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BEA Show Daily 2011: 'Dummies' Marks Two Decades
This BEA season, for Wiley everything's coming up... dummies. This week, the publisher has big plans to celebrate 20 years of building the wildly successful For Dummies line.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Where the Skies Are Not Cloudy
Bison Books, the trade paperback line at the University of Nebraska Press, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. To share the excitement, the press is offering a prize of 50 books worth $500 in a drawing to be conducted at BEA. The winner gets to choose the books from the full range of the press's titles: backlist, frontlist, hardcover, or paperback. "It's so much more exciting than a preset list," says editor–in-chief Heather Lundine.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Dancing at Coffee House
It's often difficult, while in New York City for BEA, to find the time to go out on the town and attend the theater or a concert or a dance performance. There're just too many BEA-related evening events enticing us after we've been walking the show floor all day.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Booksellers, Take Your Victory Lap
"How come my foot hurts?" is the question that launched journalist Christopher McDougall on a journey into the ancient Tarahumara tribe, a people who navigate the rugged and treacherous Copper Canyons of Mexico on nothing but their bare feet.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Network with INscribe Digital
If you've been wanting to meet the executive team from INscribe Digital, the new digital distributor of e-books and provider of content conversion services, today's your chance. From 4:30 to 6 p.m. at their booth (4109), have a glass of wine and meet the executive team. On hand will be Anne Kubek (executive v-p and general manager); Larry Norton (business development); Paul Ignasinski (v-p, corporate development); John Orofino (manager, client services); and Matthew Burns (chief operating officer of Isolation Network, INscribe Digital's parent company).
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Jess Goodell: A Marine's Tale
Former Marine Jess Goodell never intended to talk publicly about her time with the first official Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq and her hard transition back to civilian life. In fact, the story of how she came to collaborate on her memoir, Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq (Casemate, May), with John Hearn is not so much a journey toward publication as one of healing.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Jack Gantos You Can Go Home Again
It's the summer of 1962, and 11-year-old Jack Gantos is grounded, big-time. Instead of having two months of carefree adventures in his small town of Norvelt, Penn., he's going to work off his punishment by helping an elderly neighbor. Such is the stage that Gantos sets for his latest work of humorous, inspired-by-truth fiction—and his first middle-grade novel in 10 years—Dead End in Norvelt, due from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September. Gantos will be signing ARCs of his book today, 4–5 p.m., at Table 15.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Daniel Stefanski: Building Bridges for Autism
Daniel Stefanski might be only 14 years old, but the eighth-grader is a young man on a mission: he wants to build bridges between autistic children and the people in their lives. Stefanski, the author of How to Talk to an Autistic Kid, will be signing copies of his book today at Table 25 in the autographing area, 1–1:30 pm.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Dava Sobel: Bringing Copernicus's Story to Life
Bestselling author Dava Sobel's undergraduate major may have been theater history, but she's only now returning to her dramatic roots with September's A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (Bloomsbury). While Sobel does tell the story of the Copernican revolution in her well-established narrative style, she also dramatizes a central part of the action in her first-ever play.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Lisa Randall: Searching for Answers
Like many scientists, Harvard professor and theoretical physicist Lisa Randall believes that science has a lot to teach us, and not just about the way the physical world works. Its goal, she says, is to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and what could be better than that? She concedes that her first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, dealt with esoteric topics—in particular, particle physics, string theory, and cosmology. But her new one, Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (Ecco, Sept.), is different, she jokes, and can be viewed as a prequel to that earlier one, with much more basic information in it.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis: All in the Family Fantasy
Colin Meloy is best known as lead singer and songwriter for indie folk rock band the Decemberists. But he's making his debut as a children's book author with the middle-grade fantasy Wildwood, coming from HarperCollins's Balzer + Bray in August. The novel is illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis (The Mysterious Benedict Society). "It's an adventure story set in an alternate universe in contemporary Portland, Ore., where a 5,000-acre park has become an impassible wilderness that everyone has been taught to steer clear of," says Meloy.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Karl Marlantes: Worth Waiting For
Since the release of his debut novel last year, Karl Marlantes has been having what he calls "a bit of an identity crisis": "I'm sure a lot of writers understand," he tells Show Daily. "People ask you, what are you doing? ‘Well, I'm working on a novel.' You do that for 25 years and you begin to build up a sort of litany about it. Then all of a sudden everything changes overnight."
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Sylvia Nasar: Making Economics Exciting
If you believe that the study of economics is a snooze, come to booth 3653 today, 10–11 a.m., where Sylvia Nasar will be signing Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius (S&S, Sept.). She'll change your mind for good.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Peter Brown: The Friendship Challenge
In last year’s Children Make Terrible Pets, Peter Brown introduced Lucy, a young bear who has high, if futile, hopes of adopting a child as a pet. Lucy has another mission in You Will Be My Friend! due from Little, Brown in September with a 100,000-copy first printing. Determined to find a friend, Lucy discovers that’s a trickier pursuit than she expected when she wanders into the woods and discovers she’s too big to fit in the frog pond and accidentally ruins a giraffe’s breakfast. But just as she’s about to give up, a new friend finds her.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Florence Henderson: Sharing Moments of Grace
Actress Florence Henderson will always be associated with her portrayal of Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch, one of the most popular mothers in television history. Her own childhood, however, was far from ideal. The 10th child of a tobacco sharecropper, she was only 12 when her mother departed the impoverished family, leaving her with an alcoholic father. Henderson’s ability to sing was her ticket out, eventually leading her to stardom on the stage and screen. In her first memoir, Life Is Not a Stage: From Broadway Baby to a Lovely Lady and Beyond (Hachette Book Group/Center Street, Sept.), Henderson describes the highs and lows of a journey she hopes readers will find “inspirational.”
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Joe Finder: High Expectations
It took bestselling author Joe Finder, whose second Nick Heller thriller, Buried Secrets, will be published by St. Martin’s on June 21, almost 20 years and seven novels to decide on a character with which to build a series that he now hopes will have a long and prolific life.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Lucette Lagnado: Like Mother, Like Daughter
After the publication of Lagnado’s stunning, prize-winning memoir about her father, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, she received a lot of comments from readers who thought her mother received short shrift. “I realized that I had an unbelievably profound longing to write her story. When I wrote my father’s story, I could be completely removed while I was writing about his alleged affairs, and his leaving my mother behind at home and going off at all hours of the night. I think at some level I had to write my father’s story [first]. With my mother, it was so much more painful, so much more raw, even though almost the same number of years had passed since her death.”
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Amy Waldman The Allure of Blank Space
Amy Waldman, author of the politically charged forthcoming novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug.), has been knee-deep in international politics for some 15 years. Reporting for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and other outlets from spots like Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Africa, Waldman also spent three years in India as co-chief of the Times’s South Asia bureau. A few years back, however, the Brooklyn-based, L.A.-born journalist had an idea for a novel that wouldn’t go away.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: Chris Raschka: His First Bow as Novelist
Having made an indelible mark in the picture book world—he won a Caldecott for The Hello, Goodbye Window and Caldecott Honors for Yo! Yes?—Chris Raschka has penned his first middle-grade novel, Seriously, Norman! Out from Scholastic’s Michael di Capua Books in October, the book’s plot will speak to kids—and parents—skeptical of the often daunting rigmarole surrounding school admission tests.
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BEA Show Daily 2011: John Lithgow: Dad Was His Inspiration
What does an actor who stars in the upcoming prequel to Planet of the Apes, Rise of the Apes, who has a slew of awards—five Emmys, two Tonys, and two Golden Globes—and who has published eight bestselling children’s picture books do in his spare time? In the case of actor John Lithgow, he writes a memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education (HarperCollins, Oct.), his first book for adults. Or, as he prefers to describe it, he takes his “first stab at a book that weighs more than three ounces.”
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