I had a lovely metro ride into work this morning. The usual delays allowed me an extra couple of pages of reading and I got caught up in a rhythm and ended up walking and reading all the way to the office, which is, incidentally, a few blocks away. At one point I was coming up to a major intersection and occasionally glancing up so as not to walk into an oncoming commuter bus, I looked up and a woman was walking towards me with her nose buried in a book, but then she quickly glanced up and gave me a quick "hey, I'm not the only freak who walks and read" smile. Reader-walkers unite!

The book that had me so ensconced is A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans. This is his first novel and it concerns the spooky story of George Davies. As an adult his young marriage is about to fall apart because he is crippled by an inability to touch his newborn son. The ensuing therapy brings up some buried memories of fraught and strange childhood. In fact, Evans spends most of the book fleshing out the younger Davies who lives in a pre-pubescent prison in a sleepy southern college town. After his father's mysterious death in Central America George starts seeing and hearing things. Is this an eleven year old's painful psychotic break, or the continuation of a family tradition of demonic possession? Regardless, it is a compelling story and just the thing to start off some summertime reading.

On another note, we've still got the New York Review of Books Buy 2 Get 1 Free Sale going through the end of the month. And one of my astute, young charges has agreed to expand on a short blurb he wrote for his favorite NYRB title The Warlock by Oakley Hall. Mark Hanson hails from the Courthouse store where he manages with a firm, but loving hand. So without anymore introduction I present to you Mark's words:

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Long out of print until the New York Review of Books reissued it in 2005, Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel Warlock ranks among my personal favorites in our latest Buy Two, Get One Free sale. The novel essentially retells the saga of 1880’s Tombstone, Arizona and the shootout at the OK Corral, with the fictional town of Warlock as the setting. However, Hall refrains from simply rehashing and retracing, instead creating a work with much broader cultural and literary implications.

In a typical Western novel or film, one always feels the impact of the sheer, unpopulated space in view. But in Warlock, we see a town teeming with and almost choking on a vast array of vivid personalities. It is a town trying to pull itself up by the bootstraps from a formative stage of near anarchy to the standards it must reach in order to become a legitimate, recognized township. Through this lens, Hall deftly exposes the underbelly of the American subconscious.

A couple other elements that separate Warlock from other, more traditional Westerns are its highly erratic structure—complicit with the plot and the subject matter—and the fact that it is written in the style of a pulp novel. As well as exploding the possibilities of the genre, which exemplifies a kind of early American postmodernism, this further enables Hall to explore the formation of our national identity and the many competing voices that comprise it. In Warlock and in many other titles in the NYRB collection, we have fine examples of works that have seen their ramifications absorbed into mainstream thought over time, but now have the chance to be appreciated anew as the staunch and impacting works they always have been.

So we all know that Tony is the Events Guy and so it's really his place to tell you about fantastic author readings and not mine. I'm supposed to ramble about the exciting new books coming down the pike and what I'm reading. But I can't help it! We had two fantastic events on one night last week (this happens with alarming frequency, actually). And conveniently I wanted to talk about both of the books, so really it's just like my usual thing except it's just framed by these events. I won't talk about any upcoming events if that helps. I'll just talk about this Olsson's double-header last Thursday night.

Picture it - a beautiful Thursday evening. The weather is lovely, the birds are chirping, the spring air is heavy with allergens. It's Thursday night and the work-a-day crowd is starting to get restless. No, it's not Friday night, there will be no dancing until the break of dawn, no cavorting down the usual avenues of debauchery. But it's almost Friday, surely they can have some fun and still be presentable at work Friday morning. Right? Well, if you went to either the Irvine Welsh or the Elizabeth Hand reading you had a shot at it.

Up in the sleepy neighborhood of Columbia Heights under the shadow of the soon-to-be Target there's a little neighborhood bar called the Wonderland Ballroom. Tony and I schemed and plotted and figured out a way to have an author reading at this very establishment. Our guest was Irvine Welsh author of The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. You might remember him from such books-turned-into-movies as Trainspotting. But he's been writing at a steady clip producing many other fine books. Bedroom Secrets is the grotesque and tragic story of two frienemies and their boozy and masturbatory exploits. Up at the Wonderland with everyone all settled in, Mr. Welsh spat and burred into the microphone warming the hearts of the 100 person audience with his secretion heavy prose.

Meanwhile down on 7th Street at the Olsson's - Lansburgh a different evening was shaping up. Elizabeth Hand read from her new novel Generation Loss. This is a dark and devastating book about a walking train-wreck who forfeited her chance at greatness and has been stumbling through life ever since. A photographer herself, she's given an assignment up in rural Maine to interview a reclusive photographer and is drawn into some mysterious goings on. The locals up in Maine are drawn from the same bleak pen that Hand uses to describe the punk beginnings of the main character Cass Neary. Hand's reading drew quite a crowd and her prose is both unnerving and exhilarating.

Two rapt audiences in two happening neighborhoods on one spring night! (If only I could figure out how to be in two places at once.) This is what Thursday nights are all about... literary benders! Or at least that's what I'm advocating.

Wow, its been a few weeks since I've graced The Buyer's Corner with my presence. I didn't mean to be gone that long. I hope everyone enjoyed Bill's musings on Shakespeare in the mean time.

It's been a busy and interesting couple of weeks in the book world. It's no surprise that everyone in the DC area is buzzing about George Tenet's, um, tell-all? Er, tell-some. There's a lot of reviews and Sunday morning commentary going back and forth about whether this book clarifies much beyond the whole "slam dunk" comment, so it's certain to keep the chatter going at a clipped pace in the usual circles.

Speaking of military-political thrillers that are not fiction, I've been reading a book called Blackwater by the journalist Jeremy Scahill. This book grew out of an article he wrote for The Nation in 2005 about Blackwater's confusing deployment in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. If you haven't heard of Blackwater, they are probably the most influential private military company in the world. They provide private security in Afghanistan and Iraq and are highly skilled and trained, and also operate outside of the purview of the US Military. Scahill's meticulously researched book is a riveting account of a major trend in first response to both armed conflicts and natural disasters around the world.

On a lighter note, a couple of very different but very inventive novels are getting a lot of attention. One of which we and I think the rest of the world is eagerly awaiting the reprint shipment on: Christopher Tolkien's shaping of his father J.R.R.'s unfinished pre-pre-quel The Children of Hurin. We've got ample stock coming our way will let you know as soon as it comes back in stock. Not surprisingly, every die-hard Tolkien fan has been eagerly anticipating this previously fabled text. There was even a story on the news about a Russian man who flew from there to be in New York on the morning The Children of Hurin was released so that he could buy it.

And then there's a slight book that's been catching a lot of attention perhaps for its provocative title, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This is Mohsin Hamid's second novel and it is a smart, taut, and well-constructed meditation on presumption and fear and foreignness in a post 9/11 world. The narrator Changez sits at a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan and speaks conversationally but intensely throughout the book telling a mysterious, burly American who we never meet about his life. He has graduated from Princeton and ensconces himself in prestigious and high-pressure job; this all while he struggles with his desire for and his simultaneous disdain for this American lifestyle. Though very direct in its construction, the book is not simplistic and the conundrum that Changez faces is not so easy to to dismiss.