In or around New York City today, don't feel like catching the H-ween Parade, need something edifying to do before a late-night masquerade party?  We've got just the thing: get thee to KGBBar, the storied East Village haunt where so many brilliant, up-and-coming (and already arrived) writers of fiction and non-fiction show up and give (free) readings from their latest books! Tonight marks the resurrection of QPB @ KGB, where your beloved book club hosts the event with a club-fave book and author.  Somewhat appropriate for this day of disguises, tonight's featured book is Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent.  Fearless, deeply empathetic journalist Vincent will be reading and answering audience Q&As about her year and a half stint as "Ned," in which she infiltrated male-exclusive realms to find out what it's like on the inside of a man's world.  You've heard me wax rhapsodic about this book before, and I'll do it again tonight before an audience (just for a minute or two)--attendees will also snag fun giveaways and, of course, some candy.  Be there or be square!

Norah Vincent reads for QPB @ KGB

KGBBar, 85 E. 5th St, New York, NY

Tonight, October 31, 7pm -9pm

Free!

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Dear Readers,

In a slasher movie, a faceless madman axes random victims one horrible night. A heroine survives to unmask and kill the killer; justice done, nightmare over. Trust me: Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise, where one night of monstrous brutality lingers for decades, squeezes you in its grip longer than any movie.

June 21, 1977: On a cross-country bike trip, Yale undergrads Terri and friend Shayna were sleeping in the desert of central Oregon. They awoke to a truck running them over. The driver—a neatly dressed cowboy, seen only from the neck down—entered their tent with a hatchet. After hacking away at their already-crushed bodies, he left abruptly. Both barely survived. Terri remembers every millisecond; Shayna, nothing. The culprit unidentified, both young women resumed their lives, forever estranged.

Snapping out of a trauma-induced stupor in 1992, Terri decides to take on the cold case herself. As she investigates in Oregon over the next several years, the mystery deepens: Cops and townies know who did it, yet no one’s come forward. Her assailant is a free man—whom Terri will meet face-to-face.

In a forensics-obsessed culture, I’ve read no other book that so perceptively autopsies the emotional, cultural anatomy of violence—its psychic imprint on victims, a community, even the attacker. Visceral, lyrical, and thought-provoking, Terri’s epic journey to catharsis becomes yours as well.

Justin Ravitz
Associate Editor, QPB

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Gary Jansen, QPB's brilliant, sly, lowkey Executive Editor, is a man of many talents. 

He's a former brake mechanic and furniture delivery man, but has always had a devote love for books. "My grandfather was a grave digger," Jansen says, "but he was the most well-read person I'd ever met. He had problems dealing with people. He was shy, sometimes aggressive and abrupt, and sometimes he seemed like a lost angel. He would always call me a schweinhund, which I think is German for 'dirty dog.' But he loved to read and he would pass his books along to me after he had finished them and I would sit in my room at night and read them by flashlight. I remember all his books smelling vaguely of cigarettes and dirt, so there was always an earthiness to the words and to the stories. I don't think you can truly appreciate a good book unless you make it concrete in your life. Reading is, and always will be, a very physical experience for me - words are always one step removed from experience and it's the reader's job to eliminate that distance, to make a book his or her own."

Jansen has served as an editor for History Book Club and Book-of-the-Month Club. His writing has appeared in USA Today, New York Newsday and the Chicago Sun-Times and he is the author of The Rosary: A Journey to the Beloved.

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He's a much-loved New York Times bestselling writer with a brain, a point of view and fascinating, urgent things to say about science, culture and where we're headed.  His latest, QPB Main Selection The Omnivore's Dilemma, asks what should you have for dinner? Michael Pollan traces in detail four very different types of meals, from nature all the way to the dinner table, with an eye for what’s best for you as well as for the environment.

Here's way more on one of our favorite thinkers of today:

Date of Birth: February 6, 1955
Birthplace: Long Island, New York
Current Residence: Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut
Education: Bennington College, Massachusetts, B.A.; Oxford University, England; M.A. in English, Columbia University.
Profession: Former executive editor, Harper's
Influences, Interests and Interesting Tidbits: "Someone has got to tell Michael Pollan that he simply has not lived if he doesn't know about the magnolias, the honeysuckle, the figs, the pears, the surprise lilies and the chinaberries in Eudora Welty's fiction."
- Joan Flippin, letter to the New York Times Book Review in regard to Pollan's essay "A Gardener's Guide to Sex, Politics and Class War""Thoreau famously claimed to have spent only $28.12 building his cabin, but no construction cost-accounting can ever be believed."
- Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own

I'm very proud of the fact that I still have all ten fingers. . . It could have turned out very differently.
-Michael Pollan on his experience building his "dream" hut, At Random magazine, Winter 1997

I read to garden, and I garden to read. Mrs. Perenyi, my Virgil, not only taught me about compost and doubleness in flowers and how to make an asparagus bed; she clued me in, too, on the class consciousness operating just below the garden world's surface: gladioluses are strictly for funerals, she let me know, and magenta flowers must be eschewed, for they are ill bred and all too common, the plant world's proletariat.
-Michael Pollan, New York Times Book Review

While an admirer of Thoreau, Mr. Pollan disagrees about having to head off into the wilderness to discover nature. People can discover it in their own back yards [according to Pollan,] as they cultivate it and protect their small corner of the earth.
-Jackie Fitzpatrick, New York Times, August 9, 1992

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There are coffee table books with jaw-droppingly cute kittens (we got those and make no judgments!), stunning landscape vistas (check), genius artists' retrospectives (uhuh), blablabla...and there is POSTSECRET.  Here's a book that began as a public art project; artist Frank Warren entreated the public:

"You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything—as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.”

Folks responded in droves with beautiful, shocking, funny, disturbing, painful, embarassing, totally resonant confessions, all on handmade postcards that run the gamut from breathtaking works of art to scrawled graffiti.  Before you buy our exclusive paperback edition (yesyouwill!), use our nifty Sneak Peek feature to flip through the book (virtually) to see just what I'm talking about.  It's completely addictive--I read it aloud and show it to my friends, who blush, gasp and laugh a lot.

Posted by Justin Ravitz at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Reader:

Sometimes a book sneaks up on you quietly and steals your bearings. You feel odd, a bit unsettled, but nonetheless enjoy the experience. Colors look different, words sound like music, and you find yourself standing still in the middle of nowhere, holding an open umbrella in the bright sunlight as time seems to move in waves around you. The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis is just that sort of literary trip—an ineffable sleeper of a novel where “[n]o amount of character sketching or plot summary can begin to convey the experience of reading this strange and delightful novel”—The Washington Post.
        That being said, The Thin Place is set in an ordinary American small town near the Canadian border, and begins when three girls come across the body of a dead man near a local lake. Two of the youngsters set off in search of help. Twelve year-old Mees Kipp, however, stays with the body, touches the man’s cheek, and somehow brings him back to life. What follows is more than a mystery about what happened; it’s an investigation into the worldly and otherworldly, with peculiar and humorous characters that create a bizarre kaleidoscope of intrigue and miracles.

Gary Jansen
Executive Editor, QPB

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Did you know that QPB's editorial staffers are published writers?  That's right.  When we're not muckin' through the piles and piles of advance galleys and manuscripts of fiction, non-fiction and the unclassifiable to bring our members the bestest, we're scrawling our own stuff. 

Editorial Assistant/science fictionite and fantasist Alaya Johnson, amazingly, debuted this year with a story ("Third Day Lights") in Year's Best SF 100 AND a story ("Shard of Glass") in Year's Best Fantasy 6.   Of "Shard of Glass," Publishers Weekly said "Stories from such renowned authors as Esther Friesner and Gene Wolfe are surprisingly outclassed by tales from relative newcomers Alaya Dawn Johnson and Anne Harris."  In fact, "Shard of Glass" was a finalist for the Parallax Award....it went to Walter Mosley in the end.  Not a bad person to concede defeat to, if you ask me.  Plus, Alaya's already landed a book deal for her first novel--due out in 2008. Not too shabby for a still-recent college grad, eh?

More on Gary, and even me, in future installments. 

Posted by Justin Ravitz at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, I took my two-year-old son, Ed, to a local bookstore so he could play with this Thomas the Tank Engine train set that he loves so much. As we made our way to the children’s section, my eye caught a glimpse of the cover of Kabul in Winter—a stark winter cityscape, gun-gray sky, snow-covered ground, and a lone figure of a woman in a burka holding an umbrella. I picked the book up and soon settled in to one of the miniature chairs in Train Land and started reading.

Kabul in Winter is a fierce and shocking look at a place that many have forgotten, the so-called liberated country of Afghanistan. It is a land haunted by the memory of the Taliban and still riddled with violence, especially against women. The author, journalist Ann Jones, takes us into the lives of the ostracized, the legless and the blind, a community of “runaway brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape.” Yet, in all this starkness there is a sense of beauty, a willingness of the human spirit to survive and find meaning in meaninglessness.

Usually, I have to drag my son away from that train set, but that night we stayed for over an hour, him playing and me reading this shocking, angry, but profound book.

—Gary Jansen, Executive Editor, QPB

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...in one of the most unexpectedly poignant and prickly novels we've come across, that's kinda-sorta what kicks off And She Was, which QPB's brilliant, opinionate and passionate Alaya has been championing for months. Here's what she had to say:

Dear Reader,

The first thing I loved about And She Wasis its play off the classic, trippy song from the ’80s. The second thing I loved about this perceptive novel is its tough, conflicted narrator, Brandy. Her reason for coming to a hardscrabble boomtown in the Aleutian Islands is straightforward: “Of course, I was following a man. Women just don’t come out here on their own. Not women like me anyway.”
        Interspersed with Brandy’s snappy narration are the tales of several generations of Aleut women (spanning the 18th century to the present) who cope with the colonial destruction of their society by wresting power for themselves, in defiance of the devastating consequences.
        Colonialism and culture, gender and empowerment—all themes that have been explored ad nauseum in today’s literature. But never quite like this.

Alaya Johnson
Editorial Assistant, QPB

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In his upcoming memoirs, Gore Vidal calls his crony/rival/fellow Great Writer Truman Capote a "marvelous liar" who "lived for gossip."  Last year's Oscar-winning film, frankly, doesn't paint him in much better of a light--suggesting, as many have, that the elfin, bespectacled, squeaky voiced lil' jinx manipulated just about everyone and everything to write In Cold Blood.  Verdict's still out on how good ol' Tru comes across in this year's star-studded biopic.

You know what? It doesn't matter.  When someone writes the way Capote did--as no one else ever could--you can quibble all you want over his megalomania, superficiality or ethical flaws.  I enjoy sussing that stuff out too.  But the books, stories etc that he's left behind . . . they'll be read til time immemorial.  Here's what I had to say a while back about his recovered first book Summer Crossing.  As long as he didn't commit those Clutter murders himself, Tru will still have me as a fanboy.

Twenty-plus years after his death, Truman Capote looms large. An Oscar-nominated biopic has reignited interest in this rather inscrutable genius, but the best way to understand and celebrate Capote is to read him. The recent discovery and publication of Summer Crossing, then, is an historic boon. Handwritten in notebooks by an obscure, 19-year-old Tru and misplaced for over half a century, this is far more than auction-block memorabilia—it is a debut that literally took my breath away. Even as a teen, he wrote in prose that effervesced with timeless wit and beauty. His youth shows in his empathy for teenaged protagonist Grady McNeil, a beautiful Manhattan socialite aching to rebel against her moneyed, airless world. Left alone for the first time one summer, Grady plunges into an intense affair with a man from the wrong side of the tracks. This triggers a chain of events both exhilarating and cataclysmic—a tragic, heartbreaking romp still ringing in my ears months later. Like Grady, I lost myself in vibrant, dangerous mid-century Manhattan: breakfast at the Plaza (not Tiffany’s), a seedy downtown jazz club, Times Square at night. I finished this rediscovered classic with the same please-don’t-let-this-end euphoria as our heroine. Thank you, Tru.

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We offered Kiran Desai's THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS last month in paperback and we're pleased to say that the author has now won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Man Booker

Here's a little something about the book:

If you’ve enjoyed novels by Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and Rohinton Mistry, then you’re going to love Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Set in the isolated foothills on the border of India and Nepal, this highly acclaimed, politically trenchant novel tells the story of a small family’s desires and failed dreams, and their rude encounter with 21st-century geopolitics.

“Desai is a terrific writer”—Salman Rushdie

High in the mist-shrouded Himalayan alps, an embittered old judge lives in a crumbling manor with his spunky teenage granddaughter, Sai, and long-time cook. In the face of British discrimination, which “crushed him into a shadow,” the judge long ago retreated from public life. Sai, on the other hand, reads Trollope and embraces English culture, while the cook pines for his son, Biju, who’s struggling as an illegal kitchen worker in Manhattan. Though isolated, they are forced to confront unpleasant global realities when a band of insurgents bursts into their home. Rich and illuminating in its scope, The Inheritance of Loss is a brilliantly realized novel of exile and displacement.  

Posted by Gary Jansen at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Without getting too personal, I always feel like an outsider. Whether I’m with a group of strangers or surrounded by people I love and trust, I always feel just a bit disconnected. Yet, when I’m reading a book I truly love, this shadow—likes a sense of loneliness—seems to go away.

This certainly happened with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a memoir with which I felt a genuine kinship—even though I grew up in suburban Long Island. Understandably touted by critics as a book on melancholy, Istanbul is so much more that. Picture a young boy staring out a rain-slicked window into a world caught between East and West, tradition and modernity, peace and revolution. Istanbul, its history and its quirks, becomes a metaphor for Pamuk’s life as artist and outsider, as he chronicles his childhood and the spectral memories of his large extended family. It is these recollections, of his young life and of a city—haunted corners, crumbling streets and vacant places where loved ones once resided—that evoked my own memories of growing up. Maybe I’m not so disconnected after all.

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One of my favorite writers has been award the Nobel Prize in literature for 2006.

New York Times

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Woodward's new State of Denial from the Bush at War series is getting a lot of attention.

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