As some of you may know, we have a great service called the OZ First Editions Club. Much like our regular First Editions Club, we bring you a signed first edition every month–except these are the best (signed) picture books and middle grade novels we can get out hands on!
OZ FEC took a little bit of a hiatus recently, (the lovely Adie and Zita have been helping me revamp the club) but we are proud to announce we’re back in action! We made a few changes which I discuss here, but the biggest change is that the authors no longer have to come to the store for their book to be picked. We want our selection to be the best and unhindered by publishers’ touring schedules.
For February, we picked Penny and Her Marble by the amazing Kevin Henkes. Mr Henkes’ has won a Caldecott Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Newbery Honor, but I’m pretty sure being a selection in Lemuria’s OZ FEC trumps all of that, right? Ok, fine, maybe the Caldecott was a bigger honor, but still, you catch my drift. Penny joins the ranks of Mr. Henkes’ other well loved mice: Lily and her purple plastic purse, Julius her brother, worried Wemberly, Chrysanthemum, and others that have been favorites here at the store for years. In this installment, Penny finds a marble on her neighbor’s yard. Entranced by it, she takes it home, but she starts to worry. What if she stole this marble? Penny will steal your hearts and be a great addition to any collection.
March’s selection will be Otis and the Puppy by Loren Long. This is Loren’s second time to be inducted into the OZ FEC. He was a big hit in 2011 when we picked Otis and the Tornado, and we were thrilled to be able to bring you the newest installment in the “new classic” Otis series. When creating this series,
Loren told us that he really studied other classic children’s books such as Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel and The Story of Ferdinand. The Otis series feels like it could be decades old or just created. Loren is one of our favorites not just here at the store, but in the community as well and we are so glad to have signed copies available again!
If you aren’t a part of the club yet, now is a great time to jump on board. We are working on some really cool stuff, kinda like we did here and you don’t want to miss it! To sign up, email us a ozfec@lemuriabooks.com!
When I was a boy in the late 70s and early 80s, my friends and I would sit on the beach in the heat of summer and watch the garbage barges leaving New York Harbor. The barges looked immense. They had to be, since they carried the thousands of daily tons of whatever New York City’s offices and factories and seven-million citizens no longer wanted. The barges traveled south, away from Long Island and toward New Jersey — toward us — and then out to sea for exactly twelve miles, the government-approved distance. There, they would dump their cargo into the water and, unburdened, return to port.
In her 1956 essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty makes the hard-to-refute claim that “feelings are all bound up in place.” After moving away from New Jersey at the age of thirty to attend graduate school in the Midwest, I found that the stories I was writing were, among other things, attempts to evoke, or unbind, the feelings of a place I had internalized in my childhood. The book I was writing, beyond relating the stories of individual characters, would tell the story of my particular stretch of the Jersey Shore, a landscape replete with emotional and narrative fruit that seemed abundant, ripe, and all mine.
USA Today reports that as many as six different TV networks are currently taking advantage of New Jersey’s “fertile territory for reality TV.” There is Bravo’s Real Housewives of the Jersey Shore and Style’s Jerseylicious and Oxygen’s Jersey Couture and more. But the cornerstone of all this programming is Jersey Shore. Reality television is, we all know by now, a deeply distorting lens, but it nevertheless is a lens looked through in large numbers. Season Two of Jersey Shore routinely attracted over five million viewers per episode. As I finalized revisions to my book, I wondered how readers’ perceptions of the place I had spent years writing about were possibly being shaped by MTV producers and the antics of people named Snooki and The Situation.
It seemed only fair to conclude that the explosion of Jersey-centered reality TV programming must be having some effect on people’s perceptions about my home state, for better or — I had to assume — worse. I say “assume” because until only recently I’d never actually watched an episode of Jersey Shore, despite having grown up only a handful of miles from the first season’s epicenter, Seaside Heights — a beach, incidentally, that I had never actually set foot on. Even in the 1980s, Seaside Heights was synonymous with hard partying. The same could not be said of me. One spring day in high school, some older kids were going to cut school and drive down there for the day. My parents wouldn’t let me go. That I asked if I could cut school that day tells all you need to know.
Michael Kardos is the author of the novel 
After finishing The Three- Day Affair I did wonder what parts of Michael Kardos’ background influenced the story line of this book. My question was answered in the July 30, 2012 issue of Publishers Weekly. Lenny Picker in a PW Talks Q&A with Michael asks the following:
I think it’s not a stretch to say that between Square Books and Lemuria, we can rock a debut author’s world. At Lemuria, our AMAZING FIRST EDITIONS CLUB MEMBERS are a power house of influence with publishers. We are lucky to have you! Without you we might not ever meet such wonderful authors and read their books.
Before leaving the Jackson city limits, I stopped at a roadside burger joint because I was hungry and thirsty since, besides being unnatural, air travel isn’t conducive to my appetite. I parked my cool car. Shut down the engine. The air conditioner hissed to silence. I stepped outside and immediately had no idea what was happening to me.