On the Twelfth Day of the Holidays My Bookseller Recommended to me!

Twelve Stocking Stuffers!



Here's to hoping you have a great Holiday season!

Paz,

Nieves

On the Tenth Day of the Holidays My Bookseller Recommended to me!

Ten Calendars for keeping... track of time that is!

We have calendars galore- but of course as the year is coming close to an end quantities are limited!

Feel free to come in an browse our selection! Have a great Monday folks!

Paz,

~Nieves

Odyssey on WAMC Roundtable

Last week WAMC hosted the Odyssey's Joan Grenier, and Emily Crowe to talk about books.

Together Joan and Emily talked about 10 books in under 20 minutes. (Less than two minutes per book). I'm not sure how they do it, but I will say some of the books whose virtues they extolled are listed below.


What is Left the Daughter
Howard Norman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$25.00
(Signed copies available for a limited time).
See our previous blog post about this gorgeous novel here .




The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise
Julia Stuart
Random House
$24.95


The Spice Necklace: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating, and Island Life
Ann Vanderhoof
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$25.00


The Elephant Keeper
Christopher Nicholson
Harper
$14.99


Murder in the High Himalaya
John Green
Public Affairs
$26.95
(Signed copies available for a limited time).



Put 'Em Up!
Sherri Brooks Vinton
Storey Publishing
$19.95
(We are doing an event on Friday, August 13 at 7 p.m.)


Eating Local: The Cookbook Inspired by America's Farmers
Sur La Table
Andrews McMeel Publishing
$35.00
(Featuring a local farm in Granby, MA!)
See our previous blog post about this wonderful cookbook here.


The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food
Ben Hewitt
Rodale Press
$24.99




The Quickening
Michelle Hoover
Other Press
$14.95
(Signed copies available for a limited time).

To listen the the full interview, click here.

Enjoy!

Paz,

Nieves

Family Fun and Entertainment

Saturday morning entertainment is back!

Every Saturday morning, from now until the last Saturday in August, the Village commons shops and the Odyssey bookshop will be hosting family entertainment!

We have a blast with a variety of entertainers from puppet shows, to exotic birds, to magicians and singers.

The first entertainer to go was the excellent story telling of Caravan Puppets!

We had a nice sizable crowd join us for stories ranging from Aesop's fables to Miss Rumphius!



In case of rainy or bad weather, the event will be held indoors at the Odyssey, which was the case this morning as it began to pour buckets.

A complete listing of the dates and entertainers is listed below:

Saturday mornings 10:30- 11:15.

July 10 Caravan Puppets & Timeless Tales
July 17 Roger Tincknell... songs & singing games
July 24 Tom Ricardi... Birds of Prey
July 31 Ed Popielarczyk's Magical Moments

August 7 Bill Ross... Book 'Em! Celebrate Reading!
August 14 Tom Neilson... "Why the Sky is so High!"
August 21 Trevor the Games Man
August 28 Hoopoe... Mime, Magic & More

Pardon our mess!

The Odyssey is getting remodeled upstairs! This includes a new carpet (the current one has lasted much longer than the 10 years it was originally intended for), and a new paint job.

The whole process should be done shortly after the 4th of July, but it is still a process. With the exception of the 4th of July we will be open during this time. We will still be servicing your nonfiction needs!

We will be keeping tabs on this exciting venture, and hope that y'all can visit us during, and after the renovation to see the end results!

Have a great summer day!

Paz,
~Nieves

Happy Birthday Romeo!

Last week we celebrated Romeo Grenier's 100th birthday. Romeo, the Odyssey's founder, passed away in 1997 but his legacy of bringing great people and great books together lives on. To read his full autobiography and some Odyssey history click on the link!

On Saturday, May 29th, we had a birthday tea, that included scones, and beautiful miniature cupcakes made and served by some wonderful friends of the Odyssey. It was also a reunion weekend so we were able to celebrate with some alumna as well as many familiar faces!

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to Celebrate what would have been Romeo's centennial!

It was great to see so many friendly faces.

Paz,

Nieves

Guest blog from author Emily St. John Mandel

In honor of her reading at the Odyssey on Wednesday, June 9, at 7:00 , Emily St. John Mandel has graciously written a guest blog for us this week. Her first book, Last Night in Montreal, was the Odyssey's First Editions Club selection for J une 2009, and her new novel, The Singer's Gun, is o ur BreakOut Fiction selection for June 2010--it was also the #1 IndieBound selection for May, chosen by independent booksellers nationwide. Mandel is one of the most exciting young writers out there today, and we hope you enjoy her musings as much as we've enjoyed reading her fiction!

1.

I was on a panel at a book festival recently. There were four of us behind a table in a windowless room, novelists all, and one of the first questions from the audience was, “How would you define literary fiction?” It was a fair question—the title of the panel contained the phrase “Writers of Literary Fiction”—but all four of us responded with variations on “I don’t know.”

I think everyone’s a little confused about this. A few days before I took the train to Albany to sit on a literary fiction panel, I’d received the happy news that my first novel, Last Night in Montreal, is among the finalists for ForeWord Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year in the General Fiction category. They also have a Literary Fiction category, which I’m not in.

I was puzzled by what the difference is between literary and general fiction, and a Google query got me practically nowhere. One website defined general fiction as follows: “The story must be readable—it must have a traditional plot arc and be relatively plot- and character-driven. Controversy is welcome, but it is not presented in as nuanced a way as in literary fiction.” Which is insulting to both literary fiction writers (by implication unreadable) and general fiction writers (who aren’t, apparently, particularly nuanced.)

So I turned, as I often do in moments of doubt, to Twitter. (I’ll confess that this is a questionable strategy, but I find that Twitter’s good for crowd-sourcing.) “Can anyone,” I asked my two thousand or so followers, “give me a good definition of the difference between Literary and General fiction?”

No one really could. Half of my followers are either automated spambots or people who are just trying to sell me something, but a great many of them are very intelligent and interesting people who talk about books all day, so I was surprised by this. A few people misread “general” as “genre” and patronizingly explained what genre fiction is. A couple of people told me that general fiction is genre fiction that doesn’t fit into a genre, which is confusing—because if it doesn’t fit into a genre, then how is it genre fiction? Unless it’s somehow multi-genre fiction, like maybe a YA detective story/historical romance/western with zombies, set in outer space? When we say that general fiction is genre fiction that doesn’t fit into a genre, are we really just saying that it’s literary fiction, but with a stronger emphasis on plot? This seems unfair to the books that are habitually categorized as literary fiction, many of which are very tightly plotted.

But back to Albany, and the awkward quiet that followed the “How would you define literary fiction?” question. After a moment one of my fellow panelists took the mike and offered a thoughtful response about literary fiction perhaps being defined as fiction in which language itself is the most important thing, which I thought was as good a definition as any, but at moments like that I’m always reminded me of a particular Academy Awards presentation I saw a few years back. Some actor was presenting the award for film editing. “All audiences really care about,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “is what comes next.”

Plot, in other words, if we transpose that idea into fiction. I don’t think that plot is all readers care about, just to be clear, but I think it’s important. I think that the most beautiful text ever written will go absolutely nowhere without an engine to drive it. What I want is to write fiction as literary and as nuanced as anything out there, but to do it with the strongest possible plotting and narrative drive.

2.

It took some time to sell my first novel, Last Night in Montreal. I don’t think my agent likes it when I mention this, but it’s no reflection on her abilities—it just happens that it’s a very difficult market for first novels, especially first novels by completely unknown writers whose entire previous publishing history consists of a single poem published in a British Columbia anthology in the mid-90’s, and it wasn’t the easiest book to sell. Last Night in Montreal is difficult to categorize: it’s something of a criminal mystery, but it’s also a love story, and it’s also about dead languages, circuses, Quebec’s language politics, and the fragility of family. Several rejection letters alluded to this: “It would be difficult,” an editor wrote, “to find a way to market fiction that attempts to straddle both the literary and genre markets.”

It was a maddening letter, in the way that all “I loved it, but…” rejection letters are somewhat maddening, and at the time I would’ve vastly preferred a publishing contract. But even so, it made me a little happy. I felt that I’d succeeded in what I was trying to do. Last Night in Montreal has a private detective in it, but that doesn’t seem to me like a good reason for it to be anything less than literary.

On websites that sell books I’ve seen Last Night in Montreal logged under a baffling array of categories—Women’s Fiction, Literary Fiction, Thrillers, and Suspense. I think it’s probably all of the above. My second novel, The Singer’s Gun, walks a similar line. It’s a very different story, although some of the themes—immigration, love, betrayal, the contortions of family—are similar. The Singer’s Gun is a story about a man trying to lead an honorable life; his family is corrupt and his prospects limited, until he forges a Harvard diploma and reinvents himself as a successful water systems consultant. But a life built on a lie is terribly vulnerable, and as the book opens, it’s beginning to come undone.

I’ve seen it catalogued variously as Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction, Suspense, and World Literature (which I think just alludes to the fact that I hold citizenship in two countries.) The confusion of categories raises an interesting question: can books wherein language is of the utmost importance (in other words, the books we call literary fiction) still be driven by plot? I think they can. I think they probably should.