I just started reading the newly translated book The Savage Detectives by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. He wrote this in 1998 and this is its first appearance in English. He spent the last ten years of his life writing most of his body of work after a pretty adventurous and itinerant life. He died in 2003 at the age of 50 in Spain, widely considered to be one of the most influential South American writers of the late 20th century. New Directions translated and published his shorter works over the last couple of years, but his novels until now had remained untranslated. So this is a bit of a publishing event. And if that weren't already clear The New Yorker has a fantastic piece about Bolaño and this novel in their most recent issue, which I highly recommend.

I'm jumping the gun a bit in talking about this book today. It won't be available until next week (April 2nd), but I'll be sure to remind you in my next missive.

The opening of the book details a young student's initiation into a gang of renegade poets, the Visceral Realists. It had me at 'nicharchean'. He is lured away from his university class in poetry by these brazen poets and doesn't turn back.

I did stumble a bit at the opening, but not from the text. I opened the book and the first thing I saw was a quote from Malcolm Lowry. This worried me. I thought it might not bode well. Malcolm Lowry is an author I've found to be enormously difficult. You see, I've tried to read Under the Volcano, I mean seriously tried, not just a couple of pages tried, at least three seperate times. These times were punctuated by years between them! The first time was for a Modern American Writers class. Tortuous. I forced myself to get through at least 100 pages for the sake of being a half-way decent student, but I just couldn't go on. This book was in the Modern Library Top 100 Novels list! It was #11 on the Board's List and #39 on the Reader's List! What's wrong with me? Of the books on that list that I've read I think I feel good about almost all of them, except Mr. Lowry's. The ensuing attempts were just as frustrating and ultimately abortive. Somehow I just couldn't get into his lugubrious Mexican epic. But as for Bolano, I pushed past the quote and I haven't looked back.

I visited my old stomping ground of Brooklyn last weekend. My host suggested we make a feast using her newly acquired copy of The Silver Spoon cookbook. This way we could invite lots of people over thereby maximizing my social coverage and minimizing the planning. That’s pretty much my favorite combo. So, we worked the Silver Spoon over, not too hard since Brooklyn is now an artisanal food paradise; garlic was mashed, oil was infused, sage was stuffed, pancetta was wrapped, fettuccine was tossed, and in honor of the holiday Jameson’s was poured. All in all, a very nice way to start off my visit.

But, before I let this turn into another blog about my fondness for cooking and the cookbooks that foster that love, I’d better get back to the task at hand. I have a list somewhere…

I promised a while back that I was going to elaborate on a particularly exciting book that I was reading in January. And now it’s finally time and I am all kinds of excited. If you’ll take yourself back to early February when I had just returned from a book conference in Portland, OR, you may remember me fussing about a book that I had just finished called The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Well, I will continue to fuss and now in greater detail.

This is the debut novel of Mr. Hall, a charming and sincere Englishman I was fortunate enough to meet briefly in Portland. He sets himself a very high bar, a high-concept high bar to be sure. The premise is that one Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of his existence; who he is, where he is, why he is, the lot. He almost immediately finds a note from his previous self giving him a brief set of directions and some inadequate explanations. After this hefty set-up with its Memento-ish feel, Hall then embarks on a pretty incredible construction of multiple realities that take an awful lot of architecture both real and conceptual.

Even with all this concept to Hall manages to string a real story through it, one that is crafted from the supposed reality of Eric Sanderson’s life to the dissociative tangle of words and conceptual predators that infest his mind. I really enjoyed this book and I am truly impressed that it held together so well, a feat that eludes many authors. Both Pynchon and Murakami came to mind. The concerns of memory, and loss, and loss of memory mixed with the seeming breaks from reality that tussle and fight with the actual reality for dominance render an intricate design that belies simplicity of story. This ultimately makes The Raw Shark Texts greater than the experiments that fiction of this genre often ends up being.

The transition to Daylight Savings Time is always a difficult one. Who wants to lose an hour, especially a precious weekend hour? Sure, you get an extra one on some distant fall weekend, but with that you also get nighttime starting at 3:30pm. Ok, maybe 4:30, but still… So, the saving grace of Daylight Savings Time is all that extra daylight. And what better way to make use of the 47 hour weekend than with more light and the lately elusive unbelievably beautiful weather?

I spent the weekend wandering aimlessly around the city with friends. There was a little bit of tour-guiding, as there was a visitor to the nation’s capital in our midst. I’m a big fan of taking new people around the city and showing them all the things that I think are cool about D.C. Instead of the strict Mall and Georgetown tour, I favor the “Did you Know…” style of tourist-handling. Such as “Did you know that Walter Reed has a Medical Museum that features the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln and a hairball in the shape of a stomach” or “Did you know that there is a really cool housing project in SW that have houses with domes made out of aluminum provided by the Reynolds (Wrap) company.”

In addition to aimless wandering, I did the one thing I’ve been trying to get off my lazy bum to do, but I’ve let the cold weather hold me back. I broke out the bicycle. It’s been standing idle in my living room, sad, un-ridden. I pumped up the tires, put on my fancy shoes and got riding!

With all this walking and riding around on my bike in the city it seemed only right to delve into Scott Berg’s book Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the famous French-American whose name you can’t escape here in D.C., was appointed by George Washington to design the new federal capital. Although he now is well acknowledged in D.C. for his contribution to the city’s layout, there was a lot of fuss in between. Yes, this is where I make the joke about just how easy it is to navigate D.C.; if by easy, I mean wholly confusing and perplexing to someone who does not have a map of the city tattooed on the brain. But, if L’Enfant’s original artistic vision had been recognized the city’s sometimes mysterious roads may not have been so confusing. Well, maybe not exactly.

The story of this process, which he started in 1791, is wrought with drama and full of ego and intrigue. L’Enfant was frequently at odds with the city planning commissioners and was finally dismissed before anything was realized. His plan was published under another name and his original ideas were modified. And he never saw the acknowledgment he deserved. And Mr. Berg does quite a job drawing both the character of L’Enfant in a wonderful narrative style and captivating story of the founding of the capital city.

So with spring upon us and the city ripe and ready for gallivanting about in, there’s also some entertaining and smart writing out there to enliven your Sunday drives up and down the magisterial streets of D.C.

We were so close... so close to Spring and then, just like that, it's Winter all over again. I don't even mind winter, in fact, I'm one of those people who likes the snow. It's just that once I've committed to turning off the heat for the year I don't want to turn it back on again. But enough complaining, the snowfall was quite lovely and very unobtrusive. And it is all sparkly and beautiful in the sunlight outside my window this morning.
I hope some of you have had a chance to stop into a store and have a look at our Harper Collins Buy 2 Get 1 Free Sale. I know, I know, I talked about it last week. This is really just a lead up to a special treat this week in the Buyer's Corner. I'm going to lull you into a sense of complacency with a few short words on an author who happens to be published by the aforementioned Harper Collins and then I'm going to loose the words and stylings of one of Olsson's stable of book aficionados on you.

I wanted to talk about the charming and witty and occasionally vulgar Christopher Moore, author of Lamb, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and most recently You Suck. Lamb is perhaps his most well known work, it retells the story of Jesus early years through the hilarious voice of Biff, his best friend. His most recent paperback offering is A Dirty Job wherein poor Charlie Asher, new parent and new widower, is given the unfortunate job of Merchant of Death, which is made more difficult and more hilarious by his shy, bumbling ways. We've been lucky enough to have him appear at our stores for events in the past and his fans are legion.

But now on to the treat... Andrew Getman who manages our National Airport store after stints at three other locations has long been a fan of Gregory Maguire and has graced us with some words on his books. So without further fuss:

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Gregory Maguire is one of my favorite authors whose books are featured by Harper. He's a perfect choice for "buy two get one free" with his collection of fabulous reimaginings of famous fairytales. Mirror, Mirror supposes that Lucrezia Borgia was Snow White's evil queen, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister recounts Cinderella's story from her sister's point of view. Either will delight you with his creative spin on the classics.

However, his first book, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West still remains my favorite of all of Maguire's retellings. Now, of course, everyone knows that the book inspired the hit Broadway musical, but the book was a success first because Mr. Maguire did his research. He has reverently honored the fabulous world that L. Frank Baum created in his Oz series by representing it through a Marxist, feminist, environmentalist, agnostic lens.

And now, ten years later, he has returned to the world of Oz with his long-awaited sequel to Wicked entitled Son of a Witch. When Dorothy threw the bucket of water at the witch, she orphaned a boy named Liir. Maguire's richly layered narrative and sly wit follows the wicked witch's son as he explores the shadowy underbelly of the political machine that is the Emerald City under Glinda's rule. Gregory Maguire is back in his prime.

Choose any three for the price of two! - Andrew Getman, Store Manager, Airport

This week you will not be subjected to the arbitrary whims of my ramblings. No, this week I have a purpose, a promotional purpose! Perhaps you remember the "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" paperback sales we had last year featuring such fantastic lines as Penguin Classics, Vintage, Harcourt, and Norton to name a few. Well, it's back, starting tomorrow, Friday March 2nd! This time we're featuring Harper Perennial paperbacks. So my purpose today is to tell you about a few of my favorites. It's looking like this may in fact be the same rambly format after all...




The official start date of Major League Soccer's 2007 season is April 7. And after World Cup mania last year isn't it time we embraced the sport of the rest of the world. I mean really hugged it and made it our new best friend? I'm not suggesting we forgo our classic American sports, I'm merely suggesting we cling slightly less tenaciously to them and maybe step out of our comfort zone a little and watch a little soccer. It's fun, it's exciting, and it's not yet beholden to corporate advertisers so the games don't get interrupted every 2 minutes for commercials. Just ask local boy and Editor of the New Republic Franklin Foer. He wrote an insightful and entertaining book a few years back called How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. Not a heavy theory book, more a fantastic voyage through cultural archetype and war-torn countries, this book reveals soccer to be a powerful metaphor for our time. I read this book as soon as it came out, captivated by the title and found it to live up to the promise. Foer writes captivating stories from around the globe that are equal parts travelogue, cultural history, and political insight.

And even though the World Cup was last year it's not too late to get sucked into the excitement with the genius anthology The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. 32 essays for 32 participating countries! And, of course, Mr. Foer writes the afterword.

Moving along to a totally different topic, another book I want to mention is Marilyn Johnson's Dead Beat. A jaunt through the world of obituary writing, Dead Beat goes beyond the compulsory reading of the obituary page into the history and quirks of the obituary writing world. I've only had a chance to read a little bit of it, but it struck me as a very funny, compelling, and kind of creepy book. But creepy in a good way. She goes to an obituary writers conference, parses different types of obituaries, lays out the cultural differences between American and English obituaries, and generally tells us about why the obituary page is as vibrant as it is.

There are countless other Harper paperback titles I could go on about and in fact I may just do that next week since this "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" sale runs through the 29th of March. That's another plug for this sale, but you can't go wrong with buying two books and getting a third one for free, really.