About Broadway Baby:

As a little girl growing up in Boston, Miriam Bluestein fantasized about a life lived on stage, specifically in a musical. Get married, have a family—sure, maybe she’d do those things, too, but first and foremost there was her career. As a woman, she is both tormented and consoled by those dreams in her day-to-day existence with her family, including a short-tempered husband, a cranky mother, and three demanding children, one of whom, Ethan, shows real talent for the stage.

It is through Ethan that Miriam strives to realize her dreams. As she pushes him to make the most of his talent, the rest of her life gradually comes undone, with her husband becoming increasingly frustrated and her other two children—Sam, a mass of quirks and idiosyncrasies, and Julie, hostile and bitter—withdrawing into their own worlds. Still Miriam dreams, praying for that big finale, which, when it comes, is nothing that she ever could have imagined.

Broadway Baby marks the fiction debut of a nationally acclaimed award-winning memoirist and poet, “an acute observer of moments, people, art and language [who] packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Praise:

“If his book elicits sorrow it’s due to Shapiro’s smashing ability to portray Bluestein as a romantic . . . Broadway Baby is an ordinary story told extraordinarily well. Bluestein is as flawed as any human but is heroic all the same.” – Louisville Courier-Journal

“When great poets like Shapiro write their novels, they bring their powers of wordsmithery to the page . . . They do more than simply describe the action, so that the pleasure of reading a good story is enhanced.” – Durham Herald-Sun

“Shapiro . . . offers an endearing, witty, and heart-warming take on family life . . . Equally sad and laugh-out-loud funny and boasting a cast of vibrant characters, this book is sure to hit a nerve with readers, no matter what their background. Readers will find themselves alternately rooting for Miriam and for her much-suffering family members. Sure to be a favorite.”– Library Journal

“How do you put into words thunderous applause, curtain calls and a standing ovation? That’s what I send out to Alan Shapiro’s remarkable debut novel, Broadway Baby, a beautifully written, often hilarious, memorably moving account of the one and only Miriam Bluestein’s greatest performance:  her life.”– Jill McCorkle, author of Going Away Shoes

Read an excerpt:

About the Book:

Eddie Joseph was a high school honor student, slated to graduate early and begin college. But this was the late 1960s in Bronx’s black ghetto, and fifteen-year-old Eddie was introduced to the tenets of the Black Panther Party, which was just gaining a national foothold. By sixteen, his devotion to the cause landed him in prison on the infamous Rikers Island—charged with conspiracy as one of the Panther 21 in one of the most emblematic criminal cases of the sixties. When exonerated, Eddie—now called Jamal—became the youngest spokesperson and leader of the Panthers’ New York chapter. He joined the “revolutionary underground,” later landing back in prison.

Sentenced to more than twelve years in Leavenworth, he earned three degrees there and found a new calling. He is now chair of Columbia University’s School of the Arts film division—the very school he exhorted students to burn down during one of his most famous speeches as a Panther. In raw, powerful prose, Jamal Joseph helps us understand what it meant to be a soldier inside the militant Black Panther movement. He recounts a harrowing, sometimes deadly imprisonment as he charts his path to manhood in a book filled with equal parts rage, despair, and hope.

About the Author:

Orphan, activist, subversive, urban guerrilla, the FBI’s most wanted fugitive, drug addict, drug counselor, convict, writer, poet, filmmaker, father, professor, youth advocate, and Oscar nominee Jamal Joseph lives with his wife and family in New York City.

To celebrate its paperback release, our heroic Publicity Manager, Kelly Bowen, volunteered to take on the challenge of baking William Alexander’s peasant loaf. Read on for her hilarious account of the baking process, and don’t forget to check out the excerpt from the book at the bottom of this page!

We’ve set aside three copies for our devoted readers. Want to win one? Just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page, and you’ll be automatically entered.

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A Naïve First-Time Baker

Life is usually an annoying comedy of errors. Case in point – eagerly volunteering to bake a loaf of bread in honor of the paperback release of William Alexander’s 52 Loaves. The peasant bread recipe  took him a year to perfect, but I naively thought to myself, I like to bake and cook, and I can follow a recipe. How hard can it be? It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Sigh.

Here are just a few of my self-inflicted errors:

1.     Not looking at the recipe until 10:00am on Official Baking Day. At which point I realized several things:

1. I should have started three days earlier, in order to make a levain from fresh apples.
2. I needed to buy numerous ingredients and tools, which resulted in one trip to Kroger, Whole Foods, my local farmer’s market, and Food Lion. After all these trips I realized also that you can’t buy levain from the grocery store.
3. I was in waayyyyyy over my head.

2.     One broken bottle of wine at Whole Foods, which slipped while I was juggling three bags of flour and an electronic kitchen measurer.

3.     With no solution in sight to the no-levain problem, I contemplated using a different recipe (that didn’t involve levain) from Baking with Brother Boniface, written by the baker for Mepkin Abbey in Monck’s Corner, SC. (The abbey is mentioned in 52 Loaves, and coincidentally, my aunt is their office manager and gave me the cookbook.) Which resulted in my second trip to Whole Foods and Kroger for more ingredients.

4.     After a reassuring conversation with my co-worker Katie Ford, who I now consider to be the long-lost sister of Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman, she advised me to make a poolish, which would act like a levain in a pinch.

By 3:00pm on Saturday, I was prepared. I had a solution to the levain problem, all my ingredients and tools, and had actually read the recipe in full. So I started off with making a poolish ,which sat out overnight. When Sunday morning arrived, my poolish was twice the size and bubbling like a pro!

Using my electric measurer (which I highly recommend over a manual one), I added in all the ingredients and mixed by hand.

 The dough was put back into the mixing bowl, covered, and sat out for 25 minutes. I kneaded it on my un-greased countertop for 7 minutes, and put it back into the mixing bowl to rise for 4 hours.

I then put the dough on my lightly floured countertop, and pressed it into a disk, forming a boule. I placed it seam-side up in a colander covered with a well-floured linen napkin, and covered with Saran Wrap. At the same time, I heated up my oven to 500ºF, and put a cast iron skillet on my lower rack, and a pizza stone on my top rack.

About 1.5 hours later, I put the loaf onto a well-floured cookie sheet (the receipt calls for a baker’s peel, which I refused to buy), and sprinkled with rye flour. Taking a straight razor, I made a tick-tock-toe pattern on the top of my dough (or grignes).

I then quickly slide the dough onto the pizza stone and poured 1 cup of water into the cast iron skillet, trying to avoid too much hot air from escaping. Turning the oven down to 480ºF, I baked the dough for 20 minutes until it turned dark brown, and then turned the oven down to 425ºF and baked for an additional 30 minutes.

After rapping the bottom of the loaf to make sure it had a hollow, drumlike sound, I turned the oven off and stuck the bread back in for 15 more minutes. After letting it cool for 2 hours, it was ready to eat!

So after a hilariously frustrating weekend of scouring the city for ingredients, tools, and levain, I felt very much like William Alexander in his year-long quest to make the perfect loaf. (In my case, one somewhat presentable loaf would have done just fine.) Will I ever try it again? Absolutely not. But I give mad props to William Alexander – and all you bakers out there – for attempting this on a daily or weekly basis!

– Kelly Bowen, Publicity Manager

For the second year, Workman Publishing is sponsoring the Joe Drabyak Frontline Fellowship to the Winter Institute. The fellowship was launched last year with a three-year sponsorship from Workman Publishing to honor Joe Drabyak, Chester County Book Company’s master bookseller and a past president of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, who died of cancer in August 2010.  The fellowship provides airfare, lodging, and the meal fee for one bookseller to attend the Winter Institute, which will be held in New Orleans from January 18 – 20, 2012.

Steven Pace, Workman’s director of sales, said that the fellowship would be “awarded to a bookseller who embodies Joe’s unabashed enthusiasm for recommending good books to readers and his contagious ability to help generate overall excitement for the books that he championed.”

Drabyak learned of the fellowship to be created in his honor, three weeks before his death, when Pace and Craig Popelars, the director of marketing for Algonquin Books, went to visit him at his home in suburban Philadelphia. “Joe was incredibly touched that he would, in spirit, continue to be a part of the bookselling community,” said Popelars.

Pace said, “Joe Drabyak was a unique force in bookselling. Everyone wanted to know what Joe was recommending. And, if your book was lucky enough to be named a ‘Joe’s Pick,’ you knew it had received his ‘magic touch’ and would soon appear on Chester County Book Company’s bestseller list. But he was also generous with his time and had boundless energy for teaching the art and craft of bookselling. That legacy is the inspiration for the Frontline Fellowship.”

“Joe Drabyak was an important part of the bookselling community, and we miss him enormously,” said ABA CEO Oren Teicher. “Every time we handsell a book, we’re channeling Joe. He not only taught us a great deal about books and bookselling, he also provided a role model for many of us. We’re proud to have a part in commemorating Joe and his many years of dedication to the book industry through the annual presentation of the Joe Drabyak Frontline Fellowship.”

Booksellers, publishers, and sales representatives are encouraged to nominate booksellers for the fellowship. Nominations should include the following:

• Bookseller’s full name and complete contact information.
• Store where the bookseller is employed. Both full-time and part-time booksellers can be nominated.
• A brief letter of recommendation explaining why the bookseller is being nominated for the fellowship.

Nominations for the Joe Drabyak Frontline Fellowship must be submitted by Friday, November 11, 2011. Nominations should be e-mailed to mark@bookweb.org.

The winner, to be chosen by Workman and ABA staff, will be announced in mid-November.

Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. Morgan charts how that dream became a reality through the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies—the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.

Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories—and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans—form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War.

With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, appendixes, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America as compelling as a grand novel.

Praise for Lions of the West:

“History as it should be told: through colorful biographical sketches, Morgan presents the unvarnished story of the annexation and settling of the American West.”—Shelf Awareness

“Robert Morgan should be declared a national treasure, and his latest work, Lions of the West, is bound to become a classic in the study of American westward expansion.” – Charlotte Observer

“A vivid, well-conceived look at western expansion in the old narrative-driven school of Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Fourscore years come alive through biographical vignettes that pull no punches…Nation-building accrued human costs as well as remarkable heroes—all revealed with Morgan’s customary grace and flair.”—Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mystic Chords of Memory

“What a marvelou take on Thomas Jefferson’s westward expansion movement! In a sense Lions of the West is a sequel to Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, about Lewis and Clark… Morgan proves once again to be an incredible prose stylist…Highly recommended.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

We have three of these puppies up for grabs. Want to win one? Just submit a comment here or on our Facebook page. May the biggest baseball fans win!

Praise for Cardboard Gods:

“Proust has his madeleine. Nick Hornby has his vinyl records. And when Josh Wilker wants to summon the past, he has the scent of bubblegum. . . . If Wilker had a baseball card, its back might read: Josh is one of 2010′s most promising literary players.”—Sports Illustrated

“A baseball-loving loner deciphers his complicated childhood through his old box of trading cards. . . . Wilker’s book is as nostalgically intoxicating as the gum that sweetened his card-collecting youth. Grade: A.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Wilker connects baseball cards to more pop culture references than a season of Family Guy—everything from Louis L’Amour westerns to Jack Kerouac to Elvis Costello . . . You’ll love this book.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“I couldn’t put it down . . . In much the same way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year is as much about growing up in the 1950s as her being a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Wilker, too, uses baseball as a backdrop in writing about the ’70s.” —The Boston Herald

About the Book: Hard Work chronicles Coach Williams’ unlikely path to success, from his turbulent childhood to his stellar coaching career. In an all-new Afterword, he brings us up to speed on the past two NCAA championship titles and the subsequent 2010 season, its shake-ups and losses, the unexpected departure of key players, and on to a new season of coaching some of the most dazzling young players in the country–and a surprising ACC championship.

Williams recounts his long tenure head coach at the university of Kansas; how he recruits, teaches, and motivates his players; how he’s shepherded teams through some of the most nail-biting games at both Kansas and UNC; and how he suffered through one of the roughest seasons of his tenure and came out on the other side to be awarded 2011 ACC Coach of the Year.

Over the last seven years, Coach Williams has won 205 games, including 24 in the NCAA Tournament. That’s more Final Fours, more wins, and more NCAA Tournament victories than any basketball coach in the nation. But his memoir isn’t just for basketball fans– it’s a compelling and inspiring story for anyone who’s ever aimed high.

We’ve set aside three copies for our readers. Want a shot at winning one? Just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page, and we’ll count you in the giveaway. Good luck!

Praise for Hard Work:

“Coach Williams’ life story is all-out inspiring.”–Michael Jordan

“Inspiring … Engaging … [Williams] works as hard as anyone, and he knows how to tell a good story.”–Sports Illustrated

“A successful coach’s memoir … It reveals the humiliations and insecurities that have stoked Williams’ competitive fire and made him a basketball coach.”–Will Blythe, The Raleigh News & Observer

“If Roy Williams has a secret it is that he is the same person now that he was when I first met him as Dean Smith’s No. 3 assistant many, many years ago.  This book is a clear reflection of that man–hard working but loyal, dogged, self-deprecating, and, at his core, one of the world’s truly good people.”–John Feinstein

“There are a few people who could better explain the value of hard work than Coach Williams.  He is the epitome of the phrase… It was work that made him the success that he has become.”–John Wooden

“His story, from a small town in North Carolina to successfully running two fo the sport’s premier programs, is one that everyone who dares to dream should richly enjoy.”–Dean Smith

“When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.

She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish . . .”

—from When She Woke

So begins Hillary Jordan’s riveting new novel, When She Woke, publishing today. In the haunting first scene, Hannah Payne wakes up on a table in a bare room, covered by nothing but a flimsy paper gown. Her skin is now red and her every movement is broadcasted live on national television. In this grim vision of America’s not-too-distant future, watching “Chromes”–criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime–has become a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. The victim, according to the state of Texas, was her unborn child. Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.

In her Bellwether Prize-winning debut, Mudbound, Jordan gave us a stunning recreation of America’s past. Now she returns with a haunting and all-too-familiar vision of America’s future in which faith, love, and sexuality have fallen prey to politics. When She Woke is a powerful re-imagining of The Scarlet Letter, set in an America where the line between church and state no longer exists and criminals are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated, but “chromed” and released back into society to survive as best they can. In Hannah’s attempts to find solace in a hostile world, she unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will force her to question her country’s values–and her own. When She Woke is both a timely fable of a society that politicizes the personal and a powerful story of one woman’s struggle to reclaim herself.

We’ve set aside three copies for our devoted fans. For a chance to win one, just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page and you’ll be automatically entered!

When She Woke has already garnered rave reviews from critics and booksellers alike.  So far, it’s been:

• The #1 Indie Next pick for October
• One of Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Fiction picks for the fall
• One of O Magazine‘s Fall Reading picks

Check out some of Hillary Jordan’s fantastic reviews below and don’t miss the excerpt at the bottom of this page.

“[A] chilling futuristic novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“[A] provocative, politically charged novel… [Hannah’s] journey to reclaim herself is equally chilling and riveting.”—Family Circle

“Jordan’s elegant prose and thrilling plot make for an engrossing read, while her well-structured examination of our Schadenfreude-hungry culture and the precarious position of women’s rights within it make for a thought-provoking one.” —Shelf Awareness

“When She Woke is one of those books I did not want to put down. I read it in one sitting because the story was so desperate and dark and engrossing … It’s a well-paced literary thriller, very engaging.”–Bookslut

“Christian fundamentalists may shun this novel, but book clubs will devour it, and savvy educators will pair it with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Essential.”—Library Journal

“Jordan blends hot-button issues such as separation of church and state, abortion, and criminal justice with an utterly engrossing story, driven by a heroine as layered and magnetic as Hester Prynne herself, and reminiscent, too, of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Absolutely a must-read.”—Booklist, starred review

Running the Rift has already wracked up some serious buzz. Barbara Kingsolver calls it “Culturally rich and completely engrossing. This is truly fearless writing: ambitious, beautiful, and unapologetically passionate.” The Daily Beast included it as one of only nine titles in its Best Debuts of the Fall feature. It was one of only six titles featured earlier this year on the coveted Book Buzz panel at Book Expo America, the largest publishing trade show in the United States. And since that time, the novel has already earned two starred reviews from pre-publication trade magazines: Publishers Weekly (see below) and Library Journal.

Library Journal raves, “First novelist Benaron, who has actively worked with refugee groups, won the 2010 Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for this unflinching and beautifully crafted account of a people and their survival. In addition, she compellingly details the growth and rigorous training of a young athlete. VERDICT Readers … will find this tale of social justice a memorable read, and those interested in coming-of-age stories set in wartime will want it as well. Highly recommended; readers who loved Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner will appreciate.”

Publishers Weekly enthuses, “Benaron accomplishes the improbable feat of wringing genuine loveliness from unspeakable horror… It is a testament to Benaron’s skill that a novel about genocide … conveys so profoundly the joys of family, friendship, and community.”

Interested in winning an Advance Reading Copy of the book? Leave a comment on our blog here or on our Facebook page. We’ll notify the five lucky winners next week. Good luck!

We’ve reserved three advance copies of Lions of the West for our devoted fans. For a chance to win one, just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page. Good luck!

* * * * *

America’s Manifest destiny comes to life in Robert Morgan’s skilled hands, from Thomas Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to the California Gold rush in 1849. Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies—the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.

Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories—and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans—form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War.

With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, appendixes, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America as compelling as a grand novel.

Advance Praise for Lions of the West:

“Robert Morgan, prolific novelist and poet of the American West, again turns his hand to writing history in this collection of vivid portraits and engaging anecdotes of famous personalities of the westward expansion.”

—Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

“What a marvelous take on Thomas Jefferson’s Westward Expansion Movement! In a sense Robert Mogan’s Lions of the West is a sequel to Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage about Lewis and Clark. Morgan brilliantly showcases such outlandish characters as Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Johnny Appleseed, Winfield Scott and many others. Morgan proves once again to be an incredible prose stylist. This is a love song to the raw back pages of American frontier democracy. Highly recommended.”

—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

“Robert Morgan has found a most engaging way to envision and explain American expansion from early nationhood until the eve of Civil War. Fourscore years come alive through biographical vignettes that pull no punches. The project is meditative rather than celebratory. Hispanic responses to the consequences of Manifest Destiny are made stunningly clear. Nation-building accrued human costs as well as remarkable heroes—all revealed with Morgan’s customary grace and flair. This is engrossing as well as judicious history, narrated by a writer who knows the terrain first hand.”

—Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of People of Paradox and Mystic Chords of Memory