Michael Largo: GOD'S LUNATICS: Lost Souls, False Prophets, Martyred Saints, Murderous Cults, Demonic Nuns, and Other Victims of Man's Eternal Search for the Divine.
Tuesday, June 22, 6pm
SCAD-Ivy Hall
Arm yourself with God's Lunatics before your next encounter with those who have been blinded by the light. Award-winning author Michael Largo, "the Capote of kaput" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), chronicles history's vast and colorful cast of true believers—from the hidden side of the Bible's eccentric characters to today's street-corner doomsayers, and from extraterrestrial communicators, levitating hermits, and flagellating ascetics to self-serving preachers of overindulgence who believed money, sex, and drugs were the keys to the portal to divine understanding. In addition to the firewalkers, serpent handlers, cultists, terrorists, and alleged time travelers, God's Lunatics also reveals the dubious foundations of the world's major faiths and the many religious customs and laws that continue to influence governments and society, whether you are a believer or not.

Largo, dubbed "the Capote of kaput" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and "the curator of death" by Esquire, for his irreverent books on human mortality, takes on religious fanaticism in his new release, God’s Lunatics: Lost Souls, False Prophets, Martyred Saints, Murderous Cults, Demonic Nuns, and Other Victims of Man's Eternal Search for the Divine. His latest work examines celebrated mystics, martyrs, wizards, shamans, cult leaders, founding fathers of Utopian experiments, victims of demonic possession and the originators of New Age movements.

Largo is also the author of Genius and Heroin, The Portable Obituary and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die.

Jane Green: PROMISES TO KEEP
Friday, June 25^th 7:15
Decatur Library
Jane Green, the bestselling author of 11 popular novels makes her first visit to the Center for the Book with a compelling new novel just right for summer reading, Promises to Keep. It’s the story of one remarkable summer in Maine when the lives of several families intersect, and what happens when you have to be your parent’s child long after you’ve grown up. The novel focuses on enduring love, building relationships and making touch decisions, the challenges we all have to face. Green has won acclaim for her novels which include such favorites as The Beach House, Babyville, Dune Road and Second Chance.

Callie Perry has a pretty perfect life. It may not be everyone’s idea of happiness – her husband spends more time travelling for his job as a commercials director than he does at home – but it works for her. It gives her time to work – she is a successful family photographer – and be around for her two kids, and her friends. She lives in Bedford, New York, is beloved by all who know her, and wakes up every morning grateful for how happy she is.

Her younger sister, Steffi, the baby of the family, has never grown up. In her early thirties and the epitome of a free spirit, she’s never held down a job, or a boyfriend, for longer than six months. Her latest incarnation is as a vegan chef. She’s living with the latest unsuitable man, in a sixth floor walk up in Soho, and her parents have almost given up hope that she’ll ever learn what it is to be responsible.

Lila Grossman is Callie’s best friend. Single, she’s finally met the man of her dreams. Ed has a son she adores, a crazy ex-wife she doesn’t, and she finally feels ready to settle down. If, that is, their goals are the same.

And then there are Callie and Steff’s parents. Walter and Honor . Divorced for almost thirty years, they haven’t spoken for most of that time. They may share two grown-up daughters, but it is agreed by all who knew them, they share little else.

Until they all receive a shocking phone call that changes their lives forever, and brings them all together one short, snowy winter.

Promises to Keep is about the hard choices we sometimes have to make; about having to be a child, long after you’ve grown up, and mostly, about the enduring nature of love.
(Jane gets a shout out mainly because she has a book called The Love Verb. We think all titles should have "Verb" in them.)

Dorothea Benton Frank: LOWCOUNTRY SUMMER: A Plantation Novel
Foxtale Book Shoppe
Woodstock GA
Saturday, June 26^th 6pm
Starred Review. Here's one for the Southern gals as well as Yankees who appreciate Frank's signature mix of sass, sex, and gargantuan personalities. In this long-time-coming sequel to Plantation, opinionated and family-centric Caroline Wimbly Levine has just turned 47, but she's less concerned with advancing middle age than she is with son Eric shacking up with an older single mom. She's also dealing with a drunk and disorderly sister-in-law, Frances Mae; four nieces from hell; grieving brother Tripp; a pig-farmer boyfriend with a weak heart; and a serious crush on the local sheriff. Then there's Caroline's dead-but-not-forgotten mother, Miss Lavinia, whose presence both guides and troubles Caroline as she tries to keep her unruly family intact and out of jail. With a sizable cast of minor characters with major attitude, Frank lovingly mixes a brew of personalities who deliver nonstop clashes, mysteries, meltdowns, and commentaries; below the always funny theatrics, however, is a compelling saga of loss and acceptance. When Frank nails it, she really nails it, and she does so here. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

New York Times bestselling author of RETURN TO SULLIVANS ISLAND, BULLS ISLAND, THE CHRISTMAS PEARL, THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS and many others, has written the sequel to PLANTATION. When Caroline Wimbley Levine returned to Tall Pines Plantation, she never expected to make peace with long-buried truths about herself and her family. The Queen of Tall Pines, her late mother, was a force of nature, but now she is gone, leaving Caroline and the rest of the family uncertain of who will take her place. In the lush South Carolina countryside, old hurts, betrayals, and dark secrets will surface, and a new generation will rise along the banks of the Edisto River. In her novels, Frank, a native of the South, captures the beauty, atmosphere, characters and the eccentricities of life in this area.
(We love Dottie. She's a hoot and a half.)

The Decatur Book Festival is bringing Bruce Feiler to town on May 25th. He'll be at Agnes Scott College at 7pm at Presser Hall.

Bruce is a great speaker, and this is his most personal book:

Bruce Feiler was a young father when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. He instantly worried what his death might mean for his daughters. “Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they lack for my approval, my discipline, my voice?”
Three days later he came up with a stirring idea of how he might give them that voice. He would reach out to six men, from all the passages in his life, and asked them to be present through the passages in his daughters’ lives. And he would call this group of men, “The Council of Dads.”
“I believe my daughters will have plenty of opportunities in their lives,” he wrote to these men. “They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?”
The Council of Dads is the inspiring story of what happened next. Mixing the harrowing tale of his treatment with the uplifting lessons of these men–“Approach the Cow,” “Pack Your Flip-Flops,” “Live the Questions,” “Harvest Miracles”–Feiler’s account is touching, funny, and ultimately a deeply moving account of parenthood, loss, and love.

I'm really looking forward to having Bruce here on campus--this should be a marvelous event.

Oops. Although Dot Moye sent the post along, it was originally written by Andrew Taylor on his excellent blog Artful Manager.

Dot Moye emailed a response to an earlier post, so I'm putting it up on the site.

What happens when there are more writers than readers?

AuthorJane Hamilton ask a rather probing question toward the end of her radio interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge. The question evolves from a conversation about the crowds of people who want to be writers, but who aren't well read -- and the loss of filters to discover and celebrate the true visionaries among them.

The leading character in Hamilton's most recent book, Laura Rider's Masterpiece , longs to write a romance novel but doesn't care to read. Says Hamilton in the interview:

I think it's kind of an angry book about this idea that we're all artists. So, what happens when there are more writers than there are readers? And how will the really talented young writers' voices bubble up through the gaseous murk of the blogosphere? How will they be heard? ...they probably will. I'm banking that they will. But I think it's going to be more difficult for those real writers to find their place.

There are glorious, democratizing forces at work when almost anyone can publish their thoughts to the world. But to me, the challenging byproduct of those benefits are what Hamilton describes. How do we make space in this instant publishing world for the truly remarkable voices -- in words, in song, in composition, in performance, in whatever? Particularly, how do we nurture those exceptional voices that need time and attention to grow?

This isn't a defense of the gatekeepers or editors/curators who ran the filters before the Internet, as that system had its flaws and foibles as well. But it's a call for the nonprofit and public arts to consider their part in answering that question.

Anne Lamott:
Imperfect Birds
Friday, April 9th
7 pm at First Baptist Church, Decatur

Anne Lamott, the renowned author of many bestselling fiction and nonfiction books including Traveling Mercies, Bird by Bird, and Grace: Thoughts on Faith , visits us with a tough and touching new novel, Imperfect Birds. "Heartbreaking and delightful, moving and hopeful, the novel reminds us how our children are connected to and independent of us, and that no matter how difficult our struggle is with them, love underlies it all and saves us. This novel captures the deepest, purest, most terrifying experience of parents fearing for their children. With great insight and humor, Anne Lamott shows us what it means these dangerous days to be a parent, what it means to be a child, and what it means to be a family.” Lamott’s graceful prose is sure to inspire the child, parent, and sibling in all of us.

Patricia Sprinkle:
Hold Up the Sky
Monday, April 12th
7:15 pm at Decatur Library Auditorium
Patricia Sprinkle is one of Atlanta's favorite mystery writers. Her titles include Death of a Dunwoody Matron, A Mystery Bred in Buckhead, Death on the Family Tree, and Who Let the Killer in the House?, and countless others. She shows us a different side of her artistry with her eagerly anticipated novel, Hold Up the Sky . It's a moving story of four women facing difficult challenges who come together on a drought-stricken Georgia farm to find strength and insights with each other. As they share their stories and their troubles, they discover that their true strength comes not in independence but in interdependence. “[A] portrait of friendship, love, and Southern gumption,” declares Birmingham magazine.

Lisa Tracy
Objects of Our Affection
Wednesday, April 7th
7:15 pm at Decatur Library Auditorium

Why do Americans have so much "stuff," and why do we hang on to it forever and ever? asks Lisa Tracy, author of fascinating titles such as Muddy Waters: The Legacy of Katrina and Rita , and The Gradual Vegetarian . She reveals the delightful answers in her compelling and surprisingly tender new book, Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family's Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time . It's all about those things we keep, the heirlooms, and how we form stories about our things and what that means for generations of our family yet to come. “Plush stories of love, war, life and death are lovingly tucked inside the drawers and chair springs of a remarkable family’s furnishings. Lisa Tracy brings them to life with tender humor and due respect,” hails Tanya Maria Barrientos. You'll thoroughly enjoy this presentation about a subject close to all of us.

The operative question about the iPad is not, "What can it do that your laptop can't?" The answer to that is "pretty much nothing." The question is "what possibilities does a completely re-imagined, touch based interface open up?" One of the answers is to remove barriers to technology that were previously in place, including the need for training. If you make an interface that is closer to the natural world, then the tools become available to those who are only familiar with the natural world. Case in point, it becomes easy enough for a two-year-old to successfully use advanced technology immediately upon having access to it. The iPad isn't really about books. There are other fish to fry.

So Apple has put a partnership in place through Smashwords to let you publish your book to the iBookstore with no up front cost, and only a 15% commission on sales. It's pretty much frictionless as well--just load up a Word doc, and you're set. No layout issues, etc.
What's that mean. If you are Melville and you have to self-pub, you can get it done with no hassle. But as a consumer of books, that means that every yahoo with a word processor can be a published author in 10 minutes. The barrier is so low, we can now expect a whole new genre--the drunk pub. Some crap you wrote in 10th grade reads great to you after a St. Patty's day bender, and you go home and load it up. It's just like drunk dialing, except much more embarrassing.
Most of the publishing industry is about the filter. Editors, Agents, Booksellers, Publicists, Reviewers, and book festival directors are all about finding ways to connect you with the next book you want to read. The physical creation and distribution is really incidental.

If you want to be part of the next thing in publishing, figure out how to be the filter. Folks in the publishing world keep looking at the disaster that is the music business, and they try to learn their lessons from them. Here's an idea: Create Pandora for books. A real live mechanism that tells you that if you like a, b, c, and d, you should take a look at f and g. If you can make that work, then you really are disrupting the vast mechanism of the book trade.

Does anyone remember the paperless office? Email, the internet, and laptops were supposed to eliminate the need for paper in the workplace. Up until a few years ago, office paper consumption per capita went up 6-7 percent every year.
I don't know what book and magazine publishing is going to look like in ten years, but what I'm sure of is that neither does anybody else. Who knew that if you give away some of your music, more people would buy your stuff? Who knew that, as Cory Doctorow has shown, if you give away electronic copies of your book, then more people buy the hardcover. And who knew that if you give people a quick, cheap and efficient way to send and receive information without paper, that paper consumption would go up?
That prediction would have gotten you nothing but scorn. I'm betting that the folks in the big offices at Georgia Pacific were sure their numbers were going to plummet when email started to gain traction.

Kindle and iPad, and their next iterations especially, will really screw things up in ways we can't foresee. But it will not be anything quite as boring as the disappearance of the book. That would never sell. It'll include interesting things like this project: a dynamic, exciting idea for what is essentially a new medium. Take a look at the video. It just gives me all kinds of ideas.

This just came in over the transom. Fred Chappell is one of the finest writers of his generation, but he's too nice a guy to tell anyone. It really ought to be a great evening, so sign up soon. You are cordially invited to The 2010 Townsend Prize for Fiction Thursday, April 22, 2010 Margaret Mitchell House 990 Peachtree Street, NE Atlanta, GA 30309 Reception and Book Signing 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Keynote Speaker Fred Chappell Master of Ceremony Robin David Jenkins, Director Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to Debbie Riggs at debra.riggs@gpc.edu or call 678-891-3275

Salman Rushdie lectures on Wonderlands
March 21
Emory University
5pm
Tickets & more information at www.emory.edu/events/tickets

Sir Salman, literary master, presents his lecture Wonderlands, a discussion of writing for young readers and the young at heart. While you are there, stop by A World Mapped By Stories, an exhibit celebrating the opening of the Rushdie archive.

Ru Paul: WORKIN’ IT

Outwirte Bookstore
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 7:30PM
**This is a Line Ticketed Event
"Workin' It!" will provide helpful and provocative tips on fashion, beauty, style and confidence for girls and boys, straight and gay - and everyone in between! No one knows more about life, self-expression and style than RuPaul! With photos by Mathu Andersen from the new season of RuPaul's Drag Race and a fresh look at style and inner beauty, "Workin' It!" will pick up where the show leaves off. The book will be as colorful, fun, and intriguing as RuPaul, with insights into makeup, clothing choices and the illusion of drag. Fans of RuPaul will get piece of Ru's philosophy on style and attitude - and how it's more than the clothes that make the man, or woman! With four colour photos throughout and a fresh, funky design "Workin' It!" will be the perfect guide to RuPaul - part style guide, part confidence manifesto, and entirely fabulous! And, words of wisdom from your favourite contestants on Season One of RuPaul's Drag Race including, Nina Flowers, Ongina, Rebecca Glasscock, and more!
Ru Paul and Elton John--Don’t Go Breakin My Heart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDqPpbqSnAI

A major media presence thanks to his outgoing persona and campytheatrics, RuPaul was a popular attraction on '90s dance floors as well,scoring several club hits with Hi-NRG Euro-disco pop. Born Rupaul AndreCharles, he grew up in San Diego, learning fashion tips from his mother and three sisters.

The Big Read Kick-Off: Harlem Renaissance Celebration

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 6pm-8:30pm
Atlanta History Center
The Atlanta History Center's Literary Center at Margaret Mitchell House
presents a unique after-hours program with a nod to the Harlem Renaissance during the Big Read kick-off party. Guests enjoy living history performances by Yvonne Singh as she portrays Zora Neale Hurston, musical performances by singer/songwriter Kyshona Armstrong, and guided tours of the exhibition Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits. Light refreshments and a cash bar are available. The first 50 visitors through the door receive a free copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God. This program is free of charge.

Woody Holton: ABIGAIL ADAMS
Saturday 2/20/2010 5pm
A Cappella Books
Abigail Adams is perhaps best remembered for requesting that her husband, the not–yet–president John Adams, "remember the ladies" as he helped forge a new government in 1776. This famous private letter has turned Adams into a feminist icon, and while here she may have been specifically referring to domestic violence, in other letters she expressed what is often seen as a progressive, enlightened view that women should be equally educated with men and allowed to engage in business and control their own finances. This aspect of Adams's biography is well-known. But less so are her conflicted ideas on religion, African-Americans, money making, Europe, politics and family. In Abigail Adams, by American history scholar Woody Holton, readers are given a vivid and complete picture of America's second first lady.
Woody Holton was a finalist for the National Book Award.