The Happy Booker

TGIF

(Yes, we're still out of town but we hope to be back in time to partake in some of this literary fun.)

This weekend in DC:

The Writer's Center celebrates its 30th birthday with a two day event:

Friday, 26 January, at 8:00 p.m., the editor of Best American Poetry, David Lehman, will read and discuss his recent work with E. Ethelbert Miller and the editors of Poet Lore (a special limited edition broadside of David Lehman's poem "26 January" will also be available), followed by refreshments.

Saturday, 27 January, at 8:00 p.m., Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler will read, sign books and discuss life and literature with Newshour host Jim Lehrer and his wife Kate Lehrer — followed by cake, wine and other refreshments.

Space is limited, and admission is by ticket only! Call the Writer's Center at 301 654 8664 or purchase tickets online.

Also this weekend:

• Saturday afternoon at 2 P.M. catch  Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger discuss and sign their new anthology, Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq, at Olsson's Books— Dupont, 1307 19th St. NW. While there, take advantage of their storewide sale to mark the grand opening of their newest Crystal City  store. All books are 20% off and all CDs and DVDs are 15% off —at all Olsson's locations (sale runs through Monday, January 29.)

• The 10th annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference will be held on Saturday, Feb. 24, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Todd Performing Arts Center at Chesapeake College, 1000 College Circle, Wye Mills, Md. This day-long event will feature lectures and advice from writers, editors and publishers, as well as writing workshops on travel writing, freelancing, writing romances, and other topics. A manuscript review service will also be available (a fee applies). A continental breakfast and a networking lunch are included. The cost of the conference, sponsored by the Friends of the Talbot County Free Library, is $80 per person with advance registration (before Feb. 1), and $90 thereafter. For more details, contact Carolyn Jaffe at [email protected] or 410-820-8822, or visit the conference Web site.

True Direction

Get thee to the LBC; author Valerie Trueblood is in the house. Seven Loves has been one of our favorite LBC picks in a while. Go visit and find out why. 

NBCCA Finalists

The National Book Critic Circle Award finalists were announced this week. Sarah gives us the party scoop over at Galley Cat and includes a candid photo  — Amy Bloom has never looked better, in our humble opinion.  The NBCCA winners will be announced March 8, 2007. Anyone placing bets?

At the announcement luncheon, the NBCCA Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was awarded to Steven G. Kellman. The award was presented by friend of the blog  and former Balakian honoree Scott McLemee (read more on the event here).

National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists:

Nonfiction

    * Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
    * Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
    * Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
    * Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
    * Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East

Fiction

    * Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
    * Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
    * Dave Eggers, What is the What
    * Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
    * Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Memoir/Autobiography

    * Donald Antrim, The Afterlife
    * Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
    * Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
    * Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
    * Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise

Poetry

    * Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again.
    * Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory.
    * Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971)
    * Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
    * W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

Biography

    * Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
    * Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968
    * Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography
    * Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
    * Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler

P.S.

Note from Toby Cox, owner of  Three Lives & Company bookstore in New York, to Barbara and Carla of Politics & Prose bookstore (addressed to "The Sacred Games Four”) in response to their ad in the Washington Post:

"Way to go Politics and Prose! I loved Sacred Games. What an amazing portrait of India.”

DC Event Tonight

Remember way back to last week when we wrote about Barbara and Carla's angry response to the WaPo review of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games?

Well that very same letter, in its entirety, showed up as a full page advertisement on Friday in the Post. That's right, Politics and Prose takes on the reviewer in his very own paper and invites readers to make their own decisions.

As we said here last week, we would take Barbara and Carla's book advice over Yardley's any day—and often do. Readers, you be the judge.  Don't miss your chance to see Vikram Chandra read and discuss Sacred Games tonight at P&P at 7pm.

[Related note: as covered in Publishers Weekly, via GalleyCat)

Snow Day

We were out of town for the weekend and then held over for an additional day due to snow, snow and more snow. What could be better for a weekend of skiing, snow tubing and other winter activities—like drinking a hot Irish coffee in front of a roaring fire. Our impromptu 3-day weekend was much needed.

Now we're back and it turns out we missed the news of Mr. Wickett's birthday—pop by and wish our favorite one man litblog band many happy returns. 

A birthday party we don't plan on missing is this two-day event next weekend. Have you gotten your tickets yet?

The Writer's Center celebrates its 30th birthday next weekend.

On Friday, 26 January, at 8:00 p.m., the editor of Best American Poetry, David Lehman, will read and discuss his recent work with E. Ethelbert Miller and the editors of Poet Lore(a special limited edition broadside of David Lehman's poem "26 January" will also be available), followed by refreshments

and

On Saturday, 27 January, at 8:00 p.m., Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler will read, sign books and discuss life and literature with Newshour host Jim Lehrer and his wife Kate Lehrer — followed by cake, wine and other refreshments.

Space is limited, and admission is by ticket only! Join the fun andsupport the literary arts at our region's only independent Writer's Center! To reserve your place at one or both events, call the Writer's Center at 301 654 8664 or purchase tickets online.

Weekend Plans

If we were in DC this weekend (which we are not) we would absolutely venture into the Great Lunar Sea to catch Momix at Mason's Center for the Arts.

We would also make time to hear Jennifer Ouellette explain The Physics of the Buffyverse (Politics and Prose, Saturday at  1 p.m.) 

" Buffy the Vampire Slayer was set in fictional Sunnydale, which sat atop a portal to a hellish dimension through which demons, monsters, and vampires came to terrorize high school students. Can the portal be explained through the laws of physics? Are the demons, monsters, and vampires ruled by biological laws? The author of Black Bodies and Quantum Cats explains."

Always on the look out for a book bargain, we would recommend The Friends of the Chevy Chase, D.C. Library book sale Saturday, Jan. 20, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ( 5625 Connecticut Ave. NW.)  Call 202-244-4809 for details.

If we were in NYC this weekend, these two events would be on our list:

Regarding Jones, our new favorite band, performs at 169 Bar (169 East B'way), Saturday night at 11pm.

Sunday we wouldn't miss the Sunday night Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street) where authors Joshua Cohen and Ellis Avery are slated to read at 7pm.

What are your plans?

Winter Read This!

Pop over to the LBC this week and read all about our Winter Read This! selection. Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o takes the honor and  this lovely post gets the ball rolling. The coming weeks will include interviews, an author chat, and plenty of book discussion by LBC members and our readers. Do make it a point to stop by.

Next week, we’ll be talking about Valerie Trueblood’s novel-in-stories Seven Loves, Anne's nomination for our Read This! selection.  I enjoyed Seven Loves for its language as much as its format and I will be posting my thoughts on the novel next week.

There's much more to come here as the LBC gears up for book discussion mode. So stop by often and join the conversation—we love hearing from our readers!

Mark Your Calendars

We can't believe we missed Calvin Trillin last Thursday at Politics and Prose. Trillin was in town to read from About Alice, the next book on our towering To Be Read pile. Anybody out there who attended care to send in a FotHB Report? Yes, it has come to this, we are now living vicariously through our readers.

A reading we promise we will not miss is Vikram Chandra's return to DC to read from Sacred Games. Barbara and Carla, the outspoken owners of Politics and Prose, are up in arms over the WaPo's review of Sacred Games:

"We strongly disagree with Jonathan Yardley’s review of SACRED GAMES by Vikram Chandra last Sunday.  Four of us—Carla, Mark, Kat, and Brian—have devoured the book, which, though gigantic, is a vastly entertaining book. There is a Tolstoyan array of characters that together create a panorama of Indian life. Not often can we remember the characters of books; yet Ganesh Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh are etched unforgettably on our minds. The story includes flashbacks from the time when India achieved independence in 1947 and the nation was violently divided. It is also very much about the present. The reviews in Britain said that Mumbai itself is a character and that is certainly true. .."

I would take Barbara and Carla's book recommendations over Yardley any day. In fact, I usually do. (We should also add that Love and Longing in Bombay is one of our favorite books and we're eagerly looking forward to diving into Sacred Games.) So mark your calendars, folks: our old pal Vikram Chandra will be back in town January 23 to read at Politics and Prose and this is one reading we really don't want to miss!

(related: The New York Times profiles Virkam here and offers a favorable review here.)

Tillie Olsen's Birthday

We posted on Friday about supporting childcare subsidies for low-income working families here in Virginia. This effort made us think of Tillie Olsen's story "I Stand Here Ironing," which is about a single mother's difficult childcare choices in a "pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression."

"She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now—the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.

Except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job. "

Tillie Olsen died on January 1st, 2007, two weeks shy of her ninety-fifth birthday.  Today is her birthday.  Olsen's family requests that those whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together. The family would be comforted to hear about these gatherings and celebrations. Please contact them and share your story: [email protected]

Contributions in her name can be sent here:

Tillie Olsen Memorial Fund for Human Rights, Public Libraries and Working Class Literature 
c/o the San Francisco Foundation
225 Bush Street #500
San Francisco California 94104

Thanks to Anne for alerting us to this event and for pointing us to this informative site. To all our adjunct friends out there, we recommend this helpful Olsen teaching Wiki.