Content Tagged ‘binocular vision’

After returning from this year’s Winter Institute, where we met hundreds of dedicated booksellers from across the country, we decided to take a virtual road trip to learn more about their stores. For the next several weeks, our interview series, Seven Questions, will spotlight some of our favorites—including Parnassus Books, Quail Ridge Books, and Hub City Bookshop, among others. You just don’t find better people than the good folks who own and work at them.

The impressive book selection at Parnassus

Parnassus Books, which opened in 2011, is named after the sacred Grecian mountain known for its poetry, song, and knowledge. And the Nashville bookstore is indeed a home for literature and learning, with regular author readings and weekly story-time events for children. Co-owned by bestselling author Ann Patchett and publishing veteran Karen Hayes, the beautiful store offers an intimate and thoughtful selection of books.

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.

Just in time for National Readathon Day tomorrow, we’re excited to bring you another installment of our weekly Lit News Roundup. Inaugural sponsors Penguin Random House and the National Book Foundation invite you to curl up with your favorite book and set aside time to read on Saturday, January 24. It’s not too late to join them in pledging your time and funds to help encourage literacy and grow reading programs in the US.

We congratulate all the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle, with extra cheers to our friends at Graywolf Press and author Claudia Rankine, whose book Citizen: An American Lyric is nominated in both poetry and criticism. Toni Morrison will receive the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

UNCW is back in session, and so is our weekly Lit News Roundup. We hope that our readers had a wonderful and restful holiday season.

We highly recommend reading this thoughtful and inspiring Slate article by Daniel Menaker, who writes, “The profession, in whatever form, will continue to produce physical and now electronic objects that move not only units but people. Move them and enlighten them emotionally, move them to action, move them to share what they learn and care about with others.”

© Laura van den Berg

In case you missed the cover of the Sunday Book Review on January 4, it featured a stunning review by Laura van den Berg of Honeydew (Little, Brown), the new collection by Lookout’s debut author, Edith Pearlman (Binocular Vision). A profile of Mrs. Pearlman, written by another Lookout author, Steve Almond, also appeared in the Times and chronicles her writing and publishing background, leading to her “commercial breakthrough at seventy-eight, after five decades of writing short stories, some 200 of them, nearly all appearing in small literary magazines.” The profile includes a quote by Lookout co-founder and former editor Ben George.

It’s hard to believe that just two weeks ago we were celebrating Writers’ Week and helping our sister magazine, Ecotone, launch the fall Sustenance issue with a farm-to-table supper in partnership with Feast Down East. The delicious meal was served under a full moon and glowing lights in the Kenan Hall courtyard. Thanks again to contributors Alison Hawthorne Deming and Randall Kenan, as well as Leslie Hossfeld and Stefan Hartmann of Black River Organic Farm, for speaking. If you missed it, you can enjoy a taste of the evening in this album, courtesy of UNCW’s Will Page.

The new Sustenance issue of Ecotone is now on newsstands and available via the website, but don’t forget to pick a copy of the Spring/Summer 2014 issue, featuring a story by Lookout’s next author, Matthew Neill Null, while you’re at it.

Lookout Books would like to congratulate Edith Pearlman on her most recent success! The Sunday Times says:

“Pearlman’s UK debut at the age of 76 is a dazzling revelation. Written over a 35-year span, the stories in this collection winningly exhibit her impressive breadth of subject matter. Conjured up with atmospheric flair, locations range from London during the Blitz to condominiums in present-day New England via postwar Paris, Latin America, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Jerusalem. Characters — frequently cosmopolitan — are correspondingly various, as are tone and mood, which modulate between ironic comedy and pathos. Rich in social detail, the stories are alive with psychological and emotional subtlety. Long delayed, their arrival here is a cause for celebration.”

Be sure to check out the rest of the article to read more about Binocular Vision as well as the other Sunday Times picks. 

Review of Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision in Financial Times:

“Sometimes, you look at a really intricate piece of work and you think something quite banal. You think: “How in the name of all that is holy did they get the ship into the bottle?” That is exactly what I found myself thinking as I read these stories – each of them meticulously made, miraculously precise, and so fully populated that you marvel one mind could invent so many distinct human beings from scratch.”

carissahalston:

This Is an Experiment – Episode 46: Page 153 of Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision

Edith Pearlman isn’t just an award-winning author—she’s also local. I love Boston writers, so it made me really happy to include this page in TIAE.

A great reading of Edith Pearlman’s “The Coat.”