Lemuria Books – Page 203

Page 203 of 257

The Myths Series

On June 3, 2010

by Kelly Pickerill

I recently read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman, and when I was finished, because I read books from cover to cover (reading the acknowledgments, the “note about the font,” and even glancing at the Library of Congress info) (I know, I’m a nerd), I saw at the end that it’s the latest book in The Myths series.

“Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives,” the last page of the book reads, “they explore our desires, our fears, our longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way.”

Books in the series include Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Alexander McCall Smith’s Dream Angus, and Jeanette Winterson’s Weight. There are 14 books in all, and I’d like to collect all of them, so I started the other day by picking up Atwood’s and Winterson’s books at Lemuria.

Atwood’s novel, The Penelopiad, is essentially The Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view. In the book you witness first-hand the raucous events that went on at Odysseus’s house while he was away, and if you think the end of the Odyssey, with Odysseus saving the day disguised as a beggar and doling out a gruesome end for those smarmy suitors, is exciting, you may be interested in getting into Penelope’s head as she’s waiting, weaving, and plotting, and finding out what she really thinks of Odysseus’s triumphant return.

I am almost done with Winterson’s book, Weight, about Atlas and Heracles. Atlas has to hold up the world as punishment, Heracles has to do the god’s bidding as punishment, and when they decide to swap punishments, they find out some interesting things about themselves.

As I was reading The Good Man Jesus, I thought about what Pullman was trying to say about Jesus’s message. He is an atheist, and in the introduction he says that above all, his novel is a story about how stories become stories. The Jesus in his novel says a lot of the same things that are recorded in the Bible, but some of his words are twisted by his brother, Christ, to be prophetic of a kingdom of God on earth. In the chapter where Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane, he asks God where he is, admitting that he’s never heard his voice or seen his hand in anything he’s done, though evidence of God’s existence is all around him in the beauty of the world. He wonders aloud whether his brother, Christ, was right, that it would be good to start a church to usher in the kingdom, then ruminates on all the things that can go wrong when a body of men who believe they are doing the will of God have the power of God behind them. He finishes his prayer by asking God one thing above all: “That any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive.”

One of the great things about The Myths series is that, at the outset, each author is asked simply to rewrite a myth. They are able to choose the myth and the approach, whether to modernize the themes, and whether to inject their own philosophies into the story. Check them out. When I get ahold of some of the others, I’ll let you know.

Kate DiCamillo and Handselling

By Former Lemurians

On June 3, 2010

In Staff Blog

This year, Kate DiCamillo was honored with the 2010 Indies Choice Award “Most Engaging Author.” I personally voted for her and I was pretty excited to hear that she had won. I love The Magician’s Elephant and The Tale of Despereaux. I also love showing them to new readers everyday. In her acceptance speech, Kate praised booksellers and the wonder of handselling. It kind of made me tear up, so I thought I would share it with y’all.

“When I was in second grade, I fell in love with Abraham Lincoln.

The Clermont Elementary School library had a series of books called Notable Young Americans. And in this way, through these books, I met George Washington and Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart and Booker T. Washington.

I met them and I liked them.

But it wasn’t until Abraham Lincoln that I fell in love.

Something about his story (the poverty, the death of his mother, his love of words and books) resonated with me, moved me. I came home from school and told my mother everything that I had learned about the young Abraham Lincoln. I told her that I wanted to learn more.

My mother took me to the Cooper Memorial Library in downtown Clermont. They had there many books about Honest Abe, but there was nothing for a reader my age. And so my mother checked out a thick volume on the life of Abraham Lincoln written for adults. The text was impenetrable. After a few pages, I gave up on it and contented myself with looking at photographs of the man, his sad and hopeful face.

That year, for my eighth birthday, my mother gave me a hardcover biography of Lincoln called Meet Abraham Lincoln by Barbara Cary. It was written at my reading level. There were wonderful illustrations, and I was smitten with the man anew.

Where had my mother found that book? At Porter’s Stationery and Gifts in Eustis, Florida. Eustis was the next town over from Clermont, thirty miles away. At Porter’s, they had looked for a book about Lincoln that was at my reading level and they had special-ordered it for my mother, for me.

Also, they had told my mother that there was another book I might like. It was called The Cricket in Times Square. And so, in addition to a book about a poor, lonely boy who went on to be come president of the United States, I also received the story of a small cricket who loves music, a cricket who sings so beautifully that people stop to listen.

Who was that bookseller who thought, “Here is an almost-eight-year-old girl who loves Abraham Lincoln. What other book will she love? Oh, yes. This book about a cricket.”?

There was nothing logical about that decision. It was a leap of faith.

Those two books changed me.

Together, they cemented an idea in my eight-year-old heart. That idea was this: It doesn’t matter how small, how lonely, how broken or sad or poor you are. There is a way to make yourself heard. There is a way to sing.

A bookseller put those books into my mother’s hands, and my mother put them into mine.

Sometimes we forget that this simple, physical gesture can change lives.

I want to remind you that it does.

I want to thank you because it did.”

– Kate DiCamillo

May 26, 2010

A Guest Blog by M.O. Walsh

By Former Lemurians

On June 2, 2010

In Southern Fiction

Moving Forward With My Head Turned Back: Why I’m So Pumped to Read at Lemuria

Here’s the deal.

I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but spent most of my life nearly positive that the two kindest people in the world lived in Jackson, Mississippi. Well, they lived in Jackson first and then Brandon, although they never moved. It seemed instead that Lakeland Drive simply turned from some dusty stretch of potholes into a thick and black electrical cord, plugging downtown Jackson into the folks out near the Ross Barnett Reservoir, many of whom, once juiced, said, “Wait a second, we moved out here for a reason!” I think they (the royal “they” and not my grandparents in particular) even kicked up enough dust to have the address officially changed in order to clear up any confusion that they might live in a place that had crime, litter, and interstates. I’m no Jacksonian scholar, though, so this could be wrong. All I know is that my clumsily printed birthday cards to “Maw Maw Rebie” and “Paw Paw Milton” started coming back returned if I wrote Jackson, MS, and not Brandon. And so it strikes me now that the Mississippi P.O. may have been my first editor.

Anyway, a few things about these saints: my grandfather, Milton Walsh, was a retired oil and gas man and my grandmother, Rebie Walsh, was an artist. Both were insane golfers. My grandfather, I believe, could have gone pro if he had any interest in competing. He seemed more interested in telling knock-knock jokes in the rough areas around the green, though, and talking sincerely with strangers in the clubhouse. Still, he was the only man I ever knew who could shoot his age on the golf course. This is no small deal. My grandmother was skilled, too, but also disinterested in the competition. She’s instead spent the second half of her life throwing herself whole hog into any artist endeavor she could find; oil painting, drawing, paper-making and, once she got past seventy, memoir writing. To be honest, she was pretty damn good at most of this stuff; and a few of her works now hang out in storage areas of Mississippi museums, some future call to relevance not impossible.

But whenever I would visit them as a child during hot summers they’d lay aside every personal pursuit to entertain me. For years it was the zoo. Then the water park by the Reservoir. That old toy store right off I-55. As I grew up, though, all three of us felt the shine of these places wear off and we searched for new avenues of connection. I began duffing around the links with my grandfather. We ate at every new restaurant they could find (nearly always Mexican, though I had no idea why). Then, my grandmother noticed how much I was reading; often slinking off to my bedroom to flip through comic books as a kid, Stephen King novels as a teenager, and then starting to scribble some of my own ideas down as a young man, and she told about this place called “Lemuria”. I was immediately interested. For those in the know; this word glowed to me like Araby.

So, we went, and the next ten years of my life were some of the best. Every visit to Jackson was punctuated by a trip to Lemuria and lunch at the sandwich shop below. I’d gone through college and a graduate degree in literature at this point and eventually moved to Oxford, MS, for an MFA at Ole Miss. Every few months I’d stop in Jackson on my drive back down to Baton Rouge to go to Lemuria with my grandparents. And as my personal reading tastes were now coming into their own, my appreciation for this amazing bookstore multiplied. I got past the stacks and asked permission into the locked room of collectibles with my grandmother in tow. I carefully handled books that cost more than I would make that entire semester on my graduate stipend. Still, with her help, I began my modest collection, buying things like first edition Barry Hannah’s and a first edition of Rock Springs, by Richard Ford. I knew at those moments, more than ever before, what I wanted to do with my life.

And, during this time, I also got lucky. I had a few stories published in anthologies like Blue Moon Café and French Quarter Fiction that allowed me, as a doofus in his late twenties, to read and sign books at Lemuria. I was, of course, humbled and felt a fraud. Still, my grandparents attended these casual events in nice clothes and I remember Rebie taking about thirty pictures of me as I just sat at a table with some other writers, signing stock. I was not embarrassed by this, though it was embarrassing. I loved them and understood that they loved me. But when her pictures came back, all blurry, every one of them, almost unrecognizable, I knew that I wouldn’t have much longer to spend with them. And I was right.

Gone five years from us now (Rebie passing of a broken heart a year after losing Milton), I was already at work on the stories that now appear in my book The Prospect of Magic when they died. One of the stories in the collection, The Freddies, I began writing in that very same bedroom in Brandon, Mississsippi, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral. In the months that followed that event, while editing the story, I found myself trying to talk my grandmother into reasons to keep going. Her health was failing, her house was empty, and I knew I was waging a losing battle. Still, I’d say things to her like, “You can’t go anywhere. I want you to be there for my wedding, for when I have a kid, for when I get a book out and read at Lemuria.”

And it likely seems improbable to most that a bookstore event would be listed alongside things like birth and marriage; but it wasn’t for us. We’d discovered something cool about one another (as people and not just kin) among the stacks at Lemuria and we both knew it. And even as I type this I can remember the smell of their station wagon as we drove the long stretch up Lakeland Drive, from Castlewoods to Banner Hall, to the bookstore, and I remember the rosary lying in the small change cup by the automatic stick shift.

All this to say that I was lucky to have them then like I am lucky to have them now. And, although neither Milton or Rebie will be in attendance when I do get the chance to read and sign from my own book at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 9th, I’ll imagine her snapping photos of me the whole time, him fumbling with a golf tee in his pocket, both happy to be back in Jackson and smiling, like I am.

M. O. Walsh’s website

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

By Former Lemurians

On June 1, 2010

In Fiction

it’s the day before your ninth birthday and you mother is baking a practice birthday cake in preparation for tomorrow. you take your first bite and instead of tasting your all time favorite, lemon cake, you taste your mother’s sadness. thus begins a lifetime of being able to taste peoples emotions in the food that they prepare. imagine being able to taste your mother’s affair in the dinners she cooks, your brothers disappearance in the toast he fixes for you.

aimee bender has recently grabbed my attention and my heart. this was the first book of hers that i read and i am now on a huge bender kick.

Deep Blues by Robert Palmer

By John

On May 31, 2010

In Blues

Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World

by Robert Palmer

Viking Penguin (1981)

Browsers in our music section often say, “I want to read about the Blues, where do I start?” Always a good choice is Palmer’s Deep Blues. This little paperback is so readable and yet continuously informative – every page seems to have an unexpected folk-social history fact tucked in the text.

In 1903, the first descriptions of black music in the Delta were published in the Journal of American Folklore. From this point, Palmer describes the musical influence from Africa as it migrated into Delta culture, placing emphasis on how folk polyrhythms played such an important part in the development of Mississippi Blues (this section surely was one of my favorites, as Palmer featured interesting narratives on hand drumming).

From Dockery Plantation, to the early 1920s and 30s recordings, to Mighty Mojo Muddy From Stovall, Palmer writes a who’s who of Delta Music. With ease he explains how all the players were influenced by the music and each other, fitting in together and creating a Delta way of life. From the Delta, to Chicago in the 40s, through the Chess’n of the 50s Blues Gods – not leaving out King Biscuit Time or Memphis and all the pathways in between – Palmer clearly explains it all.

All the major players appear with jigsaw puzzle perfection explained in time, influence, and place. Palmer chronicles how major songs, bands, record labels and communities grew from the Delta blues, thus having a major impact on the world music scene.

Deep Blues has a chapter-by-chapter discography and bibliography to further guide the reader. Unfortunately, Robert Palmer passed away in 1997. A 30-year updated anniversary edition would be so interesting – a very good excuse for a reread.

Vacation Reading

By admin

On May 30, 2010

In Staff Blog

May was a really busy month at the bookstore and I feel like these past few days our blog has become a way for all the booksellers at Lemuria to keep up with each other. Some of us on vacation and some of us at the great book conference in NYC and thankfully, some left to run the store. Well, I just came back from the mountains in North Carolina. To sum it up bluntly, this vacation pretty much kicked my butt. A lot of that has to do with Graybeard Mountain (elev. 5650). The expression on my face was the closest thing to a smile I could muster once we reached the top. I’ll actually be ready to go back to work on Tuesday.

Back to books, I took along two bags of books for me and my sweetie. Here’s what I dipped into:

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman: I liked it a lot. Very pleasant, good dialogue, laugh-out-loud sections, a really neat book. I did not gush, however. See Kelly’s blog on this. This is a great book for vacation.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer: Gorgeous. Thanks for the suggestion, Nan. I am still not done with this one. But I can tell you that this novel has a little bit of everything: delicious prose, subtle eroticism, intrigue . . . also a great book to take on vacation.

The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker edited by Rudolph P. Byrd: This collection of interviews with Alice Walker helps the reader to get a good overall sense of Alice’s writing. I admit that I have shied away from some of her work. This books explains “the why” behind much of her writing and opens the door for the reader to pick up some lesser known novels. The title of this interview collection comes from a poem Alice wrote in 2008. Before I opened the book, I took the title in the negative sense. It is not. The poem reminds us of the strength we have to change ourselves and the world around us.

The world has changed:
This does not mean that
You were never
Hurt.
The world
Has changed:
Rise!
Yes
&
Shine!
Resist the siren
Call
Of
Disbelief.
The world has changed:
Don’t let
Yourself
Remain
Asleep
To
It.

Shakespeare and Company

By Former Lemurians

On May 29, 2010

In Staff Blog

I mentioned in my last post that I was on vacation in France. I had the good fortune of spending a day in Paris and visiting the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore. If you can’t get to Paris this summer, here’s a few pics.

Matterhorn: The Story Behind the Pick

By admin

On May 28, 2010

In Fiction

It was Friday, February 26th and the call came from Morgan Entrekin of Grove/Atlantic informing John that the press was almost sold out of first editions of Matterhorn prior to the March 23rd release date. At that point, the novel was already in its 6th printing. The initial print run at Grove/Atlantic was between 80,ooo and 100,000 after being bought from the small nonprofit press El Leon in 2007.

We needed to make our decision quickly to ensure first editions for the May First Editions Club selection. Joe’s reading of Matterhorn settled any ambiguity and Lemuria geared up for an event in May with debut novelist Karl Marlantes, the Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar who also earned the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals for his service as a marine in the Vietnam War.

Despite the buzz in the book world about Matterhorn, Joe had already gotten a unique impression of Karl Marlantes from an article in the January 25th edition of Publisher’s Weekly and he decided to post the article in February on Lemuria’s blog. What struck Joe about the article was how neatly Karl explained why he writes, and in doing so he referenced his experience of reading Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding:

“Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person.”

Lisa and Karl at the Eudora Welty House, May 12, 2010

At the time, there was no way for Karl to realize what a unique impression his mention of Eudora Welty would make on readers in Jackson, Mississippi. Knowing his admiration for Eudora, we set up a tour of the Welty House with Eudora’s niece, Mary Alice Welty White.

Over the next three months, Joe’s blog posting became a way for Karl’s readers, long lost friends and acquaintances to connect and express their thoughts about Matterhorn and the Vietnam war. Many readers and book critics have expressed this notion: Matterhorn is the classic novel of the Vietnam war.

Billy Watkins of Jackson’s Clarion Ledger interviewed Karl about his novel but also turned toward his personal experience during the war and finally to the reception he received afterward. Karl said that during the ride from the airport after 400 days of service, his brother remarked: “‘I have to warn you, it’s not going to be real fun when we leave this area. A lot of people don’t like the war.’” Karl concluded the interview: “When this country goes to war, it uses 19-year-olds as weapons. They’re the best weapons we have. So if we’re going to use them, we’d better be damn sure that there is no other way to resolve the issue.”

After being subjected to more than thirty years of writing and revision, Karl’s novel has been compared to such classics as The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. The New York Times Book Review called Matterhorn “a raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history”.

One of the featured recorded readings by Eudora Welty at the museum was about memory:

“Of course the greatest confluences of all is that which makes up the human memory–the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing–it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives–the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead” (One Writer’s Beginnings, 104).

A veteran of any war never forgets his or her experience. Karl Marlantes courageously served his country on foot in Vietnam, but he also serves his country to this day by keeping his memories alive and creating fictional characters, allowing readers the opportunity to get under a soldier’s skin and deepen their understanding of humanity.

More Links for Matterhorn and Karl Marlantes

Video: On Writing Matterhorn for 30 Years

Video: Understanding Other Lives through Fiction

Lisa’s blog on reading Matterhorn

Joe’s blog on Karl’s article: Why I Write

The Eyes of Willie McGee by Alex Heard

By Former Lemurians

On May 27, 2010

In Civil Rights

Willie McGee’s story wouldn’t have been very unusual were it but for a few factors. After all, he was black, and it was Mississippi, and it was 1945, and he was accused – then quickly convicted – of raping a white woman. There were allegations of an affair, with the woman pointing the finger in the courtroom suspected of actually being McGee’s lover…yes, yes, it sounds lots like the plot for To Kill A Mockingbird, doesn’t it? Typically he would’ve waited a short while, been executed, and then lost amongst the many many many other similar sad cases of his day.

But! Here are some curveballs about Willie McGee’s story that have led to The Eyes of Willie McGee: well, first of all, a lawyer from New York was hired for him by the Civil Rights Congress and so he got loads of attention. His case was actually pleaded – and Americans like William Faulkner and Norman Mailer began speaking out about it. This was the budding (if that) Civil Rights movement, though, and despite going all the way to the Supreme Court and being investigated by the FBI, Willie McGee still faced the death sentence. He was executed in Mississippi’s ‘Travelling Electric Chair” in 1951. It was – another curveball – recorded by a 20-year-old college student named Jim Leeson, who wasn’t at the execution but rather recorded it off of the radio. Leeson was later a professor at Vanderbilt, and played the recording for some of his students – among them Alex Heard. Twenty-five years later, Heard began investigating a bit more into McGee’s story, found out nobody had ever spent too much time investigating it, and began working on what is now his book. It’s a fascinating story, unusual but familiar in so many sad ways. NPR did a feature on McGee’s story recently – read about it here.

Susie

The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting and The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan/Peter Sis

By Diane

On May 26, 2010

In OZ: Young Adult Fiction

If you are looking for romance and mystery, read The Body Finder. Violet Ambrose discovered at a very early age that she had a very special talent – she could find dead bodies, at least those that were murdered. She can sense the echoes that the victim leaves behind and the imprints left on the killer. During Violet’s junior year, a serial killer is loose in her hometown and she is maybe the only person to stop him. An intense read.

(Teen, ages 12 and up)

According to the author, “The Dreamer is a work of fiction based on the events of Pablo Neruda’s childhood.” Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and is considered one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century.

In this story, Neftali Reyes (Pablo Neruda) is a young boy who has a vivid imagination, daydreams, hears voices, and loves to read. He is easily distracted and can spend hours observing and investigating everything. This is all well and good unless you have a father that has high aspirations for his young son and is a very no-nonsense man. The father wants his son to be a doctor or dentist and finds Neftali’s writings and daydreams to be an embarrassment to the family. Neftali is a very persistent young boy and lets nothing stand in his way of achieving his goals in spite of being bullied and called stupid.

(Young Adult Middle/Young Adult, ages 9 – 12)

Page 203 of 257

The Myths Series

Kate DiCamillo and Handselling

A Guest Blog by M.O. Walsh

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Deep Blues by Robert Palmer

Vacation Reading

Shakespeare and Company

Matterhorn: The Story Behind the Pick

The Eyes of Willie McGee by Alex Heard

The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting and The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan/Peter Sis

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