Andrea Walker at the Book Bench noted the cover for Serena by Ron Rash. This is an excellent book, one which inspired me to write a staff recommendation:

If the intense cover alone doesn’t draw you to this book, perhaps knowing that this novel features one of the greatest female protagonists I’ve ever come across will. It’s 1929, and George Pemberton returns to the North Carolina mountains with his new wife Serena where they plan on creating a timber empire. She’s no meek flower. She rides horses like men and even trains an eagle to kill the rattlers that plague the crews. Letting nothing get in their way, they ride roughshod over everyone who crossed paths with them including partners, sheriffs, and Pemberton’s former mistress. With echoes of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, this story of ambition and greed and revenge has haunted my dreams for weeks.

A plethora of interesting new books showed up on my desk today. What should I read after Olympos (about three quarters of the way through now)?

• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins: Everyone I’ve spoken with who has read Filkin’s book has nothing but high praise. I’ve avoided reading most books about the Iraq war but this one seems like a must read.
• Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain by John Barlow: The author lives in Galicia and decides to drive around eating hog. Sounds like a winner to me. I’ve never read Barlow before but this is published by FSG so it has to be good, right?
• The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard: I love her. She’s what I wish I could have become if I had stuck with my degree. She writes exciting prose, not the typical dry scholarly stuff that I had grown used to in school. This book explores Pompeii–what it was like before the volcano.
• Under Pressure: Cooking with Sous Vide by Thomas Keller: Yes, I’m the kind of cooking nerd who likes to read cookbooks. Will I ever tackle sous vide? Probably not, but at least I’ll know how.
• The Journey by H.G. Adler: I need to read more literature in translation and what better way to start than with with this lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature?
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons: Should I take a break from science fiction or continue on the Simmons path. I also have a galley of his upcoming book Drood, which explores the last years of Dickens.

I love my job.

Award season has begun in the literary world. Last week, the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Right. Most Americans immediately hit google when they found out.

Then we had the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday: Aravind Ariga for The White Tiger. I was rooting for Amitav Ghosh’s amazing The Sea of Poppies (can’t wait for the second in the trilogy), but am okay with Ariga nabbing the win.

Yesterday the National Book Award Finalists were announced in Chicago:

Fiction

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)

Poetry

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Young People’s Literature

Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)

I find the nonfiction a good, steady list. The fiction however is quite interesting. You’ve got two older, seasoned writers, one who is in the middle of a burgeoning career, and two debut novelists. Incidentally, they’re the only two books on the list that I’ve read. I liked The End and Telex from Cuba and see good careers ahead. Also, here’s a great interview with Salvatore Scibona. I believe I got to be the first person to ask him to sign his book ever. That’s pretty cool.We’ll see what happens on November 19th, when they announce the winners.

In perusing i09, my favorite Sci-Fi blog, I came across two stories which I couldn’t wait to share!

First, in this interview, Ridley Scott says he’s filming a version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “Because when you look at the two players or visionaries in the field, at that moment [it] would be Huxley and it would be Orwell and that was 60 or 75 years ago. They were predictions in a way, they weren’t aware at the time, but they were predictions.”

Second, they reported that AMC will be showing a television version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. “”This fits in with our bigger vision of wanting series that feel like cinematic one-hour movies,” said Christina Wayne, senior vp original series and miniseries at AMC. “We’re always looking for big genres but to do them in slightly different ways so they feel fresh and new,” she added.” They also announced another project in development, based on Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold’s book about magician Charles Carter and his role in President Harding’s death.

• Another great interview at the Meeting House, this time with Kelly Link!
• New Boldtype, this month’s theme is Science.
• I am jealous of this library. Mine is almost as good, if you like IKEA shelves and cats?
• A more lengthy article on the sale of my store.
• We don’t need your stinkin’ Nobel!

My office is about to have a party to welcome Jeff, the new owner of my store. So while I’m swilling champagne, busy yourselves with this:

• Robert Birnbaum talks with Howard Zinn.
• The National Book Foundation has announced the “5 Under 35” for this year. It’s an interesting list.
• NY Magazine has an conversation between Richard Price and Junot Diaz talking about the death of Times Square, the Lower East Side, and more.
• Publishers Weekly covers the sale of my store.
• Miriam Toews, whose The Flying Troutmans I finished this morning, is among the contenders for the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. I enjoyed her book. Comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine are inevitable, but imagine her characters more fully fleshed out.

In momentous news, Frank Kramer sold Harvard Book Store to Jeff Mayersohn yesterday afternoon. Here’s a photo of them after they returned from the closing:

That’s Frank Kramer on the left, and Jeff Mayersohn on the right. You can read more about it on Shelf Awareness.