Shelf Unbound December-January 2012

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Street Photographer

Vivian Maier BOY SCOUT BOOKS

GEEK MYTHOLOGY RENAISSANCE READS

68

SEPTEMBER 2010

what to read next in independent publishing

“

“

A BRILLIANT,

SEXY, EDGY THRILL RIDE

THE FINAL APPEARANCE OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE GIRL NEXT DOOR

Available now at the ebook stores below. Read a sample chapter in this issue of Shelf Unbound on page 9.

Can I get Shelf Unbound on the

iTunes Newsstand?

App-solutely!

staff

Margaret Brown fo u n d e r a n d p u b l i s her Anna Nair e d i to r i n ch i e f Christina Davidson c re a t i ve d i re c to r Ben Minton c i rc u l a t i o n m a n a g e r Patricia McClain c o py e d i to r Jennifer Haupt c o n t r i b u t i n g w r i te r Julia and Nico Basile yo u n g a d u l t reviewers

What to read next?

Sign up for a

FREE SUBSCRIPTION

to Shelf Unbound at www.shelfmediagroup.com.

For adver tising inqu i r i e s : call 972.375.4956 or e-mail info@shelfme d i a g ro u p. c o m .

For editor ial inquir ie s : e-mail margaret@she l f m e d i a g ro u p. c o m or write to Shelf Unb o u n d, 3 3 2 2 G re e nv i ew D r. , Garland, TX 75044

what to read next in independent publishing

PHOTO: COURTESY MTV

december/january

contents

30

four for a quarter a performance in two pages

32

darling endangered a dash of flash fiction

34

this is life seth harwood does hard-boiled

DEPARTMENTS 7

a word from the publisher

38

indie now

FEATURES

42

poetry

8

44

best of the book blogs

47

on our shelf

49

book club find

51

featured bookstore

52

last words

53

contributors

vivian maier a street photographer, discovered

14

renaissance reads an illuminating history

18

the steinbeck interview thomas steinbeck on his famous father, writing, and war

20

geek mythology jane austenites and other word nerds

24

scouting report boy scout memorabilia and literature

Cover photo by Vivian Maier from Vivian Maier, Street Photographer edited

by John Maloof, powerHouse Books 2011, www.powerhousebooks.com.

what to read next in independent publishing

Find a book fit for a...

Foodie

Or for a...

Tech Enthusiast

Smarty Pants

Adventurer

Detective

Hopeful Romantic

History Buff

Soul Seeker

English Major

Superhero

Futurist

Funny Guy

Wizard

Health Nut

Activist

Lab Rat

Environmentalist

Single Mingler

Alpha Male

BookYap.com

Personalized Book Recommendations TM

a word from the

T

publisher

DISCOVERIES

he recent discovery of the brilliant street photography of Vivian Maier, a 1950s-era Chicago nanny, brings to mind Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Maier was eccentric and reclusive and unknown as an artist in her lifetime. And just as Dickinson’s sister Lavinia discovered some 1,800 of her poems after her death, 100,000 of Maier’s undeveloped negatives that had been residing in an unpaid storage locker were purchased at auction by local historian John Maloof, who initially had no idea of their artistic merit.

The photography world has been mesmerized by the mystery of Maier’s life and her body of work ever since Maloof first posted a few of the photos on Flickr a couple of years ago, seeking information about her. He has subsequently found out a bit about her, but not all that much, and so we look at her world through her lens with a sense of both wonder and wondering, as you can see in our excerpt from Vivian Maier, Street Photographer from Counterpoint Press.

I had a similar engagement with wonder and wondering as I was reading the quite remarkable Exit, a novel about suicide, written by Nelly Arcan, who killed herself a few days after completing it. Exit also had me thinking, again, about Emily Dickinson: “I wonder if it hurts to live and if they have to try …”

We included Exit on the Shelf Unbound Top 10 Small Press Books of 2011; the rest of the list can be found here: www.shelfmediagroup.com/blog.

Margaret Brown publisher

Like what you read? Click on any book cover to purchase from an online bookstore, or click on the publisher website for more information.

what to read next in independent publishing

feature

photography

Vivian Maier Street Photographer Edited by John Maloof Text by Geoff Dyer powerHouse Books www.powerhousebooks.com

“I acquired Vivian’s negatives while at a furniture and antique auction while researching a history book I was co-authoring on Chicago’s NW Side,” says John Maloof. “From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments.” What Maloof discovered was the unknown work of the unknown street photographer Vivian Maier [1926-2009] –- nanny, loner, visual poet. Maloof’s find launched a blog, a Kickstarter project, a forthcoming documentary, museum exhibits, and a new book, briefly excerpted here.

8

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Vivian Maier represents an extreme instance of posthumous discovery: of someone who exists entirely in terms of what she saw. Not only was she entirely unknown to the photographic world, hardly anyone seemed to know that she even took photographs. While this seems unfortunate, perhaps even cruel – a symptom or side effect of the fact that she never married or had children, and apparently had no close friends – it also says something about the unknowable potential of all human beings. As Wislawa Symborska writes of Homer in her poem “Census”: “No one knows what he does in his spare time.”

—Geoff Dyer From Vivian Maier – Street Photographer, edited by John Maloof, text by Geoff Dyer, powerHouse Books 2011, www.powerhousebooks.com. Text and photographs reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

UNBOUND

9

“Maier’s recent, sudden ascent from reclusive eccentric to esteemed photographer is one of the more remarkable stories in American photography.”

—David Zax, Smithsonian

10

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

“Ms. Maier’s streetscapes manage simultaneously to capture a redolent sense of place and the paradoxical moments that give the city its jazz...”

—David W. Dunlap, lens.blogs.nytimes.com

UNBOUND

11

“She had an incredible eye for the small details and proved to be rigorous in framing, often concentrating strongly on the detail she wanted to show… without caring too much for the surroundings.”

—Photoble.com 12

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

“The arresting, artfully framed scenes from the streets and byways of New York, Chicago and beyond seem alive with movement.”

—Katie Beck, BBC.co.uk

UNBOUND

13

feature

literary history

The Book in The Renaissance

by Andrew Pettegree Yale University Press www.yalebooks.com

T

he development of the major overland trade routes was the final necessary condition for the development of an international book market. The new European economic system linked together major population centres in Italy, 14

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Germany, France and the Netherlands. The increasing wealth of the leading figures in European society created the surplus income necessary for the accumulation of fine things. The rise in lay literacy created interest in books, and supplied the commu-

nity of scribes and scholars who acted as copyists. All the conditions were in place for a rapid increase in the volume of books in circulation, fueled by the new interest in books among many of Europe’s political and cultural elites. What was possible with this happy conjunction of cultural and economic circumstances is brilliantly illustrated by the remarkable career of the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci.

Vespasiano was not a well-educated man. He knew no Latin, and, most unusually for someone moving in his circles, he was prepared to admit it. Vespasiano began his career as a cartolai, a dealer in paper and parchment. A business of this sort quite naturally expanded to include manuscript texts. By the 1440s Vespasiano was proprietor of a shop where members of Florence’s humanist community were happy to drop by to browse, read, and pass the time. Some became firm friends, and through these connections Vespasiano was introduced to the scholars and churchmen who accepted work copying manuscripts. Vespasiano became known as someone who could provide manuscripts of the highest quality. When Federico, Duke of Urbino turned his mind from war-making to building a library, it was Vespasiano he commissioned to furnish it. The

THE RENAISSANCE PORTRAIT From Donatello to Bellini Edited by Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann The Metropolitan Museum of Art Distributed by Yale University Press www.yalebooks.com

A

catalogue of the exhibit on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 21, 2011 through March 18, 2012, this new book includes essays by leading scholars on Renaissance portraiture and discusses painting, drawing, manuscript illumination, sculpture, and medallic portraiture by such artists as Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrochio, and Giovanni Bellini.

LEONARDO’S LOST PRINCESS: ONE MAN’S QUEST TO AUTHENTICATE AN UNKNOWN PORTRAIT BY LEONARDO DA VINCI

by Peter Silverman and Catherine Whitney Wiley www.wiley.com

A

nd coming in January, art collector Peter Silverman recounts the fascinating story of discovering that a painting purchased at auction for $19,000 and described as “German, early 19th century” was in fact a work by Leonardo da Vinci – and valued at more than $100 million.

UNBOUND

15

VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI

work occupied fourteen years, not surprisingly since Federico had resolved ’to do what no-one had done for a thousand years or more: that is to create the finest library since ancient times’. Vespasiano would perform a similar service for Cosimo de’ Medici, sending him a systematic cata16

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

logue that became the plan of the new library.

Supplying such eminent clients, at times simultaneously, required Vespasiano to create and manage a network of copyists and illuminators. The scale of the enterprise almost beggars belief. For Cosimo, anxious to

build his library very quickly, Vespasiano engaged fifty-five scribes, who completed 200 rich volumes in under two years. Vespasiano was responsible for supplying over half the 1,000 manuscripts in the library of Federico of Urbino. In the same period, the Vatican library expanded to around 4,000 volumes.

The increase in manuscript production during the course of the fifteenth century had demonstrated a great demand for books, fueled by the humanist desire for accurate scholarly versions of rediscovered texts. But, as the diverse book market of the Italian cities had discovered, it also set demanding standards. In the courts and cities of Europe, a book was not merely a source of information and a repository of knowledge, but a prized and valued artifact. The relationship between owners and their books was one of some intimacy. Care was taken in the presentation, beautifying and conservation of a text. All of this established a high threshold of expectations when across Europe men began to interest themselves in mechanical techniques that might speed the production process and help them meet the ever-expanding demand for books.

From The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree. Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Pettegree.

Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

RENAISSANCE READS Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

In Hamlet, Polonius also calls brevity the soul of wit, so with that in mind here’s a brief list of mustread literature from the Renaissance era.

THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante Alighieri. Written between 1308 and 1321, The Divine Comedy is an epic poem with an imaginative and allegorical vision of the afterlife. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language.

THE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer. A collection of stories written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century, the tales (mostly in verse, although some are in prose) paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time.

HAMLET by William Shakespeare. Believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601, the play Hamlet vividly portrays real and feigned madness – from overwhelming grief to seething rage – and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

DON QUIXOTE by Miguel de Cervantes. Published in two volumes a decade apart (in 1605 and 1615), Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon.

PARADISE LOST by John Milton. Milton’s purpose in this epic poem in blank verse published in 1667, as stated in Book I, is to “justify the ways of God to men” and elucidate the conflict between God’s eternal foresight and free will.

Source: Wikipedia.com UNBOUND

17

novel thinking

T

Counterpoint Press | www.counterpointpress.com

homas Steinbeck’s new novel The Silver Lotus is a romantic epic that novelist T.C. Boyle calls “a beautifully crafted historical novel written with the grace and clarity of a folk tale.”

We recently spoke with Steinbeck about writing, racism, and war. It was an honor.

Shelf Unbound: Your father, John Steinbeck, sparked your lifelong interest in history by giving you books to read. Was there a specific fact or story that you came across in your studies that led to your new historical novel, The Silver Lotus?

Thomas Steinbeck: Lady Yee is a character that I invented for an earlier novel, In the Shadow of the Cypress. She’s a compilation of some remarkable women I’ve met over my life who were philanthropic but, shall we say, not of the “right” race. In California at the turn of the century, if you were wealthy and Chinese you were not necessarily praised for being so. In order to accomplish their ends they did it behind a Chinese wall, if you will forgive the pun. I liked Lady Yee so much, I finally decided to write a whole book about her.

One of my bete noires has always been racism and bias and how it is such a self-defeating mechanism. I grew up in California and my best friends were Chinese kids and Filipino kids and Mexican kids. When I went off to prep schools on the East Coast I couldn’t find a brown face in the room and I felt out of place.

that journalists don’t have that kind of power.

Now as a writer, rather than talking about the big issues, which most people don’t have the time for or are politically ill prepared to deal with, I decided to write about bias and racism on a scale people could deal with. I write about what racism and bias cost a country, cost each other, how they keep us from seeing the genius of others. I use history to buttress whatever history I’m writing. I set it in real time and real space and real incidents. I then insert my small piece of story into that place.

Shelf: You’re an active supporter of The Wounded Warriors Project. Tell us about this program and what people can do to support it.

Steinbeck: More men have died of suicide after Desert Storm and Iraq than have died in combat.

I was in Vietnam both as a solider and journalist and I’m still trying to come to terms with it. You cannot take young people and put them in these situations and not have them come back deeply emotionally scarred. You can come back with both arms and both legs and not a hole in you but you’ve lost your soul. We’re dealing with a Shelf: After serving in Vietnam you went back lot of psychological damage that’s been done. there as a photojournalist. How is telling a And it’s not just the suicides – look at the broken story in images different from and/or similar families. Wounded Warriors is one of a great many projects out there, many of them private. If to telling a story in words?

Steinbeck: We all had this fantasy as young people are interested in helping vets, Google for journalists that we could take a picture or tell a information on what to do. For more information, story that would stop the war. But we learned go to www.thomassteinbeck.com.

18

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

E

ven the famous Buddhist astrologer that her father had called in before she departed Canton predicted that Master Yee’s daughter would enjoy a long span of years, be blessed with robust health, and be successful in all things of true importance. Then he said something odd. He looked at his charts and tables again, then foretold that her presence would be as food to the hungry, clothes to the naked, and shelter to the lost. She would foster a thousand souls and nourish the ignorant with wisdom. – from The Silver Lotus by Thomas Steinbeck UNBOUND

19

geek mythology

GEEK GIRLS UNITE:

It Books | www.youritlist.com

Why Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits Are Taking Over the World

by Leslie Simon

“It’s a geek’s world; everyone else is just living in it,” says Leslie Simon in her new book that gives cool cred to the bespectacled and fashion-challenged superfans of Neil Gaiman, Chuck Klosterman, and the like. Simon devotes an entire chapter to the Literary Geek (aka, us, Dear Readers), naming our beloved Jane Austen as the Hall of Fame Literary Geek Goddess, as excerpted here: 20

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

W

hether they call themselves Austenologists or Janeites, it’s hard to find a literary geek girl who doesn’t adore the work of Jane Austen. Known for her sharp wit and sentimental irony, Austen basically invented the genre of chick lit with the posthumous success of period novels like Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Many also view Austen as one of the earliest first-wave femi-

nists because she dared to write about then-unmentionable topics like gender and class and continued to question whether a woman could truly be both independent and married – a debate that still carries on today.

When Jane Austen first published her novel Sense and Sensibility in 1811, the London literary community basically yawned. Not only were the themes of Austen’s books far too progressive for the time, but also it was downright uncommon and unseemly for women to pursue a career in publishing. Much like her beloved characters, Austen wasn’t interested in conforming to traditional literary standards – or the expectations of aristocracy, for that matter. She wanted to write about real women, complete with flaws, intellect, and sass to spare. That’s why her fictional creations – like Emma Woodhouse from Emma and Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice – remain feminist icons to this day and continue to be adapted and updated, though never outdone. How many authors can say the same?

From Geek Girls Unite: Why Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits Are Taking Over the World by Leslie Simon, It Books 2011, www.youritlist.com.

Excerpted with permission. All rights reserved.

MEMOIRS OF A GEEKSTER

We asked Leslie Simon for her must-read list for the Geek Girl. Break out your new Kindle Fires, sisters, and get thee to these geeks.

Bossypants (Reagan Arthur Books)

by Tina Fey No respectable geek girl would dare show anyone her bookshelf without Bossypants being prominently featured front and center. (Bonus points if said she-geek sets up her own personal end cap to highlight the title.) What can I say? Tina, you had me at “I want to go to there.”

Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures Of A Hollywood Geek (St. Martin’s Griffin)

by Olivia Munn As I say in Geek Girls Unite, “Olivia might get some flack because she flaunts her sexuality (something that’s traditionally very un-fangirllike), but that shouldn’t tarnish her goddess glow. If anything, it just proves that fangirls come in all different shapes, colors and cup sizes.” I, for one, applaud her for sharing the story of her life—Wookiee warts and all.

UNBOUND

21

more MEMOIRS

I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned From Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, FauxSensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated (Gotham)

by Julie Klausner I first became aware of Julie Klausner when her essay “Was I On A Date Or Just BabySitting?”, about an awkward romantic interlude with a certain indie-rock man-child, appeared in the Style Section of The New York Times back in 1998, and I’ve been hooked on her hilarity ever since. The initial piece that stole my heart is included in her literary debut, along with other hysterical and cringe-worthy sexcapades.

22

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

But Enough About Me: How A Small-Town Girl Went From Shag Carpet To Red Carpet (Harper Collins)

by Jancee Dunn I’ve been a fan of Jancee Dunn ever since I was old enough to read her byline in Rolling Stone and her memoir is a great testament to the fact that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary pursuits. How else do you explain a girl from the Dirty Jerz conquering The Big Apple (she was the original hostess of MTV2’s 120 Minutes), The City Of Angels (she’s interviewed everyone from Dolly Parton to Ben Affleck) and everything in between?

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (Crown Archetype)

by Mindy Kaling She acts! She produces! She writes! What can’t Mindy Kaling do? Got me. This look back at The Office star’s rise to fame is both comical and inspiring, and just makes me love Mindy more—as if that were humanly possible.

Leslie Simon, www.leslie-simon.com, @geekgirlsunite

UNBOUND

23

feature

scouts

DK | www.dk.com

A

shoebox full of badges; scrapbooked photos of boys standing at attention in high-collared uniforms and broad-brimmed hats; a khaki shirt faded from wear and outgrown long ago – look in the attic or basement of just about anyone who has been associated with the Boy Scouts of America and you’re likely to find a collection of Scout stuff as dear to the owner today as it was when everything was new.

Scout Stuff is a celebration of Boy Scouts of America memorabilia and the rich—often life-changing—events they represent. Most of the items featured

24

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

in the book have found a home in the National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas. This facility is Scouting’s shoebox—the repository of much that the organization has come to cherish.

—Robert Birkby Images and text from Boy Scouts of America Scout Stuff by Robert Birkby, DK 2011, www.dk.com. Excerpted with permission. All rights reserved.

UNBOUND

25

The merit badges of Arthur Eldred, the first Eagle Scout, include Pathfinding, Plumbing, Cycling, Civics, Gardening, Dairying, and Poultry Farming.

The Photography merit badge asked Scouts to “make a recognizable photograph of any wild bird larger than a robin, while on its nest; or a wild animal in its native haunts; or a fish in the water.� Here, a 1930s Kodak Scout Camera.

26

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Made by Kenner with the Boy Scouts of America’s approval and advertised as true-to-life” action figures, Steve and Bob Scout appeared on store shelves in 1974.

Cards of the World War II decade featured artist Norman Rockwell’s illustration of a Cub Scout, Boy Scout, and Sea Scout marching together.

UNBOUND

27

Books with strong Boy Scouts of America themes featured Tom Slade, Roy Blakely, Westy Martin, and PeeWee Harris. Tom’s books sold more than a million copies.

Tom Slade, Boy Scout “Quick, now, hand me the light and look out you don’t trip on the wires. If they once get past Westy’s house – g-o-o-dnight! Just inside the garage door there you’ll see a switch – turn it on. Here, take the lantern. If Westy don’t get this right, we’ll kill him.”

Tom, with the haziest idea of what was to be done, followed directions. It evidently had something to do with the mysterious “dot flares” and with his own mean act.

“You’ll see a book just inside the tent – paper covered – hand me that too, and come up yourself. Look out for the wires,” cautioned Roy. He opened the Scout Handbook to about the middle and laid it flat on the tower rail.

“That’s the Morse Code,” said he, “easy as eating ice cream once you get the hang of it.”

Excerpted from Tom Slade, Boy Scout

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh, first published in 1915 by Grosset and Dunlap.

28

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

I

n the early 20th century, many publishers saw America’s young people as a vast, untapped market with a small, disposable income. What followed was an era where hundreds of characters were developed and exploited in a seemingly endless stream of juvenile fiction. The paperback Dime Novels of the previous decade gave way to hardbound books that sold for 50 cents. Heroes such as Tom Swift, Dave Fearless, and The Rover Boys were all the rage. Retailers were having a hard time keeping them in stock as boys went running to the local bookseller each week to see which new “fiftycenters” had arrived. While series books aimed at youth were not new, the format of the books and the marketing approach was

groundbreaking. This latest version of the form was designed mainly to entertain, and featured stories packed with action and adventure. The recently formed Boy Scouts of America, rapidly gaining popularity across the country, provided an obvious subject matter for this emerging form of fiction. Nearly every publisher of juvenile books had some sort of Scout fiction in their catalog.

Amid this frenzy of reading was a growing concern of many parents that their youth – especially boys – were becoming over-stimulated. Image was extremely important to the Boy Scouts of America and they also viewed this trend with some concern.

“The boy’s taste is being constantly vitiated and exploited by the mass of cheap juvenile literature. To meet this grave peril, the Library Commission of the Boy Scouts is to be organized.”

– James E. West, Chief Scout Executive Percy Keese Fitzhugh was assigned by the Boy Scouts of America to write a novel [and] use it as a platform for a series of books that would be appealing to young minds, but also give an accurate picture of the Boy Scout movement.

The resulting book, released

in 1915, was Tom Slade Boy Scout of the Moving Pictures (later published as Tom Slade Boy Scout). With this novel, Fitzhugh was at the trail head of a long series of Scouting books. He had created a literary icon that would last some 16 years and include over 60 novels. Suddenly, amid the morass of boys’ books, there appeared a gem, a book which boys relished for its action and adventure, and which parents doted over because of its message of pride and honor.

From Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Boy Scout Author by Jeff Rhoads, copyright 2007 Jeff Rhoads.

Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Available from www.amazon.com. For more information on Percy Keese Fitzhugh, go to www.bridgeboro.com.

UNBOUND

29

Reading Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter is like flipping through radio stations in your car in the middle of the night in West Texas, a wash of wonderful elegiac fragments, memories, anecdotes, haunting bits and pieces of ordinary days, from Beatles’ backstories to the Eat Mor Chikin cow, from Santa Claus to baseball under the lights. A masterful performance.

– Frederick Barthelme

HEALTH The sign says that I should wash my hands for health. The doctors put them back together, my hands, as best they could. They even used some toes.

The skin is a patchwork jumble of patches of my skin from all the other parts of my body, like my mother’s quilts, the crazy kind. Who knew I was made up of such shades in color, grades of grit, like sandpaper, the differences in each tuft of hair?

I have to look at my hands now to know what they are doing. They are attached but not connected, the wiring all frayed and shorted out so that when

30

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

they move they don’t send to me, to my brain, a signal that they are moving. I have to watch them. I have to say to myself – well, not to myself but to the hands – “Look,” I am watching. Do this, do that. “Look,” they are moving.

It is hard this way to squeeze and slip the bar of soap around and around in my hands, working up a lather, bubbles. It had been so effortless, a simple task. I never thought about it before, how the fingers work together, one after the other, to get the cake of soap to spin on its own thin layer of melting.

Now, I drop it a lot.

I am in the bathtub where they found me. I put my hands in the water to search for the soap. The surface of the water cuts my hands off at the wrist and they drift beneath the surface, twitching wreckage, a sore coral reef. It is not like they can feel anymore either, that sense all whacked and warped.

I feel both the losses of my hands – the phantom limbs, as if I had lost them altogether, and the overloaded feedback of having these trumped-up hands after all. So, maybe, I am feeling too much. Feeling and feeling that feeling of how it used to feel, all that memory of what feeling felt like before. Before.

It doesn’t stop.

I can drive the combine. My new cobbled hands perch on the wheel of the big machine. It power steers. I think of them, these hands, as machines now too – all gears and guy wires, cables and sprockets. The machine I am driving takes apart the corn I am picking. The various operations of separating the grain from the cob, each kernel – cut clean and polished – collected in the bin. It happens all around me, the shutter of the massive sieves and augers, screens and belts. The combine is painted red. It’s a dumb machine, but it knows what it is doing and it does what it does effortlessly.

When I pray, and I still pray, I crash my hands together in a mangled ball.

Where did that come from? Who thought that up? Palm to palm, like that, that says you are praying. When I pray, I thank the Lord for the miracle of microsurgery and the mechanism of the whirlybird and the chemistry of soap made up of ash and fat, the leftover parts put back together to make us clean and new and better.

From Four for a Quarter by Michael Martone, The University of Alabama Press 2011, www.uapress.ua.edu. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

UNBOUND

31

short story

Darling Endangered

By Carol Guess Brooklyn Arts Press www.brooklynartspress.com

Amazing, really, the enormity of what Carol Guess accomplishes in her lyrical short fiction, as evidenced by the 169-word story “The Five Positions of the Feet.” What inspired the piece?

“As a former dancer, writing about dance challenges me to convey movement through the music of the alphabet,” Guess says. “In this very short story I tried to suggest something of classical ballet’s interplay between restraint and release, as well as the mundane context of most dancers’ daily lives.”

32

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

The Five Positions of the Feet First The lie is the line: that it can be held in the mouth or refined at the thigh.

Line is horizon, vanishing. The dancer opens his feet in first. Surely the corps can find what’s missing, the lost step, hidden? Shatter, recur. First is a book he reads over and over, backwards in mirrors and forwards onstage.

Second To be open to anything, she must move both ways at once. And never sleep.

She scatters left and right, center tight against temptation.

Third We’re halfway between bussing tables and tulle. Neither first, nor fifth, we lack precision: pedestrian burg en route to urban.

Fourth Comes the winter you call disappointment: no callbacks. Pirouettes become fouettes, but don’t spot EXIT – there’s no out.

Fifth To perfect fifth, the body’s city shuts, dropping popsicles down darkening peepholes. Shuttered and final, this window yields nothing. No one can see the armchair inside, or the spinning globe, or the mine, with its chutes and blood diamonds.

From Darling Endangered by Carol Guess, Brooklyn Arts Press 2011, www.brooklynartspress.com. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

UNBOUND

33

author

interview

CrimeWAV Books www.sethharwood.com

seth

harwood If

you take your scotch neat and your crime fiction hard-boiled, then Jack Palms is your man. The Man. A Ducati-driving, thug-busting wiseass, Palms is the creation of Seth Harwood, whose smart, tight, sonic writing and social media genius have made him a Raymond Chandler for the iPad generation. We talked to Harwood about Jack Palms, film noir, and the power of the podcast.

Shelf Unbound: How did you come up with the character of Jack Palms, and what actor would you pick to play him in a movie adaptation?

Seth Harwood: There has been a lot of discussion about this on my website, especially back when I was serializing Jack Wakes Up. Mostly people came up with Jason Statham and Bruce Willis (from back when). I could personally go either way, though I had Jason Statham in mind when I first wrote the book.

I had seen The Transporter, where he kills about 300 men with his bare hands, bare-chested and covered in crude oil for part, but had only seen him in Snatch previously. So I started to wonder: what would happen if a normal guy got cast in a brutal action movie (like a Bruce Lee or Van Damme thing) and then never did another film? How would people react to him on the street? That’s the situation Jack Palms finds himself in.

Shelf: Your hard-boiled style is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, yet thoroughly modern. What attracts you to this retro crime genre?

Harwood: I just love Chandler’s and Hammett’s work--especially The Long Goodbye and Red Harvest. When you’re talking about the crime genre (which to me encompasses mystery as well), you’ve got to go back to these two as the fathers

34

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Jackpod!

Sample free podcasts of Seth Harwood reading chapters from each of the Jack Palms novels, A Long Way from Disney, and the forthcoming In Broad Daylight by clicking on the book covers.

of the form. Since that time, so many greats have come along to help it evolve, but it started with them.

I’ve heard people talk about how subsequent generations were influenced by film noir as well as writers, and I believe it. These days, I think some of the best crime writing is happening for television: shows like Dexter and Luther now, and previously The Wire and The Sopranos. Now I get a lot of inspiration from these.

As a kid, I grew up reading comic books, watching action movies and playing every video game I could get my hands on, so I think it’s all just blended together over time. You could call me a student of the form at all its levels--the high and the low.

Shelf: You released your first novel, Jack Wakes Up, as a free audiobook and gained a large following that way. Is this approach the future of publishing?

Harwood: Great question. I don’t think any of us truly know what the future of publishing is or will be for some time. Right now it seems like eBooks and eReaders or Tablets will be with us for a while and are only going to keep taking off. But who knows?

I’m certainly pushing to release as much of my work in eBook form this year as I can. I’ve put out two Jack Palms novels and a literary story collection, Further from Disney, this fall, with another stand-alone mystery novel, In Broad Daylight, due out in January. I’ve been podcasting it since September at sethharwood.com and it’s going very well. It follows FBI agent Jess Harding as she tracks a bloody serial killer across Alaska.

I think podcasting probably isn’t the future of publishing, but for me it’s the future of publicity and marketing. I record my own high-quality audiobooks and release them on the web for a minimal cost, then make them free to download via iTunes and on my own site, sethharwood.com. This has worked out great as a way to distribute my writing, especially novels, to a wide new audience. I’ve also been having a great time doing it!

UNBOUND

35

THIS IS

LIFE J

ack walks up Bryant and around the corner to where he parked his car. He sees the now-familiar craters along the driver’s side, the three bullet holes, and puts his finger to the one on his door. Its smooth metal cradles his fingertip.

“Shit.”

He wants to get them fixed or work on them himself, but with the bald Russian out and around, the burned bed, and the shooter in his yard, he shouldn’t be cruising the city. He should be lying low.

Jack gets in and starts the Fastback, pulling his cell phone out from under the seat. It’s not time to go looking for answers; it’s time he found a place to disappear.

He takes a decent room at the St. Francis downtown, up on the sixteenth floor.

It’s not the Regis, but that suits Jack fine.

He’s coming around to the fact that the house in Sausalito might not be exactly him either.

Looking out the hotel window down onto Post Street, Jack sees the cars and the foot traffic and knows he can get used to the action of the city again.

He finds his cell phone in one of his jacket pockets and turns it back on. The familiar graphic of two friendly hands joining lights up the screen, then its song starts chiming. Jack waits for the number of messages to show and then, impatient, he calls his voicemail.

He hasn’t checked his messages or

36

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

answered his phone for six weeks. The eight messages start with calls from Mills Hopkins, then an old one from Joe Buddha asking if Jack is okay and where he is. Next he’s got a call from Victoria: not a happy one, worse than her usual annoyed tone, wanting him to call her back as soon as possible because she “really needs him for something.” He figures she called back after this but wouldn’t leave another message. Typical her: needing him but not wanting to show it too much. The truth is, Jack’s glad not to hear more from her.

The last calls are another one from Buddha and one more from Sargeant Hopkins, saying that he’s concerned about where Jack is and whether he’s all right, but that he’d know if anything happened because he’d recognize Jack’s ugly mug on any John Doe that turned up.

Hopkins ends his last message with “Shit, Jack. If you don’t give a call sometime, I’m going to have to go over to your casa and let my ass in to look around.”

Jack puts the phone on the bedside table. He made the right decision to leave it behind, but now that he’s back, he’ll have to start belonging to the city again, its game.

From This Is Life by Seth Harwood, CrimeWAV Books 2011, www.sethharwood.com.

Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE

DE CE MB ER

/JA NU AR Y

20 12

Street Photographer

Vivian Maier BOY SCOU T BOOK S

GEEK MYTHOLOGY CE R EA DS R ENA ISSA N

t publishing

68

SEPTEM

0 BER 201

xt in independen what to read ne

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

UNBOUND

37

indie:

i want my mtv

MTV Ruled the World The Early Years of Music Video

By Greg Prato

L

ong before The Osbournes and Punk’d and Jersey Shore, MTV was, well, MTV—Music Television, emphasis on the music. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the channel’s launch, Greg Prato explores its early heyday with a collection of interviews with the executives and bands who were part of the cultural revolution that was MTV.

Greg Prato www.lulu.com/spotlight/gregprato

[

38

Click here for more information or to purchase from Lulu.com

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

]

Shelf Unbound: You call 1981-85 the “golden years of MTV.” What videos stand out for you as the best from this period?

Greg Prato: The best would include: Men at Work’s “Who Can It Be Now,” “Down Under,” and “Be Good Johnny.” All three videos showed off the group’s sense of humor, and proved that you didn’t have to take yourself too seriously in the video making world (something that unfortunately, not a lot of other artists would pick up on, as videos got more and more over-thetop and bombastic as the decade went on).

The Police’s “Spirits in the Material World” and “Every Breath You Take.” When I interviewed original MTV VJ Alan Hunter for the book, he had a great quote about the “Spirits” video—“To me, the ‘Spirits in the Material World’ video played at 2:00 in the morning really provided the kind of atmosphere that almost made MTV hallucinogenic in that first year. Coming in from a night on the town, to hear that song, and those chords in the beginning, kind of gave me chills.” And “Every Breath” because of its striking visuals (courtesy of directors Godley and Creme).

Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Thriller.”

Up until Michael Jackson, for whatever reason, MTV was not playing very many black artists. But that all changed with the arrival of these three classic videos, which kicked off “the dance craze” in videos (meaning having a mandatory choreographed dance scene) and also sinking

serious dough into making videos, and trying to make them come off like mini-movies … for better or for worse.

Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” Def Leppard’s “Photograph,” and Quiet Riot’s “Metal Health.” Heavy metal up until this point had a dark and sinister image associated with it. With these three videos in particular, heavy metal crossed over and reached the masses and showed that, surprisingly, the genre could have an undeniable melodic side (and in Def Leppard and Quiet Riot’s case, that heavy metal musicians could be “cute,” to boot!).

Shelf: I think everyone of a certain age remembers how revolutionary MTV was at the time. What was your first MTV experience like for you?

Prato: Up until my town got MTV (the summer of 1982), rock radio made absolutely no sense to yours truly. Up until that point, the only rock bands I was familiar with were Kiss and Queen. I’d read about bands like Led Zeppelin, the Ramones, and Van Halen, but each time I tried to find them on the radio, all I seemed to get was commercials or some lame/bland stuff. Once I started watching MTV, suddenly everything started to come into focus and make more sense from a musical standpoint.

Shelf: Would Madonna have become Madonna without MTV? Prato: Absolutely not. Madonna’s look and fashion sense was every bit as important as the music (in fact, some would say even more important). And to Madonna’s credit, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing (in a calculated way), as each subsequent video caused a greater splash than the previous one.

PHOTOS: COURTESY MTV

Shelf: Your pick for best music video from the golden years?

Worst video?

Prato: I’m going to be bold and say that the best video was also the worst video. Of course, I’m talking about Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonite.” If you’re unfamiliar with this amazingly mesmerizing video, you really owe it to yourself to go to YouTube pronto [click here to watch the video]. It’s often pointed to as the video that killed Mr. Squier’s career dead in its tracks (you’ll understand why after you see it). But like a car accident on a highway, you just can’t help but stop and stare at it. Over and over. And over. And over.

UNBOUND

39

indie:

snapshot

One Small Sacrifice Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

By Trace A. DeMeyer Trace A. DeMeyer | www.bluehandbooks.com

I

’m a fly on the wall, one who listens, the observer of the absurd, and a young girl wearing braids. That’s me standing in front of an Ojibwe wigwam with my adoptive mother Edie and my adopted brother Joey. I’m the only Indian in this family. It was 1969. I’m 12 and the family is attending the famous Lumberjack Festival in Hayward, Wisconsin. Back then life was about mystery. I knew little to nothing about being adopted or Indian, just that I was.

My Irish blood advised tell your whole story. The Indian in my heart cautioned me to stay balanced, humble. Shame tried to interfere and told me to keep quiet. I took my old humiliations and used them like keys. I open up my life like a can of worms.

From One Small Sacrifice by Trace A. DeMeyer, Trace A. DeMeyer 2010, www. bluehandbooks.com. Blue Hand Books is a new collective publishing ebooks by Native American authors.

The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox

By Lisa Louise Cooke Genealogy Gems Publications | www.genealogygems.com

I

n The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox, Lisa Louise Cooke, host of the Genealogy Gems podcast, details free methods for researching your ancestors online. How’d Cooke get started? “My interest in genealogy first surfaced when I was about 10 years old,” she says. “I remember sitting on the floor at my grandparents house looking through old dusty black scrapbooks I found on the bottom shelf of a book case. Inside were sepia tone photos of people I didn’t recognize. I brought one out to my wonderful Grandma, who was working in the kitchen, and she smiled and threw the dishtowel over her shoulder and said, “Well, let’s sit down and talk about it.” And for the next few hours she told me stories of her German parents making the journey to America in 1910 and introduced me to them through the pages of photographs. I was riveted and hooked, and it’s been a life long passion to “meet” more of my ancestors and help introduce others to theirs.”

The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox by Lisa Louise Cooke, Genealogy Gems Publications 2011, www.genealogygems.com. Listen to The Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 81 featuring Cooke’s interview with Lisa Kudrow of Who Do You Think You Are? here: http://www.genealogygemspodcast.com/webpage/episode_81_lisa_kudrow_is_on_the_podcast_who_do_you_think_you_are_ 40

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

In this most gently human of memoirs, Sternbach traces the connections — romantic kisses to pecks on the cheek — that have defined her life so far.

“A memorable, laugh-out-loud, cry-out-loud essay collection for both genders and all ages.”

— Kirkus Reviews “Flawless pitch and balance. Guileless, unaffected writing. A book club’s dream date.

I loved this perfect little opal earring of a book.”

— Joni Rodgers

Available in April

When a young woman goes missing, a professional searcher with uncanny empathetic skill works heroically to find her.

“YOU BELIEVERS examines the anatomy of a horrific crime from every angle: the victim, the perpetrator, the family members left behind, and the tenacious searcher whose job it is to bring closure ... a strong song of love, loss and human resilience.

A gripping, intense read.”

— Jodi Picoult, author of House Rules Read more at unbridledbooks.com

Available in May

Unbridled U N B O U N D 41 Books

poetry

Our Great Aunts & Uncles Are Photographs

by Michael Robins

LADIES &GENTLEMEN

If it’s true that families assemble, trial & error of guesswork & string hung onto air, you soon find a pitcher finished by lemonade, by oxygen, your child of the summers hereafter.

Bird in a cage not yet, simply a house you remember drifting inland, lanterns mirrored in the harbor like a garden.

Mirror in a bedroom, simply the years like a sheet, children erased one by one

POEMS BY MICHAEL ROBINS

& filled with water. Beyond an entry they float on the wall of the gallery, horizon & sea, the words slung loosely as if a diver’s cloth on an empty beach.

From Ladies & Gentlemen by Michael Robins, Saturnalia Books 2011, www.saturnaliabooks.com. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

42

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Leave us then gently like a kite, picture of grace they no longer wish to climb.

poetry Ice Storm

by Sarah Gorham

Hear it fall, laughter from a train.

Under the transparent tapping, crawl into a hollow sleep. First comes a dream of cocktail banter. Then crazy clappers in a grange hall.

It makes her sad, this uncalled for enthusiasm. Answers unlink and veer from their questions.

Deer blink under the dangerous wires.

Now is not the time to hope in the smoke of night, in deep dying boughs. She cannot feel her hands nor find her serious throat.

From Bad Daughter by Sarah Gorham, Four Way Books 2011, www.fourwaybooks.com. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

UNBOUND

43

best

of the book blogs

The Playgroup

by Elizabeth Mosier Gemma Media www.gemmamedia.com

A

bout halfway through Elizabeth Mosier’s The Playgroup, the narrator describes the struggle involved in turning the events of real life into fiction: “What intrigued me was reality: Sarah’s guilt over her brother’s death, Linda’s postpartum depression, Bryn given up for adoption, Maggie’s son found blue and still in his bassinet. Was it even possible, I wondered, to capture their losses in words?” Fittingly, it’s Mosier’s own gift for turning such losses into a sense of yearning that makes this work of fiction so compelling. Her characters are a handful of mothers whose uncertainty and ambivalence about motherhood is rivaled only by the pressure they feel to put on their best happy faces and pretend for the world that they know exactly what they’re doing at all times. Yet when a member of the group learns that the child she’s carrying may have developed a cancerous mass, the facade of perfection becomes almost impossible to sustain. The resulting crisis forces the members of the group to take stock of their lives and to come to terms, each in her own way, with the myth of the perfect mother.

The Playgroup is one of several titles in Gemma Media’s new Open Door series, a line of books designed to promote adult literacy.

Participating in this endeavor, Mosier is in good company. Other Open Door authors include Roddy Doyle, Nick Hornby, and Maeve Binchy. While the narratives are short and the prose straightforward, the subject matter and themes of these works offer much to consider.

—Marc Schuster, www.marcschuster.com

44

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

The Killer is Dying

by James Sallis Walker & Company www.walkerbooks.com

J

ames Sallis is no ordinary crime writer.

Aside from crime writing, he has produced poetry collections, biographies, and books on musicology. It is perhaps no surprise then, that The Killer is Dying is no ordinary crime novel.

Elements of the plot are typical enough; a terminally ill contract killer works his final job, pursued by a dogged but despairing detective. This is no bog-standard binary conflict though; a third party, a young boy named Jimmie, is haunted by the contract killer’s dreams. The three never meet, but Sallis weaves the three threads into a lonely but beautiful tapestry.

All three characters make fascinating reading.

Sayles, the detective, is distraught by the physical decay besetting his wife. As she herself edges closer to death, she chooses to flee from her husband rather than ask him to endure. Professionally, he enjoys a relationship with his partner which is compassionate, founded on a deep respect, but which never spills over into the spoken word. Their lack of candor only adds to their loneliness.

That sense of isolation is felt most strongly through Jimmie. Jimmie is a young boy literally abandoned by his parents. Rather than throw himself on the mercy of fate and the authorities, he sets about providing for himself, desperately concealing his predicament from the neighbors and society at large.

Despite the complexity of Jimmie, Christian and Sayles, this is no mere character study. Instead, The Killer is Dying is more of a meditation on death and alienation. Through pithy observations such as “change was the law, the only law that always applied,” and through his distanced, almost dispassionate prose, Sallis creates a work of staggering pathos.

—Mike Stafford, www.bookgeeks.co.uk UNBOUND

45

46

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2011

on our shelf

A MEANING FOR WIFE

A

EVERY THIRD THOUGHT

N

ational Book Award winner John Barth’s latest is a metafictional whirlwind, with 77-year-old George I. Newett writing and screwing and thinking about writing and screwing while on a European cruise with his delightful and equally erudite wife. The novel unfolds around a series of coincidences and a series of five flashback visions recalling and revealing Newett’s life. Every Third Thought is bawdy, idiosyncratic, and relentlessly creative, from start (“Clearing George I. Newett’s Narrative Throat”) to finish (“our story’s done”).

—Anna Nair Every Third Thought by John Barth, Counterpoint Press 2011, www.counterpointpress.com.

young widower travels home with his toddler son to his parents’ home and his high school reunion in poet Mark Yakich’s debut novel. The author’s use of the second person is effective here, as the narrator is at a distance from his own emotions and grief, only bumping up against them as he looks at his high school yearbook, interacts with his schizophrenic father, and awkwardly navigates the drunken whirl of his reunion. At times humorous, at times touching, A Meaning for Wife is a short book with punch. —Ben Minton A Meaning for Wife by Mark Yakich, Ig Publishing 2011, www.igpub.com.

KARAOKE CULTURE

I

n a series of essays, Dubravka Ugresic (born in the former Yugoslavia and now living in Amsterdam) takes sharp, wry aim at the tendency of modern culture, both pop and political, to create blithe conformists. In the Internet age, “the anonymous participant derives pleasure and gets his kicks by simply getting to be ‘someone else, somewhere else,’” she asserts. David Williams, who translated the book from the Croation, describes the essays as “new postcards sent from a space both inside and outside the global village.”

Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by David Williams, Open Letter 2011, www.openletterbooks.org.

UNBOUND

47

48

SEPTEMBER 2010

book club find

Exit

By Nelly Arcan Anvil Press www.anvilpress.com

I

t is impossible to read Nelly Arcan’s Exit without considering throughout that the author committed suicide at age 36 a few days after completing it. When the narrator, Antoinette, describes the depth of her suffering, it is impossible not to reel from the blow of Arcan’s own pain. The book was written in French and recently published in English by Anvil Press.

The English translator, David Scott Hamilton, was kind enough to shed some light on Exit and Nelly Arcan.

Shelf Unbound: How did you discover Paradis, clef en main?

David Scott Hamilton: I bought the book completely by chance from a bookstore in downtown Vancouver in the late autumn of 2009, only a month after it was published in Quebec. Prior to that, I had never encountered Nelly Arcan’s writing, but based on the recommendation of the bookseller, Marc Fournier, I realized that it was an important book. The shock of Nelly Arcan’s suicide in September of that year was still reverberating in the Quebec media, but much less so in English Canada.

Shelf: What do you think of Arcan’s decision to have Antoinette decide to live, while she herself decided to die?

Hamilton: There are so many paradoxes that arise out of the intersection of Arcan’s life and her writing. She was a woman who decried the Beauty Myth with all her force and yet, a public personality who rivaled Marilyn Monroe in the manipulation of her hyper-sexualized image.

It is important to remember that Arcan clearly stated that she intended Paradis, clef en main to be a “hymn to life.” I think she was writing towards that aspiration. Unfortunately, she was also painfully annotating the powerful forces that can pull someone in the opposite direction.

Shelf Unbound named Exit a Top 10 Book of 2011; for the entire list, click here: www. shelfmediagroup.com/blog.

UNBOUND

49

The Butcher’s Boy A Paranormal Chiller by best-selling author Michael Robb

Not everyone is who they seem: even the DEAD.

“Keeps you on the edge of your seat.” —Books: Treasure or Trash “A suspenseful page-turner.” —ForeWord Clarion Review A “R EA DERS FAVOR ITE” 2011 F INA L IST 50

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

Available at w w w.amazon.com

featured

bookstore

PARNASSUS BOOKS NASHVILLE, TN

I

f stranded on a desert island, I would hope that The Geniuses would have by that time invented a solar-powered e-reader. If not, I would happily settle for a copy of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto.

If that wondrous book alone isn’t enough reason to love Ann Patchett, here’s another: She’s just opened an indie bookstore in her home town of Nashville. Here she tells Shelf Unbound why: “I write books for a living and certainly my career was made by the support of small, independent booksellers who took the time to read the books and know which customers to hand them to. I want stores like that both for the future of PATCHETT my own writing and for young authors who are just coming up,” says Patchett. “Also, there’s an element of nostalgia involved: I grew up going to Mills, Nashville’s long ago and very tiny independent, and life seemed better when there was a small store of thoughtfully chosen books to go to. I knew the people who worked there and they knew me. We talked about books. I long for that now, and if I have the ability to re-create that experience for my community, then why not?”

Store co-owner Karen Hayes adds, “there is still a huge market for the printed book and it is not going away anytime soon. When people hear that Amazon sales for digital books are now outpacing HAYES printed books they think that represents the entire book market. That is not true, and even if it was at 50 percent for the entire market, that is still a lot of people reading printed books.”

Their bookstore, Parnassus, opened in November and is located in Green Hills in southwest Nashville. “We will carry the best books in literature, non-fiction, children’s books, local interest, and the arts,” says Hayes. “Mt. Parnassus in Greek mythology is the home of literature, learning and music. We will be Nashville’s Parnassus by providing a refuge for Nashvillians of all ages who share in the love of the written word.”

UNBOUND

51

PHOTO OP

“

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

”

—from Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

52

DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012

december/january SARAH GORHAM is a poet, essayist, and publisher who resides in Prospect KY. She was born in Santa Monica, California in 1954. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1978 and her BA in 1976 from Antioch College. Gorham’s poems have been published widely in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, DoubleTake, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, where she won the Carolyn Kizer Award.

CAROL GUESS is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, as well as three forthcoming collections: Doll Studies: Forensics, Willful Machine, and My Father In Water. She is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her at: www.carolguess. blogspot.com.

SETH HARWOOD grew up in Cambridge and the Boston area and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2002. His latest novel, Young Junius, is now available from Tyrus Books. It is billed as “The Wire meets Cambridge, MA in 1987” and was picked by George Pelecanos as one of his best books of 2010.

Seth lives in San Francisco where he teaches English and creative writing at Stanford and the City College of San Francisco. He can be contacted by email at seth@ sethharwood.com and on Twitter (@sethharwood).

MICHAEL MARTONE is a Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Alabama.

He is the author of several books including The Blue Guide to Indiana and Michael Martone.

contributors

MICHAEL ROBINS is the author of Ladies & Gentlemen (Saturnalia Books, 2011), the chapbook Circus (Flying Guillotine, 2009), and The Next Settlement (UNT Press, 2007), which received the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.

Born in Portland, Oregon, he teaches poetry and literature at Columbia College Chicago.

LESLIE SIMON lives in Los Angeles, isn’t a fan of hot weather, and loves her parents, Gilmore Girls and French bulldog puppies. She’s the author of Wish You Were Here: An Essential Guide To Your Favorite Music Scenes and co-author of Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture. She is currently the Senior Creative Director at Warner Bros. Records.

THOMAS STEINBECK began his career as a combat photographer in Vietnam. Along with his writing and producing obligations, Steinbeck is in demand as a public speaker where he lectures on numerous subjects, particularly history and literature as they relate to current events. He is the author of Down to a Soundless Sea and In the Shadow of the Cypress. He has written numerous original screenplays and documentaries, as well as adaptations of his father’s work.

Shelf Unbound is published bimonthly by Shelf Media Group LLC, P.O. Box 601695, Dallas, TX 75360. Copyright 2011

by Shelf Media Group LLC. Subscriptions are FREE, go to www.shelfmediagroup.com to subscribe.

ANDREW PETTEGREE is a British historian and one of the leading experts on Europe during the Reformation. He currently holds a professorship at St. Andrews University where he is the director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project. He is also the founding director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute.

GREG PRATO is a Long Island, New York—based journalist whose writing has appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone, All Music Guide, and Classic Rock Magazine. He is the author of several books, including A Devil on One Shoulder and an Angel on the Other: The Story of Shannon Hoon and Blind Melon, Touched by Magic: The Tommy Bolin Story, and Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music.

what to read next in independent publishing