Similar to my Indie Craft reaction, World of Geekcraft sold me on every page! Susan Beal has brought together, with some of her own work,  several stellar examples of quirky crafting.  Just can’t find the right spot for your Wii-mote? How about a handy belt and holster to help you out? Books on the shelf looking a little bare? Wrap them up in a robot themed book jacket!

I was very intrigued by Diane Gilleland’s idea giving new life to old watch parts. Her “Marvelous Machine Steam Punk” pendant shows off these now  nonfunctioning parts from a fresh perspective.  This makes me want to go get some wire clippers and start this week! This design reminds me of Hermione Granger’s Time Turner necklace that she uses in the third Harry Potter book to use time travel to her advantage. This recycled piece of jewelry is like a miniature art installation around your neck.

There’s really too many favorites in this book to mention: felted solar system mobile, periodic table iPod cozies.  And I can think of several people who would love a Star Wars Terrarium! All it takes is a mason jar, your favorite action figure, some sand, or more appropriate landscaping materials, and you’re ready to start Lucas‘ing.  Another favorite, bringing back warm childhood memories, is the Oregon Trail cross-stitch.  Check out all these great ideas!

-Peyton

It’s a good day to be at Lemuria.

Karen Russell will sign and read this evening starting at five. I’ve been anticipating this event since months before Swamplandia! came out, when, to use Kaycie’s phrase, there was a “knock-down drag-out bookseller battle” over advanced copies of the book (yes, I was involved, and yes, I was victorious). We hadn’t yet booked the signing at that point, but I’m sure our enthusiasm over the book helped persuade our Random House rep, Liz, to make it happen.

The wait is almost over! Just a few more hours are left until we get to meet Russell, and if you’re coming to the reading, I can already tell you you’re in for a treat. I know this because my dad saw her a few weeks ago in Florida, at my “bookstore alma mater,” the Vero Beach Book Center.

Dad told me that Florida author Carl Hiaasen introduced her, heralding Russell’s sophomore work as the establishment of a great talent.

Dad says, “Ms. Russell read from chapter one to a hushed crowd. Though she has a soft, unassuming voice, the story held her audience in rapt attention. After she read, she answered questions and kept us laughing with her charming, witty banter. Many who attended the event were curious about her life, the book, her writing process and future plans. Despite all the attention she’s been drawing, she seemed so modest and expressed appreciation for the good response her book’s receiving. It was a wonderful afternoon with her.”

We took a lot of reserve orders for Wednesday’s event with Téa Obreht. In fact, we were worried we wouldn’t have enough unreserved books left for the great turnout we had. Nothing beats hearing an author read. Especially while drinking a beer and hanging out in the dot com building. And you can’t help but feel more jazzed about a signed book, too, when you’ve watched the hand that actually wrote the book put a pen to it.

Simply everything about author events makes me happy. Have I mentioned it yet? Today’s a good day.

Above: Téa Obreht talking with Emily after the event.

Not long after I started working at Lemuria last summer, our Random House reps stopped by to pitch some of the upcoming titles to us booksellers.  When they pulled out advanced reader copies of Karen Russell’s  Swamplandia! I thought there was going to be a real knock-down drag-out bookseller battle to see who got their hands on one.  I had never heard of Karen Russell at that point, but it was enough to convince me that I needed to see what she was all about.

I did a little research on Russell and found out that she had been chosen by The New Yorker for their fiction feature “20 Under 40,” which, as the name suggests, provides interviews and stories by 20 writers under 40 that The New Yorker considers to be worth watching and following as their careers unfold. I’m an avid reader of New Yorker fiction picks so I took their choice of Russell to be an excellent sign.

The next week I purchased a copy of Russell’s short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and devoured it (much like a girl raised by a wolf, I guess you could say). It’s the kind of short story collection that I could read over and over again, and I wish that my own life was enveloped in the kind of magical realism that Russell invents in St. Lucy’s.  The novel Swamplandia! is an expansion of “Ava Wrestles an Alligator,” the first story in this collection, so I found myself with familiar characters except now they had a back story.

In the New York Times book review Emma Donoghue had this to say about Russell’s magical realism and the evolution of “Ava Wrestles an Alligator” to the novel Swamplandia!:

“The setting and the sisters (Ava and Osceola, a k a Ossie) are the same, but they now benefit from a full back story. It’s easier to care about the pleasures and miseries of life in a failing gator park when we know how the father (the self-proclaimed Chief Bigtree) and his family ended up there, and are led to understand what goes into the routine of putting on death-defying shows every day. If Russell’s style is a North American take on magical realism, then her commitment to life’s nitty-gritties anchors the magic; we are more inclined to suspend disbelief at the moments that verge on the paranormal because she has turned “Swamplandia!” into a credible world.”

I agree with Donoghue 100% when it comes to the believability of Swamplandia!.  Though there is still that sense of magic, the story takes a darker, grittier turn as reality sets in.  It’s the “nitty-gritty” that makes this book truly remarkable. Russell presents you with a quirky, larger than life family—a 13 year old girl whose narration is wise beyond her years, a teenage brother who runs off to work for the rival theme park to save his family, a faux Indian chief father, and a sister who fancies herself in love with a ghost, and yet their story is believable.  When this family and their theme park are torn apart by loss, you can sympathize with them. Despite all of their quirks Russell makes the Bigtrees into a real family struggling with the real loss of both a mother and of the Florida swamplands culture that is all that they know.

Russell is a great new voice for Southern fiction, and we’re so happy to have her visit Lemuria.  I hope you will read her books, come to her signing and reading, and love her work as much as I (and my co-workers) do.

For Russell’s interview with the New Yorker, you can go here.

Karen Russell will be at Lemuria signing and reading today at 5pm. Swamplandia! is our April First Editions Club selection.

Swamplandia! is published by Knopf with a first printing of 40,000. As of today the book is in its 9th printing . . . and counting.  -Kaycie

A few months ago I blogged about a children’s book that I absolutely love and couldn’t more highly recommend to all ages. Well now it is time to recommend the author of that book to everyone.

Lesley M. M. Blume could quite possibly be the most delightful human being on the planet. Her new book is called Let’s Bring Back: An Encyclopedia of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful, Chic, Useful, Curious, and Otherwise Commendable Things from Times Gone By. This books contains, in its very aesthetically pleasing cover of brown and mint green, a veritable smorgasbord of fun knowledge.  It is laid out like a dictionary, which happens to be one of my most favorite things. The book starts out with Acquaintance and ends with Zinc Bar.

We have had this delightful little book sitting at the front desk so whenever I have a moment I often reach for it to learn something maybe not new but fun. My personal favorite is Hotel Living, which looks a little something like this:

Hotel Living: This used to be a common practice in hotels of grandeur and disrepute; you would simply move into town and “take rooms.” One advantage to hotel living: If you die there, you’re more likely to be found in a timely manner.

Some Famous People Who Died in Their Hotel Digs

Oscar Wilde, in a small, frowsy room at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris. His reported last words: “I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means.” (Other sources claim that he utterd, “Either those curtains go, or I do.”)

Dorothy Parker, at the Volney Hotel in New York City. Ironically, in earlier years, she love to ridicule the culture of old hotel-dwelling ladies. The worst part: After Parker was cremated, no one collected the ashes, and her urn was stored in her lawyer’s metal file cabinet for fifteen years before being properly interred.

Eugene O’Neill, in room  at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. The playwright’s reported last words: “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room-GD it, died in a hotel room.”

So that is a little teaser of the clever wit (which is also explained in the book) which this book is made of. I would love to receive this book as a gift and have already given it as a gift. -Ellen

Sometimes when we write The Story behind the Pick for our First Editions Club, few readers have ever heard of the book, but that is not the case with Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. Since its March 8th release, it seems The Tiger’s Wife and Téa Obreht have been front and center in every major newspaper. Some of the obvious points we’ve heard about her include her young age of 25 and being selected for 20 under 40: Stories from The New Yorker and as well as the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 under 35.

The last time The New Yorker had put together such a collection was in 1999 and included excerpts from Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” as well as the work of Junot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri and Edwidge Dandicat. Téa has this to say about the honor:

[It’s] really humbling, in the most positive way. It’s surreal to be attached to this list of writers I admire. But I’m not going to let it go to my head.” (Publisher’s Weekly Interview)

The Tiger’s Wife is a complex, ambitious and beautiful novel. Natalia, a practicing doctor, must come to terms with the life around her which none of her medical training can answer. Her grandfather, a great storyteller and physician, mysteriously passes away in a village far from home.

With his belongings are still in the village, Natalia’s grandmother is nervous about getting them home before the family’s Eastern Orthodox mourning ritual is passed. Meanwhile, at the orphanage where Natalia is helping sick children, a family is digging night and day to unearth a body they believe to be causing the sickness.

Throughout this time period, Natalia begins to understand that the myth of the tiger’s wife actually surrounds real people from her grandfather’s hometown. Weaving myth and allegory from traditional Serbian and Croatian literature into the plot of the narrative, the reader begins to see life reflected in these long-told stories. Michiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times, expounds on the strong presence of myth in The Tiger’s Wife:

“Ms. Obreht, who was born in the former Yugoslavia . . . writes with remarkable authority and eloquence, and she demonstrates an uncommon ability to move seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary-colored world of the fable. It’s not so much magical realism in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez or Günter Grass as it is an extraordinarily limber exploration of allegory and myth making and the ways in which narratives (be they superstition, cultural beliefs or supernatural legends) reveal–and reflect back–the identities of individuals and communities: their dreams, fears, sympathies and hatreds.” (March 11, 2011)

While there is much to discuss regarding the novel and its author, it would be a great oversight not to mention the story of how it came to be published. It is another story of precociousness.

Téa Obreht’s 30-year-old agent, Seth Fishman, got about half-way through the sixty-page manuscript before he had to stop and pace to contain his elation. Tiger’s Wife became his first book to ever sell as an agent. While on jury duty, editor Noah Eaker read the book-length version and excitedly e-mailed his colleague at Random House and pleaded with her to read it over the weekend. At that time, Eaker was still an editorial assistant and a mere 26-years-old.

In an age when anti-intellectualism sometimes feels rampant, you have teams such as this group of young people producing great literature that will be long remembered.

The Tiger’s Wife is published by Random House with a first printing of 25,000.

While Tiger’s Wife is the kind of novel you just want to get lost in, here is list of commentary that Lemurians have been reading over the past several weeks:

Death and Tigers: PW Talks with Téa Obreht, Publisher’s Weekly, 1/17

The Practical and Fantastical, The Wall Street Journal, 3/5

Magical Realism Meets Big Cats In The Tiger’s Wife, NPR, 3/8

Luminous Fables in a Land of Loss, The New York Times, 3/11

A Mythic Novel of the Balkan Wars, The New York Times Book Review, 3/13

Author Earns Her Stripes on First Try, The New York Times, 3/14

Téa Obreht will be at Lemuria signing and reading The Tiger’s Wife at 5pm on Wednesday, March 23rd. The Tiger’s Wife is Lemuria’s March First Edition Club Pick.

Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. As mentioned before, she has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York. (www.teaobreht.com)