BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT

By Maile Meloy
Riverhead Books,

In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them.

CHRONIC CITY

By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday,     

Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a “war free” edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS

By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, 

Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.

HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel

By Jeannette Walls 
Scribner, $26.

In her luminous memoir, “The Glass Castle,” Walls told of being raised by eccentric and unfit parents. Now, in a novel based on family lore, she has adopted the voice of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith — mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider and bush pilot. The result ­re­animates a chapter of America’s frontier past

A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN

By Kate Walbert 
Scribner,

The 15 lean, concentrated chapters in this exquisitely written novel alternate among the lives of a British suffragist and a handful of her Anglo-American descendants. The theme is feminism, but Walbert is keenly alert to male preoccupations and the impressions they leave on the lives of her female cast. Walbert’s prose, cool and intelligent, captures the many ways we silence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear as we struggle to grasp hold of meaning.

     You can go to your favorite search engine and type in your question about how to publish a book and thousands of suggested sites are returned to you.  Keep it simple stupid (kiss) is still the best principle to follow. 

Libraries and Charity Book Sales

     There was a time when you could go to a book sale and pick up a book for 25 cents or 50 cents for a softcover book, and spend a maximum of $1.00 for a hardcover book.  Of course, there was always the exception for rare or collectible books where the price was high but always negotiable. As with most things in life, that has changed.  The prices keep going up so much so that the resellers are not in a position to purchase the books any longer because the online channels they use have become too competitive.  A good example of this is half.com where the minimum price for any book can be .75.  As long as online channels for sales allow such low beginning prices it does not make sense for resellers to purchase books from libraries or charity sales at such high costs.  After all, popular books have a very short shelf life especially with high volume of publication.  If you agree with this article, write to you libraries and encourage your charities to keep the costs down for large public sales. 

If you found this helpful, feel free to forward this page to a friend.  Thank you for taking the time to visit.  ~L. A. Girouard