Also published on this date: Monday, April 2, 2018 Dedicated Issue: Moon

Shelf Awareness for Monday, April 2, 2018


HarperCollins: The Good Egg by Jory John, illustrated by Pete Oswald

Bloomsbury Publishing: The Storm Keeper's Island by Catherine Doyle

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: How High the Moon by Karyn Parsons

Shadow Mountain: Healing Hearts (Proper Romance Western) by Sarah M. Eden

Doubleday Books: Southern Lady Code: Essays by Helen Ellis

Andrews McMeel Publishing: Lupin Leaps in: A Breaking Cat News Adventure by Georgia Dunn

Beacon Press: In Memoriam: Mary Oliver 1935 - 2019

Find Bloomsbury at Winter Institute in Albuquerque - Request an ARC!

News

Canada's Indie Bookstore Day Has a New Look For 2018

When U.S. booksellers celebrate Independent Bookstore Day on April 28, their neighbors to the north will be taking part in Canadian Independent Bookstore Day, a "new look" version of Authors for Indies Day, which was launched in 2015 and had announced last fall that significant changes were in the works.

Beginning this year, the Retail Council of Canada has adopted the project and renamed it Canadian Independent Bookstore Day "to celebrate the amazing independent bookstores in communities across Canada that develop and maintain a thriving book industry across the country. It is a day to go out into your community and enjoy the unique intersection of art, culture, business and opportunity that bookstores provide."

BookNet Canada noted that CIBD will be "a day for communities to appreciate and show off these unique businesses that help spread art, culture, and literature across Canada. It's also a day for authors to give back to the indie bookstores and booksellers who support their work every day.... We're excited to support the RCC in this initiative, and we're working to provide data that will aid them in their promotional efforts and with tracking the impact of the day on indie bookstore sales."


Disney-Hyperion: Book Hog by Greg Pizzoli


Lance Fensterman Named President of GlobalReedPOP

Lance Fensterman

Lance Fensterman has been named president of GlobalReedPOP, the pop culture division of Reed Exhibitions that stages 38 events in 11 countries, including BookExpo, BookCon, New York Comic Con and Emerald City Comic Con.

"Lance's passion is unmistakable and contagious, and that passion has driven the explosive growth of ReedPOP from a quirky offshoot of Reed Exhibitions to the global powerhouse brand that it is today," Hervé Sedky, president of Reed Exhibitions Americas, said.

Fensterman added: "I'm beyond humbled and extremely excited about the opportunity to continue to lead the ReedPOP business from this new perch, and it is a true testament to the strength of the brand we have created and the hard work that the entire team has put in to grow this business over the last 10 years."

Before joining Reed in 2006 as event director of BookExpo America (a position he held until 2009), Fensterman was store manager of Elm Street Books, New Canaan, Conn., and general manager of Bound to Be Read Bookstore, St. Paul, Minn. Earlier he worked in hotel sales and marketing, co-founded a dot com business and founded North Perk Coffee House.


Rick Riordan Present: Aru Shah and the Song of Death (Pandava #2) by Roshani Chokshi


24-Hour, Employee-Less 'Trust' Bookstore Opens in Dubai

Continuing the apparent trend of employee-less bookstores opening in cities around the globe, a staff-less, 24-hour bookstore called Book Hero has opened in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, ANI News reported. The store carries some 20,000 titles, the majority in either English or Arabic, and prices range from 10 to 20 dirhams, or around $2.75 to $5.50.

Unlike the employee-less bookstores that have recently opened in Beijing, or Amazon’s cashier-less grocery stores in the U.S., Book Hero relies on the honor system rather than digital technology: customers simply take a book and drop their money into a payment box called the Trust Box, which owner Montserrat Martin stops by to empty once per day.

Asked about the risk of theft, Martin told Gulf News that “nobody would steal a book,” and that even if someone did, the cost of replacing stolen books would still be far, far lower than “what I would spend on hiring staff and paying for overheads like visa and insurance.”


Graywolf Press at Winter Institute 14 in Albuquerque - Click for more info


Obituary Note: Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve

Bestselling author Anita Shreve, "who was beloved by fans around the world for her novels and for encouraging other writers," died March 29, the Boston Globe reported. She was 71. "Setting book after book in New England, Ms. Shreve used prose that was both thoughtful and unsparing to offer intimate glimpses of the emotional landscape of her characters and, not incidentally, the region's topography," the Globe noted.

"She wrote beautifully melodic and nuanced prose. I admired every book of hers," said Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group. "She brought a great mind to the observation of emotions."

"I used to marvel at her research that was seamlessly integrated into each book," said Elinor Lipman, a friend and fellow novelist. "The research that she did showed, but not in such a way that you felt the index cards being shuffled and flapping. It was all about the right time and the right fact."

"This is pretty emotional for me," Dan Chartrand, owner of Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, N.H., told SeacoastOnline.com. "Anita was really an amazing person to me especially when I was getting the store started. Aside from being a good personal friend to both myself and the store, she was a great writer, a great local author and community member, but in the end, she was the best person." He added that Shreve had done many events at the bookshop even though she was a "very private" person. "At the same time, she saw it was important to be a member of the local literary community. Really just a wonderful individual."

Shreve's career received a significant boost in 1999 when Oprah Winfrey chose The Pilot's Wife for Oprah's Book Club. The novel was adapted for film, as were Resistance and The Weight of Water. Shreve wrote some 20 books, including  Eden Close, Fortune's Rocks, Stella Bain, Strange Fits of Passion, Testimony and Sea Glass.

Jordan Pavlin, her editor at Knopf, which published her final work, The Stars Are Fire, said: "Anita's writing has touched the lives of millions of readers around the world, and she did some of her most elegant, rich, and unforgettable work in the last years of her life. Her body of work is extraordinary, and her books will continue to be read for generations."

Shreve's novels "explored change, loss and troubled marriages, often against the backdrop of a real historical event," the New York Times wrote, adding: "Many of her books featured women in stressful situations, a setup she found rich in possibilities."


G.P. Putnam's Sons: Someone Knows by Lisa Scottoline


Notes

Image of the Day: Perfect Timing at Ingram

Daniel Pink shared insights from his latest book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (Riverhead), with staff at Ingram Content Group's headquarters in LaVergne, Tenn., including (from l.) Cheryl Jones, Holly Merriman, Nicole Robinson-Hamilton, Pink, Gail Vinett and Rasco Gordon.


Happy Fifth Birthday, Literati Bookstore!

Congratulations to Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, Mich., which is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. Yesterday, on the store's Facebook page, co-owners Mike and Hilary Gustafson wrote: "We opened Literati five years and a day ago. We often looked forward to this milestone. We saw it as a place in the future where we might one day feel securely rooted and supported in our community, and I can say with a full heart that we do feel that way today.

"When we opened Literati we knew the importance of bookstores in our own lives and hoped to continue the long tradition of bookselling in Ann Arbor. We wanted to foster the idea that bookstores are places where people gather, where people discover new ideas, attend readings of an author they've never heard about before, and where people can surprise themselves. These ideas of community, curiosity, and a craving to interact with real people at a real bookstore are not new, and they did not begin here at Literati, but we feel incredibly lucky to work every day to keep them alive.

"And this brings us to the special people in this store who keep bookselling vibrantly alive here at Literati. On this occasion we want to call special attention and give thanks to our amazing staff. We are so fortunate to have not only smart, hardworking, passionate employees, but to have ones that we legitimately consider some of our favorite people on this planet. Their expertise is unrivaled, their enthusiasm contagious, and their humor infectious. But perhaps most importantly, I love watching their generous natures with the community--seeing how they spread their kindness to all those around them. You make this store what it is and are the reason for its success over the years.

"And we thank all of you in the community who have made an effort to support this bookstore and these booksellers. We know you have many choices of where to buy your books, but you choose to buy them from us and it makes us eternally grateful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."


Cool Idea of April Fool's Day: Duck's Cottage Coffee & Books

Duck's Cottage Coffee & Books, Duck, N.C., may have won April Fool's Day with three Instagram posts over a 12-hour period:


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Cecile Richards on CBS This Morning, Morning Joe and More

Today:
CBS This Morning: Cecile Richards, author of Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead--My Life Story (Touchstone, $27, 9781501187599). She will also appear tomorrow on Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow and CNN's Erin Burnett Outfront.

Also on CBS This Morning: Menno Schilthuizen, author of Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution (Picador, $27, 9781250127822).

Ellen: Giada De Laurentiis, author of Giada's Italy: My Recipes for La Dolce Vita (Clarkson Potter, $35, 9780307987228).

Also on Ellen: Bob Roth, author of Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation (Simon & Schuster, $24, 9781501161216).

Tomorrow:
Fox & Friends: Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, authors of Tiger Woods (Simon & Schuster, $30, 9781501126420).

CBS This Morning: Senator Tim Scott and Rep. Trey Gowdy, authors of Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country (Tyndale Momentum, $24.99, 9781496430410).

Morning Joe: Mike Lupica, author of Point Guard (Simon & Schuster, $7.99, 9781481410052). He will also appear on Megyn Kelly.

Today Show: Marion Ross, author of My Days: Happy and Otherwise (Kensington, $26, 9781496715159).

Good Morning America: Vivica A. Fox, author of Every Day I'm Hustling (St. Martin's Press, $26.99, 9781250134455). She will also appear on Dr. Phil.

Also on GMA: Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, authors of The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance--What Women Should Know (HarperBusiness, $16.99, 9780062230638).

The View repeat: Charlotte Pence, author of Marlon Bundo's Day in the Life of the Vice President (Regnery Kids, $18.99, 9781621577768).

NPR's On Point: Michael Benson, author of Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster, $30, 9781501163937).


Movies: The Darkest Minds; And Then I Go

A trailer has been released for The Darkest Minds, Jennifer Yuh Nelson's film adaptation of Alexandra Bracken's YA novel. IndieWire reported that the movie offers "a teen-centric dystopian vision that's mostly been missing from the movie marketplace since the last Divergent film didn't even make it in into theaters." The Darkest Minds stars Amandla Stenberg (Hunger Games; Everything, Everything), Mandy Moore, Gwendoline Christie and Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats). It opens August 3.

---

A trailer is out for And Then I Go, which was adapted by Brett Haley and Jim Shepard from Shepard's 2004 novel Project X, IndieWire reported. Directed by Vincent Grashaw (Coldwater), the film stars Arman Darbo, Justin Long, Melanie Lynskey, Tony Hale and Sawyer Barth. Set for an April 18 release, it will be available via On Demand and Digital HD.



Books & Authors

Awards: PEN/Hemingway; 1943 Retrospective Hugo

Weike Wang won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, honoring a distinguished first book of fiction, for her novel, Chemistry (Knopf). The judges praised the book, a first-person narrative of a graduate chemist's personal and professional indecision, as a "brilliant book" written in "elliptical prose, spare and clean as bone."

Wang will receive $25,000 underwritten by the Hemingway Family Prize and the Hemingway Foundation; a month-long residency fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers; and a residency from the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho's MFA Creative Writing Program, and a $5,000 stipend.

The two PEN/Hemingway runners-up are Lisa Ko for The Leavers (Algonquin) and Adelia Saunders for Indelible (Bloomsbury). Two writers receive honorable mentions: Curtis Dawkins for The Graybar Hotel (Scribner) and Ian Bassingthwaighte for Live from Cairo (Scribner).

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The finalists for the 1943 Retrospective Hugo Awards have been chosen in nine categories and can be seen here. Winners will be announced on August 16 during Worldcon 76 in San Jose, Calif.


Book Review

Review: The Feather Thief

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson (Viking, $27 hardcover, 320p., 9781101981610, April 24, 2018)

Feathers--who knew? At the turn of the 19th century, fashionable women in Paris and New York were parading under hats with as many exotic bird feathers as they could manage without toppling over. An ounce of snowy egret feathers in 1900 cost more than an ounce of gold. Adventurous bird harvesters swarmed South America and the Malaysian archipelago to feed the demand.

Fast forward 100 years. Obsessive salmon fly-tyers and collectors paid nearly $2,000 on eBay for authentic bird feathers. Protected by anti-poaching and conservation laws, most exotic wild birds of the world were off limits. Sure enough, a thief used the Willie Sutton method to go where the feathers were. In 2009, 22-year-old flautist and world-class fly-tyer Edwin Rist broke into the British Museum of Natural History, housed in a Rothschild mansion in the small Hertfordshire town of Tring. He made off with a suitcase full of carefully stored and catalogued 100-year-old bird carcasses, including some 70 New Guinea birds-of-paradise. It's not easy to fence dead birds, but Rist got away with his misdeed for almost two years before he got nabbed selling baggies of feathers on the Internet.

The Feather Thief is a story about Rist, as well as a history of early naturalists, evolution theory and the Victorian compulsion to collect the oddities of nature. Along the way, it also becomes a primer on fly-tying and the contrasting worlds of fly fisherman and fly collectors. One of the former, Kirk Wallace Johnson, was working a trout stream in New Mexico in 2011 when his guide told him about the great Tring bird theft.

An Iraq and Afghan war vet who helped facilitate visas for the loyal locals who were left behind (described in his first book, To Be a Friend Is Fatal), Johnson was looking for a new writing career move. The feather caper became his obsession, and for five years he doggedly dug into the crime. He researched the travels of Charles Darwin and his contemporary (and scientific rival) Alfred Russel Wallace, who amassed the bird specimens in the Tring museum. He interviewed the constable who finally caught Rist, and the circumspect fly-tyers across the globe who traded in black-market feathers on Internet forums. Persistent but personable, he even managed to interview Rist himself, calming his wife's security worries by telling her: "He's a flute player! He stole feathers. He's not going to do anything!"

Johnson got his story and then some. He took a peek into a world of dazzling natural variety and an underworld of subterfuge and crime--a realm "filled with quirky and obsessive individuals, strange birds, dusty museums, archaic fly recipes, Victorian hats, plume smugglers, grave-robbers, and, at the heart of it all, a flute-playing thief." Richly informative, with handy illustrations, endlessly fascinating and crackingly entertaining, The Feather Thief is the kind of true-crime narrative that gives Erik Larson's much-lauded The Devil in the White City a run for the money. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Shelf Talker: A bizarre 2009 theft of 100-year-old bird carcasses sends journalist Kirk Wallace Johnson on a five-year odyssey through history, police stations and the Internet black market to chronicle this intriguing crime.


The Bestsellers

Top Libro.fm Audiobooks in March

The bestselling Libro.fm audiobooks at independent bookstore locations during March:

Fiction:

  1. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Random House Audio)
  2. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (Penguin Random House Audio)
  3. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Penguin Random House Audio)
  4. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Penguin Random House Audio)
  5. The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn (HarperCollins)
  6. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Macmillan Audio)
  7. Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate (Penguin Random House Audio)
  8. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin (Penguin Random House Audio)
  9. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (HarperCollins)
  10. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Simon & Schuster Audio)

Nonfiction:

  1. Educated by Tara Westover (Penguin Random House Audio)
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (Penguin Random House Audio)
  3. I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (HarperCollins)
  4. Russian Roulette by Michael Isikoff and David Corn (Hachette Audio)
  5. The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish (Simon & Schuster Audio)
  6. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson (HarperCollins)
  7. Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (Penguin Random House Audio)
  8. Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown (Penguin Random House Audio)
  9. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins)
  10. Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster Audio)

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