First Editions – Page 5

Raymond Carver died at the age of fifty but during his brief career he revived the short story form during the 1980s. His short story collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” made him famous and writers have sought to emulate him ever since—Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor, and others. Scholars have compared their work to Somerset Maugham, Guy du Maupassant and Anton Chekhov.

Raymond Carver had a legendary relationship with his editor Gordon Lish, who took a heavy hand with Carver’s work. While editing “What We Talk About” Lish got ahead of him and the final manuscript was sent to Knopf before Carver could stop some of Lish’s significant changes. While Carver was upset he also expressed gratitude for Lish’s work and the collection set his literary career and brought great financial gain which he and his wife desperately needed.

Uncorrected Proof. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1989.

In contrast to “What We Talk About,” Carver’s final collection of stories, “Where I’m Calling From” was edited by Gary Fisketjon who worked at the Atlantic Monthly Press at the time. Fisketjon noted in Carver’s biography by Carol Skelnicka:

“’The main reason Ray and I wanted to do a ‘new and selected’ with Where I’m Calling From was to show how steadily his work had evolved and to shuck the moronic ‘minimalist’ label.’”

Limited Edition. Signed. Franklin Library Edition. 1988.

Fisketjon, who had read many of Carver’s stories in their earlier magazine versions, said, “Where I’m Calling From is the definitive edition of Ray’s stories. Those are the stories that Ray wanted to restore.”

Carver’s title story “What We Talk About” appears in the Oscar-winning film “Birdman.” During the film, the main character, Riggins—played by Michael Keaton, rehearses a play adaptation of Carver’s story. Whether you’ve seen the movie or not, it’s a great time to read Raymond Carver again, or maybe even delightfully, for the first time.

For reading, The Collected Stories published by the Library of America contains both Lish’s edit of “What We Talk About” and Carver’s version plus several insightful essays by Carver.

For collecting, the uncorrected proof of “Where I’m Calling From”–which contains the story “What We Talk About”–is particularly meaningful noting Carver’s literary journey and that he would pass away several months later in 1988.

See all of Lemuria’s collectible books by Raymond Carver here.

The Marauders: Signed First Editions Available!

By Lemuria

On March 6, 2015

In Fiction, First Editions, Guest Post, Southern History

By Jim Ewing
Special to The Clarion-Ledger

On one level, The Marauders, a first novel by Tom Cooper, is the story of a treasure seeker with a metal detector looking for the buried bounty of Jean Lafitte.

Set in the fictional town of Jeanette in the Bataria region north of New Orleans where the famous pirate once roamed, it also is a realistic and detailed tale of despair among shrimpers and others who make their living from the water in the days after the twin tragedies of the Gulf Oil Spill and Hurricane Katrina.

In that way, The Marauders provides a fictional base for an all-too-real reality: the destruction of people’s homes, families, livelihoods due to natural and man-made disasters.

The plot is carried along by five sets of characters:
— Wes, a young man, and his father who lost their mother/wife to the storm surge of Katrina;
— Two felonious small-time hustlers who are seeking to rob and swindle their way to wealth;
— A set of monstrously evil twin brothers and their secret island of illegal marijuana;
— A miserable representative of the oil company trying get his former neighbors to sign on to a cut-rate settlement, hating himself for it and hating the region he has been trying to put behind him;
— The treasure-seeker, Lindquist, a one-armed man addicted to pain pills and living in the wreckage remaining from his broken marriage.

In the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Cooper with The Marauders uses fiction to expose to the public the grinding inequities and institutional unfairness facing a people trying to make do with less and less in a world where every card is seemingly dealt against them.

That story, in real life, is still playing out — witness the recent news stories where BP attorneys are disputing U.S. Justice Department claims that the accident “caused serious and widespread sociocultural harm to coastal communities.”

On a more symbolic note, the one-armed man, Lindquist, is a Gulf Coast Everyman desperately trying against all odds to find something valuable and good in the muck and ruin of a world breaking bad.

But to readers The Marauders is a good read filled with believable characters of the type found in this region. The suspense builds as the lives of those characters entwine with sometimes predictable and sometimes surprising results.

There are some criticisms that can be made. The plot moves slowly as Cooper spends a great deal of time building such a relatively large cast of main characters that exemplify the various facets of circumstances and despair arising from the disasters.

Then, some readers not familiar with the region might need that amount of detail. It’s well written and only slows the pace a bit. Too, Cooper could have added some layers of depth to the characters. More accomplished authors learn to weave small details that give nuance to relationships. But these are minor flaws that come with time, and polish.

As a first novel set in New Orleans and environs, Cooper’s Marauders shines for its local flavor, colorful characters and picturesque scenes. Let’s hope Cooper continues to write more thrillers set in this locale for many years to come By the way, The Marauders would make a dynamite movie!

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating, and the forthcoming Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, Spring 2015. Jim is a regular contributor to the Lemuria blog.

Franklin Library’s Signed First Edition Series

By Lisa

On March 3, 2015

In Fiction, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

breathing lessons by anne tyler “Breathing Lessons” by Anne Tyler. Franklin Library: Philadelphia, PA: 1988.

The Franklin Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania published some of the most beautiful leather bound books of the twentieth century. In operation from the early 1970s until 2000, the press published collectible books in three different styles: full genuine leather, imitation leather, and quarter-bound genuine leather. The books were released in several series: The 100 Greatest Books of All Time, The Great Books of the Western World, Pulitzer Prize Classics and the Signed First Editions series. Franklin Library provided an affordable way to enhance a library’s look and feel. Besides being aesthetically pleasing to many collectors, the fine craftsmanship of the books ensure they can be handed down from generation to generation.

The Signed First Edition series gave readers a way to have a signed book from authors that might otherwise be inaccessible. One example is “Breathing Lessons” by Anne Tyler. During the 1980s, Tyler was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” and “The Accidental Tourist.” The Franklin Library honored her in 1988 with a leather bound Signed First Edition of “Breathing Lessons,” for which she finally won the Pulitzer Prize. Tyler has always been a private author, declining book tours and rarely giving interviews. Although her publisher Knopf has worked over the years to distribute pre-signed trade editions, they are always of limited number. And a note for Anne Tyler fans–Tyler released her twentieth novel, “A Spool of Blue Thread” in February 2015.

Other beautiful books in the Signed First Edition series include: “Where I’m Calling From” by Raymond Carver and “Eva Luna” by Isabella Allende.

The Franklin Library also issued signed books which were not first editions but allowed the book lover the opportunity to collect a major work like “The Moviegoer” signed by Walker Percy.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

The Orenda: The 2014 Lemuria Fiction Book of the Year

By Former Lemurians

On February 10, 2015

In Fiction, First Editions, First Editions Club

“We had magic before the crows came. Before the rise of the great villages they so

roughly carved on the shores of our inland sea and named with words plucked from

our tongues—Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Ottawa—we had our own great

villages on these same shores. And we understood our magic. We understood what

the orenda implied.”

These are the very first words you read in The Orenda. There is something menacing in the tone, something tragic.

I read The Orenda in October of 2013 and since that time, I have found it difficult to separate my love for this book from my objective responsibility to customers when recommending books for to them. Thankfully, this is the rare case that it doesn’t matter. I can comfortably say that The Orenda is the best book released in 2014. I can tentatively say that The Orenda is one of the best book ever released.

Okay, enough gushing.

The book takes place in 17th century America. It follows a missionary, a young girl, and a great war bearer. Joseph Boyden uses each of these expertly fleshed out characters to provide depth and clarity over the course of many years. More than a year removed from reading the book, I find myself thinking of them. I wanted more time between the pages of this world. I’ve read the book twice now, and I can’t wait to read it again this year.

If I seem to be rambling, it’s because I can talk about this book for the rest of my life and still have so much left to go over. Nothing is wasted in this novel. Every chapter, every page, every word is vital to the story being told. There is a candid cadence Boyden demonstrates that left me breathless. The real treat of this book lies in its ability to be a literary classic and a page-turner at the same time.

The Orenda by Joseph Boyden is the 2014 Lemuria Fiction Book of the Year.

Written by Andre

From the Golden Age of Illustrated Books: Life on the Mississippi

By Lisa

On January 24, 2015

In First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1883.

“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

Samuel Clemens, at the age of ten, left his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, on his first riverboat voyage in 1853. He found work as a printer in St. Louis and confidently moved on for other work in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Several years later he landed his dream job as an apprentice to a veteran steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Clemens’ career came to an abrupt halt when traffic on the river became impossible during the Civil War. By 1863 he was working as a reporter and first signed his pen name “Mark Twain.” Throughout his writing life, Twain returned to the river, and none more so than in “Life on the Mississippi.”

Twain published a seven-part series of essays,“Old Times on the Mississippi,” based on his travels on the Mississippi River in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. Seven years later Twain made a trip on the Mississippi with his publisher James Osgood and stenographer Roswell Phelps to gather more material to make a book suitable in length for the subscription book market.

The first edition of “Life on the Mississippi” was lavishly illustrated. The spine and cover featured gold stamped scenes of riverboat life on the Mississippi by the principal artist John Harley. While Harley focused on many of the river folk sketches, Edmund Henry Garrett was employed to capture many of the landscape and shoreline scenes. To meet the publishing deadline, illustrator A. B. Shute was added to the team to complete the final chapters. The illustrations also identify a first edition, first printing: a Mark Twain in flames above a cremation urn was removed from subsequent printings due to objections from his wife.

In 19^th century America, illustrated books were the main way visual images entered the home, influencing how Americans learned about history and faraway places. Altogether the illustrations in “Life on the Mississippi” were, and still are, vital compliments to the text of “Life on the Mississippi.”

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Guest Post: Gifford’s Up-Down reprises Sailor and Luna saga

By Lemuria

On January 20, 2015

In First Editions, First Editions Club

Special to the Clarion-Ledger

barrygifford Barry Gifford explains in the beginning of his new novel that in ancient cultures, it was believed that there were five directions: North, South, East, West and Up-Down, which represented the navel or center. It’s an inward direction that his protagonist, Pace Ripley, intended to go in order to explain his life, which at this point had extended six decades.

It’s a good thing Gifford provides this road map because without it, one might be lost as to what to make of the rapid twists and turns of Pace’s life — or, rather, this series of bizarre incidents that form an amoral (from the standpoint of organized religion) morality tale.

The lessons can be as obvious as the necessity to face one’s own fears and let go of old demons to the inexplicable which also serves up the point that life often just is inexplicable. Or, as Pace is told when awakened from a dream by a voice in the darkness: “God is a disappointment to everyone.”

Pace is the son of Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune whose tales titillated readers for decades. He was a minor character, noted for the predicaments life seemed to offer him. He wandered out of the S&L tales as a young man by going to Katmandu and then marrying a New Yorker.

875491_1779185_lz Gifford’s Sailor and Lula became popular in the 1990s. Readers might remember the film adaptation of the first S&L book Wild at Heart (1990) starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.

In that one, Sailor gets out of prison for time spent protecting Lula that resulted in a manslaughter conviction, while Lula’s mother tries to keep them apart (a thread throughout the books). They meet any number of odd characters and situations that involve quick deaths when the plot gets sticky.

By any other author, such deus ex machina might seem contrived but Gifford pulls it off, mainly because his characters are often so unbelievably believable that when the unbelievable happens, it just becomes as believable as the rest.

While Gifford’s plots are rather languid and often marked by the aforementioned quick deaths, the reader doesn’t suffer, as the observations and interplay between characters are quite juicy (sometimes R-rated).

download That continues in Up-Down, which is subtitled “The almost lost, last Sailor and Lula story, in which their son, Pace Roscoe Ripley, finds his way.”

Sailor and Lula fans will love this book and hope more “lost” tales will be found!

Biographies of Gifford state that his father was in in organized crime, and he spent his childhood largely in Chicago and New Orleans living in hotels. If so, that explains much of the richness of his writing, offbeat characters and random violence.

For new fans, the entire series is compiled in Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels (Seven Stories Press, 2010, 618 pages, $19.95).

Gifford obviously knows a great deal about Mississippi, using place names and common characters throughout his S&L books. The stories may be the closest Mississippi has to the equally wacky Serge Storms sagas by Tim Dorsey, who peoples his characters in Florida.

The Up-Down can be seen as a coda to the S&L books, or even a koan of sorts, to underscore the fact that life is not logical or comprehensible and it can only be understood intuitively, experimentally. That, also, may be considered wisdom.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating, and the forthcoming Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, Spring 2015.

Barry Gifford will be at Lemuria January 28th at 5 PM to read and sign from his book, The Up-Down.

Creamy Brains

By Former Lemurians

On December 10, 2014

In Fiction, First Editions, Foreign Fiction, Newsworthy

Jacket (5) Haruki Murakami released Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage earlier this year and it was pretty lackluster in the “creamy brains” department. Oh, you haven’t read Murakami? You’re unsure why someone would title a blog Creamy Brains. Well, Murakami is a master of magical realism, and magical realism is probably my favorite genre of books. Think plot-lines like those of 2010’s Inception directed by Christopher Nolan, add men that wear sheep costumes and fry donuts, and you have the basics of a Murakami novel.

Colorless rarely ventured into the realms unknown and left me extremely underwhelmed. I think if the book would have completely omitted the dream sequences and replaced those pages with more of what the novel is actually about (a middle aged man examining a life once lived) it would have been much more enjoyable for me. As it stands, the book is a great reflection of the title character: it was somewhat colorless, and drab.

The Strange Library is the second book Murakami has released this year, and I consider it masterful. The book is a concise tour de force of magical realism. Knopf has paired Chip Kidd +(designer and art director) with the author Murakami to create a beautiful book that allows the reader to fall into an uneasy and uncomfortable experience.

Jacket (6)

It tells the story of an unnamed narrator. He quickly finds himself trapped inside of the library, uneasy and intruding. He is tasked with memorizing three tomes with a one month deadline. His only companion, the aforementioned sheep man. His captor tells him if he completes this task, he will be set free, but conflicting information tells him his captor traps young minds, has them read for one month, and eats the brains to absorb the information.

The more information, the creamier the brain.

Creamy brains.

This is all weird stuff, and if you have ever read any of my past blogs here on the Lemuria Blog, you’ll understand that I love weird. The Strange Library is like a bad dream. A bad dream of a small Japanese boy that is fundamentally incapable of disobeying the wishes of an elder. Despite his terrifying predicament, his primary concern is that of worrying his mother by showing up to dinner late. The book reminds me of a Studio Ghibli film. Ghibli is famous for turning Japanese parables and fairy tales into modern masterpieces.

The Strange Library is available now at Lemuria Bookstore, and is absolutely perfect for an afternoon away from reality.

Written by Andre

Jubilee – A Labor of Love

By Lisa

On December 8, 2014

In Fiction, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

Jubilee by Margaret Walker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Poet Nikki Giovianni described her good friend Margaret Walker as “the most famous person nobody knows.” While known for her signature poem “For My People,” her novel Jubilee was the first modern novel on slavery.

Walker’s parents were both teachers and always encouraged her to do well in school as they moved from Birmingham to Meridian to New Orleans. By the Great Depression, Walker had finished college at Northwestern and was working for the WPA Writer’s Project with Richard Wright in Chicago. Her collection of poems, For My People, was published in 1942 by Yale Press and she became the first black woman to be awarded Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her literary reputation was established.

Despite this literary success, Walker had an even greater and perhaps an even more personal ambition: to write a novel based on the life of her grandmother. Jubilee was a thirty-year labor of love for Walker. The novel was to span slavery, civil war and reconstruction. She immersed herself in historical records and slave narratives, collected the stories of her family and visited old home sites while juggling the responsibilities of teaching and raising a family with four children. Sadly, Walker’s grandmother died before the Jubilee was published in 1966.

Jubilee is significant because until the 1960s black historical fiction had hardly been attempted by black writers. Jubilee was the first novel to be written by a black writer from slavery to reconstruction from the daily perspective of the black population. That Walker took 30 years to research it from a historical perspective while maintaining the heart of the story gleaned from her grandmother’s stories is no surprise. Scholars have credited Walker with paving the way for other black historical novels like Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Margaret Walker devoted her life to teaching and her community at Jackson State University for thirty years before retiring in 1980. As Walker was involved in her community, many may cherish signed copies of her work. For collectors, first editions of Jubilee can be found at a reasonable price though signed copies are scarce.

Learn more about Margaret Walker’s Centennial Celebration at the Margaret Walker Center.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Let’s Talk Jackson Guest Post: Building Castles between here and New Orleans

By Lemuria

On December 3, 2014

In First Editions, First Editions Club, Gift Books

Written by Jim Pathfinder Ewing

Meeting Katy Simpson Smith at a book signing and reading at Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS, I was immediately captivated by her infectious smile, her sweet presence, her unassuming grace. She seemed baffled that her first book, The Story of Land and Sea, had excited such interest in the book world.

As the publisher HarperCollins describes it: Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, the novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave—characters who yearn for redemption amid a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love.

But it’s much, much more.

It was happenstance that I was at Lemuria at all, much less buying her book. I had stopped by to have some signed first editions put in mylar so they might wear better on the shelf, and Adie and Maggie who work there, asked me if I was coming to the signing. What signing? I asked.

They told me about this young writer, 28, who grew up in Jackson and was making waves with her debut novel. In Jackson? How could I not know her? So, I bought the book and stayed, and was the first person to greet her when she arrived. We chatted and I thought, hmmm, sweet lady.

Little did I know that the surface of this woman was like the ocean she described — smiles and laughter like jumping fish and mermaids — covering unfathomable depths where leviathans live unceasing and unknown.

Once I picked up the book, I was hooked.

Lyrical, poetic, masterful, each page is a delight. I found myself not worrying about the plot, each page its own reward. My thoughts about the book became a barely conscious narrative itself:

I don’t want it to stop. She skirts through the puzzles of people’s hearts like sure fingers on combination locks, first left, then right, then left again, releasing understandings that roll through me like waves.

Young and old, they are all the same: transparent to her in magical ways. I am mesmerized as the pages glide by, getting my sea legs in this voyage of discovery. I cannot put the book down.

As the chapters flow, and I take breaks now and then, to rest, recuperate, gather myself. I plunge back again and again; from sea to land, from land to sea, taking deep breaths, from a gathering intelligence of who is who and how, to knowing I was unknowing, only thinking I knew. I gasp as each chapter forms a sea change in the facets revealed about each character.

In the first chapter, my feet on solid ground, I don’t like Asa, the grandfather. He’s a hateful, self-righteous man, through his clinging to religion. In the next, I see him as a young man, and my heart breaks for him; I am him. How did that happen? And I hate Helen, the mother, his daughter, for her cold, callous pretension; even, as before, I had felt the husband’s and the granddaughter’s longing and loss for her. Now, I see, I had only seen her as a ship on the horizon, her gallant sails, the dim outline, defiant and wonderful as she sailed into the golden sunset of memory. But wait! What’s this! Quick as a riptide, the roles change again. Helen, the mother, in love; Asa turning, turning … into what he will become.

We delve deeper and deeper, exploring, finding, shifting, changing.

As the pages turn and mount, I grow fearful the book will end, and where will I be? On sea or land?

Now, having made the voyage, I am spent; in awe and slightly resentful. Like the father, a privateer, she has stolen my admiration. It’s a prize hard won. Enduring.

Since I met her at the book signing, and sat with her, and conversed, and heard her speak to an audience, I wonder: How can someone so young, this author, fathom so many diverse people, and present them in all their mystery and unconscious revelation?

I think back to the photo I took of her, so full of life and easy laughter; how can such depth of knowledge reside there? Her bright face, her youthful demeanor, are like the book’s cover: beautiful, well crafted, but the inner pages tell a different story: of love and loss, poignant hopes and crushing realities. Unless you take the time to hear her words in your own mind, you will never know certain secrets that are universal, hidden in your own heart.

It is a joy and a wonder to have a Jackson author of such talent. She could live and write anywhere. But she doesn’t, building her castles between here and New Orleans.

I look forward to her next book, on land, sea or air.

Here’s a story about her in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2014/08/katy_simpson_smith_grabs_natio.html

Jim PathFinder Ewing has written six books, published in English, French, German, Russian and Japanese. His latest is “Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating” (Findhorn Press, 2012). His next book — about which he is mysteriously silent — is scheduled to be released in Spring, 2015. Find him on Facebook, join him on Twitter @EdiblePrayers, or see his website,www.blueskywaters.com