• Boldtype #39 available for the new year.
• Two new Bat Segundo interviews. He badgered spoke with Simon Winchester and Claire Messud.
• Five Chapters has a new story available, “The Ultimate Jackpot” by Brian DeVido, author of the novel Every Time I Talk to Liston.
• Competition is killing the independent bookstore according to this article by the AP. Wait, what? Seriously? Sorry, it’s just that no matter how many articles come out saying what we already know—the chains and online sales are killing independents—nothing changes. People still come into our stores to browse and then go by their books on Amazon. And yes, it’s making me a little bitter.

If you haven’t heard, John Edwards has announced that he’s going to run for president. I met Mr. Edwards when he did a signing for his book Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives back in late November. Guess which picture the New York Times decided to use in an article about his strategy? Those would be my boobs next to John Edwards head.

The Phoenix has top 10 lists of non-fiction and fiction.
The Village Voice meanwhile has a longer list of both fiction and non-fiction, all alphabetically listed to show that no book is valued above another, well except these which are better than all the rest.

Last week I spent much of my time on the sales floor, helping customers find books and keeping the floor well stocked. This week I’m busy getting the store ready for the new year. A new season of books is ready to flood the store starting in January and we usually spend this week getting rid of the any lingering hardcovers and other excess. It’s busy in a different way. I’ve also got to clean out the office a bit to get prepared for the sales reps who’ll be coming to sell Summer 2007 titles to me. Lots to do here.

I did finish reading Christine Falls by Benjamin Black aka Jon Banville last night. I found the book easy to read and enjoyable—not always words one associates with Jon Banville. This is Banville’s version of a literary mystery and it’s quite good. I’m hoping to hear something on this book soon from the one I consider the Banville expert, TEV.

I literally squealed when I saw the page in the catalog. It’s called Death of a Murderer and is due sometime in August 2007. Here’s what the catalog page says:

Rupert Thomson—a “true master,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle—now gives us his most powerful work yet, the story of a woman who, even after her death, inflames an entire nation, and the man who comes under her spell.

Having spent decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, this murderer has finally died of natural causes but is no less notorious in death than she was in life. Bully Tyler, a career policeman, is assigned the task of guarding her body, which brings him, over the strident objections of his wife, to the hospital morgue, to make sure, he’s told, that nothing happens. What does happen, though, is a thorough recounting of his life, his complicated thoughts about violence in himself and society, the unease that distances him from marital disappointment and a damaged daughter, and of how, in his long night of the soul, this child-killer seems to speak out to him directly, and to know him more fully than anyone else. The questions that emerge, finally, should haunt us all: Whom do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? And what separates us from those we call monsters?

A gripping revelation of crime, of punishment—and of what we seek to hide, above all, from ourselves.

Here is the Times’s list and also Time’s list.