PD James: writing everything while remaining in the genre

Cropped version Murdo Macleod's photo of PD James before an 8/26/06 appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival accompanied  The Guardian's obituary by Stanley Reynolds.

I first published this post at 5:44pm on 11/30,14, as I wanted to get the word out and am in the process of adding to it. (In glancing over the program, I noticed others we have lost who appeared that year, including Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) and Harold Pinter (1930-2008).

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From the obituary of PD James by Stanley Reynolds in The Guardian:

...Phyllis [Dorothy] James had not started writing until her 40s, and said she only wrote a whodunnit as practice for a serious novel. Later on, though, she never fretted about being locked into crime writing. She said she could write everything she wanted while remaining in the genre.

What I miss when I don't go online.  While I was celebrating Thanksgiving, PD James died at age 94, having published Death Comes to Pemberley (Jane Austen revisited through a murder mystery) in 2011 "which combined my two great enthusiams in life" (quote from video at the end of this post) and Talking about Detective Fiction in 2009.  Both (and many more) are at the Virginia Tech Library including her 1999 autobiography, A Time to be in Earnest, as well as a DVD of Children of Men, the 2006 film based on her book on the end of the world due to male infertility of the same name published in 1992 (with a first U.S. edition by Knopf in 1993.)


James talks about why she started with and maintained loyal to the detective novel in her Paris Review interview from 1994 by the late Shusha Guppy:

I don’t make a distinction between the so-called serious or literary novel and the crime novel. I suppose one could say mainstream novel. But I didn’t hesitate long before I decided to try to write a detective story, because I so much enjoyed reading them myself. And I thought I could probably do it successfully, and the detective story being a popular genre, it would have a better chance of being accepted for publication. I didn’t want to use the traumatic experiences of my own life in an autobiographical book, which would have been another option for a first attempt. But there were two other reasons. First, I like structured fiction, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like a novel to have narrative drive, pace, resolution, which a detective novel has. Second, I was setting out at last on the path of becoming a writer, which I had longed for all my life, and I thought writing a detective story would be a wonderful apprenticeship for a “serious” novelist, because a detective story is very easy to write badly but difficult to write well. There is so much you have to fit into eighty or ninety-thousand words—not just creating a puzzle, but an atmosphere, a setting, characters . . . Then when the first one worked, I continued, and I came to believe that it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live.

It's not as if James didn't want to be a writer earlier than at age 40.  As Marilyn Stasio noted 
in the NYT, James was fond of saying [as she did in the Paris Review],

When I first heard that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall...I  immediately wondered: Did he fall — or was he pushed?

I didn't know that James opposed Scottish independence and marriage equality in the House of Lords until I read a bitter comment in The Guardian.  Evidently, activist Linda Semple has forgiven her for both, if not two of the books I mentioned above. (Semple "spent the 1980s and ’90s working in women’s and LGBTQ organizations, publishing, and journalism. She now works for the Scottish Government, heading up its work on health and social care efficiency.")

I love this send up James gave the BBC (tape), which she describes as being a:

large and unwieldy ship … with a crew that was somewhat discontented and a little mutinous, the ship sinking close to the Plimsoll line and the customers feeling they have paid too much for their journey and not quite sure where they are going or who is the captain.

But even more, this lovely interview with James by Australian journalist Jennifer Byrne which aired on ABC Book Talk on 5/14/2013:

52 Books in 52 Weeks: The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs, Scribner, 416 pp, Septembe 23, 2014, ISBN 978-1476731902

Novelist Jebb Hobbs, spent over 300 hours of interviews trying to make sense of the murder of his Yales roommate, Robert Peace.  The 30-year-old African-American was an almost straight-A student in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, who also dealt marijuana, not so much for what he could buy himself, as for how he could support his family and friends..

Here is an NPR interview including Hobbs reading from the book and the NYT book review.

52 Books in 52 Weeks: The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Knopf, 432 pp, October 28, 2014, ISBN
978-0385354042.

Lepore, a Harvard professor, is also a staff writer for The New Yorker, where I've enjoyed her essays Much of Lepore's research, teaching, and writing "explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record."  This lively book tell of the creation of an Amazonian cartoon by a feminist polygamist and its connection to the various waves of the women's movement.

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Revival by Stephen King

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

Stephen King, Revival,  Scribner, 416 pages, November 11, 2014, ISBN 9781476770383.

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Some Luck by Jane Smiley and Toughs by Edward Falco

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

Some Luck: A novel by Jane Smiley, Knopf, 416 pages, October 7, 2014 (ISBN 978-0307700315)

Edward Falco, Toughs, Unbridled Books, 480 pages, August 12, 2014, (ISBN 978-1-60953-111-9)

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood and The Children's Act by Ian McEwan

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood, Nan A. Talese, 288 pages, September 16, 2014,
ISBN 978-0385539128

The Children Act by Ian McEwan,
Nan A. Talese, 240 pages, September 9, 2014, ISBN 978-0385539708

52 Books in 52 Weeks

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel, Henry Holt & Co., 256 pp (ISBN 978-1627792103, September 14, 2014)

Rachel Caron:  Witness for Nature by Linda Lear Henry Holt & Co., 634 pp (ISBN  978-0805034271, 1997)

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Linda Parson Marion's Motherland

Cover art by Rachel Travis for  Linda Parson Marion's Motherland (Iris Press, 2008, 96 pp).  I first published this post on 10/12/14 at 11:00 PM.  I last updated it on 7:05 PM on 10/18/14.

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

This week I read Linda Parson Marion's Motherland, her narrative poems about leaving at the age of 11 from the home of her bi-polar mother (not to be diagnosed until age 73) to join her father and her young stepmother (who had married her father at age 20) and of subsequent visits back and forth. 

The images (and the story) are riveting.

UPDATE:  I reconnect with Linda on Facebook on 10/18, having last seen her (and met her) at a reading at  Radford University in June 2011.  I had just found this piece from last month (with additional artwork by Travis, who, it turns out is her daughter).  I wrote to let Marion know that I'd be doing a real review once I caught up, but that I wanted to let her know about this post and that her book was "a real lesson in how to write about hard things." 

This was her response, which she gave me permission to reprint here, since I think it gives insight in the writing process:

I like that, Beth, a lesson in how to write about hard things. The challenge is always to craft the raw emotion and memory into a semblance of art, to distance yourself enough from the pain or horror, yet not lose the truth and depth of the experience so that it becomes as much universal as personal.

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Howard Reich, Naomi Shihab Nye, Christopher Green, Jeff Daniel Marion

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)

Howard Reich will be at Virginia Tech Newman library Monday to discuss his book and the resulting documentary (which shows at the Lyric on Tuesday.

Other books I read this week:

Naomi Shihab Nye:  Transfer (poems):

Christopher Green:  The Headmasters Wife (literary novel)

Jeff Daniel Marion: Father (poems)

52 Books in 52 Weeks

The book editor of the Roanoke Times pointed me to Sacramento blogger Robin McCormack's book challenge.  Reports are due every Sunday.

I was a member of an book group started by Harriet and Sig Davidson that met in Roanoke  from 1980.  Harriet died in March of 2007, but we continued using the same format of a book dinner until July of 2013.  When the format changed, I attended one last meeting on August 15, 2013. Since I've been limited to reading on my own for the last year and change, 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge seemed like an opportunity.

I need to go back and check my records for the books I've read from January through July, which I will record here later,  but tonight I'm listing the books I've read so far in August.  Because I received review copies for the first three, I'll be posting separate book reviews, but I wanted to make an entry here, so I could link to the virtual reading group.

Henna House, Nomi Eve, Scribner, August 12, 2014, 320 pages (ISBN 978-1476740270)

August  16, Eve was one of the seven featured authors for the Doylestown Bookshop's  first annual August Authors' Fest. (Others were Robin Black,  Rachel Cantor, Pamela Erens, Elise Juska,Violet Kupersmith  and Maya Lang.)

Reimagining Camelot: Wheelwright, Kentucky in Memory and Folklore, Lisa R. Perry, Create Space, July 28, 2014, 206 pages (ISBN 978-1499607901)

I first "met" Lisa through the Appalachian Studies listserve on 12/27/10 when she was inquiring about Carl Sandburg and "Company Town" for her dissertation.  Turns out it wasn't one of his poems, but a song he sang, at least according to his daughter.

A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music, Jason Howard with a foreword by Rodney Crowell, University of Kentucky Press, September 18, 2012, 272 pages, (ISBN 978-0-8131-3645-5)  The paperback is coming out in January, 2015.

Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice, , Larry S. Gibson, 
Prometheus Books, December 4, 2012, 413 pages, (ISBN 978-1616145712)

Book Review: Mike Hudson: The Monster

Cover from MacMillan Publishers.  Just heard back from Nona Walker, book editor of the Roanoke Times, that this review, with minor changes, is slated to run January 2, 2011.  Since there is usually non permalink for reviews there, I'm posting a copy here with a few links, along with a bit of an introduction.  


November 8, I had the pleasure of listening to Mike Hudson speak at Washington and Lee about the connection between predatory lending, Wall Street and the past two year's economic meltdown.  That's the subject of his new book, THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis, which came out in October from Holt/Times Books.

Here's a 2008 interview by Randall Chittum published by Columbia Journalism Review in which Mike talks about the leadup to the mortgage crisis and how the dots were there in the form of individual stories--which never got connected:

Mike currently covers business and finance for the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism non-profit. Before that, he worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and wrote for Forbes, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones, among others.

I met Mike when he was working for the Roanoke Times covering the low-income beat and graciously sent me a note to say our all-volunteer 8-12 page alternative monthly, the New River Free Press, had scooped his daily on the criminalization of panhandling.

Mike started on the trail of predatory lending long before the current melt-down, after he received a 1992 Alicia Patterson fellowship to research businesses that target low-income Americans, He edited the award-winning book Merchants of Misery:  How Corporate America Profits from Poverty (Common Courage Press, 2002 and appeared in the documentary film Maxed Out:  Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lending (Trueworks, 2006).

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THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis, October 2010, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York, 365 pp.

 This fall's latest banking scandal revealed foreclosure lawyers backdating mortgage documents and faking affidavits to courts in order to evict families and resell their homes. After more than two years of stories on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, readers may have wearied . Was the resulting financial meltdown an unavoidable market accident--as former Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan called it, a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami?” If so, what's the purpose in studying it?

 In The Monster, Mike Hudson paints the larger picture, connecting the dots all the way back to the 80s, exploring how the “plain vanilla business” of mortgages was corrupted and who is to blame. Rather than a tome on finance, The Monster reads like a true-crime story--perhaps because Hudson's first job out of college was covering the Roanoke Times & World News's police beat. The compelling story he unravels stems from interviews with hundreds of individuals and from thousands of pages of court transcripts. Hudson pieces together a Rube Goldberg world of falsified income, forged signatures, and pressure on families to sign sub-prime loans as quickly as possible.   He shows large investments from Wall Street firms sustained these practices, concentrating on Roland Arnall--who created Ameriquest, one of the first and biggest predatory lending firms--and on the Wall Street firm of Lehman Brothers.

For Hudson, Arnall represents the birth of the sub-prime mortgage industry. An immigrant who originally opened up a savings and loan to bankroll his real-estate projects, Arnall figured out how to make lots of money making high-priced home loans to borrowers in mostly minority neighborhoods. His workers felt his impatience to grow the business. Dennis Rivelli, a former manager, told Hudson, Arnall

never cared how you got the volume and where it came from and what you had to do to get it...He could care less. Just pump it out and move on.

After being pressed by S&L regulators in the early 1990s, Arnall morphed his savings and loan into a lightly-regulated independent mortgage lender, Ameriquest. His company might have been advertising as the ""proud sponsor of the American dream" of home ownership, but it wasn't even generating new mortgages. In 2004, one quarter of 1 percent of Ameriquest loans went for home purchases. 99.75% went for refinancing deals with onerous fees and loan rates which increased the odds of foreclosure.

Take, for instance, the case of Carolyn Pittman, who had borrowed $58,859 in 1993 with her husband to buy a one-story, concrete block house near Jacksonville, Florida. They paid $500 per month on a fixed-rate FHA loan which included home insurance and property taxes.

Even after Charlie died in 1998, Pittman kept up with her house payments. But things were tough for her.... Like many older black women who owned their homes but had modest incomes, Pittman was deluged almost every day, by mail and by phone, with sales pitches offering money to fix up her house or pay off her bills. A few months after her heart attack, a salesman ... caught her on the phone and assured her he could ease her worries. He said Ameriquest would help her out by lowering her interest rate and her monthly payments.

 By the time Pittman had been churned through the mill, her house payment came to $1,069 per month. And Arnall's reaction to such stories, "Stuff happens."

Meanwhile Arnall's minions profited:

For those who gave themselves over to the breakneck pace of life inside Ameriquest, the rewards were dazzling. Twenty-three year old salesmen made $100,000 per year. Twenty-six-year-old branch managers groused $200,000, $200,000, even half a million dollars a year, and boosted their takes higher as they climbed within the companies ranks. Many would become millionaires as they made Roland Arnall a billionaire.

 After one aide left the company his consulting contract from Arnall yielded $35 million dollars.


 Nothing could have happened on this scale, however, without the infusion of huge amounts of capital by Wall Street firms such as Lehman Brothers. Lawrence McDonald, a vice president at Lehman explained that

The executives who ran the company's sprawling mortgage business...had direct access to CEO Dick Fuld and his inner circle ..."Their words were not so much heard as acclaimed...Whatever they needed--extra budget, permission for more risk, permission to invest colossal hunks of the firm's capital in their market--they got."

 Hudson first wrote about predatory lending in “Stealing home” for The Washington Monthly (1992) and “Poverty, Incorporated” for Southern Exposure (1993). What’s remarkable to me is how Hudson has stuck with this story. While other reporters wrote an account here or there before dropping the subject, Hudson pressed on, often as a freelancer, completing “Banking on Misery” for Southern Exposure in 2003 and “Workers Say Lender Ran 'Boiler Rooms' (on Ameriquest with E. Scott Reckard) for the Los Angeles Times in 2005, before writing a series of stories for The Wall Street Journal in 2006-7.

 As the Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman (website) notes in his analysis, "Power Problem",

 Only after the crackup had already begun... [was] Wall Street's role in the subprime again laid bare...It referred...to documents available for years. There is really no excuse...as federal regulation folded like a cheap suitcase, the business press...lost whatever taste it had for head-on investigations of core practices of powerful institutions...it relies on [Wall Street and corporate subculture]...for its stories. Burning a bridge is hard.

Hudson now writes about business and finance for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalism organization founded by Charles Lewis (bio) who explained his reason for founding the Center in 1989 (see IRE Journal, Spring 1990, "Mercenary, Not Public, Service."

 America's best and brightest reporters, working for the most respected national news organizations, too often do not investigate the country's most important stories.

Predatory lending's contribution to our current economic upheaval is one such story. Some might argue that the buyers should beware, that corporations and politicians will always be complicit. Such cynics probably see no place for investigative journalism. I'd disagree. Hudson digs deep and provides a compelling, convincing account for those who hope that an informed public can stimulate reform.

Judy Bonds: "Fight harder and finish them off."

Portrait of Judy Bonds by Robert Shetterly for his project, Americans Who Tell the Truth, used by permission of the artist. (UPDATE 7/29: Ordering info--more details see the bottom of this entry.)

Vernon Haltom, Judy Bond's co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch, just sent me the bad news that Judy has found out that she is battling stage three cancer. Vernon writes that "She said that some people have asked her before, "What do you want us to do if anything ever happens to you?" Her answer is "Fight harder." She repeated that today, to fight harder. " Her words:

We've got them on the ropes and smell blood. Don't let up, fight harder and finish them off.

I'm sharing this by permission. When I asked to what extent I should share the news, Vernon answer, "I asked how much of that she wanted me to let folks know, and she said there's no point in keeping it from people."

Treatment will take at least 3 months, and she doesn't expect to be back at work for several months. Judy had been sick for several weeks when her doctor sent her to the hospital in Charleston, after antibiotics didn't work on what had been diagnosed as pneumonia. Vernon wrote,

Judy has always been a fighter, never giving up. This is her big fight now; the only one she's able to do right now. ...Please, keep her in your prayers.

Judy won the prestigious Goldman Prize in 2003, for her work in fighting mountaintop removal. I also love the quotation on the page I've linked to.

The right to mine coal here ends where it endangers our health and safety. You may have your job tomorrow, but what do you tell your kids? That you wasted the future of these mountains?

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Did you know you can support this post?

I'm putting this on a separate page, so as not to mix my discussion of how to crowd-source my journalism with news of Judy. But if you're interested, see my July 29 update: "Why I decided to try and fund this blog." (And, I might mention, if the experiment goes well, to also provide a way for me to fund support for activism in the coal fields and others' media coverage thereof. Too bad I didn't have the idea before I launched this page--for a while it was getting over 300 out of the last 500 hits, according to statcounter. If this works, I might also pitch in for something other than a free account and have better data.

Edward Sorel's illustration for "President Tom’s Cabin: Jefferson, Hemings, and a disclaimed lineage," Jill Lepore's review of Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008) a biography of three generations of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Gordon-Reed, , won the National Book Award for nonfiction this evening for her book. A professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University, she is alos the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.



Cover art for Gordon-Reed's book.

Update: Read UMD Law school prof Sherrilyn Ifill's (yes, Gwen's cousin) comments on the book from November 21 here.

National Book Festival

Makes me wish i were in DC. See the Washington Post for coverage of the Festival.

McClellan: I Became What I Wanted to Change

ABC News has posted the transcript of White House Correspondent Martha Raddatz's interview with former White House Press Secretary and George Bush aide Scott McClellan about his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington, (PublicAffairs, May 2008) which has attracted a firestorm of protests from his fellows in the Bush Administration. (I've deleted out the "ums" and "uhs."

I do have great affection for him. I think he's authentic and sincere, in his beliefs. But I think that, instead of changing Washington, as he promised to do, remember, he came to Washington on a promise of bipartisanship, and honesty, and integrity, he too readily embraced the way Washington, the way the Washington game is played today. He got caught up in this permanent campaign mentality, and I think that was what caused him problems later on, in terms of, uh, a lack of a high level of openness, and forthrightness, at some defining moments. and, and all of us, to some extent, got caught up in that, people on both sides of the aisle...There are a lot of good and decent people, like the President, who come to Washington for the right reasons. But they get caught up in this atmosphere, which is very poisonous.

Norton to publish new Dufresne novel Requiem, Mass

According to the blurb at Amazon, John's novel, Requiem, Mass. due out from Norton on July 18:

takes us to Requiem, Mass., heart of the Commonwealth, where Johnny's mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again. She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she's sure of it, and she's pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn't need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean Naté Après Bain. Dad, truck driver and pathological liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life. And Audrey, when she's not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet telling herself stories. Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself.

For some reason Amazon says you'll like this book if you liked Ratatouille. I'll have to ask him if he knows why. Something is kerflewy with the page at Norton--when you
search on the title, the link takes you to three books on militant Islam. Evidently it has something to do with the ISBN. I've let John know by email and will post a link, once it's working properly.

As regular readers know, I'm a fan of John's. I upgraded the Wikipedia stub on him to an article in August 2005 and his books made it to my top ten list in my post "Books That Meet the Gold Standard" from December 7, 2007.

Ten days after that entry, John had to start a new blog after his site crashed. Somehow he lost the archives to his old blog which he started in 2004. When I checked the Archive.org for him, there were entries posts for him that year covering the periods:

• July 17 - August 3, 2004
• September 1 - 16, 2004
• October 1 -11, 2004
• December 1 -29, 2004

The last crawl that captured anything was for the period July 1 - August 31, 2006. After that, the links for webcrawls bring up this message:

Not in Archive. The page you requested has not been archived. If the page is still available on the Internet, we will begin archiving it during our next crawl. Try another request or click here to search for all pages on johndufresne.com/Blog+Content.htm See the FAQs for more info and help, or contact us.

Obviously, something is wacky and a promise to crawl again is too little. too late. Similarly, with Yahoo about to bail on my blog at 360, I'm not much comforted by the Internet Archive covering me only at great intervals in 2006, with none of the links to prior entries having been recorded. Sigh. Joe Dunphy tried to download my entries to his Dad's computer, but he can't seem to email me a copy. I did discover tonight that I can backdate any entry that I transfer manually, but haven't yet figured how to get them to archive by anything other than year.

I did find a link there to a television interview I hadn't known about on cable access:

One of John's readers and now mine since April of 2007, Joe from Cheese, TX sent along a link you might enjoy, to the Salem, Virginia (since 1936) meatpacker Valleydale's archive of

TV commercials created in the late 50s featured animated pigs working or marching in a parade, playing band instruments and singing the "Hooray for Valleydale" jingle.

As I told him in my thank you note,

Valleydale's ham comes to me by way of Cheese. Now all we need is Rye. (Maybe wry will count.)

Speaking of the 50's he answered with a description of growing up on what he's called in the past the "dark side of the [Mill Mountian] star":

ya gotta remember i went to a 2 room school...
an iron stained Howdy Doody glass (water from a pump in the schoolyard) and we stayed warm
by taking turns carrying coal in to a stove in the middle of the room.
(sign of bigness was to be perceived to be big enough to carry the bucket WITH COAL.)

Books that meet the gold standard

Books remaindered, books destroyed.

When I was a Girl Scout, we used to sing a round, "Make new friends but keep the old/ One is silver the other's gold." My sentiment about books, as well as people. But, except for continuing best sellers, commercial publishers are into selling this year's books, in part in response to inventory depreciation rules established in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 439 U.S. 522 (1979). And the mainsteam media buys into this model, only reviewing recent titles.

Literary presses, in contrast, maintain a backlist, keep their authors' works in print. And alternative media can, in books, as well as other matters, inform their readers about other than the latest frenzy. Below, I've listed some of my favorites from years past, old friends I revisit again and again. All are still available from their presses.

You can buy directly: the wellbeing of these publishers affects their authors. As Jonathan Greene of Gnomon Press explained to Meredith Sue Wilson for her September 10, 2007 Books for Readers Newsletter,

mall Press Distribution and Consortium that distribute books for many small presses return even less to small presses that Amazon: they normally sell books to stores or chains at 40% - 55% then take half of the gross receipts of any payment and put the amount due the publisher in escrow for three months. And Consortium charges the publisher a re-stocking fee for any books stores or distributors return [sometimes in unsellable condition.]

And support your local independent bookseller: Chapters Book Shop in Galax and The Easy Chair in Blacksburg special order any books that are not in stock. Anne Holbach at The Easy Chair says,

We definitely place special orders for customers. Usually, turnaround time is 2-3 days, and there is no charge for shipping. We also offer free membership in our frequent buyer’s club. Customers earn a $10 coupon for every $100 they spend, including special order items.

And you can order from that great family-run bookstore for three generations, Powell's Books of Portland, Oregon , which inceasingly relies on its national internet trade to stay in business. While Powell's doesn't offer the deep discounts of the chain stores which view books as just another commodity, Mike Powell explained to Scott Timberg for his December 3 Los Angeles Times story, "Powells turns the page," that his customers are charged

market price because we pay market wages, market benefits, market rents.

(The store is unionized.)

So here's my list:

1. Kettle Bottom: Diane Gilliam Fisher's (now just plain Diane Gilliam) 2004 series of poems imagines first person accounts of coal camp lives and deaths during the mines wars of 1920-1921. http://www.perugiapress.com/books2004_kettle.html
2. One Good Hand: Dana Wildsmith 2005 poetry collection chronicles a year in the Georgia mountains and has the single best poem I've read addressed to the beloved late poet Jim Wayne Miller, who for years taught summers at Hindman Settlement School. http://www.irisbooks.com/Wildsmith/One_Good_Hand.html
3. Coal, A Poetry Anthology: Disclosure--I was in this 2006 collection, but that's not why I'm suggesting it. Look at life in coal country as told by poets ranging from Don West, Jim Wayne Miller and James Still to Grace Cavalieri, Jay Parini, Dick Hague and Bob Henry Baber. http://www.blairmtp.com/CoalAnthology.htm
4. Shell Shaker LeAnne Howe's 2001 novel both hilarious and heartbreaking, juxtaposes the murders of two Choctows, one contemporary and one from the Trail of Tears era. http://www.auntlute.com/shellshaker.htm.
5. Sabbath Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: Blacksburg author Edward Falco's graceful 2005 short story collection combines compelling plots with engrossing characters. http://www.unbridledbooks.com/sabbathnight.html
6. Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa: Intellectually ambition and funny, Mark Estrin's 2005 novel imagines Kafka's Gregor Samsa rescued only to be sold to a freak show, which he leaves to wend his way through the first half of 20th century U.S. history, ending up as a risk management consultant for the Manhattan Project. http://www.unbridledbooks.com/insectdreams.html
7. Rehearsing With the Gods: Ronald T. Simon's black and white photographs and Marc Estrin's text, published in 2004, give you the insiders' look at Bread and Puppet Theater. http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/rehearsingwithgods/AssociatedArticles
8. If You Return Home with Food: Shawsville writer Mary Crockett Hill's award-winning 1998 poetry vivid and quirky collection speaks to hope and dread. http://www.emporia.edu/bluestem/hill.htm
9. Divine Right's Trip: Gurney Norman's novel with Ed McClannahan, spins the tale of a hippie traveling home from California to rescue his Kentucky homestead from the effects of stripmining. If you're old enough, you'll remember the novel as a seris of installments on the pages of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. Kinfolks, Norman's linked short stories, evoke loyalty to family and the close ties of community in the coming of age of Wilgus Collier and end in a stalemated correspondence between a sister who wants to return to Kentucky and her brother who wants to join her in Arizona because the mountains are now what they had been. Both were reissued by Gnomon Press, 329 W Broadway in Frankfort, 502-223-1858.
10. The Lie that Tells the Truth: John Dufresne's 2003 guide to writing fiction ranks as the most generous spirted and useful book on the writing craft since poet Bill Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life. Also, check out any fiction by Dufresne. You won't be disappointed. http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring04/032581.htm

UPDATE: A version of this post was published by New River Voice December 13. The owner did not post a link to that issue on his website and ironically lists the books I recommened by their Amazon links. Is that why the version that appeared on newsstands eliminated my links or even the names of the publishing houses and any reference to my blog in the author's note?)

Happily, I just found a link to the article in the books section posted December 18, but that version, while linking to the publishers, omits my mention of Powell's as an alternative to Amazon or a link to my blog. I added a comment January 13.

Thank you for posting the links to the original publishers. I notice that you have advertisements for your Amazon shop to the right. Have you looked into whether Powell’s Books has a co-marketing plan. Wouldn’t it be better to support an independent bookseller on line, as well?

That great family-run bookstore for three generations, of Portland, Oregon , inceasingly relies on its national internet trade to stay in business. While Powell’s doesn’t offer the deep discounts of the chain stores which view books as just another commodity, Mike Powell explained to Scott Timberg for his December 3 Los Angeles Times story, “Powells turns the page,” that his customers are charged

market price because we pay market wages, market benefits, market rents.

(The store is unionized.)

I got back the comment,

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Let's see if it gets posted. If it does, I'll post a link. If not, as Tony Soprano said,

forgedaboutit!