

Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Jamieson is brutally ambushed by two strange men in an airport bathroom. Although he has no recollection of anything they claim he’s done, it turns out Wil is the key to a secret war between rival factions of poets and is quickly caught in their increasingly deadly crossfire. Pursued relentlessly by people with powers he can barely comprehend and protected by the very man who first attacked him, Wil discovers that everything he thought he knew about his past was fiction. In order to survive, must journey to the toxically decimated tow nof Broken Hill, Australia, to discover who he is and why an entire town was blown off the map.

As the two narratives converge, the shocking work of the poets is fully revealed, the body count rises, and the world crashes toward a Tower of Babel event which would leave all language meaningless. Max Barry’s most spellbinding and ambitious novel yet, Lexicon is a brilliant thriller that explores language, power, identity, and our capacity to love—whatever the cost.

She helps people put their demons to rest.
But she has a few of her own…

In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire—healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years.

When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her—and learns of some troubling parallels with her own life. Digging deeper, Nadine is forced to confront her traumatic childhood, and the damage that began when she and her brother were brought by their mother to a remote commune on Vancouver Island.  What happened to Nadine?  Why was their family destroyed? And why does the name Aaron Quinn, the group’s leader, bring complex feelings of terror to Nadine even today?

And then, the unthinkable happens, and Nadine realizes that danger is closer to home than she ever imagined. She has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most…and fight back. 
Sometimes you can leave the past, but you can never escape.

TC Tidbit: 9 Books That People Will Judge You For Reading (And Why They're Wrong)

By Andrew Losowsky of the Huffington Post.  

Don't miss the slide show at the bottom of the link!

New YA On Our Shelves

It says quite a lot about Jeremy Johnson Johnson that the strangest thing about him isn't even the fact his mother and father both had the same last name. Jeremy once admitted he's able to hear voices, and the townspeople of Never Better have treated him like an outsider since. After his mother left, his father became a recluse, and it's been up to Jeremy to support the family. But it hasn't been up to Jeremy alone. The truth is, Jeremy can hear voices. Or, specifically, one voice: the voice of the ghost of Jacob Grimm, one half of the infamous writing duo, The Brothers Grimm. Jacob watches over Jeremy, protecting him from an unknown dark evil whispered about in the space between this world and the next. But when the provocative local girl Ginger Boultinghouse takes an interest in Jeremy (and his unique abilities), a grim chain of events is put into motion. And as anyone familiar with the Grimm Brothers know, not all fairy tales have happy endings. . .
  
Young adult veteran Tom McNeal (one half of the writing duo known as Laura & Tom McNeal) has crafted a novel at once warmhearted, compulsively readable, and altogether thrilling--and McNeal fans of their tautly told stories will not be disappointed.

A rare meteorite struck Alex Woods when he was ten years old, leaving scars and marking him for an extraordinary future. The son of a fortune teller, bookish, and an easy target for bullies, Alex hasn't had the easiest childhood.

But when he meets curmudgeonly widower Mr. Peterson, he finds an unlikely friend. Someone who teaches him that that you only get one shot at life. That you have to make it count.

So when, aged seventeen, Alex is stopped at customs with 113 grams of marijuana, an urn full of ashes on the front seat, and an entire nation in uproar, he's fairly sure he's done the right thing ...

Introducing a bright young voice destined to charm the world, The Universe Versus Alex Woods is a celebration of curious incidents, astronomy and astrology, the works of Kurt Vonnegut and the unexpected connections that form our world.

Filled with humor, raw emotion, a strong voice, and a brilliant dog named Sandy Koufax, When You Were Here explores the two most powerful forces known to man-death and love. Daisy Whitney brings her characters to life with a deft touch and resonating authenticity.

Danny's mother lost her five-year battle with cancer three weeks before his graduation-the one day that she was hanging on to see.
Now Danny is left alone, with only his memories, his dog, and his heart-breaking ex-girlfriend for company. He doesn't know how to figure out what to do with her estate, what to say for his Valedictorian speech, let alone how to live or be happy anymore.

When he gets a letter from his mom's property manager in Tokyo, where she had been going for treatment, it shows a side of a side of his mother he never knew. So, with no other sense of direction, Danny travels to Tokyo to connect with his mother's memory and make sense of her final months, which seemed filled with more joy than Danny ever knew. There, among the cherry blossoms, temples, and crowds, and with the help of an almost-but-definitely-not Harajuku girl, he begins to see how it may not have been ancient magic or mystical treatment that kept his mother going. Perhaps, the secret of how to live lies in how she died.

The spine-tingling horror of Stephen King meets an eerie mystery worthy of Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series in Kate Karyus Quinn's haunting debut.

On a cool autumn night, Annaliese Rose Gordon stumbled out of the woods and into a high school party. She was screaming. Drenched in blood. Then she vanished.

A year later, Annaliese is found wandering down a road hundreds of miles away. She doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know how she got there. She only knows one thing: She is not the real Annaliese Rose Gordon.

Now Annaliese is haunted by strange visions and broken memories. Memories of a reckless, desperate wish . . . a bloody razor . . . and the faces of other girls who disappeared. Piece by piece, Annaliese's fractured memories come together to reveal a violent, endless cycle that she will never escape--unless she can unlock the twisted secrets of her past.

Attack.
Not isolated.
Fate of Americans: unknown.

Amy is watching TV when the world is attacked by Them. Most of the population is overtaken, but Amy manages to survive--and even rescue "Baby," a toddler she finds in an abandoned supermarket.

Then, after years of hiding, they are miraculously rescued and taken to New Hope, a colony of survivors living in a former government research compound. While at first the colony seems like a dream, with plenty of food, safety, and shelter, New Hope slowly reveals that it is far from ideal. And Amy soon realizes that unless things change, she'll lose Baby--and much more.

You'll tear through the pulse-pounding narrow escapes and horrifying twists of fate in this thrilling debut from author Demitria Lunetta.