The Book Shopper

Atlanta Area Book Events Calendar – April 2012

Here are your on-ramps for literary discourse during the month of April in the Atlanta area:

The Auburn Avenue Research Library is hosting many events this month ranging from a signing and reading of acclaimed journalist and civil rights icon Charlyne Hunter-Gault's To the Mountaintop: My Journey through the Civil Rights Movement ( Monday, April 2nd) to Langston Out Loud: Celebrating the Power of Langston Hughes' Poetry in the Modern World (Saturday, April 21st).

Lauren Groff, author of the novel Arcadia will be at the Savannah College of Art and Design's Ivy Hall on Tuesday, April 3. Stephen King, Lorrie Moore and Richard Russo have all praised Groff's fiction. Groff is part of this spring's SCAD Ivy Hall Writer Series. Andre Dubus III will be there April 12th. Admission ($$) is charged.

On Wednesday, April 11th, Winston Groom, author of Shiloh 1862, (and Forrest Gump) will read and sign books at the Carter Presidential Library & Museum Theater. Other authors in the month of April include syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson, author of the memoir Hank Hung the Moon...and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts appears at the library on April 30th.

On Wednesday, April 18th Kevin Wilson author of the novel The Family Fang and the book of short stories Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (he was at the Decatur Book Festival a couple of years ago) will be at the Decatur Public Library. Wilson's appearance is just one of authors appearing locally via the Georgia Center of the Book. Austin Kleon author of Steal Like and Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative appears at the library on Wednesday, April 11th.

Different Worlds: On Reading Ben Okri's The Famished Road

by Chantal James

Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991) is a novel about being caught between two worlds. Maybe we all know the feeling; compelling books disorient us, don't they? They hook us. As we wrench our eyes away from an unfinished book for a few hours, to go about our daily lives, it can feel like having the left foot in one world and the right foot in another.

Books weave spells, so that the very rooms we read them in fall away from us. They spin visions in our minds more real, for the moment, than quotidian reality.

And so, The Famished Road enchants. At its center is the narrator Azaro, a very young child in Nigeria on the eve of its national independence. Azaro has not yet lost his memory of the spirit world in which he lived before birth. In fact, the world of the spirits is still more real to him than the world of the living. The book so far is dreamlike, full of ghosts.

This novel is sectioned into several "books." I've now finished the first of these. I am securely past The Famished Road’s point of no return. Most novels have one: the point after which you know you won't escape it, and that it will pull you deeper through its tunnels, until emerging on the other side, you shake yourself from its hold and re-enter the world.

Azaro, floats into and out of the world of the dead, unsure if he really wants to be here with us, and tempted by friends of his from the spirit realm. His spirit “buddies” literally set death traps for him, hoping that he will be killed and so return to them. He narrowly escapes several times. At one point the young boy is kidnapped by a couple whose son has died. He is given the dead boy's clothes to wear, while his parents across town search high and low for him, fearing the worst. For Azaro, the spirit dimension is superimposed on the physical. He does not easily distinguish between the things he sees that are invisible to everyone else: he can see the dead, the unborn, and forms that will never live or die. Because the child who tells the story cannot tell the difference, the reader doesn't always either.

Nora Ephron on Blogging and Essay Writing

I just finished reading Kathyrn Borel's interview with Nora Ephron in the March issue of The Believer Magazine. In the brief excerpt, Ephron talks about the relationship between blogging and essay writing. Later on in the article (you will have to buy the magazine ) she mentions that looking back, a pivotol essay in her career was the  "A Few Words About Breasts" published in 1973, which appeared in Esquire Magazine. In retrospect, Ephron views that essay as something that defined her as a writer who could either successfully shock readers with candidness or run the risk of being judged as writer who has crossed the boundary of "who needs to know this?" As she finished the Breasts piece, Ephron admits to Borel she didn't know how readers would react.

Coincidently  bookshoppingwise, you can find the Breasts essay in the 1983 collection, The Best of Modern Humor edited by Mordecai Richler. The book includes pieces by Woody Allen, Ian Frazier and E.B. White. Knopf printed a lot of these books and you can sometimes find them for a few dollars at a used book store. (Check out the price tag on this photo.)

 

A Cappella's New Store: A Browser's Audio Tour

Just off Dekalb Avenue on Harolson Avenue– not far from the spot where Scarlett's second husband Frank Kennedy was killed in Gone with with Wind – near the Inman Park MARTA station – is the new home of A Cappella Books, a mainstay of the Atlanta book scene for over twenty years.

A Cappella is owned by Frank Reiss. I stopped by to visit with Frank (you can hear him in the background) and do a walk through of the new store. Here's the raw recording ( a little over three minutes) but you can get a sense of what it means to browse at a good bookstore.

Download Audio Tour of A Cappella (Windows)

Audio Tour of A Cappella (mpg)

 

 

Mini-review: Rob Walker in Atlanta

Where & When: Reception Hall at the Carlos Museum on the campus of Emory University, February 29, 2012

Attendance: ~250 people, which packed the house.

Why I Went: I've read and reread Walker's (2008) book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. Walker is a former columnist for The New York Times Magazine. The book examines how marketing and advertising have changed their approach and how consumers have changed their mindsets or think they are immune to the machinations of advertisers.

What He Read: The evening consisted of Walker and Department of Religion Professor Bobbi Patterson sitting in big comfy chairs and conversing about what desire means in Buddhism. The Buddhism perspective was the dominant theme (as advertised), so I have a no right to be disappointed, but I was. (I should have managed my high expectations better.) From reading his book, I know Walker has interesting perspectives about consumerism, but all I remember from the evening is that Walker drives a 1999 Jeep Cherokee and Patterson used to own a Jeep Cherokee too (not kidding).