If you’re a book lover (yes, they still exist) you’ve probably shared the experience of finding a bookstore, any bookstore, and walking in with a sigh of delight, nostalgia and sadness.

There’s so much going on in the modern bookstore that’s more about us as a society than it is [...]]]>

If you’re a book lover (yes, they still exist) you’ve probably shared the experience of finding a bookstore, any bookstore, and walking in with a sigh of delight, nostalgia and sadness.

There’s so much going on in the modern bookstore that’s more about us as a society than it is about just books. Here’s an excerpt from a fine piece by Curtis White in Lapham’s Quarterly about literature and how we get it.

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Lomans out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

The Late Word by Curtis White – Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly.

Inside Google Books: Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you..

Readers in Vancouver can get it immediately from The People’s [...]]]>
Average consumer, step right up, have I got a deal for you! If you really want to buy The Miracle Tree, my (sporadically funny) novel about a young reporter who gets sent to cover a tree that might make wishes come true, it’s your lucky day.

Readers in Vancouver can get it immediately from The People’s Co-op Bookstore (908 Commercial Drive), or down the street near Venables at Robin’s Pharmacy (1391 Commercial). The People’s Co-op is a landmark, one of those venerable spots for thinkers that define the best of Vancouver. Robin’s is an upstart turning your old notion of the pharmacy on its head (picture your pharmacist in a t-shirt and jeans listening to Pavement while he gets your drugs). It’s probably wrong but I take some pride in knowing The Miracle Tree is in the Personal Growth book section of the pharmacy, even though it should be in Personal Debauchery.

It can also be ordered through any bookstore (here’s the ISBN to help them find it:9780986505508), on-line through amazon.com, or as an ebook from Smashwords.

Or you can order it directly from me for $18 + service and delivery charges.

It’s called The Miracle Tree. It’s about a tree that might make wishes come true. And also about reality, race, politics, ecology, trees, love, redemption, spirituality, hope and miracles. It’s supposed to be funny.

Buy the eco-friendly, plant-saving, guilt-assuaging, electronic version here. Offered [...]]]> Spitting in the face of common sense and economic feasibility, I wrote a novel.

It’s called The Miracle Tree. It’s about a tree that might make wishes come true. And also about reality, race, politics, ecology, trees, love, redemption, spirituality, hope and miracles. It’s supposed to be funny.

Buy the eco-friendly, plant-saving, guilt-assuaging, electronic version here. Offered at the low-low price of $5, for which you get your choice of seven  digital formats (no DRM) to be used on your new Kindle and/or home computer and/or Ipod or whatever. A tree-killing print version will be available in a few weeks for $20.

Listen to a Miracle Tree Author Interview I did with Robert Ouimet of Brainpicker, a cool site of ideas that “won’t hurt a bit.”

Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream is pretty much all there in the title. It’s an inside look at eating competitions. Not so much the ones with cherubs stuffing their cheeks on country-fair blueberry pies; more on the modern version where [...]]]> You can too judge a book by its cover.

Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream is pretty much all there in the title. It’s an inside look at eating competitions. Not so much the ones with cherubs stuffing their cheeks on country-fair blueberry pies; more on the modern version where behemoths pack in megacalories at an queasy rate only to find a skinny Japanese kid eating them all under the table. Like the title, the book is snappy, sometimes funny, and ultimately unable to match the overhyped grandiosity of its subject.

In turning the subject of a great magazine article into a full-length book, Jason Fagone runs out of gas shortly after a bang-up opener. He heads to Japan to discover the secret of the hot-dog-demolishing Kobayashi, but comes up empty (not too surprising — Japan has been confounding visiting writers for generations). He chooses to narrow his lens instead on two American competitors, but the closer we get, the less interesting they become. There are clearly some fascinating characters here, but we never do quite get into their heads or hearts. (I at least hoped to learn more about the slick promoter behind the modern contests who came up with the title depiction.)

Fagone has a running battle throughout his book with the absurdity of it all — and understandably so. Taking on any book project can be a lonely task. When it’s about something like big eaters, self-doubt is inevitable. But Fagone’s solution, to concoct out of brief glimmers of insight some half-baked and purple-tinted big ideas, doesn’t exactly convince.

Then again, how much meaning do you need in a book about eaters? It’s a fun story. Dig in.