Daina Chaviano's The Island of Eternal Love (Riverhead, 336 pages, $25.95) has been translated into 20 languages around the world, including English, introducing Chaviano to English-speaking readers for the first time. Her story of "three families from opposite corners of the world — from Africa, Spain and China — that spans more than a century" is a dreamy tale of love and loss.
And if you're still unsure of what it's about or whether to read it, check out this bizarre "trailer" I stumbled upon on YouTube. There is no commentary, only imagery, music and text. I've never seen such a thing and am wondering if it helps sales?
If you were a kid in the mid-'70s, it's likely you collected Wacky Packs, as we all referred to them. (Officially they were/are Wacky Packages.) They came packaged like baseball cards — complete with the not-so-fresh, sugar-coated stick of bubble gum — and for a short time were more popular.
The famed Series One through Series Seven (from 1973-74) have been put together in book form to celebrate the phenomenon's 35th anniversary. Wacky Packages (Abrams, 239 pages, $19.95) will perhaps take you back to a time when you started looking at life askance — and never looked back.
As you can see here, the Topps company tapped into our most depraved sensibilities with their product parodies. And the accompanying artwork by guys like Norm Saunders, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman and Chicago artist Jay Lynch became embedded in our brains.
Spiegelman and Lynch provide the introduction and afterword, respectively. "The dopey gags came easily. This was a dream job," writes Spiegelman. "Yessirree — I am proud to have been a worker in the debased basement of the great temple of commerce that is America's popular culture."
Lynch sums it up: "Thirty-five years later, they're still funny. What more could we hope for?"
Chicago native Lily Koppel went Dumpster diving in her Manhattan neighborhood and came up with a treasure trove of memories in the form of a diary from the 1930s. Koppel tracked down the writer of the diary, Florence Wolfson, who is now 90 and living in Florida. Through interviews with Florence and entries from the diary, Koppel has crafted The Red Leather Diary (Harper, 336 pages, $23.95), a story of a curious, creative Upper East Side young woman in Depression-era Manhattan.
A coworker of mine has a miniature curling stone on his desk. Next to that are four fake ice cubes. I'm not sure what that says about him but if I started scrutinizing all the other things on his desk — toy Tigger, "Star Wars" characters, rubber creepy things, press pass to David Letterman appearance (not that I'm snooping while he's on vacation or anything) — I could probably come up with some kind of psychological profile.
Author and noted psychologist Sam Gosling says the stuff we own and how we arrange it can say more about us than even our most intimate conversations with our closest friends. And he's written a book about it: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Basic Books, 250, $25).
Gosling and his team of researchers looked not only on desk tops but also through closets, iPods, refrigerators, Facebook profiles, underneath beds, in purses, bookshelves and more. Through their snooping, we readers should be able to figure out things like how committed our co-workers are and how reliable our new boyfriend or girlfriend is.
A Los Angeles woman, who until recently was known only to the scientific community as "AJ," has come out of the laboratory closet to talk about herself — a subject she knows intimately. Jill Price is an autobiographical Rainman. She can tell you what she had for lunch on any random day 15 or 20 years ago. So precise are her memories that leading experts on human memory have been studying her for eight years.
Price has written a book, with Bart Davis: The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science (Free Press, 263 pages, $26).
It is the story of an ordinary woman, now 42 years old, whose brain began working overtime when she was 14. Price says her life plays out like a split-screen in her head, with all her memories continually swirling around.
What are country singer/songwriters if not storytellers. Heck, most country songs tell a story with their titles. Who can forget: "I Gave Her the Ring (She Gave Me the Finger)"? Or how about "If My Nose Were Full of Nickels Then I'd Blow It All on You"? Or "My Phone Ain't Been Ringin' So I Guess it Wasn't You."
I'm not sure those are true song titles, but they sound good, don't they?
Robert Hicks, a New York Times best-selling author (The Widow of the South), along with singer/songwriter John Bohlinger and writer Justin Stelter, have put together A Guitar and a Pen (Center Street, 256 pages, $23.99) — a collection of stories by "Country Music's Greatest Songwriters," as the subtitle states. Vince Gill provides the foreword.
There are some recognizable names in the bunch — Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Hal Ketchum, Janis Ian and Charlie Daniels, to name a few — and some not so recognizable names. If I hadn't seen Bohlinger's name on the book cover, I wouldn't have known who he was. One name, likely recognizable only to Chicagoans and fringe country fans, is Robbie Fulks...
It was 1961, and Allen Ginsberg was in search of life’s meaning.
His quest would lead him to the gurus and ashrams of India, to its streets and heady opium dens. It is a journey that Deborah Baker tells through journals, letters, memoirs and other documents collected for A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Penguin, 243 pages, $25.95).
Ginsberg’s friends in New York insist that he travel to the East and explore the subcontinent with them, but he does not need much encouragement. Ginsberg had already heard the ancient voice of William Blake reciting poetry inside his Harlem apartment. He had looked outside the window and noticed how everything was created by a ‘‘living hand,’’ how the sky itself was ‘‘the living blue hand.’’
‘‘From that moment, Irwin Allen Ginsberg became a divining rod in the headlong and holy pursuit of God,’’ Baker writes.
Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee often seemed to be odd man out in Washington.
He was one of the Senate’s most liberal Republicans, bucking his party on big issues such as Iraq, tax cuts, abortion and the environment. His reserved, sometimes quirky personality was never a smooth fit in the clubby Senate, where friendships can mean more than political ties in making things happen.
In his new political memoir, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President (St. Martin’s Press, 245 pages. $24.95), Chafee revels in his outsider status as he chronicles his disillusionment with the bitter partisanship that dominated his seven years in the Senate. He wields a broad brush, heaping blame on Republicans and Democrats alike for putting party loyalty and ambition ahead of the public good.
On the eve of Cynthia Ozick’s 80th birthday on April 17, four of her pessimistic but entertaining stories have been brought together under the title Dictation (Houghton Mifflin Company, 179 pages, $24).
It could have been Deception.
Ozick doesn’t write action packed page-turners and she allows herself more than an occasional literary or historical reference. But something is always going on — the book is hard to put down, even if you need to make sure the roast isn’t burning.
The title story fantasizes about two typists supposedly hired by two giants of 20th-century fiction: Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Miss Lilian Hallowes and Miss Theodora Bosanquet achieve what seems to them a bit of literary immortality. They successfully conspire to insert a few lines from a novel being written by one writer into the work of the other.
Contrary to the book jacket might make you think, this books is not about cows that go "moo." Here's a review:
By DINESH RAMDE
It’s easy to understand why business self-help books tend to sound the same.
After all, people won’t buy a book that tells them to keep doing the same things they’ve always done. So authors instead urge change, using variations of the same cliche: adjust your paradigm, think outside the box, cross the chasm, figure out who moved your cheese.
Then how do authors sell a new book that makes many of the same points executives have heard before? This comedic trio relies on a new paradigm of their own: irreverent humor in place of the stodgy business-speak more common to the genre.
David Bernstein, Beau Fraser and Bill Schwab, executives at advertising agency The Gate Worldwide, are co-authors of Death to All Sacred Cows (Hyperion Books, 224 pages. $21.95). This short book is amusing and easily digestible, although an impatient executive may tire of wading through irreverence to get to the main point.
