The Written Nerd

Happy holiday Monday, everyone (unless you work in retail, of course). I'm taking the day off from blogging and ceding book review duties to everyone's favorite, the ALP. * * * Back when I was in high school, I somehow stumbled across the Black Lizard edition of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet . I don't know how I came across it. I may have thought the book was about vampires or something. Anyway, back then, most of the Black Lizard books had a uniform look: a blurry black and white cover photo with bars of vivid color criss-crossing the photo. The covers had a matte finish that gave them a pleasingly thick and slightly pebbled feel, like really high-quality old paper. The look was distinct and badass. It had a lurid and pulpy edge, appropriate to the contents, but the quality of presentation also suggested something lasting and enduring. As physical objects, these books were a perfect manifestation of the publisher's philosophy that these unjustly neglected ge...

Greetings literature lovers. The ALP here with some dispatches from that other pile of books on the purely metaphorical nightstand. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that Book Nerd, within her "About Me" sidebar section, claims that I read everything she doesn't. Here's what Book Nerd hasn't read recently. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race , by Richard Rhodes With his Pulitzer-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb and his 1995 follow up, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb , Rhodes pretty much staked out the nuclear era as his personal stomping ground. In his latest, Arsenals of Folly , he moves from the dawn of the Cold War Era into the lingering last days of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the end of the arms race. Where Atomic played like a tragic Promethean foundation myth and Dark Sun was steeped in the shadowy cloak and dagger paranoia of the early Cold War, Arsenals reads like a grotesque farce. Late in the E...

I'm still on August hiatus, but my friend Dan Wickett, creator of Emerging Writers Network and publisher of Dzanc Books , called in a favor for today's Best of the Web Day. I'm proud to join many other litblogs in featuring con tent related to Dzanc's awesome anthology Best of the Web 2008 , which you should run out and buy from your local indie bookstore as soon as possible. Thanks to Dan for creating this, and to Sarah Sweeney for contributing this piece. Sarah Sweeney's essay, "Tell Me If You're Lying", originally appeared in Fringe and was re-printed in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2008. The following is her thoughts on how living in the North affects her writing. DRIVING DIXIE DOWN: A Writer’s Life Beyond the South Growing up in North Carolina, I spent many hours and years dreaming about what lay beyond my humble state, the state I was born in, and the state that reared me in so many ways. From the time I could read and write I wanted to b...

Welcome home from Winter Institute, booksellers! From all I've heard already, this year in Louisville was just as invigorating a session as last year in Portland. Here's where you can find out more: The lovely Lori Kauffman of Brookline Booksmith was live blogging from WI3 on her blog, Brookline Blogsmith ; check it out for some impressions of Danny Meyer's opening presentation on hospitality vs. service, Gary Hirschberg's bit on saving the world while making a living, some bookseller/librarian conspiring, and Lori's pick of the galleys. And I suspect there's more to come -- the intensity of the programming can make it impossible to find time to blog, so sometimes it's all about the recap afterward. Dan Cullen of the ABA was also live blogging on the ABA blog, Omnibus , and has posted exhaustive coverage of the whole thing, Thursday to Saturday, plus lots of pictures. Dan humbly admits the difficulty of finding time or a single perspective on a weekend ...

Carolyn Bennett is one of my favorite people in the book industry. She's a sales rep at BookStream , a youngish independent wholesaler (and sends out their great e-newsletter), and works part time at Oblong Books in upstate New York. She also belongs to a wonderful bookselling family: her sister Whitney works for HarperCollins, and her parents John and Betty Bennett are the proprietors of Bennett Books in Wyckoff, New Jersey. I've been lucky to get to know both John and Betty through NAIBA, and they're some of my bookselling role models. Last week, Carolyn told me Bennett Books has made the decision to close at the end of September. The closing of an indie bookstore is always a hard thing to grapple with, and I think Carolyn's own words do it better than mine could. The following is also published in today's Shelf Awareness and on Carolyn's blog . Epilogue: Nineteen Years Later Back in 1988, my ten-year-old heart burst with a secret. My parents were goin...