Literary Labryinth in Los Angeles

Well, I know what I'm doing when I visit LA in November: going to the Last Bookstore to explore the Labyrinth.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Voted as one of the top 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world by Flavorwire, the independent bookstore in downtown LA is known for its spectacular space (it was a former bank!), selection of rare books, and memorable past events. And now, it will be known for its Labyrinth, a large structure containing 100,000 books, each priced at $1.

Mike, a blogger over at Franklin Avenue, shares some more details (and photos!):

The best bookstore in Los Angeles just got bigger -- and better. Downtown's amazing Last Bookstore, which we wrote about last year, has expanded dramatically into a new 6,100 square foot upstairs space that it calls the "Labyrinth."

The "Labyrinth" includes 100,000 books that are all $1 each. That's right. It's a bit of a treasure hunt, as the books aren't necessarily shelved in any particular order (although kids books seem to be grouped together in places). But that's perhaps part of the fun. If you want order, the books downstairs in the Last Bookstore's normal floor space are indeed cataloged. Upstairs, it's the wild west.

 

 See Mike's full article and images HERE

How cool! :)

Release Day: WINTER OMENS by Trisha Leigh

Tuesdays mean release day, and today that means the second book in Trisha Leigh's "Last Year" series, Winter Omens!

Picking up where Whispers in Autumn left off, Althea has even more at stake this season as the Others get closer and closer to tracking her down:

Althea and Lucas barely escaped the Others’ clutches in the autumn, and were separated in the process. Alone and on the run from the cruel alien race determined to exterminate her, Althea struggles to adapt and survive in a world she never imagined.

When a boy named Pax appears out of nowhere, he quickly recognizes Althea for what she is – a human/Other hybrid just like him. Althea begs him to help her find Lucas, but Pax refuses, intent on following his own mysterious agenda.

The Others’ presence continues to devour the planet’s resources, and if history is an indication, they won’t leave until Earth is destroyed beyond repair. Althea and Pax sense the only way to save themselves – and maybe their home – is to understand the powers simmering inside them.

Together they push the limits of their capabilities in the quiet Wilds, but are soon confronted with a terrifying fact: no place is safe from the relentless pursuit of the Others.

We sat down with author Trisha Leigh to get a little inside scoop on her and her series:

RBtL: Congratulations on the release of WINTER OMENS, Trisha! What inspired you to write this YA sci-fi series?

TL: The original idea came from a tweet – someone’s daughter had woken up terrified she didn’t exist. I wrote it down and tossed it on my desk, and Althea showed up soon after. She’s kind of a hard nut to crack, but once she told me why she was so terrified she didn’t exist, the rest of the story kind of fell into place.

RBtL: Even though you didn’t go the traditional publishing route, you seem to have hit all your bases self-publishing. What made you decide to self-publish? What was your process in doing so?

TL: Honestly, three years ago when I wrote this book, the possibility of self-publishing wasn’t even on my radar. I had an agent for about a year and we worked on the book but never went on submission to editors. After she and I parted ways, I queried the ms again but found agents much more gun shy about taking on what would be pitched as a dystopian YA because of the overcrowded market. For a while I stuck it in a drawer, but as I watched more and more people find success with strong manuscripts in self-publishing, I thought I owed it to the story to put it out there and see what happens. I’m really happy that I did.

I will say that one of the best decisions I made was hiring a professional cover designer, developmental editor, copy editor, and formatters to make the book as professional as possible. Some authors who self-publish overlook the importance of each of those steps, and their readers are the ones who suffer for it.

RBtL: The Last Year series is full of strong and interesting characters—Althea, Pax, Lucas, Greer, Griffin, the whole crew. Who is your favorite to write and why?

TL: Oh, gosh, that’s a hard question. It changes, honestly, from book to book. In Whispers in Autumn, definitely Althea. I really love exploring the strange balance of ferocity and vulnerability. I loved writing Pax in Winter Omens, and Griffin was a welcome bit of humor. In Betrayals in Spring [the next book in the series] Greer helped get me through some tough scenes, but Lucas has become the easiest for me to connect with – so yeah, I guess all of them at one time or another.

RBtL: It must be tough juggling writing, marketing, and all of the other aspects of self-publishing...and your family, both human and canine. :-p Tell us a little about your writing routine—how do you find the time and energy?

TL: It is tough, and I don’t think many writers would tell you differently. I’m single, which helps, but I do take the time to spend time with my family when an opportunity comes up – it’s never even a question in my mind. I write whenever I have a minute, during breaks and lunches at the day job, after work, etc. My sleeping patterns leave much to be desired, however, and I’m afraid I’m going to remain single until I can find a magical way to erase the bags beneath my eyes!

Seriously, it’s a lot of coffee and chocolate and making the time to do it. We can all find something else to do, but if you set deadlines for yourself and want to meet them, it’s almost always possible.

RBtL: With two books left in the series after Winter Omens, what can readers look forward to? Can we have a little sneak peek?

TL: Hmm. I’m someone who hates spoilers, BUT I think it’s fair to say that in Betrayals in Spring, Althea’s romantic life will become, shall we say, untangled a bit. We’ll finally meet the real Deshi, and our cast of characters grows quite a bit (and not all of the new members are human or Other).

Available in print and eBook, don't miss this exciting installment in this engaging new YA science fiction series!

Fiction, Food, and Pho-tography

Because we all know how much I love books and food, I'm not surprised that the awesome Alex Christopher sent me a link to the NPR article, "Photographing Literature's Famous Food Scene." In the piece, NPR discusses the photographer Dinah Fried's "Fictitious Dishes" series:

A confession: I've read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but I can't tell you much about it. Yes, I know he's on a road trip. But beyond that, I don't recall any of the characters or anything they do or what the point was. What I do remember is that he described some truly great food. In fact, I liked those sections of the book so much that when I read them, I apparently felt the need to scribble them down, word for word, in a notebook.

On the Road isn't the only example of this. I remember the hoecakes and the maple snow candy from Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. My favorite scene from Roald Dahl's Boy is in the candy shop. The details of meals and food and eating always stay with me long after the plotlines have faded.

So when I saw a series of photographs by Dinah Fried being passed around Tumblr, I knew I'd found a kindred spirit. Her "Fictitious Dishes" re-create the food scenes from a range of books, largely classics like Moby Dick and The Bell Jar.

Alice in Wonderland

"For me as a reader, and in life as well, I remember the eating scenes in books," Fried says on the phone. "They really bring me to an emotional place in the character and the book."

Fried has 10 photos in her collection so far, five of which she's sharing here on The Picture Show for the first time. Some of the scenes are of iconic literary meals — the gruel from Oliver Twist and the tea party from Alice in Wonderland.

Others, like the scene in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, are a bit less literal. The open-faced sandwiches pictured aren't actually described in the book. But, says Fried, that type of sandwich was mentioned so many times that she felt she had to re-create them somehow.

Catcher in the Rye

She does take some liberties with her photos. The layouts are of her own design, and not all of the details are 100 percent true to the text. Take, for instance, the cheese sandwich from The Catcher in the Rye. "I know it's a Swiss cheese sandwich," she says. "But I didn't use Swiss cheese because I wanted the color to pop. The designer in me wanted the cheese to be more orange."

The designer in her is also always on the hunt for the right props. Most of them are snagged from people's kitchens and found on visits to flea markets and thrift stores. Sometimes Fried has the food scene in mind but can't proceed until she has the right prop. That was the case with Moby Dick. She knew her dad had a pewter beer stein that she absolutely had to have. He'd long forgotten about it, but, until they found it, she couldn't take the photo.

Heidi

Sometimes a particularly good find will spark her creativity. The discovery of a three-pronged toasting fork reminded Fried of a scene in Heidi, and she felt compelled to re-create the meal of toasted cheese eaten by Heidi and her grandfather. And there are a few things in her collection that she hasn't yet used, like a 1960s coffee carafe with gold star bursts.

Often, the literary passages that Fried draws on don't have a description of a specific place or setting, so the goal with her photos is to create the atmosphere of a particular scene.

"I'm interested in creating something that evokes an emotional feeling for myself and others," she explains. "I wanted to see how other people who had read the books would connect on that level."

See the original post HERE

While this is a very cool series, I can't help but wish Fried had expanded the concept beyond only classic literature (also, speaking of...no Dickens other than the somewhat cliched Oliver Twist?? No Little Women??). I'd love to see something from The Secret Lives of Bees, the new novel The Night Circus, or even Fried Green Tomatoes. Scenes from children's literature would also be amazing--anything Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Winnie the Pooh, and The Secret Garden.  I do, however, love her take on To Kill a Mockingbird:

To Kill a Mockingbird

Hopefully Fried will continue this series. If not, I may have to stage some things of my own! :)

A Book Art Extravaganza

Even though books are art in and of themselves, it's become quite the trend to turn this readable art form into something purely aesthetic. (And YA author and reality TV star Lauren Conrad used them for more "practical" purposes, to much controversy.)

Scottish artist Georgia Russell removes and uses the pages of books to create her artistic visions:

Artist: Georgia Russel

Other artists, like Robert The, turn a single book into a carved-out sculpture that doesn't look at all like a book:

Artist: Robert The

While Brian Dettmer carves elaborate scenes into the pages of books:

Artist: Brian Dettmer

There there's photographer Cara Barer who manipulates pages into a book-like sculpture:

Artist: Cara Barer

And yet other artists (Su Blackwell, for one) create pop-up scenes within the pages of a bound book (my personal fave):

Artist: Su Blackwell

Artist: Su Blackwell

Artist: Unknown

Artist: Unknown

Artist: Unknown

These are all versions of book art I had seen before. But just this week, a friend of mine introduced me to a new style of carvings. Specifically those of artist Guy Laramee.

Now, Laramee's unique carvings aren't like the ones by Robert The or Brian Dettmer, where they take a single book and work their magic. Instead, Laramee takes multiple books and carves and paints landscapes along the top edge:

Artist: Guy Laramee

Artist: Guy Laramee

Artist: Guy Laramee

Laramee, naturally, explores the single book art form as well:

Artist: Guy Laramee

Artist: Guy Laramee

But there's something about his pieces that feels very different to me than anything else I've seen before in the book-art family. He takes a man-made book and turns it into something that feels truly of nature, an intriguing dichotomy, I think. But Laramee himself has an even more complex reasoning behind his art, that of the expression of cultural erosion over time, particularly now as the book itself is gaining recognition as a "dying art."

In his Artist Statement he says:

 Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?

[...]

My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation.

[...]

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: to project us into this thick “cloud of unknowing.”

See Laramee's full Artist's Statement HERE

An interesting concept, no? :)

Be sure to check out his projects on his website, complete with further explanations (and sometimes poetry) about his specific purpose in creating each collection. (My favorite is The Great Wall.)

Artist: Guy Laramee

Typewriters Galore

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap Tap. Zing! Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. 

That is me typing on my typewriter when I was eleven years old.

I'd found it at a garage sale in my development. All I could think was "WANT." So, I rode by bike home, dug up the cash, and hurried back over to buy it. When I got it home, I hooked it up and it didn't work. Then I fiddled--not something a kid should probably do with an old piece of machinery if she actually wants it to ever work again, but somehow after cleaning the ribbon, taking out pieces and putting them right back in, I got the keys to pound out some inked letters on paper. I wrote poems, plays, random prose. I loved that thing. To this day I don't know what happened to it. I remember that it stopped working and I needed to replace a part, but I never did. I think my mom threw it away after that because it was just gone.

Ever since, I have been dying for a "new" typewriter. I was ecstatic when I was at "journalism camp" at Northwestern the summer between my junior and senior year of college, we were required to do type our articles on Smith Coronas. I'll gaze into store windows when an typewriter sits up front until someone literally drags me away. I reblog photos of typewriters whenever possible on Tumblr. I adore them. I don't know what it is.

So, naturally, when Flavorwire posted a great slideslow of fun typewriters that are currently on the market last week, I drooled.I I saved the link for later second and third viewings, and of course, for purchase potential. Then today, another typewriter-related article from The Atlantic was sent to me by a friend, this time discussing more than just regular old typewriter options. This time, it focused on 25-year-old guy who, after finding a typewriter on the side of the street one day, decided to find a why to hook it up to a computer:

Jack Zylkin, an engineer, hooks antique typewriters up to modern computers and tablets to create functioning writing machines -- and then sells them on Etsy. It's almost a perfect storm of hipster obsessions. Vintage? Check. Handmade? Check. iPad? Check. Open source? Check. Et cetera. You might be tempted roll your eyes, but watch this documentary from Etsy's Handmade Portraits series and see if he doesn't convince you that there's something extremely satisfying about merging antique machinery with glossy, networked devices. The video was produced by Jenny Schweitzer, who provides more background on the project here. 

See the original post HERE

I don't know if I would want one necessarily, though it is pretty damn awesome.

I will have to ponder this further. 

Costner Co-writes New Adventure Series for S&S

Today's SHOCKING news: another celebrity has landed a book deal.

This time, Atria Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) has inked an agreement with actor Kevin Costner for a adventure series, according to GalleyCat:

Actor Kevin Costner has signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books imprint for an adventure series. It begins with The Explorers Guild, Volume One: Passage to Shambhala in 2014. The book is aimed at a broad group of readers, ranging from “young adult to more mature mystery and adventure enthusiasts.”

Writer and art director Jon Baird (pictured, left) also worked on the project with Costner (middle), which will be illustrated by Rick Ross (middle). Rob Weisbach and Fonda Snyder at Rob Weisbach Creative Management negotiated the deal with publisher Judith Curr. Atria senior editor Sarah Durand and assistant editor Daniel Loedel will edit the book.

Here’s more from the release: “Behind the staid rooms of an old world gentlemen’s club operates a darker, more mysterious organization: The Explorers Guild, a clandestine group of adventurers who seek out the places where light gives way to shadow and reason is usurped by myth … Set against the backdrop of World War I, with Western Civilization spiraling into chaos, the first installment in The Explorers Guild series, A Passage to Shambhala, concerns the Guild’s quest to find Shambhala, the golden city of Buddhist myth. Each member is driven toward the City for a different reason: one believes that finding it will save his brother’s life; another hopes that it will reveal a path to spiritual enlightenment. Some believe the power of the city can be used to restore peace, while others are certain that Shambhala is responsible for bringing mankind to the brink of apocalypse.”

See the original post HERE

While the market seems to be more and more inundated with celeb authors, it's nice to see that Costner chose to co-write his book--and to publicly acknowledge it. What a strange concept for a celeb novelist! And while the plot sounds a little all over the place to me--and with way too broad a targeted audience--I'm somewhat intrigued.

Other celebs with book deals this week? Musician Carlos Santana and actress Jessica Lange.

Say "Happy Roald Dahl Month" with Literery-themed Recipes

I learned today that September is Roald Dahl Month. A bit of a strange coincidence too given how often I've talked about Roald Dahl lately with not only by cubemate, but also with random people coming by to troll the free book shelf, my father, my six-year-old sister, and many others. He just keeps popping up!

And when I saw that the Huffington Post did a post about foods from children's books, it reminded me immediately of Roald Dahl and the crazy cookbooks based on his stories.

I owned both of these cookbooks once upon a time. I'd flip through the pages, giggling at the ridiculousness, but I'll admit that I never once made anything from them.

I kind of wish now that I still had these gems so I could make something with my sisters, yet in the hustle and bustle that is growing up, the books seem to have vanished. At least HuffPo has given me some new literary dishes to give a whirl (and they've thrown in some Roald Dahl-related treats too!):

Harry Potter: Butterbeer

Alice in Wonderland: Jam-filled "Eat Me" Cupcakes

The Hunger Games: Lamb Stew with Dried Plums

James and the Giant Peach: Peach Juice

Oliver Twist: Gruel

 See the complete article and slideshow HERE