New York: Random House, 2001.

If you spend too much time wandering around bookstores, you may come across a plain looking version of a book labeled uncorrected proof or advanced reader copy. Despite their generic appearance, the original intent of these editions is to help generate buzz around a book before the book even goes on sale. Advanced copies may be sent to news media, book reviewers, book sellers, and librarians. For these professionals, advance copies may pile up in the desks rather quickly and unthinkingly. If a book becomes a great success, however, an uncorrected proof or advance copy can become highly sought after by collectors. One reason is that such a limited number of advanced copies were printed and another reason is that the proof may differ slightly from the final publication.

Someone who collects uncorrected proofs reveals a particular connection to an author, his or her story, or that time in publication history. Here are some examples of proofs that have become collectible over the years: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965), Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1988), and Lancelot by Walker Percy (1977). It takes a keener eye to look out for more contemporary proofs like the debut of A Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) or A Painted House by John Grisham. Released in 2001, a proof of Grisham’s Painted House is significant in that it was his first work outside the legal thriller genre, a coming-of-age story set in rural Arkansas likely influenced by the writing style of Willie Morris. Finding the proofs signed or getting them signed renders them rare indeed.

Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. 1970.

We collect books not so much as objects but as mementos of a particular time in our lives, a philosophy that opened our eyes, a history we do not want to forget. Alice Walker wrote her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in a room of her own in Jackson, Mississippi as a way to honor her family’s determination to build lives of dignity. Around the time of publication of The Third Life, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye were also released. Morrison and Walker would go on to win the Pulitzer while Angelou would be nominated.

Alice Walker came to Mississippi in 1966 to support the freedom movement. She collected depositions from Greenwood sharecroppers thrown off the land for attempting to vote. She discovered the poetry of Margaret Walker and eventually covered Dr. Walker’s leave of absence from Jackson State University. She also taught literature and writing at Tougaloo College and wrote a second novel, Meridian, from her home in Jackson. She fell in love, she married, she had a child. Walker’s marriage to Mel Leventhal was the first legal interracial marriage in Mississippi. While Walker worked, Leventhal risked his life as a lawyer deconstructing Jim Crow. In 2008, Walker reflected on her time in Mississippi at the Third Annual Gathering of Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement in conjunction with Jackson State University:

“I saw the best of human beings in Mississippi. They were black and they were white. They were young and they were old. They were women and they were men. They were children who sacrificed childhood so that future generations might enjoy it. Mississippi, in its vanguard position of struggle in the Southern black freedom movement, was a fierce, challenging, loving, rageful mother and father to my spirit. My debt for what I learned of human courage and possibility can never be paid with less than my understanding that I must never, given our people’s beauty, endurance, trust in each other, and grace, give up.”

Working at a bookstore has unfortunate side effects.  One of the prerequisites for working at Lemuria is being a fairly regular reader.  We encourage all of our employees to read, and read often.  The basis of being a good bookseller is reading and being able to accurately (and honestly) convey your experience with customers looking for the next best thing.  For me, this means prioritizing my time for only the best books.

Therein lies the unfortunate side effect.

You see, you can never truly appreciate the sun without rain.  So, objectively, can we place one above the other?  The sun and rain both provide pros and cons.  Objectivity is almost impossible when choosing why we like one more than the other.  Adam Sternbergh has cooked up a torrential downpour with his hard boiled mystery series.

Earlier this year Random House sent the us a huge batch of Advance Reading Copies.  These special edition books are printed for the sole purpose of spreading the good news about upcoming releases.  I like to site down with a few crates and start dividing the books in keep and toss piles respectively.  Shovel Ready had a hilariously bad title and an even worse cover.  I threw it in the keep pile.  Shovel Ready is the first in a new mystery series that follows Spademan.

He’s a garbage man.  Not the kind of garbage man that takes out the trash.  He’s the kind that takes out the trash.

Spademan considers himself a bullet.  Just point, pull, bang.  Only one rule:  no kids.  All he needs is a name, he’ll take care of the rest.  Point, pull, bang.  Except he doesn’t use guns.  He uses a box cutter; it gets the job done. The book starts up with Spademan receiving a call with his latest hit and he sets off the do what he does best;  only he doesn’t because its a kid.

Shovel Ready takes place in a dystopian New York recovering from a nuclear terrorist attack on Times Square.  The city has been all but abandoned by the rest of the country leaving a great divide between the city’s elite and the poor.  Just before the attack an alternate reality is constructed for the people that can afford it called the limnosphere.  The limn allows for a user to fulfill visor her wildest fantasies.  After the bombing, Spademan sinks into the limn to escape the world around.

Now, I’d like to pause for a moment to say that all of this is ridiculous.  If it sounds that way, it’s because it is.  It’s ridiculous and I love it.

After a trail of bodies, the book wraps up quite nicely and ties up all the plot points in under 300 pages.  Almost.

I had absolutely no idea a sequel was coming out until 2 days ago.  I immediately stopped all of my books in progress and settled in for another wild ride through the disjointed and frequently inconsistent world of Near Enemy.

Near Enemy picks up a year after Shovel Ready.  Spademan gets a call, and gets to work. …then he doesn’t.  Again.  Near Enemy’s narrative genesis is identical to Shovel Ready, and I have no idea how Adam Sternbergh got away with this.  It contradicts everything that Spademan is supposed to be.  In the first book  Spademan doesn’t kill his target because she’s a kid, but in this book, he just doesn’t do his job.  I’m expected to just go with it.

And I do.

These books are the perfect palate cleansers.  After reading book after book, classic after classic, it’s nice to just sit back and enjoy the ride.  I can’t be objective about this series because I know the only reason I’m reading them is because how fun they are.  Things rarely make sense, characters are unpredictable, everything is convenient, and I don’t care.

Like the characters I’m happy to leave the dark, dense literary world behind and tap-in to the world that Adam Sternbergh has created for me.  His limnosphere of happenstance.

Shovel Ready is available now in paperback.

Written by Andre

People often talk about all the places you can go with a book. LeVar Burton assured me on Reading Rainbow that, partnering with a book, my imagination is unstoppable, and I can travel anywhere in time or space. I can empathize with others and learn what it’s like to be a pauper, a king, or that person next door I just didn’t quite get before.

Everyone should travel through books, with books, and to places where you can’t even take books, then write about it. But as I’ve traveled around the world and moved within the US, my yearning for settledness, or a sense of home, has intensified.

Feeling a hunger for community, identity, and home, I became engrossed in literature of displacement, particularly Irish literature. Home preoccupies many Irish writers, who have been scattered from their close-knit island across the planet, left to make sense of their identity without the help of the familiar. This struggle obviously isn’t unique to the Irish, though. Today, according to the UNHCR, over 51 million people are forcibly displaced from their homes, and millions more are unsure where to call home for other reasons. Displaced or not, we feel the longing for home, the need for settledness that we may not find even in familiar surroundings.

As I leaf through the pages of the Jackson book, each image helps me piece together my home. I didn’t grow up in Jackson, but in many ways I’m finding myself here. The memories I have of each image join with the collective memories of my neighbors and others across the city, helping me know and love this place better.

When I see photographs of the Eudora Welty Commons, memories of wedding receptions I’ve attended there come back to help me piece together what was. Friends who now live across the Atlantic are suddenly back with me on that page to re-celebrate their special day and remember distant community.

On another page, I visit the Elite Restaurant, where my family used to regularly dine before attending a ballet, theater, or musical performance at Thalia Mara Hall. The cozy booths reassemble memories of good conversations, delicious food, and feelings of anticipation in this historic Jackson landmark.

This is why I can’t recommend the Jackson book enough—for long-time Jacksonians and those tasting their first sip of sweet tea, for brides and grooms starting their first home together here, and for Jackson ex-pats who need a tangible way to reconstruct home wherever in the world they find themselves.

No, you can’t really buy home in book form. But you can re-remember it, putting splintered fragments back together in your mind. And Jackson helps make home whole again.

Written by Marianna 

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. 

Being on facebook has at least one very good advantage. My friend from high school Becky H. Parrish is a recently retired art professor at the University of Texas at El Paso; she is a fantastic artist, an outspoken Democrat, and a bibliophile. When she posts on facebook about books she has read, I usually find them at Lemuria and read them, too. A few weeks ago, she posted that she was enjoying a day outside, under an umbrella, reading a great book that made her laugh and cry; and what’s more… it is fantastic. It’s Mona Simpson’s new creation Casebook.

A teenage boy named Miles and his friend Hector jerryrig a listening device in the basement that somehow (don’t ask me how) picks up the conversations on the upstairs phone. In the meantime, his parent’s marriage is quietly falling apart, a fact that wouldn’t be apparent if it weren’t for that piece of detective equipment in the basement. Miles has two sisters, younger twins he affectionately calls the Boops. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of affection in this book even though marriages are dissolving and people are moving to new neighborhoods to live on divided goods once shared by the intact families.

The two self-proclaimed detective friends Miles and Hector start to notice new phone calls and grow suspicious enough to engage the services of a private detective who lives far enough away for them to jump on their bikes and cycle over. Of course, there’s the matter of money and how to pay when they are just in middle school. How they do this is part of the fun and pathos of the gentle story which, like the art professor from UTEP says, will make you laugh and cry in this well crafted book seen through the eyes of a boy coming of age in California.

Written by Pat