Easygoing, Friendly Bookshop ISO Friends

Hi Folks!

Well, it's happened. The Gothic Bookshop has joined the, um, latest century. 20th? 21st? 44th? The neo-post-industrial-halfway-hip age? The pre-tweens?

Anyway, we're on Facebook now, is what I'm saying. We're just getting started, but soon you'll see a steady stream of updates about new books, events, and special sales. You'll also find links to things that we just think are cool. (I promise that Arthur and I will do our best to limit the number of links to abjectly nerdy stuff.)

Also, much like the Rockin' Robin, we now tweet. Or twit. The difference twixt the tweet and twit escapes me (though I do know how to do The Twist); regardless, we're on it.

So feel free to friend and follow us! Frankly, you can fawn over us if you're feeling flirty (though as far as I know there's not yet an app for that...).

Twit you later, Facefriends!

New Duke Reads Selections!

Welcome back to campus, Gothic Shoppers!

We're glad to see so many of you back in the store. We've got stacks and stacks of great new books on the shelves for you to see, including...

THE NEW DUKE READS SELECTIONS!!

That's right, folks. The 2009/2010 selections were announced this morning, and we've got the books in stock here at the store. Remember, when you buy all seven books at once, you receive a 25% discount off the retail price, and we throw in a free Duke Reads tote bag!

And now (drum roll, please!) here are the presenters and reading list for 2009-10:


October 14
Peter Lange, Provost and Professor of Political Science
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess by William D. Cohan '81

November 11
Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of English, Literature, and Women's Studies
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

January 13
Reynolds Price '55, James B. Duke Professor of English
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

February 17
Blair Sheppard, Dean of the Fuqua School of Business
A Brief History of the Human Race by Michael Cook

March 17
Michael Malone, Professor of the Practice, Theater Studies
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

April 21
Stephen Nowicki, Dean and Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

The summer reading selection for first-year students is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. The author will be on campus during orientation week and will be giving two presentations August 20 at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. in Baldwin Auditorium for the entering Class of 2013 and you are invited.

Were Back.....well we will be soon anyway

The Gargoyle has been away on a much appreciated summer break but we are coming back with a book vengeance Monday August 17th. Until then, check out our completely new and different website.

SIBA Book Awards

Hi Fellow Gargoyles,

Many (some? none?) of you have been waiting eagerly for this year's list of SIBA Book Award winners. The rest of you are scratching your head and wondering (again) what the heck I'm on about.

SIBA is the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, an organization of scrappy, non-corporate, southern bookstores. These booksellers come together online and out in the real world to celebrate and/or bemoan the bookselling life, to exchange advice on making it in the current economic climate, and -most significantly, for this post- to promote good books for southern readers.

(A disclosure: The Gothic's former commander-in-chief, Gerry Eidenier, was president of SIBA once upon a time. While his dream of an insurgent battalion of armed, poetry-reciting booksellers was never realized, he is nonetheless remembered fondly by SIBA members. For our part, we at the Gothic are predisposed to feel generous towards SBIA as an organization.)

Once a year the SIBA members vote on the best new writing to come out of the South. Now, don't get me wrong: I loves me some Southern Lit. Both of you who read this blog have seen me wax enthusiastic, if not eloquent, on books such as Padgett Powell's Edisto, Donald Hays' The Dixie Association, and Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.

I'll confess, though, to approaching the SIBA awards with a little wariness. As a community of booksellers, we sometimes endorse the same names and topics over and over again. I like a good straight-up narrative yarn as much as the next fellow, and I'll eat grits pretty much any day of the week (especially if served up in a giant make-your-own-grit-bowl over at Durham's own Watts Grocery). But I feel that we SIBA members are inclined to promote books that are broadly palatable and that reinforce an image of Southern-ness that is less nuanced than it could be.

There's good reason for this, of course. We're all trying to sell books here. Slapping our award sticker on the cover of a proven seller such such as Pat Conroy or Rick Bragg (no offense meant to either of these fine writers) is a more profitable move than promoting stylistically experimental writing from the amazing Selah Saterstrom or dark, challenging writing from Robert Goolrick. I get that, and I get that we as a community are often too busy to go digging up writers from independent presses when corporate presses have lots of bells and whistles to draw our attention.

But we owe it to our customers, and to the reading public at large, to reach a little. When we proclaim a book "the best in Southern Literature by the people who would know", let's make sure that it actually is the best and that we actually do know.

You wouldn't believe it, but all this soapbox crankiness is by way of saying that I was particularly pleased with one of the awards this year. Kevin Young's moving, elegiac book, Dear Darkness, was given the 2009 SIBA award for poetry, and I couldn't be happier about it. I've been a big fan of Young's work ever since his book To Repel Ghosts, originally published by the independent press Zoland Books. (Young has since moved on to being published by one of the corporate biggies, which tempers only slightly my enthusiasm.) Dear Darkness is a book of work that reflects on place, family, and history. In the midst of Young's working on the book, his father died unexpectedly. Temporarily silenced by grief, he ultimately turned to writing poems about the food he so closely associated with his Father's Louisiana-based family. Pickled okra, turtle soup, maque-choux, kitchen grease: these and more down-home delicacies get turned into verses that evoke both the complexity of grief and longing and the comfort-food that helps heal such grief. It's truly a knockout of a book.

It seems incredible to say so now, but when I first heard these poems read aloud at the great A Cappella Books in Atlanta, Georgia, I never considered that they might be "Southern" poems. I think that's what makes me so enthusiastic to see Dear Darkness in the ranks of the SIBA awards. Though many of the poems deal with the touchstones of life and food in the South, they are not in structure or even tone what we have come to expect from the canon of SIBA-endorsed verse. Our booksellers reached a little on this one, and I think that with more such efforts the award will carry more significance moving forward.

SIBA is starting a new brand: the Okra Picks, designed to promote newly released southern writing. This is a chance for SIBA to broaden its perceived tastes a little bit, to show that being Southern isn't being static. I'll be doing my best to find lesser-known writers and publishers to recommend. Any (either) of you readers out there who want to direct my attention to a book I might have missed should email me through the blog. I'll be happy to pass on any suggestions.

Congratulations to Kevin Young on his award, and congratulations to SIBA members for a wise selection this time around!

Versus: Monster Blog!!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s been a national, runaway sensation. There have been news stories, reviews and editorials on the book. It is far and away our bestselling title, whenever we’ve been able to keep it in stock, that is. . It’s truly shaping up to be the book of the summer, against all odds.

Well, I say “against all odds”, but that’s not really true. In fact, the odds were solidly in the book’s favor. For any of you who’ve been living under a rock or who in fact are zombies yourselves, let me present the basic concept: it’s the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, with scenes inserted in which the characters try to fight off zombies. There. It’s simple, isn’t it? Simple, and flat-out brilliant. The brainchild behind the project, Seth Grahame-Smith, is lurching & staggering all the way to the bank. His fingers are falling off as he counts his money.

Why? Because monsters are hot right now. Zombies are all over the place, that’s for sure. Max Brooks’ World War Z has been a big seller for us, especially since Arthur had it as a staff pick last month. There’s the Zombie Survival Guide, the Zen of Zombie, Zombie Blondes, and Never Slow Dance With a Zombie. For my money, the best of the lot can be found in Kelly Link’s book Magic for Beginners, in which her story, The Hortlak describes a convenience store at the edge of the world in which zombies shop for things that don’t exist. But then I’m something of a Kelly Link nut.

It’s not just zombies that have overrun the book world. We’ve got yetis, Bigfoot, Werewolves—you name it. And we can’t forget the hottest of all hot monsters, the vampire.

Not since Harry Potter came on the scene has there been such a breakout book for young readers as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. That title and Meyer’s subsequent books -New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn- have been huge bestsellers, spawning a hit movie with sequels to come.

The monster-driven riches that authors like Meyer and Grahame-Smith are rolling in have gotten Arthur and me thinking about what the next hot (or hott) monster will be. We want in on this. We had a conversation with one of our Schokenly intelligent customers recently. She agreed with us that werewolves are up and coming, but thought there was probably room for the faerie folk to make a comeback. Arthur and I think that she’s the one to write it, so watch out for that somewhere down the line.

As for Arthur and me, we have slightly diverging opinions (as always) on what will be the next big sexy scary. So we’re doing an installment of Versus today. It’s a scare-off!

You first, Arthur:


ARTHUR:

Before I roll out my mythical pick for you I thought I might touch on what I feel are some points that make for a great mythical archetype.

1) Must Appear Human: vampires, werewolves, and even zombies to a degree can appear human at times. It would be difficult for a storyteller to weave a compelling tell about a monster who was always monstrous. Humanity is one of the few things that all of an author’s reader will have in common. Humanity also makes for an interesting plot point. The monsters desire to return to mere humanity. It is what drove the television series Angel.

2) Love: You are much more likely to be interested in something if there is a potential for a love story to be told. I would argue that Twilight is a love story, which just happens to include vampires. We are suckers (no pun intended vamps) for a good love story.

3) Mythos: any good mythical monster comes with a mythos, some larger than others. The larger the mythos the harder the job for the writer. Do you lock yourself into the existing mythos or forge ahead a slightly altered mythos at the risk of offending others?

I have decided on a “monster” that can appear human from time to time. This allows him/her to build relationships with humans and even love them. I chose a monster with a limited mythos so a new fresh one could be rolled out without traumatizing too many followers.

Insert drum roll here

My selection is the Djinn, or genie as we call them from time to time. The Djinn for all intents and purposes is a human who has been granted the rights to make wishes happen.

Several questions come about when thinking of this:

1) Why the lamp? First thing I would do would be to ditch the lamp. I would spin this into a different story. Lets say the Djinn’s spirit is contained with a vessel of some sort, not necessarily a lamp. The Djinn would need to be in constant vigilance over the whereabouts of their spirit vessel.

2) What about the wishes? I think a lot can be done here. Imagine a Djinn who has existed for eons. He has done both good and bad things. He is traumatized by the bad and desires only to do the good. He is at his deepest a good person who wishes to improve people’s lives. (See what I did there? He’s a genie that wishes something for himself. The depth of humanity there.)

3) Where’s the love? Through chance or luck our djinn's spirit vessel ends up in the possession of the most thoughtful woman he has ever met. He desires to stay with her forever but he knows there is a limit to what he can do. He is bound by magic older than himself. What if she desires to stay with him too but understands the condition he is in? They could try to unravel the mysteries surrounding what it means to be a Djinn together.

4) Finally, Where’s the plot? The plot is in the discovery. How did djinns come to be? Who are these people who are now djinns? How did their spirits become tied to these vessels? How or can they ever be free again?

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s it for me. I think the idea is fascinating but maybe I’m in the minority here. Either way I can’t wait to see what Bill’s got cooking:

BILL:

Arthur, that’s a very well thought-out take on the monster novel. I’m totally with you on the Djinn. I wish I could promise the same degree of insight with my pick. I do have a monster in mind, though I have no delusions that my choice is likely to catch on. Out of respect for your thoughtful choice, I’m going to try to get down a few notions of my own regarding what we can call the MLS (Monster Love Story):

1) I’ll take your notion of the monster/human one step further. I agree that a humanoid or even part-time human monster makes for a good story (and especially good film rights- let’s not forget the riches we’re after). But what I think makes a monster appealing is his/her/its reflection of some aspect of the human condition: the vampire is a lonely creature who hides from the light; the werewolf periodically loses control of his animal nature; the yeti… smells bad. It’s what we see in monsters and recognize in ourselves (or wish we did) that makes them alive and enticing to us.

2) Monster love is, ultimately, impossible love. You referred to the TV series Angel earlier (and I will bring you those DVD’s back, honest). I’ll also invoke Twilight here. Both stories feature love that cannot and must not be consummated. The most successful monster/human love stories bring the reader into contact with something dangerous without asking that he (or, more likely, she) commit to something dangerous.

3) The monster must be mortal. This is crucial. And not only mortal, but flawed in some way that makes him more vulnerable than even a human. The vampire is killed by a wooden stake; the werewolf is killed by a silver bullet; the yeti… I don’t know, the yeti dies from breathing his own stench. This of course introduces a measure of fragility to our monster, but more importantly it brings the threat of death. Let’s not forget that these MLS’s are ultimately about temptation and transgression. Nothing like almost certain death to give characters the permission to go walking on the wild side.

So, without further ado, here’s my pick for next year’s hot monster:

fanfare, please

It’s The Blob.

You heard me, The Blob. The Blob is the next great heartthrob. Or heartblob, as it were. Just bear with me. I can back it up using my own three rules:

1. The Blob embodies (sort of –he’s got no body) many aspects of the human condition, especially the adolescent condition: he’s an outsider, picked on because of his size; he’s an out-of-towner (well, an out-of-spacer) who doesn’t know anybody in his new school; he’s afflicted by that social disease that so many adolescents suffer from: mindless, endless consumption.

2. Is there any love more impossible than human/blob love? Beyond the inter-species difficulty, it’s clear that The Blob, in the rush of emotion and/or hunger of new romance, would absolutely smother a girlfriend.

3. Despite poor Blob’s massive size and unquenchable appetite, he’s just so fragile. He’s in terrible health—one hard winter will absolutely kill him.

So there you have it, Gothic Shoppers. Arthur and I have each set forth our picks for the hot monster to come. Feel free to leave a comment endorsing one or the other of the two plans (I’ll go ahead and concede victory to Arthur right now), or let us know what sexy beast you see slouching across the horizon.