I keep the Beast running. I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

We don’t know much of what happened, but in the first few pages of Dog Stars we learn that most everyone has died. Pretty much alone Hig, the survivor, explores the foothills of the Rockies by a small 1956 Cessna airplane fighting off attacks from other, more desperate, survivors with the help of his crazy neighbor and his loyal but old dog. That’s pretty much all you need by way of set up. The important thing to know is that this is no Hunger Games and this is no Cormac McCarthy throwback. Heller’s novel is an intensely human exploration of loneliness and the inner life. His mix of introspection and action is breathtaking – and I mean that. There are times when you are crying and other times when you are turning pages as quick as you can to follow the action.

One of the great elements of Lemuria’s First Editions Club is that we really love to pick first novels. The idea being that on one hand we have the “cred” to know who is going to grow as an author and on the other hand that we are able to help someone who could use a little help.

Above that we try to pick author’s who don’t fall into the typical first novel traps. I think a lot of first novels have pacing problems. The plot seems to stop and start, rush ahead and slow down. In this respect Dog Stars almost can’t be a first novel – my prediction is that when we ask Heller he’ll admit to having those first two or three “failed” attempts in a drawer somewhere.

When I first read Dog Stars back in the spring the style was off-putting. Opening the first page illustrates my points – short choppy little sentences here on the first page. I’m a Hemingway fan and this was even too much for me. I put it down, gave up. But my friend Liz, from Random House, urged me on. I committed to starting over again and when I got the Dr. Pepper scene I knew it was going to be a great book. “Fuckers tried to kill me. For Coke.” Anyway, as soon as I finished Dog Stars I raced to work and pitched the book to Knopf as an event for Lemuria and a First Editions Club selection. They liked the idea and here we are. Enjoy!

Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal.  He is an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction.  He lives in Denver.

Dog Stars is our First Editions Club pick for August and is published by Knopf. First Printing: 60,000.

Click here to reserve a signed copy: $24.95.

Peter Heller will be signing and reading Tuesday, August 21st at 5:00 and 5:30. 

All photos courtesy of Peter Heller.

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Hey y’all, been a long time since you’ve heard from me huh? Well, not really. I’m new here to Lemuria, sort of. New here as a bookseller, but I’ve been a customer for quite some time. I love this shop and all the people that make it what it is. At some point I may write something more of an introduction to myself, but today I’m too excited about a book that was recommended to me a year ago by Simon, so this is going to be more of a testament to the sellers here and their powers of perception. Also, I would like to note that this book has been blogged about a few times already and I will leave links to those at the bottom of this page for further reading.

What has got me so excited about this book is that it is being made into a film directed by the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) and the trailer looks amazing. It is scheduled to be released 26 October 2012. Watch it below…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnAqFyaQ5s?rel=0-A&w=500]

One final note I would like to add that isn’t mentioned in the blogs below is its theme of time and history in relation to Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. I wont say much other than i think the two make great analogs. Stoppard’s play and Mitchell’s novel are quite different in tone and method but both move through heavy philosophy with an ease that leaves the reader in awe. With that said, they are both a blast to read.

Come by and snag Cloud Atlas before the movie release, and enjoy!

Lemuria Book Sellers love David Mitchell–Check out these blogs on David Mitchell and his work:

Cloud Atlas by Simon

David Mitchell . . . Beast by John P

David Mitchell: Part 2 by Susie

David Mitchell: Part 1 (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) by Susie

What I’m Reading (Black Swan Green) by Kelly

Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch is a book I picked up because the introduction was written by Chuck Palahniuk.  Palahniuk has a tendency to only blurb about books that are actually worth reading.  Because of his blurb on  Knockemstiff , I was introduced to Donald Ray Pollock’s dark approach to story telling, which is for all to view in his newest novel Devil All the Time (check out Simon’s blog on Devil All the Time).

Ida a.k.a. Dora is a Seattle teenager who has recently entered therapy with a psychiatrist she has dubbed “Siggy”.  Dora and her tight group of friends stage what they call “art attacks” (playing hide and go seek with bottles of alcohol in the local Nordstroms for example) as a means of entertainment.  Dora and her friends have decided to make a film about her shrink, Siggy and go about stealthily videotaping, recording, tracking and following him around.  I’m not going to give too much away but know this about Dora; whenever she and her love interest, Obsidian, start to get intimate Dora passes out or loses her voice.  Maybe she should start taking her therapy seriously…

by Zita

Carolyn Brown tells us how she came to write a new biography on Eudora Welty.

My love of Eudora Welty goes back 20 years, to graduate school at UNC-Greensboro, and a class I was taking in literary theory. In that class I was given a very open-ended assignment: take one of the modern literary theories we had studied (Jung, Nietzsche, Derrida, etc.) and apply that theory to an author’s work (any author). Why I chose Welty I do not know, but I took a few of the short stories in A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net and explained that the mystery of Welty’s fiction can be understood as a tension between the Apollonian and Dionysiac visions of the world described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In very simplistic terms, characters like Mrs. Larkin from “A Curtain of Green,” Hazel Wallace in “The Wide Net,” and Howard in “Flowers for Marjorie” seek order (Apollo) amidst the chaos (Dionysos) of their worlds. This graduate school paper was the first article I ever published; it appeared in the 1990 edition of the journal Notes on Mississippi Writers.

Flash forward to 2006. I am married with two children, and my husband gets a job in Jackson. I haven’t thought much about Eudora in the intervening years, but I receive a gift from the company which is wooing my husband to Jackson. It is Suzanne Marrs’ biography of Eudora, newly published and signed by the author! I am overwhelmed. I think, “This company gets it–this is not the standard fruit basket. It’s a wonderful, meaningful gift.” We move to Jackson, and a few months later I am hired by Millsaps and meet the author, Suzanne Marrs.

Since I have lived in Jackson, I have loved seeing the Welty House and Visitors Center grow–moving from Eudora’s garage into the beautiful facility that houses the museum today. I have loved giving tours, making presentations to the docents, and working closely with Suzanne on her books. Living in what I affectionately call “Welty World” reawakened my love of the author and my desire to write about her again.

The idea for the biography grew out of my own enjoyment of reading biographies as a young girl, especially biographies of strong women, as well as being a mother to middle school and high school age boys. It became apparent to me that there was a dearth of biographies in general for middle and high school age students. It’s a wide open field–there are many writers like Welty who have a long scholarly biography devoted to their life and accomplishments, but not a shorter one that offers an introduction to their lives and works. I also believe students and all readers can learn a lot about recent history as Welty’s life closely follows the 20th century arc, and she was closely affected by the major historical events of the century–the depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Finally, I believe Mississippi needs more biographies of their famous citizens, which is why I am writing a second one–on Jackson writer Margaret Walker–whose papers, like Welty’s, are archived here and whose life is also a great example from which we can learn. -Carolyn Brown

A signing for Carolyn Brown will be held Wednesday, August 15th at 5:00. A reading will follow at 5:30. Click here for more details.

A Daring Life is published by University Press of Mississippi. Signed copies are available at Lemuria, $20.

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For me relationships are the most rewarding aspect of bookselling. A bookseller develops relationships with their books and their readers; both are rewarding. Perhaps the most special relationship is one of bookseller with author. The author writes and loves the books they share with their readers. Also, the author reads the books that enhance her life and work.

However, more importantly, the author chooses their bookstore to browse. They buy books and share reading experiences with their booksellers, creating a relationship built around reading and sharing the joy of experiencing the physical book.

Without question, of all the authors that have shared their gifts of reading and writing, the foremost friend of Lemuria and its booksellers was Jackson’s wonderful Eudora Welty.

As a young bookseller, I had no clue how special a reading/writing relationship could be. I could not have anticipated what a deep friendship could be developed over the sharing of books. Miss Welty taught me this specialness.

As her bookstore, I was in a rare place to get to know Miss Welty. She loved to browse Lemuria and listen to reading suggestions, especially from a young Lemurian bookseller, Valerie Walley. Valerie had studied literature at Belhaven College. Belhaven was across the street from Welty’s writing windows.

Miss Welty loved mysteries and shared her love of reading Ross MacDonald with me. She pegged me instantly and I read all his books. I even visited Ross’s hometown, Santa Barbara,  and stayed at the motel she stayed when visiting Ross. I read Ross’s books overlooking the ocean he tried to keep clean and the land he loved. I visited Ross’s bookseller Ralph Sipper of Joseph the Provider Books, and we became bookselling pals of sort. Ralph was a specialist and I, well you know, just a Lemurian. When Ralph eventually visited Lemuria, he shared as a gift a remarkable photo of Eudora on her last trip to see Ross. (see above photo)

My love for Miss Welty and the grace she shared with Lemuria can never be expressed in words. I just smile when she comes to mind. 

As a last word, in 37 years of bookselling, my relationship with Miss Welty has given me the meaningful and complete experience a bookseller can hope to have with the books she read, the books she wrote and the readers that loved her and her work.

Left: Miss Welty at Lemuria in the old Highland Village location.

This was her first public signing for the publication of The Collected Stories, November 7, 1980.

With this blog I celebrate my remembrance of this special lady and her beautiful soul.

We’ll be sharing more stories of Eudora Welty in honor of Carolyn Brown’s new biography, A Daring Life, from University Press of Mississippi.

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