SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Note: Laurel Braitman is a Senior TED fellow.  This book was one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month for June and one of the Ten Best Books of the Week, this week, on Publishers Weekly.

“Mac, the miniature donkey…bats his eyelashes, angles his long furred ears toward you…and pushes his belly up against your thighs.  Then, just as you’ve grown comfortable with his small stocky presence…something dark and confusing stirs within him.  He stiffens, whips his head back, and bites down hard on the bony part of your shin and doesn’t let go…or he kicks his back legs like sharp springs in the direction of your kneecaps…You can’t predict when it will happen.”

Laurel Braitman introduces her research about the psychological traumas which animals can exhibit in this anecdote about Mac, a miniature donkey which she tended on the farm where she grew up.  Mac’s mother had died just days after giving birth to him, and Laurel, then twelve, nursed him through his infancy.  “I spent hours bottle-feeding him, and playing with him, until I got distracted by Anne of Green Gables books and my seventh-grade crush.” As a result, Mac, still a “child,” was weaned too quickly, she now believes, and then consigned to a corral without “a donkey mother to show him the ropes.” Suffering from a lack of nurturing and with no example of a healthy miniature donkey to follow, Mac turned on himself, biting off chunks of his fur and sometimes becoming unexpectedly violent against people and other animals.

Laurel Braitman giving a TED lecture.

This experience with Mac forever affected Braitman’s life.  Now, more than twenty years later, Braitman has exhaustively studied the aberrant behavior of other disturbed animals, like Oliver, the four-year-old Bernese Mountain dog she and her husband adopted.  Desperately in need of attention, Oliver received it, without restraint, from Laurel and her husband. Despite this, he still remained so anxious whenever he was left alone that he literally “went crazy,” snapping at flies that weren’t there and going into trances from which he could not be distracted. Eventually he even became a “liability at the dog park, [which] he had begun to approach…as a sort of canine buffet, the smallest Dachshunds and pugs like unattended snacks.” Ultimately, Oliver, alone one day and unable to cope, destroyed the framing on a 4^th floor window in order to burst through the screen, falling fifty feet to the ground, but sustaining not a single broken bone. Separation anxiety was just the tip of the iceberg with Oliver, who becomes a recurrent image in the book.

Braitman with Mac

From the outset Braitman recognizes that it is not possible to avoid completely the problem of “anthropomorphizing” (attributing human characteristics to things that are not human, like animals), but she says it is possible to “anthropomorphize well” if we can avoid “anthrocentrism,” the belief that we humans are unique in our abilities and that our intelligence is the only one that counts. Dogs and cats and elephants are not human, and they do not think and feel exactly as humans do since their daily lives are not similar.  Still, all animals do share some basic characteristics and needs with other animals, and they are often subject to the same psychological problems as humans.  Quoting scientists from around the world and tracing the evolution of thinking about animals over many generations, Braitman shows how our attitudes toward animals, from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Ivan Pavlov to contemporary animal behaviorists, primatologists, ethologists, zoologists, comparative psychologists, psychoanalysts, zookeepers and trainers have changed over the past two centuries, with the terminology for the animal problems they observed also changing.

Oliver, the Bernese Mountain Dog

Braitman uses her own experiences at animal sanctuaries, zoos, aquariums, water parks, and animal research centers throughout the world as rich resources in her study of psychologically impaired animals.  Her own research, much of which is presented here, is thorough and academically rigorous enough to have earned her a PhD in the History of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but she also recognizes that the audience for this book is quite different from the academic audience to which she presented her original research.  Here, her readers are primarily animal lovers interested in preventing the very real psychological problems which can develop within other, non-human animal species, and Braitman understands and hopes to assuage the emotions of guilt, helplessness, and sadness among pet lovers who have discovered that love is simply not enough in dealing with a disturbed animal.  She considers herself among those who still deal with guilt about animals with whom they have lived.

Thanks to the research of animal behaviorists over the last hundred years, a “mad elephant,” a gorilla with “night terrors” and extreme “homesickness,” and a “brokenhearted” bear, may now be diagnosed with conditions more similar to some of the “codes of behavior” mentioned in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1952) which identifies and names the psychiatric problems which humans face.  Constantly being updated as more research evolves, this DSM is often used now to identify animal problems which resemble those of humans.  Some of the same medications used to treat human problems are now being prescribed for animals with similar issues.  PTSD, generalized anxiety disorders, separation anxiety, attachment disorders, generalized panic disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and even Alzheimer’s disease are all being diagnosed now in animals, and Braitman gives a wide variety of examples – from her research at an elephant park and at the Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand, to her studies with animal behaviorists throughout the world, and her observations of abnormal behaviors among displaced animals at zoos, marine centers, and seaquariums across the United States.  Enrichment programs for captive animals and even “family therapy” are now being used to help some of these animals which have not been able to deal with the reality of their current existence. Ultimately, Braitman questions whether some animals may even commit suicide, be it a dolphin’s “passive suicide” to the apparently deliberate stranding of many whales, sea lions, and monk seals.

Braitman observes a pilot whale and calf in Baja, Mexico, at Laguna San Ignacio. Mother and calf played beside the boat for an hour. Photo by Jodi Frediani

In her own life, Braitman admits that “I discovered that the guilty country is crowded.  So many of us are there looking for answers and blaming ourselves, wondering what would have happened if we’d taken the dog to the park more often, refused to adopt the second cat that the first one despised, cleaned the iguana’s tank more frequently, given the hamster more time in his plastic ball, or ridden the horse as much as we had first intended.  Animal madness isn’t our fault, though – not always anyway…”

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on her website:  http://animalmadness.com

Braitman’s donkey Mac is from http://www.coolhunting.com/

Oliver’s photo and an interview with the author appear on http://www.coolhunting.com

Braitman and a baby elephant are on the author’s  website:  http://animalmadness.com/about/

In 2012, Braitman went to Baja, Mexico to observe pilot whale mothers and calves, who were very curious about her.  The baby came right up to the boat.  Photo by Jodi Frediani.  http://www.ted.com/

ARC: Simon & Schuster

Note: Lily King’s Euphoria was WINNER of the Kirkus Prize for Best Novel of 2014.  King was also WINNER of the New England Book Award for Father of the Rain in 2010, and has received both a Whiting Award for fiction and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship.

“I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.  And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world…[though] I fear that [my] awareness of their impending doom alters my observations.”—Nell Stone, anthropologist in New Guinea, 1933.

In this breakthrough novel, Lily King abandons the focus of her previous novels, which have always delved deeply into the subjects of love, family relationships, and personal identity within a narrow, circumscribed setting involving one major character.  Her first book, The Pleasing Hour (2000), tells the story of an American au pair in Paris and her difficult relationships with the family for which she works. The English Teacher (2005) depicts a long-time teacher and her fifteen-year-old son who live on an island off the New England coast until the teacher accepts a marriage proposal, which changes all their lives.  In Father of the Rain (2010), she analyzes how a woman’s unresolved issues regarding her need and love for her alcoholic and irresponsible father affect her own life over the course of forty years.  In all these novels, King thoroughly and effectively examines a “world writ small.”

There is nothing small-scale about King’s new novel, Euphoria, however.  Here she creates a novel on the grandest scale in terms of themes and ideas, at the same time that she also dramatically changes the time frame and setting from her previous locales, familiar to the reader, to areas of New Guinea so remote that they have never been explored by “outsiders.”  American anthropologist Nell Stone and her Australian husband, anthropologist Schuyler Fenwick, have been in New Guinea since 1931, and now, almost two years later, Nell is more than ready for change.  For the past six months they have been studying the warlike and cannibalistic Mumbanyo tribe, though most of that study has been done by Fen.  Fen’s specialties have always been religion, religious totems, religious ceremonies, warfare, and genealogy while Nell’s interests have been economics, food, government, social structure, and child-rearing.  Now, however, she is weary and frightened of the fearsome Mumbanyos with their bloodlust and their penchant for discarding babies in the river.

A New Guinea family. Their dramatic and difficult story is told in a link given in the photo credits.

King creates a vibrant novel, starting with a dramatic and evocative first chapter, which explodes with information as Nell and Fen are being propelled down the river toward a port.  They plan to leave New Guinea now and go to Australia to study an aborigine group.  The trip, which describes some aspects of their lives with the Mumbanyos, also establishes the themes, stressing the enormous cultural contrasts between their goals and the goals of some of the more “civilized” passengers in this small boat – including British overseers of plantations and mines and their elegantly dressed wives.  One woman’s references to a “shocking” book published in England about “all the children fornicating in the bushes” in the Solomon Islands hints at the success of Nell’s earlier published research, while also telling her about its reception by the British public.  Fen’s treatment of her on the boat suggests that their relationship has not been a true partnership, and the tension is palpable.

Their boat is met by Andrew Bankson, a British anthropologist they had previously met in Sydney and who has been doing research in New Guinea for several years. His life has been depressingly lonely, and he is desperate to have fellow researchers “nearby” with whom he can talk.  Eventually, Nell and Fen decide to stay in New Guinea, studying a new tribe upriver from Bankson’s camp.

Tribes often made maps for navigating on the water, with shells representing islands and bamboo slats representing currents.

The point of view then shifts to that of Bankson, who offers his own commentary on the action and on the other characters.  Additional points of view, including that of Nell, continue to appear throughout, as the time frames shift to provide new information. The use of letters and the characters’ reminiscences fill in details of the past and bring the characters to life.  As the relationships (and in some cases, rivalries) among Nell Stone, Schuyler Fenwick, and Andrew Bankson become more personal when they have only each other for company, Bankson asks Nell what is her favorite part of her work.  Surprised, she remarks, “It’s the moment about two months in when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place.  Suddenly it feels within your grasp.  It’s a delusion…But at that moment the place feels entirely yours.  It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”  Before long, the characters’ relationships become still more intimate, leading to a sexually intense atmosphere, which King develops in explicit detail.

Crocodiles painted on eucalyptus bark. Bankson’s Kiona tribe had “crocodile origins and a cannibal past.”

The author makes no secret of the fact that she has used the lives of anthropologists Margaret Mead, her husband Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson during their several months together in 1933 on the Sepik River in New Guinea as the models for Nell, Fen, and Bankson, and one need only go to Wikipedia to find out just how closely the activities of these scientists parallel the action of the novel. Though King reminds the reader that this is a work of fiction, her extensive research into the lives of these scientists helps bring the novel’s characters to life and makes their commitment to their work understandable and realistic. Ultimately, however, it is King who guides the story, not a biographer.  It is she who makes all the decisions about what to include, what to omit, and what to emphasize; and she is the one who orders the information and controls the outcomes, some of which are different from what one reads in the biographies.  Her careful eye and acute sensitivity to detail bring an alien landscape to life for the reader while also allowing her to explore ideas in new ways, and she does all this with great panache.  Though some may quibble about the difficulty of following the shifting points of view at the beginning of this unusual novel, Euphoria is dramatic and rewarding, a book which beautifully illustrates Nell Stone’s belief that “our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.”

ALSO by Lily King:  FATHER OF THE RAIN

The book’s cover shows the bark of a rainbow eucalyptus. This blue eucalyptus is also found in New Guinea. These are natural colors

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.bookpassage.com

The family in the photo is protecting a young girl who was raped viciously by her father.  Her response was to behead him.  The family and the village are protecting her from “authorities.”  The story, from 2013, is here:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

A male tribesman from New Guinea stands in front of a hanging bridge:  http://commons.wikimedia.org

Maps made from bamboo and shells have been used throughout the South Pacific, from Hawaii to New Guinea:  http://critiki.com

This beautiful aboriginal bark painting by Mick Kubaku is found on http://www.artrecord.com/

The cover of this book shows the bark of a rainbow eucalyptus.  This last photo shows a blue eucalyptus, part of the same tree family.  These are natural colors.  http://www.factrange.com/

Note: This novel was WINNER of the New England Book Award for Fiction in 2010.  Her 2014 novel, Euphoria was WINNER of the Kirkus Prize for Best Novel of 2014. The author has also been a WINNER of a Whiting Award for fiction for her novel The Pleasing Hour and has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

“In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness.  To take something seriously is to be a fool.  It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery.  Passion is allowed only for athletics…Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.”

John Updike made the life of Boston’s suburban elite his territory—emphasizing their sense of entitlement and superiority, their “clubbiness,” their alcoholism, and their sexual experimentation as a way of asserting their existence and their privilege.  One generation later, Lily King, like her fellow Massachusetts authors Susan and George Minot, shares her own insights into what sometimes passed for family life in a similar, privileged setting.  Their fathers, as depicted by the younger authors, might have belonged to similar clubs, attended similar social events, and even drunk the same brand of gin.  Their mothers were the rocks of the family, with values more closely allied with the real world, until their deaths or divorces left the children without a strong parental figure as they faced the storms of adolescence.

Dividing her novel into three parts, Lily King tells the story of Daley Amory, daughter of Gardiner and Meredith Amory, from her eleventh birthday, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, through her forties and the election of Barack Obama.  Though she lives for long periods of time during those years without contact with her alcoholic father, she never really escapes her need for him, even, on occasion, subsuming her own “best interests” to care for him. In the hands of a lesser author, the novel might have devolved into outrageous melodrama during its long chronology, but King is too good an author to allow that to happen.   With a fine eye for imagery, an unerring ear for dialogue, and a firm grasp of the depths of emotion that underlie the interplay between Daley and Gardiner, she creates a novel that establishes her themes about daughters and their fathers, a surprisingly rare subject for fiction.

Lily King’s photo by Laura Lewis

The novel opens on Daley’s eleventh birthday.  Her mother has sworn her to secrecy that week, telling her that she intends to leave her father and wants Daley to come with her to her parents’ house in New Hampshire for the summer.  When her father takes her to get a new “birthday puppy,” Daley, knowing about the impending separation whereas her father does not, chooses the ugliest puppy in the shop.  An ugly puppy, she believes, will be easier to leave behind.  Her mother, an activist, is entertaining inner city children in their pool that week.  Her father, at home because he has lost his job, for mysterious reasons, mocks their accents, their skin color, and their poverty, then persuades Daley to join him in streaking nude through the gathering. Three months later, after a summer in New Hampshire, Daley returns to her former home to visit her father–and finds him living with someone else, the woman’s daughter sleeping in Daley’s bedroom, and her mother’s garden and the grounds a mess.

A small Massachusetts harbor town with some resemblances to the one in which Daley Amory spends her early childhood.

Part II takes place during a going-away party for Daley in Michigan sixteen years later.  Having completed her degree work, she is about to begin work in California.  Then she gets a call saying that her father is suicidal and needs her.  The call reawakens her feelings for him at some cost to her own future.  In Part III, Daley is the mother of two children.  She has had no contact with her father for fifteen years.  And then she gets another phone call asking her to return to see him.

Gardiner Amory is an almost impossible person to like, primarily because he is so ignorant and self-satisfied.  He has no interests beyond the elite little world of his town and his club, surrounding himself with people who behave as he does.  Snide and snobbish, he is a manipulator, willing to do anything to get his own way.  Insensitive in the extreme, especially to the needs of his children, he does whatever he wants, encouraging Daley to see the world through his own blinders.  His profanity, his alcoholic tantrums, his insulting behavior toward his succession of wives, and his flagrant sexual performances are more than many readers will want to know about.  It is this last issue which, unfortunately, casts a clinker into the mix of scenes—several sexual episodes so explicit that they will, for some readers, negatively affect the thoughtfully observed mood and style of the novel overall.

The carnival is an image that appears at both the beginning and ending of this novel.

Daley is sympathetic and largely believable, a character whose childhood activities—experimenting with smoking, drinking, and necking—are not unusual.  Her love of reading makes her eventual academic achievements plausible, though there is no hint that she will achieve at the level that she does.  Though her decision to nurse her weak father emphasizes her overwhelming need for him, the length of her stay is more difficult to understand.  Having reached the pinnacle of academic achievement, Daley allows herself to be cooped up with a man who rejects (and even mocks) academic interests, a situation which would have bored or infuriated most other brilliant scholars. The fact that her devotion is taken for granted, rather than appreciated, makes her long stay especially sad (and unrealistic).   A fascinating look at the extent to which girls and women yearn for a father and the lengths to which they will go to make that father love them, Father of the Rain is a thoughtful novel which shows the evolution of a woman who must help her father deal with his limited view of life, even as her own world view is expanding and eventually flourishing.

ALSO by Lily King:  EUPHORIA

Photos, in order: The author’s photo comes from http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/

The photo of the rotunda and harbor is from a small Massachusetts town similar to the one Ms. King describes in her novel. http://www.yelp.com

The carnival plays a role at the beginning and ending of this novel.  http://thenakedscribe.com

“He had nothing to go on.  Hunting out a woman with the tarot cards to see if she could give him a few leads seemed as good an idea as any.  Or flip through the phone book for a spiritualist… Absurd though they were, these thoughts marked a turning point…in his search for Malory.  From then on…he came to rely less on external clues than on his intuitive grasp of what Malory might have done in similar circumstances.”

With his crisp, hard-boiled style, unrelenting pace, and a protagonist reminiscent of Travis McGee, whose earthiness was always mixed with a sense chivalric mission, Geoff Dyer might seem, at first, to have much in common with John D. MacDonald whose pulp novels of the 1960s and 1970s were so popular.  Though Dyer does use a relatively tough and noir-ish style at the outset of the novel, and does have a main character with a mission, he quickly leaves the dark realism of MacDonald’s novels behind and moves into far more philosophical areas, alien to Travis McGee.  Once beyond the first chapter, Dyer begins to reveal a more vibrant, less cryptic, literary style filled with unique images and descriptions.  The plot abandons dark realism and starts moving in and out of reality, dreams, literature, symbolic stories reminiscent of old allegories, art, and medieval quests and jousts with an evil enemy, as Dyer branches out into metaphysical realms.  No matter how surprising (and sometimes abstract) the author’s focus may seem to be as the novel progresses, however, Dyer never loses sight of his plot or his characters, and the overall framework of this quest novel never disappears.

Photo of Geoff Dyer by Eamonn McCabe

Originally published in 1993, and recently re-released by Graywolf Press, The Search benefits from its setting in a period in which there are no computers, cell phones, iPads, or an internet to consult for information.  Instead, it requires the main character to make decisions as well as he can with the knowledge he already has – there can be no “wait-a-minute-while-I-look-it-up” moments in this novel where one of the major events is the discovery of a Dictaphone tape.  As a result, the author is able to maintain Walker’s quest for answers, both in his personal life and in his mission to find a missing man, with an intensity and honesty which allow the main character to grow and explore ideas within the search which dominates the novel.

"Night Hawks," by Edward Hopper (1942), directly parallels the mood and atmosphere of the novel as Walker travels the country looking for Malory and spending time in local cafes.

Main character Walker meets Rachel Malory at an elegant cocktail party ”by the bay,” where he feels out of place and where the one point of compatibility they discover is that both of them regard this as a “terrible party.”  When Walker tires and leaves, Rachel does not suggest that he call her.  Instead, she says that she will contact him, which she does shortly thereafter, appearing at his apartment two days later.  Asking leading questions, she wants to know what he’s doing these days, and when he is evasive, she lets him know that she thinks he’s been involved in “quite a few interesting things.  Not all of them quite legal.”  When he then tries to be enigmatic, she asks, simply, “How was prison?” She eventually reveals that she knows he has been a “tracker” and that she is looking for someone like him who will find Alexander Malory, her husband, who has disappeared.  Though they have been separated for a long time, there are people who want to kill him, and she needs him to sign some papers to get around a legal loophole which has just arisen:  if he dies or is arrested before she gets his signature, she will lose everything.  She agrees to pay Walker twice as much as he received on his last case.

The Slough of Despond is John Bunyan's description of a person's misery when feeling totally alienated from God.

Getting as much information as he can about Malory’s last sightings and phone calls, Walker takes the job and goes to Durban, a three day drive from where he is.  Dyer is careful not to mention real places.  He never says that this is San Francisco Bay, nor does he specifically identify all the places that Walker drives to, sometimes over the course of three days, as the novel unfolds.  Shortly after arriving in Durban, Walker is off on a two-day trip to Kingston on the edge of the “Southern Wetlands” where Malory stayed recently.  While there, a man named Carver, arrives, and it quickly evolves that he had been at the same party as Walker and Rachel, and that he has been following Walker.

After leaving Horizon, Walker arrives in a town in which "the city reminded him of Pompeii where people were frozen in the defensive attitudes they assumed when lava poured over the ancient city."

Sneaking in and out of a hotel room, ditching the car, stealing another one, and driving to Meridian, he visits the house of Malory’s sister. Then he is off to Iberia, and then Usfret, where Walker believes that he sees Malory.  Eventually, he takes a sea journey and discovers that he is pursued again.  In the mysterious Avlona, where he spends the night, there are no people – no one in the shop where he takes a croissant, no one in the clothing shop, and no one in another shop where he takes money from the till. He moves on to several other towns, as the journey itself  becomes the story, and the search for Malory begins to wane. It is on his trip to Despond (a parallel with the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress) that he discovers that everyone remembers Malory there.  Trapped in Despond, Walker is unable to motivate himself to leave, but finally, continuing his quest, he takes a train to a new town, a place that is entirely silent – reminiscent of Pompeii – with all the people stopped in mid-action.

The novel culminates in a fight to the death on a cathedral rooftop, a battle in the fashion of a medieval romance.

Eventually, he arrives in the ominously named Nemesis, a medieval town in which he will engage in a “tournament” with his nemesis Carver, narrated as a  medieval romance involving symbolic hand-to-hand combat on the roof of a cathedral.  The themes are brought to more specific life when Walker talks with a man named Marek, who raises the questions of “What happened to you?  Where have you been? Where are you going?” a direct parallel with the most iconic of Gauguin’s paintings.

Full and rich in its imagery and ideas, The Search masquerades as a noir mystery while behaving like an allegory and metaphysical novel – in the style of the novels of Italo Calvino.  Challenging and thoughtful, at the same time that it is often surreal, this novel is fun to read and justifies the comment from a writer in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, which calls Dyer “possibly the best living writer in Britain.”

Paul Gauguin's most famous painting, referenced in Marek's question to Walker, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" also summarizes the novel's themes.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Eamonn McCabe appears on http://www.theguardian.com/

The Slough of Despond, from John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is from http://etc.usf.edu/

Edward Hopper’s “Night Hawks” (1942), is the visual equivalent of the mood of Walker as he travels from town to town, eating and drinking in cafes. Found on http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/

A person frozen in his dying posture at Pompeii, thought by some to be praying, appears on http://willows95988.typepad.com

Gargoyles on the cathedral rooftop add imagery to the medieval-style battle between Walker and Carver on the cathedral rooftop.

Paul Gauguin’s famous “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where are we Going?” is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  http://fineartarchives.com/

ARC: Graywolf

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” — Joyce Carol Oates

The Javits Center, site for the past several years of Book Expo America

From the moment one arrives at Book Expo America until the moment one leaves, flush with the pleasure of meeting authors, publishers, and fellow book lovers; with head ringing from sensory overload from the color, noise, activity, and sheer volume of books to look at; and with shoulders aching from carrying too many impossible-to-resist literary giveaways, a BEA attendee will fully understand what it feels like to experience “book heaven.”  For a few days each year, the Javits Center in New York City is a showcase for the book industry, a place where librarians, book sellers, teachers, writers, editors, bloggers, critics, and the press can preview books that will be released in the next few months, attend author breakfasts and chats, line up for book signings, obtain free review copies, and learn more about the book industry.  Thousands of “book professionals” this year met with publishers and authors on Thursday, May 29, and Friday, May 30.

Massive banner for Jodi Picoult's newest book, offered at both BEA and Book Con.

For those who are not “book professionals” but who may also want to attend a BEA exhibition, there is no problem anymore, thanks to a new BEA feature which debuted today, Saturday, May 31.  “Book Con,” modeled on the wildly popular Comic Con fan conventions held in numerous cities throughout the world, now allows and encourages any book-loving “non-professional” to visit the BEA exhibition hall on the last day of the Expo, which, this year, was Saturday, May 31.  Described in one report as an event in which “storytelling and pop culture collide,”  the new Book Con allows publishers and authors to connect directly with their readers, one-on-one, during the last day of the exhibition.  Among the events at this first Book Con were author signings for many books which will surely be bestsellers, autographing sessions and book signings by dozens of popular authors on the bestseller lists, giveaways of thousands of books, author panels (one of which was “John Grisham in Conversation with Carl Hiaasen” and another of which was “Jodi Picoult, Kathy Reichs, and Ruth Reichl Talk Bestsellers”).  A truly unique feature – “a Book Swap/Speed Dating Event” is planned for late this afternoon!

Actor Neil Patrick Harris has just written "an exciting, interactive read that puts the 'u' back in 'aUtobiography.' "

By Saturday at ten o’clock a.m., all nine thousand tickets were completely sold out for this one-day Book Con, and by noontime, I’d received an e-mailed press release from BEA saying that they have already decided that next year a fourth day will be added to the exhibition and that the Book Con feature will also run for more days, either as an add-on or perhaps simultaneously with Book Expo in separate sections of the exhibition hall.

The Book Expo session which I attended on Thursday, May 29, emphasized the Expo’s interest in broadening its scope, and it featured a number of booths from foreign publishers, including Korea, Romania, Italy, Iceland, Russia, the Nordic countries, Spain, Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Mexico, China, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirate of Sharjah (which I had to look up).  There was also a section for publishers specializing in literature in translation, which included representatives of the new Hispabooks, a publisher from Spain, and Europa Editions, based in Italy, with a New York office (one of the publishers whose many books I have reviewed regularly for more than five years).  When I met with Europa’s Kent Carroll, I learned, to my surprise, that the “quartet” of novels by Maurizio de Giovanni, including I Will Have Vengeance, Blood Curse, and Everyone in Their Place, did not really end with Book Four, The Day of the Dead, after all, since a fifth Commissario Ricciardi novel will be released in August, and a sixth in March, 2015!

Azar Nafisi, author of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, has a new book coming out about reading in America, THE REPUBLIC OF IMAGINATION

Those who bemoaned the disappointing ending to the fourth book will undoubtedly cheer this development.  In addition, Europa’s “trilogy” by Elena Ferrante, including My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, which have been wildly popular, will not end with Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, scheduled for a September 2 release.  At least one more novel – the fourth – in that series is already being readied for publication.  Obviously, that series has found an audience.

Other authors with new books coming out: Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, which sold over a million copies, has a new release in October, The Republic of Imagination, which considers what reading means to Americans, as opposed to what it means to her former students in Tehran.

Deon Meyer, who won France’s Le Grand Prix de Litterature in 2003, and numerous other prizes over the past fifteen years, has a ninth mystery set in South Africa – Cobra – due for release in October. Links to other novels by Deon Meyer may be found here:  Blood Safari.

Edgard Telles Ribeiro’s His Own Man, winner of the Brazilian PEN Prize, draws on the author’s own experience as a diplomat and journalist in this realistic novel about Brazil’s military coup of 1964, scheduled for release in September.

Jane Smiley, award-winning author of A THOUSAND ACRES, has written a new book, SOME LUCK, the first in a trilogy.

Jane Smiley, winner in 1992 of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for A Thousand Acres, introduces the first novel of her planned trilogy about an Iowa farm family in Some Luck, due out on October 7.

Sarah Waters, British Book Awards Author of the Year in 2003, and winner of “Writer of the Year” in 2006 and 2009, at the Stonewall Awards, has The Paying Guests coming out in September.  Set in 1922, this is a BIG book, which may expand Waters’s reputation for brilliant historical fiction.  Due out in September.

Lily King’s Euphoria (which I read, fascinated, on the train home from BEA) focuses on the lives of three anthropologists in New Guinea in the 1930s, and is inspired by the life of Margaret Mead.  This one will be released on June 3.

Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane, about the effects of the Sri Lankan Civil War on one residential neighborhood, has just been released in paperback.  It was a Library Journal Best Indie Fiction selection for 2013.

Ru Freeman's ON SAL MAL LANE, her novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, has now been released in paperback.

Other novels which will interest many readers of this site: Alan Furst’s Midnight in Europe; Bradford Morrow’s The Forgers; Peter Stamm’s All Days Are Night; Adriana Lisboa’s Crow Blue; Germaine Greer’s White Beech: The Rainforest Years; Javier Cercas’s Outlaws; Paolo Giordano’s The Human Body; Naomi Wood’s Mrs. Hemingway; John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children; and Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster.

Photos, in order: The photo of the Javits Center appears on http://www.bvents.com

The photos of Neil Patrick Harris, Azar Nafisi, Jane Smiley, and Ru Freeman are by Mary Whipple and are copyrighted.