Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee, talks about his work

Come meet him tonight and hear more at 7:30 at our Colfax Avenue store!

Interview with Bo Hoefinger and His Human Parents Horst and Lisa

Bo Hoefinger is not an everyday, run-of-the-mill author--he's a mixed-breed shelter dog with an attitude. "Bad to the Bone" focuses on how he and two seemingly normal people wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world while creating a lifelong bond in the process. All three graciously sat down for an interview with Between The Covers.

BTC:Please tell us the story of how "Bad To The Bone" went from being a Christmas present to being a hot new non-fiction book.

Lisa: It was actually written as a x-mas present for me in 2006. Bo was getting older and Horst wanted to give me something to have long after Bo was gone, the result was a book written through Bo's eyes. I thought it was so cute and funny I decided to find Bo a literary agent. In July 2007 he signed on with Barbara Poelle at the Irene Goodman Agency , then in July 2008 he put paw to paper on a contract with Kensington Books. In October 2009 Bad To The Bone was released and became the first book written by a dog to ever be published in non-fiction, not bad for a writer in a fur suit. I hope Bo's book brings as much enjoyment and laughter to others as it has to me.

BTC: What's the secret to having a happy multi-species home?

Lisa: There are three main ingredients to being happy in a situation such as ours:
1) There needs to be a healthy supply of love to go around
2) A Swiffer with a 10 boxes of bonus sheets in reserve
3) An immune system resistant to pet dander

Bo: And a king size bed. Humans take up a lot of space.

BTC: Author Temple Grandin, asserts that "animals make us human". What are your thoughts on this?

Bo: Funny you should mention that because I was just reading Church Grandin, that's Temple's dog, who asserts "humans make us animals". Church is right of course because 'the man' is always looking to keep us down. If I have to hear about opposable thumbs one more time I'm going to have to pee in a shoe.

BTC: Thinking about writers, what do you think about the recent popularity of dogs as narrators of books (Garth Stein's "Art of Racing In The Rain", Spencer Quinn's mystery series with Chet, etc.)?

Bo: Those dogs aren't real. But the writers are, with a heaping load of talent. Kinda the opposite of what we got going on in my house.

BTC: As a writer, how do you "court the muse"?

Horst: Since I write as Bo, I like to get inside his head. I sit back and think of a time when he was less than obedient, usually in an obnoxious way. Once I have that feeling, I get a snarky type commentary going on in my head. That's the voice that types away on the keyboard. If I were to use my own voice it would sound something like...

Bo: He's not taking credit for writing the book again, is he? That man is shameless. Simply shameless.

BTC: It seems that pretty much everyone in the family is a blogger these days. We know about boknowsonline.com, sunbearsquad.org, still doing a bit on dogster.com--what else? Since we are bloggers too, we'd love to hear more about them, what inspired you to start them, etc.

Lisa: We started Bo Knows to introduce Bo to the world. There are so many sites with sad animal news we decided to have one with only funny stories, a place to go to get a laugh.

Bo: On my blog I normally introduce a ridiculous story from my perspective and then excerpt the relevant parts. My specialty is any wacky story with an animal angle. As long as the protagonist in the story can't speak a human language (parrots get a pass) and they've caused trouble or embarrassment for humans, I will cover them.

Lisa: After working on Dogster for over 16 months we decided it was time for our next adventure. On Dogster we covered the hard hitting issues in the animal community; abuse, puppy mills, legislation, and the huge overpopulation of homeless dogs. We have always adopted rescues but never really knew the story behind the scenes, what it takes to save even one dog.
All the issues that affect the dog community have become very important to us and we after our departure from Dogster we have decided that is where our focus will remain. Bo's book is dedicated to rescue and shelter workers who make this world a better place, one animal at a time. We are donating a portion of the proceeds to help homeless dogs.

Sunbear Squad is a wonderful not-for-profit that took the horrible tragedy of Sunbear and used it to help others to become good Samaritans to animals. A blog has recently been set-up, The Sunbear Blog Squad, and my goal is to start blogging regularly in the spring. I'm taking a little hiatus at the moment to spend time with Bo.

BTC: What advice do you have for aspiring writers/bloggers?

Horst: Do it as a hobby and have fun with it...all else is gravy.

Bo: Yeah, do it for the gravy!

BTC: And, of course, the burning question for BO--Rawhides or Greenies?

Bo: Greenies by a landslide. After I eat one, I don't worry about chatting up the local Chihuahua for fear of knocking her over with bad breath. Besides rawhides can be dangerous. One time I had to put my paw down Copper's {his sister dog} throat to pull one out. I wasn't hungry, she was chocking. Now my parents make her use a fork and knife with everything she eats. Even the
Thanksgiving turkey.


As a special treat, Bo has donated three "pawtographed" copies of his book to BTC readers. All you have to do to enter to win one is send a blog subject you'd like to learn Bo's thoughts on, or a photo of your own dog to: talktotc@tatteredcover.com. Winners will be picked randomly from the entries on Monday, March 1, 2010.

Fantastic interview with "The Girl Who Fell From the Sky" author Heidi Durrow

Bookreporter.com - Author Profile: Heidi W. Durrow
Used with permission from Bookreporter.com

Fun interview with Joshua Ferris from asylum.com

Watch more Asylum Drinks With Writers videos on AOL Video

Author Joshua Ferris discusses his book "The Unnamed" with Asylum’s Anthony Layser. Taped at the Brooklyn Public House in New York City.

Tattered Cover on C-Span's BookTV

Filmed at Tattered Cover Highlands Ranch just last week!!!

U.S. History - To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West - Book TV

from www.guardian.co.uk: Henry Sutton's top 10 Unreliable Narrators

Something strange happened to unreliable narrators in the mid-20th century: they became a little more reliably unreliable, and a lot nastier. In the late-19th century they tended to be untrustworthy either because they were hiding something about themselves or had failed to recognise the truth, generally because of some kind of psychological weakness. However, as modernism shifted into post-modernism and we all became that much more cynical, most narrators were expected to be complicated. Unreliability became inextricably linked with malevolence – not to mention duplicity, delusion, even derangement. Of course, as the parameters stretched, unreliable narrators also became a lot more fun, with humour often countering the blackness. The challenge was to make tricksy first-person characters both intriguing and entertaining.

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Never straight with himself, let alone the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to whom he is ultimately addressing his words, Humbert Humbert arrived halfway through the 20th century, intent on justifying his appalling crime. Nabokov's syntactical genius is the one true triumph.

2. The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James (1898)

Is it a ghost story, or the tragic tale of a young woman undergoing a breakdown? Believing her two young charges are communing with the spirits of her two dead predecessors, the prim governess of Bly House becomes increasingly panic-stricken and erratic, until she's left with a dead boy in her arms.

3. The Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)

Right at the start we're told that Marlow likes to spin yarns. However, his tale of journeying up the Congo, in search first of ivory, and then the infamous Kurtz, is one of the most powerful stories in literature. Whether his story is strictly faithful becomes irrelevant, as Marlow ends up highlighting the moral corruption at the heart of all humans.

4. Money by Martin Amis (1984)

John Self is one of literature's most repulsively addictive narrators. The book might be subtitled "A Suicide Note", but it is in fact a love story, with Self dreaming up ever more extravagant ways to shed his wedge while pursuing entirely corruptible Selina Street, among others. The fact that Self might never have actually existed, revealed towards the end, is Amis's sly take on the death of the self.

5. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

Patrick Bateman makes John Self look even more out of shape, when it comes to commenting on the big brands and applying his murderous hands to the unsuspecting and the vulnerable. Yet Ellis's great comment on consumerism and the death of high culture could just be a mirror to our own deluded thoughts, and Bateman nothing more than a sickly funny fantasist.

6. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)

It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he's in possession of a secret he doesn't even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.

7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)

Classic unreliability when first published in the early 1950s which now looks almost tamely reliable. Of course young Holden Caulfield is anything but clear about what his short, privileged life has already led him to believe – he's a teenager. Naturally everything's phoney, except his beloved sister Phoebe. Though even she is abandoned as Holden loses his fragile grasp on reality.

8. The End Of Alice by AM Homes (1996)

Narrated in the first person by a hyper-intelligent paedophile, and from the third person perspective of a 19-year-old girl with an unhealthy fixation on a much younger boy, Homes's homage to Nabokov didn't just question the nature of desire, but that of literary taste and acceptability. A brutally brave and truly experimental novel that, over here, fell very foul of the Daily Mail.

9. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Shriver's Orange Prize-winning novel is a postmodern masterclass in unreliability, as the principal theme of nature versus nurture trickles through the slow revelations of exactly what Kevin has done. Told in a series of letters by Kevin's mother, Eva, to her estranged husband, Franklin, the reader is never quite sure of whether it was Eva or Kevin who exhibited the most disturbing behaviour. Franklin, meanwhile, is guilty of chronic denial.

10. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

In his search of freedom, as he floats down the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer's best friend "Huck" Finn finds himself travelling out of his rational mind. First published in 1884, Twain himself described his controversial masterpiece, as "... a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".

Henry Sutton was born in Norfolk in 1963. After training as a journalist he worked for a number of national newspapers and magazines. He is the author of five previous novels, including Gorleston, Flying and Kids' Stuff, and a collection of short stories, Thong Nation. He also teaches creative writing at UEA and lives in Norwich with his family. His new novel, Get Me Out of Here, is published by Harvill Secker.

link to original article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/17/henry-sutton-top-10-unreliable-narrators

Ramping up for Dave Eggers...

Dave Eggers will be at the Tattered Cover Historic Lodo on March 4--stay tuned for details on free tickets, etc. But to help with those long two weeks until then, here's a great interview with Dave, Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze about the movie version of Where The Wild Things Are that Dave and Spike co-wrote. The part about what book critics children are is our favorite part!
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216997/page/1

And, you can always come into one of our stores and pet the new fur-covered edition of Wild Things to pass some time, too! As far as we know, it doesn't bite....