"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

Come Visit Our Book Dome at the Okanogan/Tonasket Barter Faire

We'll be on the North end of one of the aisles, as usual. Look for the Pirate Flag!

FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR 2011 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

Fiction

Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn
Bellevue Literary Press

Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
(Random House)

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
(Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House)

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision
(Lookout Books, an imprint of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington)

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
(Bloomsbury USA)

Nonfiction

Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
(Graywolf Press)

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
(Little, Brown and Company)

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
(W. W. Norton & Company)

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
(Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Group USA)

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout
(It Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Poetry

Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split
(TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press)

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Carl Phillips, Double Shadow
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010
(W.W. Norton & Company)

Bruce Smith, Devotions
(University of Chicago Press)

Young People's Literature

Franny Billingsley, Chime
(Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)

Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy
(Marshall Cavendish)

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again
(Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy
(Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books)

Lauren Myracle, Shine
(Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS)

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now
(Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Judges for the 2011 National Book Awards (bios available here):

Fiction

Deirdre McNamer (Panel Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li

Nonfiction

Alice Kaplan (Panel Chair), Yunte Huang, Jill Lepore, Barbara Savage

Poetry

Elizabeth Alexander (Panel Chair), Thomas Sayers Ellis, Amy Gerstler, Kathleen Graber, Roberto Tejada

Young People's Literature

Marc Aronson (Panel Chair), Ann Brashares, Matt de la Peña, Nikki Grimes, Will Weaver
_______________________

New York, NY (October 12, 2011) -The twenty Finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards were announced by past National Book Award Winners, Finalists, and Judges in front of a live audience at the new Literary Arts Center in Portland, Oregon as part of Oregon Public Broadcasting's morning radio program, Think Out Loud, and streamed live at www.opb.org/nationalbookawards

The Winners in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature will be announced at the 62nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 16. Actor, writer, and musician John Lithgow will host the event. Winners receive $10,000 and a bronze statue; Finalists receive a bronze medal and $1,000. Poet John Ashbery will receive the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, to be presented by poet Ann Lauterbach. Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International, will receive the Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community, to be presented by writer Walter Mosley.

The invitation-only Awards Ceremony is the culminating event of National Book Awards Week. The celebration begins on November 14 with 5 Under 35, the Foundation's sixth annual invitation-only celebration of emerging fiction writers selected by National Book Award Winners and Finalists. On November 15, for the first time, the National Book Awards Teen Press Conference will be streamed live online, from Scholastic in Soho, hosted by acclaimed young adult author and Scholastic editor David Levithan. Streaming will allow students from across the country to play the role of reporters as they direct questions to the five Finalists for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature. That evening, all twenty Finalists will read from their nominated works at the National Book Award Finalists Reading at The New School. The Finalists Reading is open to the public; tickets are $10 and are available through The New School box office by calling 212-229-5488 or by emailing boxoffice@newschool.edu.

For more information about the 2011 Finalists and upcoming National Book Awards Week events, visit www.nationalbook.org

Possessions are generally diminished by possession. --Nietzsche

How to Run a Bookstore: Neatness doesn’t count, customers prefer stacks on the floor to books on the shelf - by Larry McMurtry

The first essential is to have good stock. The better the books, the more people will come. We were fortunate that when we started this business in 1971, we came into the secondhand book trade just as a lot of ancient families were dying out and selling grandpa’s books, so we were able to get a respectable stock very cheaply.

For a large bookshop to survive today, you need cheap real estate, or you have to be an institution like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., or the Tattered Cover in Denver. They have everything from lunch counters to day care to get families to spend the day at the store. We are here in Archer City, Tex., where we can get buildings for $30,000 to $50,000. If we have two customers a day, it’s like a riot. We’ve had our first significant Chinese customer, and if we stay open another 10 or 15 years, a large part of our clientele will be from overseas.

There are different kinds of bookstores. For example, there’s the high-end store, like the Heritage in Los Angeles used to be. They had one whole room in which no books were admitted unless they were over $5,000. It was a jungle, but it was an expensive jungle. When Brad Pitt finishes a movie and wants to give a director a present, it has to cost $30,000 or $40,000. They’d go to the Heritage. But there are very few places where there’s that surface money, quick money, excess money.

Now, suppose you’re in Berkeley, down the street from one of the country’s great universities. You’re not going to sell the $40,000 Huck Finn. You’re going to provide a high level of general literature and scholarly books in many fields. You are selling $25 books instead of $5,000 books, and you have to sell a lot of them.

Some people don’t like too much order in bookshops and want to feel like they’re finding something. You can have 300,000 books perfectly arranged on the shelf, and every time, people will walk in and want to look at the books stacked up on the floor. So if you really want to sell something, jumble it up and pitch it on the floor.

McMurtry is the author of Lonesome Dove and owns the bookstore Booked Up.

Nature has made us frivolous to console us for our miseries. --Voltaire

A Guide to Navigating NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books