With bleak economic news everywhere Nashvillians turn, it’s been a fun distraction for the gold-diggers who are hunting for the gold coin in the Nashville Treasure Hunt sponsored by Cashville Gold & Silver Buyers.
It seems that gold is the only commodity that keeps going up in value these days. And there is a 1/2 ounce gold coin at stake in this treasure hunt. Although the winner gets the choice of keeping the gold coin or selling it back to Cashville Gold & Silver Buyers it will be interesting to see if the person who finds it will decide to sell it back for $500 immediately or hang on to it as gold prices increase.
This is Clue #2 (for more information on rules and future clues, visit www.cashvillegold.com):
Bet you got some exercise on the bridge.
We hope you enjoyed the view;
for what you saw is the next clue.
We couldn’t put it there it would be impolite;
there are a lot of people that are afraid of heights.
So we had to pick a side: east or west,
for the gold which one do you think is best?
As the economy continues to implode and family discussions turn to new ways to celebrate Christmas this year in a more thoughtful and less commercial way, libraries across the country are seeing steep increases in traffic. According to a Sept. 1, 2008 article by AP, there have been 1.3 billion visits to US libraries with 2 billion items checked-out from summer 2007 to summer 2008 — there has been a 10% increase in use of libraries compared with 2001, the last time that there was a significant spike in use.
Not only are libraries resources for checking out hours of free entertainment — books, CDs, DVDs — but also some are addressing the issues facing folks in these uncertain times by providing seminars such as the ones offered in The Queens Library (the system with the highest rates of check out in the country) — helping people facing foreclosure.
Although local community budget squeezes may affect libraries adversely, this could be a golden opportunity for families to re-discover their local resources during the suddenly popular “staycations.”
(tourairstream.com cartoon)
Stephen Usery interviewing Helen Hemphill on Oct. 6, 2008 in the WYPL studios
In the ever-shrinking world of book reviews on air and in print, there is one very refreshing exception. The excellent Book Talk program on WYPL has been expanded from a 30 minute show to a full hour on Saturdays.
More NPR stations should consider picking this program up for their own market area. People who listen to NPR tend to be voracious readers and we miss and mourn the loss of our local literary programs on NPR. Until other NPR markets do pick this up, the rest of us can enjoy the podcasts at: Book Talk.
Stephen Usery is the Producer and hosts/interviews about 40% of the time. The man is so intelligent and thoughtful in preparing for his interviews, that it’s valuable to take the time to hear his visits with authors, especially when you are considering reading a book or want to know more about a book after you’ve read it.
Some of his podcasts you might want to check out include:
David Wroblewski,: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Laurie Notaro - one of the funniest authors on earth
Helen Hemphill’s will be on line in November discussing The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones
M.L. Rose - Linda Weeks will be on-line soon discussing The Road to Eden’s Ridge
Helen Hemphill with Cowboy Mike (Professor Michael N. Searles, August State University) at the Wester Writers of America Book on the SIBA exhibition floor. Wanda Jewell, Executive Director, and Nicki Leone deserve real kudos for a terrific event for authors, publishers and booksellers to come together in Mobile, AL for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance meeting Sept. 26 -28. It was the first time I had the opportunity to attend and it was overwhelmingly helpful and delightful. Finally meeting Wanda and Nicki person was fun after exchanging emails and voice mails for the past year. Helen Hemphill, author of The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones, and I enjoyed every minute of the 3 days. Each meal was a good time to get to know booksellers (some of the nicest and most committed people in the world!) from around the South and to hear delightful presentations by authors launching books. At the Friday morning breakfast everyone was presented with their own business books by Bo Burlingham, The Knack and Small Giants. The Gen Z Reader: understanding the New Reader in the Post Electronic Age panel was enlightening. Kristen McLean, Executive Director of Booksellers for Children (ABC) provided insight that was helpful to Helen and me and then she stayed on to listen in on Helen’s panel, Reaching the New Reader with Young Adult Authors panel. Lois Ruby, author of The Secret of Laurel Oaks and Kristin Cashor, author of Graceling joined Helen Hemphill on the panel. Lunch featured presentations by T. A. Barron, Merlin’s Dragon; Bailgarrad - who is funny, smart and entertaining and other accomplished authors (alas, we did not get to stay for their presentations, though) - Rick Bragg (expected to be a crowd favorite this week-end at Southern Festival of Books in Nashville) and Sarah Addison Allen. The supper on Friday night was delicious (rare steak! First time in years I was at a banquet that had steak that tasted good - not like leather!). We had to run to the hotel’s business center (where the flat screen tvs were without having to listen to live music) to watch the presidential debate with Angie Smits, VP at Southern Territory, and lots of others. Everyone was most polite in not whooping or hollering for their favorite candidate. Other highlights included the Fire & Brimstone SIBA BBQ on Saturday night hosted by Turner Publishing and Chelsea Green. Todd Bottorff, President and Publisher of Turner Publishing, did a clever Q&A with Frank Durham, author of Cain’s Version: A Novel. The next day I heard the people who attended saying that they hope the BBQ will become a tradition. The best short road-trip of the week-end was Helen’s signing at Page & Palette, the wonderful bookstore in Fairhope, AL (my new favorite town) owned by Karin Wilson, President of SIBA.
Some of our friends with whom we shared a meal or a chat in line, who are the delightful, bright and committed booksellers throughout the South own these shops: FoxTale Book Shoppe, Bookin It!, Country Bookshop, Paper Chase Bookstore, ABDebs Books & Gifts, Eagle Eye Book Shop, Park Road Books Carpe Librum and Sherlocks to name just a few.
Cashville Gold & Silver Buyers has posted the first clue for the new Nashville Treasure Hunt the company is again sponsoring.
Once again, a faux gold coin is hidden somewhere (check the rules on the company website - www.cashvillegold.com) in Nashville. The person who finds it and brings it to Jerry and Josh Levine at Cashville Gold & Silver Buyers will be given a 1/2 ounce genuine gold coin. The winner can keep the coin or sell it back to Cashville for the market value that day.
You probably saw the article in The Tennessean by Nicole Young about the winners of the last treasure hunt and the clue for this new hunt…if not….
Here it is — the 1st clue (for additional clues, check www.cashvillegold.com treasure page):
We loved the bridge! It was such a great place
To hide the gold, to create a race!
This next location will stretch from shore to shore,
linking Nashvillians like never before.
While you’re out looking for gold, getting hit by traffic should not be possible
but if you do….remember Cashville is not responsible!
Happy hunting!
Helen Hemphill, author of The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones, and I are off to Mobile, AL in the morning for the Fall SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) event at the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel . I’ve heard from a bunch of folks who are looking forward to it as much as we are. Facebook has been humming with anticipation.
Helen Hemphill will be presenting Friday 11:00 - 11:50 AM in Mobile Bay 1: “Reaching the New Reader with Young Adult Authors.” Joining her on the panel will be Lois Ruby, author of The Secret of Laurel Oaks, and Kristen Cashore, author of Graceling.
Saturday night promises to be a rolicking good time with the Fire & Brimstone SIBA BBQ in the West Ballroom featuring Diane Wilson, author of Holy Roller, and Frank Durham, author of Cain’s Version. Chelsea Green and Turner Publishing are sponsors. And I’ll be providing the party favors for guests at the end of the evening.
If you’re there please come to Helen’s session on Friday, or visit us at her signing on Sunday 10:00 - 11:00 AM. Helen’s got some fun goodies to give away to those who come by and — as Prometheus Jones and the young cowboys in her book might say — “howdy partner!”
Wanda and Nicki have been working tirelessly for months (I know, because I do special event execution and it’s tough!), so that I know it’s going to be a worthwhile, interesting and fun week-end for all -500 Southeastern booksellers and around 1500 book editors, publishers, authors, and other industry professionals!
How many people had recommended The Legal Limit by Martin Clark (Random House, July 8, 2008)? I’ve lost count. I should send each a hand-written thank you note.
Clark, a circuit court judge in Stuart, VA, is “the thinking man’s John Grisham” according to The New York Times for good reason.
A murder cover-up that involves two brothers who have chosen very different paths despite a horrendous shared childhood, grabs the reader from page one. The moral dilemmas presented give the title The Legal Limit double entendre. The twists and turns in the plot are quite satisfying.
I have to confess that while reading the book the only breaks I took were to head to Martin Clark’s website and Virginia newspaper archives to try to figure out which portions of the book were ripped directly from his experience as a judge and which were probably inspired by real-life events but could safely be construed as fiction. At the beginning of the book the author plainly states that there are true, or at least truths woven into the novel. I bring this up because in the last few pages, it becomes obvious which character Martin is in the book.
Catalog Copy for the book:
Martin Clark’s most remarkable novel yet is the gripping, complex story
of a murder cover-up that wreaks widespread havoc even as it redefines
the concept of justice—a relentlessly entertaining saga that delves
deeply into matters at once ambiguous and essential.
While Gates
Hunt chose to fight his abusive father head-on, his younger brother,
Mason, eventually escaped their bitter, impoverished circumstances by
earning a free ride to college and law school. And while Gates became
an intransigent, compulsive felon, Mason met and married the love of
his life, had a spitfire daughter, and returned to his rural hometown
as the commonwealth’s attorney. But Mason’s idyll is abruptly pierced
by a wicked tragedy, and soon afterward his life further unravels when
Gates, convinced that his brother’s legal influence should spring him
from prison, attempts to force his cooperation by means of a secret
they’d both sworn to take with them to the grave. And with his closest
friend and staunch ally suddenly threatened by secrets of his own,
Mason ultimately finds himself facing complete ruin and desperately
defending everything and everyone he holds dear.
Intricately plotted and shot through with authenticity, The Legal Limit
is a roller coaster of moral relevance. What should govern our actions
when family loyalty challenges personal integrity, when the letter of
the law defies its spirit, and when fate plays dice with our best
endeavors?
I loved this book.
That Bookstore in Blytheville turned 32 on Saturday, or at least that’s when we all converged on Mary Gay Shipley and her wonderful ladies at the store.
Susan Gregg Gilmore and I enjoyed all the festivities and hustle and bustle of a bursting-to-the-seams party — everyone came out to indulge in a fabulous cake (baked by the brand new Cake Shop that opened in the Historic Downtown District of Blytheville this week), ice cream, books, books and more books! A special treat was a reading by Myra McLarey & Linda Weeks, co-authors under the pseudonym M.L. Rose, of their newly released soft cover The Road To Eden’s Ridge. No doubt that Tennessee was well-represented in Blytheville that day!
Since I was chatting and browsing the shelves toward the front of the store, I completely missed taking photos of the huge cake toward the back that was decorated as a stack of books. But, below are some photos I did snap.
L-R: Myra McLarey (Nashville), Susan Gregg Gilmore (Nashville), and Linda Weeks (Ripley, TN) after the reading
L-R:Mary Gay Shipley (sitting on one of her famous author chairs signed by John Grisham and others), Susan Gregg Gilmore and Cathy Mosley
While I was in the store I noticed that far from sitting on their laurels, Mary Gay and her team have a FULL schedule of events for fall with posters everywhere of famous authors and personalities who will be popping in over the next two months! Check it out.
For the better part of three days the fine folks of North Little Rock, AR showed Susan Gregg Gilmore and me a delightful time!
Kaye Richardson, a terrific lady who manages to cram more work and play into a day than most anyone I’ve ever met, invited us to her hometown for a series of events she organized.
Susan spoke to the Have Books Will Travel Book Club — a group of women who are smart, funny and make a mean Italian dinner! Kaye (a voracious reader who has posted more than 600 reviews on Goodreads) and the group presented both of us with our own personalized over-sized coffee cups to commemorate the evening. Kaye had candles made with the Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen book cover photo for everyone attending that evening.
She organized 5 classes at Northwood Middle School where she is a counselor to sit in on 3 presentations by Susan. Two groups of teachers gathered for presentations during a lovely luncheon in Susan’s honor. And a reporter attended and took such great notes and photos that I know a good article is coming! Kaye and the faculty presented us with more gifts!
Susan and I agreed as we drove out of town on Saturday morning that on top of everything else wonderful that happened during our visit, Kaye and her husband, Larry, introduced us to a little local restaurant that makes about the best fajitas we’ve ever had!
If I had a nickel for every time that an author has confided in me that he or she has been asked to blurb a book — write a nice sentence or two for an aquaintance or as a favor to another person in the book publishing industry — but that (s)he read the book and come up empty-handed — nothing positive to say — I wouldn’t be rich, but I could buy myself a nice dinner.
Hurt feelings? You bet! And all the while, the unsuspecting browser in the bookstore is blissfully unaware that there is such high drama in the literary world surrounding the adjectives and exclamation points inside quotation marks on the book cover they are purusing. Maybe also unaware that it’s a feather in the cap of one author to be “blurbing” another on the cover of their new book — you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours…what great PR to have your name, as an author, on the cover of another author’s book! Of course, does it matter if neither author is well known?
Rachel Donadio wrote a fascinating piece on this very subject in the New York Times (see below)
He Blurbed, She Blurbed
A new company recently emerged on the publishing scene, offering writers the chance to buy and sell book endorsements. Aimed at self-published authors, Blurbings LLC traffics in “blurbs,” the often hyperbolic declamations on book covers alerting readers that they’re holding the greatest single work of literature since the Bible — or perhaps since “The Da Vinci Code.”
At least one writer was so affronted by the idea of blurbs for cash that he complained to the Authors Guild. But the more jaundiced might say that asking one unknown writer to endorse another unknown writer hardly helps to make one of those writers known. Besides, some might argue, what the company appears to have done is simply put a price — starting at $19.95 for 10 blurbs — on the logrolling and back-scratching that have long marked the process by which mainstream publishers or agents ask authors to blurb a book.
Caveat lector! The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith. There’s some debate about whether blurbs actually help sell books, but publishers agree they can’t hurt. Often, agents try to solicit blurbs even before a publisher buys a book.
Some don’t think the effort is worth it. “I wish, and I think most editors would agree, that we should impose a moratorium on blurb-hunting,” Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, said in an e-mail message. “It has become more about running to stay in place than about getting ahead.” Besides, Simonoff added, “there is a yawning gap between the obligatory blurb (‘This is a fine debut novel’) and the over-the-top selling blurb (‘Good God! Drop everything and read this book now!’). The former is merely window dressing … the latter a legitimate path to sales, but all too rare.”
For writers, to blurb or not to blurb can be a tricky matter. Blurb too little and you’ll have a hard time drumming up the requisite superlatives when your turn comes. Blurb too often, or include too many blurbs on your book, and you might get called a blurb whore. The essayist David Rakoff said a plug from David Sedaris — declaring that Rakoff had managed to “successfully pass himself off as the wittiest and most perceptive man in the world” — helped his book “Fraud” get attention. “But it can just as easily backfire,” Rakoff said in an e-mail message. “If it looks like you’re too much of an insider, have too-fancy friends, etc., that can unleash the bloggerati and your backlash begins before they’ve even shipped your work to the stores.”
Sometimes a blurb is news. The reclusive Thomas Pynchon seems to elicit excitement each time he breaks his public silence, as he has by endorsing, among others, “The Testament of Yves Gundron” (1999), the first novel by Emily Barton; Jim Knipfel’s memoir “Slackjaw” (1999); and “The Restraint of Beasts” (1998), a Booker-nominated novel by Magnus Mills, which he called “a demented, deadpan-comic wonder.” (Pynchon has also written the liner notes for “Nobody’s Cool,” the second album by the alt-rock band Lotion.) Recently, Post Road magazine published Pynchon’s collected blurbs from the years 1966 to 2003 — more than two dozen in all.
The South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee rarely grants interviews and shies away from the press, but on the backs of books he’s positively loquacious. Coetzee called “The Secret Scripture,” by Sebastian Barry, “a deeply moving story of courage and fidelity,” while praising Ceridwen Dovey’s “Blood Kin” as “a fable of the arrogance of power, beneath whose dreamlike surface swirls currents of complex sensuality.”
For the most famous writers, blurbing is often a matter of noblesse oblige. Many authors blurb down, endorsing former students (Joyce Carol Oates on Jonathan Safran Foer), less celebrated writers working in a similar vein or up-and-comers who validate the blurbers’ own influence without challenging their supremacy (Salman Rushdie on Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” and Kiran Desai’s “Inheritance of Loss”; Chinua Achebe on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”). Major authors like John Updike or Philip Roth often forgo blurbs for their own books, preferring to trumpet critical praise for earlier works.
Contemporary authors can also associate themselves with greatness by blurbing up — by endorsing a reissued classic, for instance, as when Rick Moody plugged “The Recognitions” by William Gaddis, or by blurbing the safely dead, as when Nicole Krauss plugged “The Savage Detectives,” Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous best seller (“an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come”).
Then there’s the great churning mass of lateral blurbing, where patterns are harder to discern and dangerous rivalries might lurk, with hard feelings existing among the blurbers themselves. “One has to be especially careful about the mix,” Robert Weil, an editor at W. W. Norton & Company, said in an e-mail message. “Even though two separate blurbers may both greatly admire the author, they may be sworn enemies to one another and would refuse to provide a quote if they knew that the other person was weighing in.”
Sometimes blurbish enthusiasm can backfire. Dave Eggers’s first book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” itself sounds like a blurb, and came with endorsements from David Sedaris (“the force and energy of this book could power a train”) and David Foster Wallace (“this thing took off for me in the basement and didn’t stop”). Since then, Eggers has become such an effusive endorser of his contemporaries that one critic, Andre Mayer, said his blurbs “border on farce.” After Eggers called Sean Wilsey’s memoir, “Oh the Glory of It All,” so “intriguing,” “hilarious,” “jaw-dropping,” “reckless and brilliant and insane” that “at one point I had to burn the second half … so I didn’t distract myself from my own dumb deadlines,” Mayer, writing on the Web site of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, took him to task: “Isn’t the point of a blurb to kindle interest in the book — and not the blurber?”
Asking for blurbs — and being rejected — can lead to the kinds of hurt feelings and fallings-out more common in romance. In an e-mail message, the novelist Roxana Robinson recalled collecting some “wildly infuriating refusals.” One author declined her request by saying, “I’m such a slow reader, I won’t be able to give your book the careful attention it deserves” — despite the fact that the manuscript was “sent out several decades before the blurb deadline,” she said. But her “top all-time most frustrating response was ‘I’m really sorry, but I think it would be inappropriate for me to blurb your book, because you’re so distinguished.’ ”
The novelist Colum McCann added: “I do a lot of blurbs, but sometimes wish I didn’t. It’s a horrible cycle.” McCann said he was still haunted by his decision not to endorse the second novel of a young Irish writer. “I used the traditional excuse that I was deep in a novel of my own, so couldn’t read the new book right now,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “The truth was that I had read it and didn’t like it.” Time passed, but “then came the crushing news that he had a full 18 months before it would be published,” McCann said. “I agonized over the blurb. Lost sleep over it. Literally. … I decided then to write to him and tell him that I couldn’t do it. The letter took days to shape.” To this day, McCann said, he regrets not writing the blurb. “I’ve blurbed worse. Much worse. And it’s still a gnawing feeling that his book — to my knowledge — never got published in the end.”
But some authors have the luxury of treating the whole business as a joke. The back cover of Jim Holt’s “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes” offers these words from the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik: “I read your joke book with steady pleasure and a sense of revelation last night. My only complaint was that you didn’t ask me for a blurb.”