Ya’ll may wonder how all of this Damned stuff came about. For those who care, I will try to tell a story.

Around 15 years ago, my old, often referenced book-selling pal, Tom, who was then selling books in Eugene, Oregon, contacted me about Chuck Palahniuk. With excitement he said, “This guy Palahniuk is the real deal, he gets it and it’s on edge. Furthermore, he’s a nice guy, even a great guy.” Tom and I have shared wisdoms about books and writers for so long and so honestly that I heard him ring the bell to pause and listen.

Around five years ago, my almost adopted, loved-one, Zita, of whom I am so very fond of, started selling books at Lemuria. Her youthful rebel self was an avid Chuck fan and has always cringed with glee as his new titles landed at Lemuria. There is something about youthful bookselling vigor for an author that’s real and tangible, that always catches an old bookseller’s notice. While Zita learned bookseller skills and developed our First Editions Club, she always got bubbly when Chuck’s books came up in conversation. And proudly to bring all this together, we have selected Damned as one of our First Editions Club picks.

So needless to say, last Spring when we learned that Chuck’s Damned book tour was coming to Jackson, causing Zita’s feet to leap six feet off the floor, things got damned exciting around here.

A short time later in New York City, I found myself at a Random House cocktail party where Chuck was an honoree. In the back shadows visiting with others was Chuck, so I approached to thank him for coming to Lemuria. But even more importantly, I wanted to share Zita’s young bookseller love and admiration for his books, and he agreed to graciously inscribe a Damned book for her.

While signing Zita’s book, Chuck hit me with a “Fight Club” punch question:

“When I come to Lemuria, what can’t I do?”

Never having been asked such a thing before, I paused and thought for a moment.

My answer: “I don’t care, whatever you want to do. I’m cool with it all. It sounds like fun.”

Chuck said, “Really?” with a direct gaze.

I said, “Yeah, I own the joint, anything goes.”

On the trip home and the next while, I concluded: Well, if he can do anything, why can’t I? My desires began kickin’, and along with my co-conspirators, we agreed to wake up Jackson in “Chuck” style all the way.

“Hell Cat” concoctions are being brewed. Art is being conceived. Food is stewing to fire you up. Musicians are honing their chops and “bingos” are already being shouted. Pre-Halloween costumes of Chuck’s fantasies (or yours) are being planned to welcome Chuck to Jackson. Hal & Mal’s get ready cause here we come!

We don’t know what’s all comin’ down, but you have three months to get ready. “Katie bar the door!” unless you wanna get loose. Join us because we are proud to bring Zita’s cool guy to Jackson to rock Hal & Mal’s on October 20th, a very special Lemuria day.

Our first blog all about Chuck’s Damned Book Night, October 20th

Zita’s t-shirt blog: Get the shirt for the event!

cpcp

I never thought we could possible sell more copies of The Help but just when the movie was about to premier in Mississippi, the fever for The Help caught again. And then I found myself on the phone with my mom, my granny and my aunt, all of whom I had given a copy of The Help when it first came out. They had just been to see The Help together in Texas. So it brought back the experience we all had of reading the book at the same time.

And today I am reading a professional book industry publication and I see this headline: “The Help Boosts Mississippi Tourism.” Well, I guess I should have known this was coming: Jackson offers two self-guided tours, one for Jackson and one for Belhaven. And Greenwood has seen an increase in demand for tours.

Can you believe that Bill Crump, chairman of the the Greenwood-Leflore-Carroll Industrial Foundation, projects that The Help tourism should generate $13 million in revenue for the state? When Lemurians first began reading The Help before its release, we read with great discussion but I do not think any of us imagined the fever that would spread world-wide, selling well over 2 million copies and with translation into more than 40 languages.

Read the full article from Shelf  Awareness below. (Shelf Awareness is a publication for book industry professionals and everyday book lovers. Click here to read their entire daily newsletter.)

The movie based on Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel, The Help, has been in theaters less than two weeks, but “tourism agencies in Greenwood and Jackson have rolled out self-guided driving tours targeting book and movie fans,” the Clarion-Ledger reported.

Marika Cackett, a spokeswoman for Jackson’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the city currently offers a pair of self-guided tours–The Help in Belhaven Neighborhood Driving Tour and The Help in Jackson Driving Tour.

“People read the book, see the movie, then Google Jackson, Mississippi,” Cackett said. “It’s cool to say we’ve been in a motion picture, and the residual effects from this could be a very good thing.”

Most of the film was shot in Greenwood, where CVB executive director Paige Hunt noted that tour requests from groups and individuals have risen dramatically.

“We plan to have the tour indefinitely,” she said, citing the Steel Magnolias tour in Natchitoches, La., as the reason her group began planning for this in May 2010, after learning The Help would be shot locally. “Steel Magnolias was released in 1989, and the tours are still around.”

Hunt added that she had recently received a call “from a lady in Louisiana who is coming here with some girlfriends for a weekend getaway. They’re not just doing The Help tour. They’re taking a class at Viking Cooking School and exploring what Greenwood has to offer. The movie has brought a lot of excitement to our community.” Greenwood is also home of the elegant TurnRow Book Co. bookstore, which opened in 2006 (Shelf Awareness, October 3, 2006).

Bill Crump, chairman of the the Greenwood-Leflore-Carroll Industrial Foundation, told the Clarion-Ledger he estimates that the direct economic contribution to the area will be $13 million.

For full disclosure, when this blog posts I will be in Dauphin Island, Alabama and will have been since Wednesday.  I am just positive on Tuesday as I write this that I will have a wonderful time and will not want to come home.  I have been packing my book bag for weeks and I am positive that it weighs more than my suitcase!  I thought that I had finally finished but I kept getting tweets from Farin Schlussel, a marketing intern at Dutton Books, going on and on about this great new book.  I knew the book was in my bag so I just decided to go on and read it. I will most likely finish it in the car tomorrow and I am totally not disappointed that I unpacked it!

Just for fun let’s take a count on how many Scandinavian Authors everyone has read in the past few years?  I need more than one hand for this game!  Guess what?   I’m about to introduce you to another one…meet Jussi Adler-Olsen.  He is from Denmark, has won the Glass Key Award (along with Mankell, Larsson and Hoeg), has been at the top of the bestseller lists in Denmark, Germany, and Austria.  The Keeper of Lost Causes is his American debut.

Carl was one of the best homicide detectives in Copenhagen until he was shot while on a case.  He survived but his partners were not so lucky.  One was killed and the other is paralyzed and still in the hospital and Carl blames himself for what has happened.  Of course, he has some marital problems though still married his wife moved out and has a few boyfriends while her son lives with Carl.  He has gone back to work and no one wants to work with him and the chief of detectives has come up with a plan.  Carl is going to be ‘promoted’ to run Department Q, a new division that has been organized to work on cold cases.  He will be the only one in the department except for his new assistant, Assad.  Carl and Assad continuously bicker back and forth and it really is the comedy relief through out the book because the first case that they begin to work on is a wild one.

The first case that Carl picks for Department Q to work on is a missing persons case.  Five years earlier an up and coming politician disappeared without a trace.  She was last seen on a ferry going on holiday so the ‘world’ assumes that she fell into the water and drowned but her body was never found.  After reading the file Carl’s interest is piqued as well as Assad’s who cannot wait to do some police work.  As he back tracks on the clues left in the file he begins to realize that some things were left out or just not followed up on and in his gut he feels that Merete Lynggaard is waiting somewhere for him to find.  What he is not sure of is if he will find her dead or alive.

Dear Listener,

Recently I have been rereading portions of Joseph Heller’s 1974 sophomore novel that satirizes the American Dream Something Happened.  Simply put, this is not a book for an impatient reader.  In fact, I would be willing to attest to the fact that the plot (or lackthereof) lies almost entirely in the hundreds of pages of character development.  That being said, I love this book.  (I love this book so much I wanted to share a song by Sharon Van Etten called “Save Yourself” from her 2010 album Epic which coincides with Americana and hopelessness. Listen to it here:

I even love it enough to read about it.  Shortly after finishing Something Happened the first time, I read that Kurt Vonnegut had written a review for the New York Times Book Review.  Lord knows I trust Kurt Vonnegut.  After scouring the internet in search of the review, I eventually purchased a used copy (which turned out to be a first edition!) of Vonnegut’s 1981 collection of short stories, essays, letters, speeches, and reviews Palm Sunday from a library in Michigan.  Lemuria currently has a copy of Palm Sunday on the shelf, and I greatly recommend you take a look at the glowing review.

I love this book so much I decided to keep searching the internet for more literature on this piece of literature.  What I found was astonishing.  In May of 1992 Playboy Magazine published an interview, which can be found here, with not only Kurt Vonnegut, but also Joseph Heller!  I reckon satirists really do stick together! A short sample of this can be found here:

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn’t you find it a full-time job?

HELLER: Oh, it’s more than a full-time job. You ought to go back and read that section in No Laughing Matter on the divorce. I went through all the lawyers. But yours is going to be a tranquil one, you told me.

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It’s like a head-on collision every time. It’s supposed to be a surprise but it’s commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It’s in Something Happened: ”I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.”

VONNEGUT: Norman Mailer has what–five divorces now?

And I found this pertinent as well:

PLAYBOY: Let’s turn to books. Are you alarmed about the corporate role in publishing?

HELLER: ”Alarmed” is a strong word. I’m aware of it and I don’t think the effects will be beneficial toward literature. As I get older, I begin thinking that not only are certain things inevitable, everything is inevitable.

PLAYBOY: How about censorship in publishing? What about when Simon and Schuster decided not to publish a book it had contracted for — Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho — because of pressure?

HELLER: The allegation was made that the decision came from the head of Paramount which owns Simon and Schuster. But the book was published. I don’t think censorship is a widespread threat in this country.

VONNEGUT: You can publish yourself. During the McCarthy era, Howard Fast published Spartacus. Sold it to the movies. Nobody would publish him because he was a Communist.

PLAYBOY: Are writers supportive of one another or resentful?

VONNEGUT: Writers aren’t envious of one another.

HELLER: We may be envious of the success but not of one another.

So whether you’re a fan of hard-nosed, dense, realism satire like Joseph Heller, or you prefer a more whimsical, snarky satire like Kurt Vonnegut (I recommend his 1965 opus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), the important thing to remember is that we are all finding fault and dealing with it in the same way.

by Simon

I have now found one of my all time favorite novels, and it will be my number ONE book to sell  for the holidays! So, “What is it?”, you ask! It is: The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Naturally, because I am a flower lover and spend most of my spare time in my garden, when not reading the latest contemporary fiction, I was bound to love this book. But, I might not have liked it, if the writing and the story had not been so “good”! Lisa had read the advanced copy a few weeks ago and had told me that I was going to like it. She was right!

The novel revolves around flowers, essentially the meaning or language of flowers. The protagonist, Victoria Jones, an orphan who has been in and out of numerous foster homes, has learned from her once favorite, but currently estranged, foster mom, all about the meaning of each flower. Even though she left that household at age 10, Victoria never forgot what she had learned and actually continued to teach herself about the meaning of flowers. Eventually, at age 18, when she had been fully emancipated from the girls’ group home, Victoria, now voluntarily homeless, lands a  job as a flower arranger at a local florist. Eventually she acquires a long list of customers who request her personally to design bridal bouquets, as well as other arrangements containing the flowers which send the messages or secret codes for the beloved.

Meet author Vanessa Diffenbaugh in the above video, courtesy of Random House. See Vanessa’s official website here.

As the novel progresses, love finds a way into Victoria’s life, as well as a demanding  newborn, but being unequipped for the emotions and demanding physical requirements, she flees. As the author works out the challenges of each character involved in this convoluted, but charismatic story, the reader sits on pins and needles hoping and desiring a positive outcome. One of the reasons that I believe this novel is so very successful is due to the fact that the author is a foster mom herself, having personal experience with the problems that foster girls face, particularly the matter of trust.

One of my favorite features of this novel is the flower glossary at the end which lists specific flowers and their meanings.In fact, gardeners will adore this book as well!  I will cherish it for years to come, and will also “use” it to remind myself of  the special “language of flowers.”

I thank Toni Hetzel, one of our brilliant Random House reps for saving this book for me, knowing all along how much I would like it! Liz, our other RH rep and Toni are like the ultimate book sellers, for they sell to us readers/book sellers at Lemuria, and they know our tastes and choices just as the staff here knows the tastes of our customers. It’s a pretty cozy relationship which has worked at Lemuria for over thirty years now, one more reason for praises for our independent book store! Can one find this at the big “box” stores? I think not!

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The Language of Flowers is a book written from the heart.

Vanessa and her husband, PK, have three children: Tre’von, eighteen; Chela, four; and Miles, three. Tre’von, a former foster child, is attending New York University on a Gates Millennium Scholarship.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh is also the founder of the Camellia Network.  The mission of the Camellia Network is to create a nationwide movement to support youth transitioning from foster care. In The Language of Flowers, Camellia [kuh-meel-yuh] means “My Destiny is in Your Hands.” The network’s name emphasizes the belief in the interconnectedness of humanity: each gift a young person receives will be accompanied by a camellia, a reminder that the destiny of our nation lies in the hands of our youngest citizens.

See Vanessa’s official website here.

The Language of Flowers will be released Tuesday, August 23, 2011.

-Nan