Chicagoans of the Year in Literature

The Book Stall is grateful and proud to be among a group of local independent booksellers named by the Chicago Tribune as Chicagoans of the Year in Literature in 2014. 

The honor usually goes to an individual author, and the Tribune noted that some of the country's best and most successful works in fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature in 2014 came from Chicago writers. "But would there even be a book community in Chicago to talk about without, you know, local booksellers?" asked the Trib's Christopher Borelli.  He continued: "...a number of local women have stepped up recently and either started new bookstores in the Chicago area or became the next-gen owners of beloved neighborhood institutions." 

Tonight's the Night

It's Oscar time in the world of American publishing tonight when the National Book Awards are presented in New York City. You can watch a live webcast of the awards ceremony here on the National Book Foundation website. (The ceremony begins at 6:40 pm CST, and the actual awards are scheduled to be announced starting at 7:50 pm CST.) 

Finalists for the fiction award are Rabih Alameddine for An Unnecessary Woman; Anthony Doerr for All the Light We Cannot See; Phil Klay for Redeployment; Emily St. John Mandel for Station Eleven; and Marilynne Robinson for Lila -- each and every one of which, we must say, we have loved here at The Book Stall!

Nonfiction finalists are Roz Chast for Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?; Anand Gopal for No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes; John Lahr for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh; Evan Osnos for Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China; and Edward Wilson for The Meaning of Human Existence.

Click here to read interviews with each of the authors.

Man Booker Longlist Just Announced

The always highly-anticipated Longlist (see it here) for the 2014 Man Booker Prize was revealed today in London, and four American authors made the cut. They include:

* Joshua Ferris for To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

* Karen Joy Fowler for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

* Siri Hustvedt for The Blazing World
* Richard Powers for Orfeo.

The announcement was made even more suspenseful this year because this is the first time the prize is open to novels from across the globe ("whether from Chicago, Sheffield, or Shanghai," as the Man Booker announcement put it) as long as they are written in English and published in the UK. Previously it was restricted to authors from Great Britain, Ireland, and the Commonwealth.

 

Karen Joy Fowler won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award earlier this year for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which was heartily endorsed by Book Stall staff and readers when it came out in 2013. She was also one of the featured authors at the 2013 Ragdale "Novel Affair" program in Lake Forest.

 

The Man Booker Shortlist will be announced September 9 and the winner on October 14.

Donna Tartt, Doris Kearns Goodwin win Carnegie Medals

 

 

 

The Book Stall congratulates Donna Tartt and Doris Kearns Goodwin, winners of the 2014 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Exellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, awarded last weekend by the American Library Association at its annual conference in Las Vegas. 

 

Ms.Tartt (right) won the fiction award for The Goldfinch (also the winner of this year's fiction Pulitzer Prize), and Ms. Kearns Goodwin the nonfiction award for The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.

  

Fiction finalists included Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat. Nonfiction finalists included On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History by Nicholas A. Basbanes and Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink.

Roberta Rubin Achievement Award

Congratulations, Roberta!   

 

We're pleased to report that Roberta Rubin has been named the 2014 Women of Achievement Honoree for Arts and Culture by the YWCA of Lake County. She and other distinguished honorees will be feted at the 36th Annual Women of Achievement Awards Dinner on Friday, May 16, at the Marriott Lincolnshire Resort. Please join us to honor Roberta. To read more about this event and for information on registration, click here.

MARCUS SEDGWICK

MARCUS SEDGWICK

       Tuesday, April 29 @ The Book Stall, 4:30 pm

       4:30 pm at The Book Stall

British author Marcus Sedgwick, winner of this year's Printz Award for his book Midwinterblood, speaks about his hot new novel, She Is Not Invisible, a thriller about  a blind young woman chasing from London to New York on a mission to find her missing father.  

Click here for six short clips of conversations the author had with a student at an English college for the blind, where he spent time researching She Is Not Invisible.

A visit with Rachel Kushner Feb. 13 at 7 p.m.

Thursday, February 13, 7 pm at The Book Stall

We rarely single out authors coming to the store or events downtown because we believe every writer we host has his or her own unique draw and appeal to readers. 

But we do want to call special attention to the appearance at The Book Stall tomorrow evening of Rachel Kushner, whose novel The Flamethrowers was named one of the best books of 2013 by numerous leading publications as well as a finalist for the National Book Award and, now, for the Folio Prize to be awarded for the first time ever next month in the UK.

Just this week, Ms. Kushner was featured in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Read the interview here.

The 2013 National Book Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of this year's National Book Awards, announced last week in New York.

  

The winner in fiction: The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. Except for book critics, who loved it, no one was more surprised about the award than the author himself. Click here to read about his reaction in Monday's New York Times. 

 

The winner in nonfiction: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, a book we've been recommending to our readers ever since its publication last spring. Click here to visit the Macmillan website and read an excerpt and see an appearance by the author on The Daily Show. 

Man Booker Prize awarded...

And the 2013 Man Booker Prize Goes to...

...New Zealand author Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries, a Victorian mystery set during the 19th century New Zealand gold rush. Congratulations to Ms. Catton, who at age 28 is the youngest-ever recipient of the award. Her book, at 832 pages, is the longest-ever winner. It has just been published in the US.  

Order it from The Book Stall here!

Kudos to our Kids Staff

A salute to Robert McDonald and his Children's Department colleagues Betsy Balyeat and Amy Trogdon for bringing home to The Book Stall the honors as the "Best Kids' Book Store" in Make It Better magazine's latest issue, featuring the "Best of 2013."

June 1st, Caldecott Art Exhibit

Caldecott Art Exhibit featuring

AARON REYNOLDS and ERIC ROHMANN

Saturday, June 1

1:30 - 4:30 pm, Skokie Public Library, 5215 Oakton St.

Celebrate the art of children's picture books with Aaron Reynolds, the author of this year's Caldecott Honor book  

Creepy Carrots, 

who at 1:30 pm will talk about how his story went from a creepy idea to a creepy finished book.

 

 

 

At 3:30 pm, Eric Rohmann, the 2003 Caldecott Medial winner for My Friend Rabbit, will talk about the process of creating art for children's picture books.

 

 

This event is recommended for ages 5 and up. 

No registration necessary. For more information from the Skokie Public Library, click here.

Man Booker International Prize to American author, Lydia Davis

 

Congratulations to Lydia Davis, the American author who last week was awarded the fifth Man Booker International Prize at a ceremony in London. The prize, honoring an achievement in fiction on the world stage, is the sibling of the Man Booker Prize -- one of the world's premier literary awards -- given annually to a novel written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, or the Republic of Ireland. 

Davis, described as the shortest of all short story writers, has produced several collections of stories, some of which are only one or two sentences long. For example: 

"Idea for a Short Documentary Film" 

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

Many writers -- Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers are frequently cited -- have credited Davis with being hugely influential on their own work. Eggers once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction." Previously a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, Davis teaches creative writing at the University of Albany and is also an accomplished translator of classics from the French, including Proust's Swann's Way and Flaubert's Madame Bouvary.

Previous winners of the Man Booker International Prize include Philip Roth in 2011, Canadian novelist Alice Munro in 2009, the late Nigerian poet and novelist Chinua Achebe in 2007, and Albanian writer Ismail Kadare in 2005.

If you haven't read Lydia Davis's stories before, take the award as a reason to have a look at her books. Currently on order at The Book Stall are Break It Down: Stories, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and Two American Scenes.

Voice of the Heartland Award !!

We are delighted to share this wonderful news

 

Earlier this month, Book Stall owner Roberta Rubin received her second major accolade of 2012 -- The Voice of the Heartland Award at the annual Heartland Fall Forum of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association in Minneapolis.  The award is conferred periodically to a person or organization that has shown a lifelong commitment to regional books and book selling.

Roberta is in distinguished company. The last recipient of the award from the Chicago area was none other than the great Studs Terkel.

Roberta Rubin at Book Expo America 2012

Roberta accepting the Publishers Weekly "Bookstore of the Year 2012" award

in New York, June 7 2012.

Some excerpts from Roberta's remarks

"Being honored as Publishers Weekly  Bookstore of the Year has truly been an unforgettable experience -- and now, here we are, to say thank you to so many of you in our great wide world of publishing!

"After all these years, I realize that what we do in our individual stores is only a part of a team effort within the publishing industry. I am standing before you today as a team member of this amazing industry of books, readers, writers, and booksellers!

"There was a cartoon in this past week's New Yorker with the caption 'Castaway Island' and a hermit sitting on a spit of land with a few books on the ground and objects surrounding him -- an old telephone booth, a mailbox with letters strewn around it, a typewriter, a phonograph, a parking meter...and a bricks-and-mortar bookstore! No, no, that is not going to happen to us!  We are not castaways! We are a vital segment of the bookselling community and getting stronger with each passing year.  For this, I am proud to be an independent bookseller in Winnetka, Illinois, and I hope to be for  many years to come. Thank you for giving us a vote of confidence with this award."