We loved meeting all of the smart, dedicated booksellers at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute in Asheville last week. Thanks to everyone who came to our NC Speakeasy, joined us for the rep picks lunches, and added Lookout’s debut novel, Honey from the Lion, to your tote bags. If you weren’t able to snag a galley, please e-mail us.
Four years after the collapse of Borders, “Independents are looking at adding locations and taking back some of the physical bookshelf space that had been lost,” writes Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly. We couldn’t be happier to read about the ongoing resurgence.
Speaking of bookstores, this “carousel of light” just opened in the heart of Bucharest. Read on to discover six beautiful floors of more than 10,000 books. The space will also host cultural events and concerts.
In author news, we were thrilled to find Ecotone contributor Molly Antopol among the finalists for the New York Public Library’s 2015 Young Lions Fiction Award, along with Catherine Lacey, Andrew Ladd, Jesse Ball, and Ben Lerner. The Young Lions Fiction Award has been honoring promising young writers for fifteen years.
And in the New Yorker’s 90th-anniversary issue, James Wood reviews Edith Pearlman’s new collection, Honeydew (Little, Brown), calling Pearlman “one of God’s spies.” He adds that her singular work, “throbbing with restrained tenderness, treats both her characters and her readers as adults. These days, it seems almost radical.” His consideration includes several stories in Binocular Vision, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
This week the world lost former United States poet laureate Philip Levine, “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” according to fellow poet Edward Hirsch. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his collection The Simple Truth and won two National Book Awards, for Ashes: Poems New & Old and What Work Is. In the New York Times this week, Margalit Fox wrote that critics “admired his deceptively simple style, which could belie the carefully worked out cadences beneath its colloquial surface. They also praised Mr. Levine’s unabashed use of poetry as a vehicle for radical
social criticism, noting his frank explorations of the nature of masculinity and his cleareyed depictions of working-class lives and the immigrant Jewish experience.”
