The Love Wife by Gish Jen:  This novel takes us to the heart of the most complicated–and a complicating–American family. It broke my heart and then put it back together again.

Last Seen by Jacqueline Jones Lamon: Sometimes poetry can take us somewhere that fiction just can’t. These poems the aftermath of those left behind when children are abducted.

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta:  As always, Perrotta gives us funny ha-ha and funny strange.  Imagine American after a “Rapture-like event.” It’s like Octavia Butler meets Cheever meets a total stranger who shakes everything up even more.

Brock Clarke, author of Exley

The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson: A novel dedicated to making serious beauty out a family dedicated to making serious art out of the serious damage they do to one another.

The Call, by Yannick Murphy: A lovely, funny, odd and rigorously structured novel about a large animal vet and his rising levels (you’ll understand what that means once you’ve read the book).

Trophy, by Michael Griffith: A wise, brilliant, hilarious book about a man who tries to delay his death (crushed by stuffed bear, is the cause of death) by reliving every bizarre, sad-sack, riotous, heartbreaking moment of his life.

Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

I loved Mat Johnson’s Pym. It’s a hilarious, thought-provoking story about a sad-sack professor who journeys to the South Pole to discover the mythical land of pure blackness that Edgar Allen Poe describes in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

Danzy Senna’s You Are Free is funny and heart-wrenching–a wonderful collection of stories about womanhood, mothering, and identity.

The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, by Michele Elam. This is an excellent book on new artistic works about the Mixed experience and the ways in which the narratives are possibly shaping a new “Creole aesthetic.”

Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World

Mark Richard’s Memoir House of Prayer # 2. That rare thing–an account of the making of a writer which manages to be both honest and interesting at once. It helps that Richard writes some of the loveliest and most sonorous sentences of anyone alive.

Carlos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo:  I somehow missed this novel when it came out, which is embarrassing because it is wondrous and important. This account of the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce and his imagined life (and death) among Pancho Villa’s men is hallucinatory, concise, lyrical in the most restrained manner, and–as with everything Fuentes has written–as good a guide to Mexican history and culture as you’ll find.

I also loved Isabel Wilkerson’s story of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. Excellent and deeply readable mix of vibrant storytelling and carefully researched cultural history.

Penelope Rowlands, author of Paris Was Ours

Lucking Out:  My Life Getting Down and Semi-dirty in Seventies New York, by James Wolcott:
A thrilling, funny memoir that brings back a New York moment no sane person wants to remember – complete with burning garbage, hideous crime, and Patti Smith.

Old Filth, by Jane Gardam: The acronym behind this novel’s title–Failed in London, Tried Hong Kong–is the first clue that this finely-wrought story of an ancient, flinty English barrister is about far more than it first appears.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (translated by Lydia Davis)
In her elegant translation of this classic tale of hypocrisy and romantic illusion in the French provinces, Lydia Davis beautifully evokes Flaubert’s precise, crystalline prose.

Joseph Skibell, author of A Curable Romantic

Luminarium by Alex Shakar. Shakar’s third book and his second novel, Luminarium announces the arrival of a master  unafraid to grapple with large subjects and big themes. The book is so captivating, you might not realize how finely crafted and ambitious it is. While never violating the novel’s sense of realism, Shakar describes altered states, hallucinations, visions, dreams, alternate cyber realities, planned cities, mega-churches, Margaritavilles, magic shows, and a host of scientific experiments and explanations, all with an understated panache. It’s also a sweet love story played out against the background of the 10^th anniversary of 911. Full disclosure: Shakar is a dear friend and one of my most valued colleagues. Still, the book is the real deal.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood. I’ll start with the full disclosure here: This book includes Atwood’s Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, given in 2010 at Emory University. I am the director of the Ellmann Lectures. This book comprises the critical summation of the thinking that went into Atwood’s three SF novels: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. The essays and lectures included in this volume are as delightful, charming, thought-provoking, honest and funny as their author.

And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. I never read this classic book about the early days of the AIDS crisis, published in the late 1980s, but I always meant to. This summer, it occurred to me that I should probably read it, and by coincidence, I found it on the book shelf of a house I rented this fall in Austin, TX. It’s as good, as essential, as fascinating as everyone said it was 25 years ago.

David Anthony, author of Something for Nothing

Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife: I read this modern-day fairy tale as slowly as possible, because I didn’t want it to end. It’s absolutely absorbing and other-worldly—especially the main story line, which revolves around a Tiger that has escaped from a zoo during a war in an unnamed Balkan country, and the human that befriends it.

John Banville, The Book of Evidence: I was blown away by this book—less by the plot, which is the recounting of a murder the narrator has committed, than by the incredible images Banville offers in his prose. The protagonist is a monster in the tradition of Humbert Humbert, but Banville, like Nabokov, makes him seductively likeable.

Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine: This hilarious and unsettling novel begins as the narrator tells us that her daughter—pregnant by an unknown man—is stupid and unattractive and unfit to raise a child. It continues to up the ante from there as grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter make their way from East Germany to West Germany. I was exhausted by the time I was done with this, but in a mostly good way.

Tonight’s the Night! Our Algonquin Book Club event with Heidi Durrow and Terry McMillan starts at 7:00pm PST / 10:00pm EST.  You can tune in to the live webcast of the event (held at Book Passage), chat with other viewers, and ask questions for Heidi. Be sure to check out our Algonquin Book Club site for an original essay by Heidi about The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, a description of the book, bios of the author and interviewer, a reading group guide, book club tips, and some culinary treats related to the book–amazing recipe pairings submitted by Heidi herself. Hope you can join us!

My favorite book from this summer is Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt, narrated by a man in his fifties who, at his mother’s funeral, runs into his aunt, who tells him that his mother was not his mother, and who drags him into a series of illegal adventures across Europe and into Turkey and South America. This is one of Greene’s so-called entertainments, but I often like his entertainments more than his supposedly serious novels, and I love this novel most of all, for the reasons I love Muriel Spark novels: an unlikely, wry, sneakily sad novel about what it means to start a new life.

– Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England

Maybe because I’ve been caretaking two elderly parents (95 and 85), both stricken with Alzheimer’s, I’ve been attracted to books by older authors who address the experience of being old, of approaching death. Googling “old age memoirs and women,” I hit on a memoir by Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End. A former British editor with a long, renowned career publishing the likes of Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul, Athill discovered late in her own life that she herself could write. The memoir is a gem, clear-eyed and unsentimental, remorseless and cranky, and tender and true. Athill focuses her sharp eye on everything from sex in old age (Ninety-one when the book was published, Athill ceased to be a sexual being in her seventies; the plus side: “other things became more interesting”) to her preference for nonfiction in her old age (“I do still want to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander”). I found myself underlining passages and starring every other page, wondering if my markings would some day elucidate what I had dreaded or looked forward to in old age for a loved one.

– Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Every year, as the summer solstice approaches, I get a hankering to reread The Sun Also Rises. I’ve now given into that hankering so often that it doesn’t really feel like summer to me anymore unless I’ve spent a few days with Hemingway’s masterpiece. And, as much as I love its bittersweet depiction of expatriate life in Paris in the nineteen-twenties and its rendering of the reckless bacchanal of the Pamplona fiesta, nothing is dearer to me than the quiet center of the book: the fishing trip Jake takes to Roncesvalles with his friend Bill. I don’t fish, but those passages, which so evocatively capture the blissful escape from workday life and the satisfactions of leisure, are redolent of every great vacation I’ve ever taken. All the more so, since in the novel–as in life–the happiness is so fragile and fleeting.

– Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

Lord of the Rings. I think I was thirteen that summer. I devoured the whole trilogy in about a week and was utterly bereft when I turned the last page. Oh, to be in Middle Earth!

– Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound

I first read Larry McMurtry’s Moving On, the summer when my first husband was busy leaving me. It was a rough summer but I lost myself in this big huge book peopled with characters so alive, I felt they were at my side. Every summer after that, I dipped back down into this story of desperate rodeo people, Texas grad students and the very unhappy Patsy Carpenter, who are all doing just what the title says–moving on. It’s funny, moving and brilliant–and it saved my life.

– Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is my new favorite summer book! It’s an illustrated novel centered on 6-year-old Sophia and her aging grandmother and set on a small Finnish island that the two adventurers explore each day. It’s a heart-warming story that holds some important life lessons. Think The Little Prince with a little bite to it. I fall in love with Sophia every time I read this book. I think you will too. How can you resist the little girl who is writing a treatise on angleworms that become split in half and concludes: “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”

– Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

As a kid, I think these books made their indelible mark in summer: Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune and of course Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I remember the exact feel of the days I spent with these books, reading them in the afternoons when the Missouri heat drove me out of the woods and fields and off the melting asphalt street, and indoors. After my father and mother bought an air conditioner, when I was a preteen and teenager, on some of those hot summer afternoons — particularly if my parents were gone — I would make hot tea, crank the air conditioner to the coldest setting, and burrow into the good living room couch I wasn’t supposed to use, and read novels by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I did this while other kids tried smoking. No, wait. I did that, too. With the air conditioner cranked up. In college, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion got me through the long, last summer. After that, memory blurs.

– Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle


“Summer read” implies guilty pleasure, the easy beach or airplane read, something we eat for flavor, not nutrition, purely as entertainment. I can’t name a single title but I can name an author, Tony Hillerman, and his series of mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The characters are both men I’d like to know. The mysteries work on two levels, giving the reader both a question he can’t answer and a world he doesn’t understand, and it’s the latter I find most inviting, books set on the Navajo reservation of the “four corners” area where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet, with its buttes and mesas, arroyos and dry river beds, lit in what seems like perpetual sunset. Maybe it’s because as a young man, headed away from home for the first time to attend a graduate writing program in Tucson and scared out of my mind, I pulled off the highway to get gas, somewhere west of Tucumcari, and I leaned against the fender of my car to rest, smoke a cigarette, drink a Coke and watch the hills all around me turn from gold to red, and I thought, “Something huge is happening here, something I’ll never know in full.” Hillerman’s books, where the landscape and the mystery fuse, take me back to that moment and give me a second chance, and feel 24 again, the age when everything seems like a mystery. That’s a pleasure, usually one I’ve savored summers, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

– Pete Nelson, author of I Thought You Were Dead

Behind the Book:
A Child’s Second Chance,
by Heidi Durrow

I started writing The Girl Who Fell from the Sky after reading a haunting news story about a young mother—recently depressed and despondent—who led her kids to her building’s rooftop, and apparently pushed the children off and then jumped.

Reporters interviewed neighbors and friends who spoke of the young mother’s fierce devotion to her children. She’d had a recent setback, but no one could have guessed that the loving mother could do such a thing. No one could put the pieces of her story together to make sense of the reason why.

I became obsessed with the miracle of that horrible tragedy: One of the children, the girl, had survived!

I searched the news for more information about her, but all I found were the barest facts of her biography: her name, her age and a photo that must have been a couple of years old. It was sad to think that the whole story of her life was now this tragedy.

In follow-up articles, I learned that the girl would make a complete recovery. After a few more weeks in the hospital, she would be healed. But then what?

I had so many questions: How would the girl grow up? How would she deal with the legacy of her past? What would her survival look like?

I hoped that she would be able to create a normal life for herself. I hoped that she would still know how to love and be loved. So I decided to imagine a future for her. I wanted to give her a voice.

I wrote the rooftop scene first. That’s when I understood the reason the girl’s story resonated with me. It had something to do with my own. No, I’m not the survivor of a fall, and I haven’t lived through a deadly family tragedy. (I always mention that up front at readings so people don’t feel like they have to treat me gently.) But what I learned writing that scene was that I wanted to write a mother-daughter story. I wanted to write a story about how a girl learns to be a woman without the help of her mother to guide her. I think it’s a reality so many women can relate to—whether a mother has passed away, or just isn’t available emotionally. And sometimes a mother just doesn’t know how to help a child navigate an unfamiliar world.

I named my character Rachel. And then I started to fill in the details of her biography. I couldn’t draw on the real girl’s story. I didn’t know it. So I wrote what I knew, as the old saying goes. I am half Danish and half African-American, and Rachel became a biracial/bicultural girl newly transplanted to a mostly black community after the accident. Her story let me write a story exploring race and identity. I didn’t know when I started to write the book that the nation would soon be talking about the same things with the election of our first biracial African-American president.

The final thread that made the book come together was the character Brick. He’s not anyone I know or have known, but I absolutely adore him. A tragedy needs a witness, and Brick became Rachel’s.

Many years have passed since I read that news story. And I still think of the real girl. What happened to her? My character Rachel is about the same age at the end of the book as the real girl might be now. I imagined Rachel growing up to be a heroic and loving young woman—I would like to believe that the real young woman is too.

####

See Terry McMillan interview Heidi Durrow about The Girl Who Fell from the Sky at 7:00pm PST/10:00 pm EST on Thursday, August 18th–live event and live webcast, where you can chat with other viewers and ask questions of the author. For more information, visit the Algonquin Book Club website here. Hope you’ll join us!

During the live webcast of the event, held at Book Passage, you can chat with other viewers and even ask questions. Be sure to check out our Algonquin Book Club site for an original essay by Durrow about The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, a description of the book, bios of the author and interviewer, a reading group guide, book club tips, and some culinary treats related to the book–amazing recipe pairings submitted by Heidi Durrow herself.

UPDATE:

These lucky winners will receive a free copy of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky. Congratulations!  We’ll be in touch with you soon.

Facebook:
Kathie Hagen
Vanessa Jimerson McDaniel
Jeffery Lanier Jones
Yvonne Hill
James White
Jennifer Michael
Bradley Wojak

Blog:
Brooke
Cynthia
Chantilly Patiño
Leslie S.
Barbara
Erin Harwood
Jessica
Nadia
Judy B
Allie Jay
Suzanne Garnet
Rena
Ivy Pittman

Our next Algonquin Book Club event with Heidi Durrow and Terry McMillan is just about three weeks away! To help kick things off, we’re giving away 20 copies of Durrow’s critically acclaimed, best-selling novel The Girl Who Fell from the Sky to those who haven’t read it and who want to tune in to the live webcast on August 18, 7:00pm PST/10:00pm EST. All you have to do is leave a comment here or on our Facebook page to enter. We’ll notify the winners by early next week. Good luck!

Be sure to check out our Algonquin Book Club site for an original essay by Durrow about The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, a description of the book, bios of the author and interviewer, a reading group guide, book club tips, and some culinary treats related to the book–recipe pairings submitted by Heidi Durrow herself. The food looks amazing!

.

Tune in on August 18 at 7:00 p.m. PST/10:00pm EST for our latest Algonquin Book Club event! Terry McMillan, award-winning author of the bestsellers Get Happy and Waiting to Exhale, will interview Heidi Durrow about her Indie Next and New York Times bestseller The Girl Who Fell From the Sky. You’ll be able to watch the entire event–held at Book Passage–via live webcast, send in questions, and chat with other viewers. In the meantime, check out the Algonquin Book Club page for more special features:

• Read Heidi Durrow’s essay “A Child’s Second Chance” and an excerpt from the novel.
• Download discussion questions from our Reading Group Guide.
• Get cooking with Heidi Durrow’s special recipe pairings. Danish pancakes! Fresh bread!
• Check out the Book Club Tips & Ideas.
• Join the conversation. Ask questions via Facebook or Twitter (using #AlgBookClub) or right here on the blog and Heidi Durrow might just answer them live.

Each week, we’ll be giving away Algonquin Book Club tote bags, autographed copies of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, and brand new titles hot off the press to people who pose questions here, on our Facebook page, or via Twitter. We look forward to hearing from you.

See you on August 18th!

.What books recently rocked my world: This is not a shameless Algonquin plug (OK, maybe it is a shameless Algonquin plug, but it doesn’t make the love any less real):

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan. Didn’t think it was going to be for me at all, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.  (Publishing October 4, 2011.)

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow. Read it in one plane flight (a long plane flight) and turned into that person in the aisle seat crying as she reads.

Long Drive Home by Will Allison

Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat

Where She Went by Gayle Forman – but I haven’t finished any of them yet because my personal civilian book club chose Bossypants this month.

Best damn event(s) we’ve hosted: We host 60 author events a month (really), so it’s tough to pick just one or two. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the two most memorable damn events:

1) When I broke my toe while dressed like Medusa in a Gothic style church. Clipped the pinky toe on my right foot on the base of a pew (“busted it up good,” to quote my doctor) in front of 500 kids awaiting Rick Riordan’s arrival. I’m still awaiting my gold medal for not cursing at the top of my lungs — in a church, in front of 500 kids – upon smashing the toe. The following week, I hobbled around BEA with my broken toe.

2) When I broke my toe climbing over a barricade of my own making at our Ricky Martin signing. Fourth toe on my right foot. The barricade was made out of pricey limited edition art books. Six days later, I hobbled around Spain with my broken toe for my long-dreamed-of trip there.

Most entertaining author(s) we’ve hosted:

I never laughed so much as at Ann Patchett and Alexander McCall Smith’s events. And Dave Barry (but he’s Books & Books family, so it doesn’t feel so much like “hosting”). Plus last week I got to watch Robert Sabuda create a pop-up right before my very eyes. Brilliant. Oh, and the Pete the Cat author and illustrator, Eric Litwin and James Dean. I was singing, dancing and jumping around – and it was my job!

Strangest question a customer has ever asked:
It’d be the strangest if I didn’t hear it with such frequency at author events, “Do you sell the book?”

Why our store kicks ass: When you walk in any of our stores, you know immediately that you’re in a Books & Books store – and yet each one has its own personality. Quiet but with an energy. Warm and inviting like you hope a bookstore will be and still new, modern, classy – and knowledgeable. Our carefully curated selection is just that. Every book is there for a reason. And here’s how dedicated and enamored of books we are – Children’s Book Buyer Becky Quiroga’s right arm is tattooed with original works-of-art drawn on her flesh by Eric Carle, Mo Willems and Lane Smith.

What makes our neighborhood and customers awesome: Well, one of our neighborhoods is a Caribbean island. Another is the most lucrative shopping mall in the United States. Another is the heart of South Beach. And another is Gate D25. … No, in all seriousness, Miami is like no other place on Earth. It’s a world unto itself with a mix of people and cultures and ideas – all combined with a whole lotta humidity – and that makes it truly vibrant (if not a little sticky.) Our customers don’t come to cultural events at the store; they are the cultural events. They bring the ideas, the questions, the give-and-take and passion that visiting authors always remember. And a book is a commitment to our readers, a bond shared, a discussion started – with much more to come.

I promise you won’t find this at any other store: A table signed by three presidents (Carter, Clinton and W.), two First Ladies (Clinton and Laura Bush), two Secretaries of State (Clinton and Albright), Julie Andrews, Barbara Walters, Kurt Vonnegut – and Paul McCartney (!), among many others.

Why I do what I do: When you recommend the right book for the right person, you’ve given him a gift for life. And when you bring the author of that book in for an event, you’ve given that reader a memory for life. (Wow, that sounds hokey. Yikes. But it’s true, I guess.)

If I weren’t selling books I’d be: A former newspaper sports editor forced into a buy-out and looking for a job.

Books that changed my life: Me by Ricky Martin and Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan (see aforementioned broken toe stories).

Top three authors, living or dead, I’d invite to my dinner party: William Shakespeare (see aforementioned fondness for double entendre), Nathan Englander (not a wasted word in his writing) and George Clooney (has George Clooney written a book?  Well, he should).

Top three songs on the soundtrack to my life: “Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney & Wings (first thing I ever bought with my own money – when I was 6).  “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ‘N Roses (my college boyfriend used to sing it to me – GNR was never so sweet).  “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green (no explanation needed).

My last meal request: Smoked fish dip at Le Tub in Hollywood, Fla., fried calamari (accompanied by a Hazed & Confused pint) at Lou’s Beer Garden in Miami Beach, pan con tomate from La Boqueria in New York, boquerones at that place in Barcelona (accompanied by an Estrella Galicia pint), baguette, pumpernickel onion rolls from Joe’s Stone Crab, radicchio and arugula salad, my mother’s brisket (legendary!), mashed potatoes, Bob the Potato (my creation), Chef Bernie Matz’s yuca fries from the Café at Books & Books (and that pan-fried grouper sandwich that goes with them), roasted asparagus and wilted spinach, ricotta cheesecake at Specchio in Surfside, Fla., Key lime pie at Mrs. Mac’s Kitchen in the Keys, carrot cake from Publix and chocolate chip cookies.