It's not every day you get a letter from Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Clinton who once was named by Time Magazine as one of the ten most successful cabinet members of the century.  Reich has taught economics and public policy at Harvard and Berkeley, and in 2008 a Wall St. Journal article about the twenty most influential business thinkers or our time, he was ranked 6th, just below Thomas Friedman, Bill Gates, and Malcolm Gladwell.  I found what he had to say compelling and plan to read his book.  

 

Here's what Reich said: 

Dear Richard,

Please let me tell you why I’m so passionate about my forthcoming book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, which Knopf is publishing September 21.

In it, I answer the three biggest questions on the minds of most Americans: Why does the economy continue to be so lousy? Why has our politics become so ugly? and What should be done?

Many falsely assume the Great Recession was just a deep downturn in the business cycle, and if we choose the right remedy we can get back to normal. Liberals say government should spend more. Conservatives say taxes should be lower and deficits reduced.

They’re wrong. The old remedies won’t work. And we can’t return to normal because normal got us into this mess. The old normal was deeper personal debt; longer hours at work with lower pay and fewer benefits; more of the nation’s income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent; and an environmental train wreck.

America can’t have a robust recovery as long as the vast middle lacks the purchasing power it needs to buy what the nation can produce. We can’t have a sane politics as long as tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs or wages and have become insecure and fearful. And we can’t have a healthy economy of sane politics as long as our environment is at risk.

In Aftershock I lay out a plan to change the structure of the American economy and the path of American politics over the next decade—a plan to give most Americans better pay and better jobs, to reduce stresses on the environment, and to widen the circle of prosperity.

It’s a plan both conservatives and liberals can get behind. A plan even the richest Americans, including CEOs of big businesses and Wall Street, can support.

I believe Aftershock is the most important book I’ve ever written.

Sincerely,

Robert B. Reich

The new Dear Reader is in the mail and now online.  There are so many great books coming out this fall that we had to go to a lighter paper weight to conform to postal regulations.  We also have a record number of author appearances scheduled--fifty-two over the next three months.  Here we offer a peek at some of this fall's Dear Reader highlights:

Old Friends

A number of writers who will not be coming this fall -- but have visited us in the past -- have new books on the way.  Charles Simic, the poet whom Barry Hannah, among others, was wild for, has a new book of poems, Master of Disguises, and Rick Bass, who has always claimed a debt to Hannah, has a novel, Nashville Chrome.  Roy Blount has been here many times, and Lisa, for one, is crazy about Hail, Hail, Euphoria! -- his meditation on the Marx Bros. Duck Soup, "the greatest war film ever made."  Ann Beattie collects The New Yorker Stories, Terry McMillan is Getting To Happy, and Tom McGuane, in perhaps Richard's favorite fall read, is Driving on the Rim.  Brock Clarke novelizes a search for the author of one hell of a novel, in Exley.

Exceptional

Some of the writers who will be returning to Square Books, or Off Square, this fall include Pat Conroy, featured on the cover of Dear Reader with My Reading Life; musician Marshall Chapman, back on Thacker, this time with They Came To Nashville, her book of interviews with other musicians;  Mona Simpson, with her terrific novel, My Hollywood; Barry Gifford, last here in 2002, with 41 stories in Sad Stories of the Death of Kings; historian Joseph Ellis, the day after Thanksgiving, with his biography of Abigail and John Adams, First Family.  We will meet Bruce Machart with his highly touted first novel, The Wake of Forgiveness; Matt Dellinger and his exceptional reportage of a highway coming soon, maybe, near you, Interstate 69; accomplished novelist Antonya Nelson, with Bound; and, a first meeting we are very excited about, Ian Frazier, with his masterpiece on Travels In Siberia.  We also will have a chance to hear a reading at the Ford Center by poets Brenda Hillman and former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, for whom we will have a reception, Sunday, October 10 at 5 p.m.

Fine Little Friends

John Claude Bemis thrilled us with his visit for The Wolf Tree, and signed copies are available of this book Jill called "a Southern Peter Pan"; Jewell Parker Rhodes has visited Square Books, but makes her first trip to Junior with her Katrina tale for kids, Ninth Ward; Kate DiCamillo and Tony Fucile team up for Bink and Gollie; we like the spooky underworld of The Replacement, a winner by Brenna Yovanoff; and Children Make Terrible Pets is the charming and delightful picturebook that the Junior crowd will press into your hands the next time you walk into that wonderland of books.  

With Pictures

Ken Murphy did that wonderful photo book two years ago, Mississippi, and now he digs a bit deeper, over in the Delta, in State of Blues, so order a signed one and check the signing date for Neil White, whose In the Sanctuary of Outcasts recently came out in paperback, and who now has edited a book of photographs with short essays on famous, notable, and little-known Mississippians.  T. R. Pearson, the novelist and first Grisham writer-in-residence, has teamed up with photographer Langdon Clay to make Year of Our Lord: Faith, Hope, and Harmony in the Mississippi Delta, a Thacker event -- and a book -- you will not want to miss.   

Local

Oxford friends and friends formerly of Oxford include Warren Steel, on Thacker and co-author of The Makers of the Sacred Harp and Marcie Ferris, who has edited essays in Jewish Roots in Southern Soil.  Former Square Books staffer Scott McKenzie will come round with his book on Larry Harmon, also known as Bozo the Clown; Shirley Perry has penned After Many Days: My Life as a Spy and Other Grand Adventures; and former UM professor James Cobb has written The South and America Since WWII -- do not miss his talk.  We claim John T. Edge and that whole gang of Foodways folks, who have come together to complete the Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, and you know these people know a good recipe or two.  We are donating a portion of proceeds from the sale of the SFA Cookbook to its parent organization.

Mysterious Friends and Others

Over the years we have hosted some great suspense writers, including Elmore Leonard, whose new book is Djibouti; Michael Connelly, author of The Reversal, which will be out in October; and Denis Lehane, whose new book is Moonlight Mile.  We will be seeing, for a second time, the bestselling author of seventeen novels, Laura Lippman, whose new one is I'd Know You Anywhere.  Other writers with forthcoming books but who, as far as we know, have never been to Oxford, but whose work is of great interest to many here, include John LeCarre and Our Kind of Traitor; Ken Follett, who begins a trilogy of 20th Century novels with Fall of Giants; and Philip Roth, with Nemesis, a small but masterful novel set during WWII, as so many great novels this past year seem to have been, including Michael Knight's The Typist and Howard Norman's What Is Left the Daughter, of which we still may have signed first editions.

The Burning Hot Core

Books from which we are expecting big things include Curtis Wilkie's long-awaited Dickie Scruggs story, The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and the Ruin of America's Most Powerful Trial Lawyer, the event for which we will have on its publication date, October 19; the issue of selected stories by Barry Hannah, Long Last, Happy, which will include five new stories; John Grisham's new suspense novel, the one that so many of you have been asking about, The Confession; and Tom Franklin's literary suspense tale, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

One might believe, with the current popularity of Marley and Me, that man-and-dog memoir is a new genre.  However, there is a great deal of wonderful writing that preceded Marley about canine companionship.  One such was My Dog Skip, the moving tribute by Willie Morris, which went on to achieve even greater fame once it was adapted into a movie.  Willie Morris himself,  gave his book that title in homage to a book published in the mid-1960s called My Dog Tulip.  In it, the distinguished British author and editor J.R. Ackerley recounts his relationship with Tulip, an Alsatian (what I believe  we would call a German Shepherd).  Mr. Ackerley, already a middle-aged bachelor when he came into possession of Tulip,  lovingly and humorously recalls his sixteen years with her in what remains, more than forty years later, one of the finest examples of  canine-man literature. 

So I was delighted to learn today that a feature-length animated film based on My Dog Tulip is being released this fall in a limited number of theatres.  It features the voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini.  As with all adaptations, it is wise to check out the book before seeing the movie.  Thankfully the New York Review of Books has kept it in print.  Read more about the film here. CFR

  From news reports around the world today it is now known that Random House and literary agent Andrew Wylie have reached an agreement over the control of digital publishing rights of authors represented by the Wylie agency and published in the U. S. by Random House.  Apparently Random House controls those rights.

But whether this agreement occurred as a result of legal authority or through Random House's threat not to do business with Wylie's clients we do not know.  Wylie's overnight enterprise, Odyssey Editions, still apparently has digital rights to the works of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and Oliver Sacks.

The day we heard at Square Books that Wylie had created an exlusive arrangement with Amazon to publish e-book editions, we immediately created a window display of Wylie authors' books, all tagged with a "This book NOT for sale" bookmark, as a way of demonstrating the harmful potential that such a monopoly held for readers.

We also do not know whether Wylie's move came out of frustration over the transition to the digital market that he or his clients may have thought was too slow or because it was simply a play for more dough -- for the owners of intellectual property and, naturally, the Jackal himself.  One thing is clear -- this sort of balls-out internecine skirmishing in what was once known as the book world is a frightening indication of things to come.  For now, as ABA's Oren Teicher said today, "It sounds like good news.  We've always felt that exclusivity is never good and if this means that Wylie authors' e-books will now be available to all retailers, the reading public will benefit."   RH

    Dwight Garner has an interesting article in today's New York Times--a piece written about James Dickey on the occasion of  the 40th anniversary of Deliverance.  It reminded us of the visits that this writer, who had a sort of deliberately constructed larger-than-life personna, literary and otherwise, made to Oxford and to Square Books.  Lisa and I first met Dickey in 1977 when we were booksellers in Washington, D. C., and attended a public reading by all the then-former poetry consultants to the Library of Congress.   

The reading was in a beautiful and fairly intimate auditorium in the Library, and prior to the reading there was an open reception in the Library's astonishing lobby, where, remarkably, we met and actually spoke with Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Nemerov, Stephen Spender and ten other poets who had held this position, now known as poet laureate.  When we encountered Dickey, who clearly had been drinking, he took a shine to us because we were Southerners, and from Oxford.  He shared a Faulkner tale, which I will one day tell, and introduced us to his wife, Deborah.  During the reading, he was the last of the thirteen poets to read, weaving about the stage as he did -- I feared that he would fall into the orchestra pit -- but gave a grand reading of his poem, "The Sheep Child."

We invited him to sign books at the Savile Bookshop, where we worked, when his book God's Images was published.  On the appointed date he showed up and, again, had drunk so much that he simply could not sign his name in the books.  Deborah assured us that she would see that he came by some other time and sign some books -- and he did.

Willie Morris knew Dickey -- "Jimbo" -- well, and invited him to Oxford to speak on campus and sign books at Square Books on two occasions during the 1980s -- once in the original store location, when we enjoyed a large and fairly wild dinner at Taylor Grocery (pre-rehab, before Bill Dunlap's crop duster mural and the signatures of some famous writers and U.S. Senators were completely covered up by besotted frat-graffiti), and again in the upstairs of the existing Square Books, where he read a number of poems standing beside the cafe counter.   He returned to Square Books for a final time in 1993 when his novel, To The White Sea, was published, and gave a memorable reading and visit otherwise -- too much to go into here.   

The Coen brothers adapted To The White Sea as a screenplay, but the film has never been made.  Like Deliverance, To The White Sea is a haunting story of man's possibly innate capacity for inhumanity.  Its locale and events are quite different: the firebombing of Tokyo and an American soldier's violent perambulation through Japan in an effort to escape to a wilderness island -- man against man and nature.  Both books are American classics and insufficiently recognized as such, as Garner makes clear in the case of Deliverance.  I would give just about anything to see a Coen brothers version of To The White Sea on the screen.   RH

Read Garner's entire article in the New York Times here. 

Longtime Square Books friend and a-long-time-ago bookseller James E. Pitts died on Thursday, August 19, 2010, after a long illness. Originally from Corinth, where he was born in 1967, he lived in Oxford since moving here circa 1990, after finishing Northeast Community College. Following a short stint in the flower shop on Van Buren where Bottletree Bakery now is, he got on at Square Books after being coached by his friend, Marc Smirnoff, who worked at Square Books at the time and included among his tips for employment, "don't tell them you know me." Jimmy worked in shipping and receiving, where he became known mostly for being himself.

He was an artist with an artist's quirky traits; he tended to regard you out of one eye with caution, the other with affection; he might be chipper one day, all gloomy the next. Jimmy was a poet, and began to get a few poems published when he worked here, including a couple in Gordon Lish's then hot new litmag, The Quarterly. Additional publications appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Arkansas Review, Shenandoah, Poetry, and, naturally, The Oxford American. Many of the poems appeared in his book, The Weather of Dreams. He was thorough in his work and cared as deeply for this bookstore as anyone who ever worked here. For Christmas in 1993 he made a gift of a wooden block in which he painstakingly had carved the store logo and colored it with crayons. It was a sort of crude-looking thing and I asked, "What is this, where did you get this?" "A woodcarving," he said. "I did it myself over the last couple of nights." I noticed his knuckles were skinned and bloodied. Over time the carving became more beautiful and precious, and long has been on the wall behind the front counter.

After four or five years at Square Books Jimmy then worked at the University Law Library. He dedicated his free time to, and was prolific with, his poetry, his art, and his music. Friday night at the Powerhouse a large group of friends gathered for food, drink, and to pay respects by viewing some of Jimmy's art that folks had brought and by listening to live music, a reading of his poems, and a few personal and extemporaneous remembrances. Many observed that the crowd was impressive in its number and diversity, as it dawned on us that Jimmy made friends the same way he made art -- deliberately, one at a time, because each mattered specifically. Lesser are the legacies of many.

Memorials may be made to the National Kidney Foundation. Jimmy's facebook page can be found here.

RH