Over the years we’ve had a lot of Hawthorne Books folks featured on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Art Beat. Here are some of our favorite Art Beat episodes featuring Monica Drake, Kassten Alonso, Michael Strelow, Tom Spanbauer, Adam McIsaac. Please let me know if I’ve left anyone out and I’ll add a link. Enjoy!

Oregon Public Broadcasting
Art Beat

A room with a view...of books.

Yet another installment of the What We’re Reading series (here’s what we were reading in July) with all sorts of novels, cookbooks, story collections and more. Please chime in if you’ve read any of these books and also let us know what good books you’ve read lately…

Rhonda:
When I Forgot, Elina Hirvonen
The Twin, Gerbrand Bakker
The Lovers, Vendela Vida

Adam:
God is Dead, Ron Currie, Jr.
Along with many Hawthorne and freelance projects

Liz:
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Habibi, Craig Thompson
Tender, Nigel Slater
Blue Nights, Joan Didion

Olivia:
Wire to Wire, Scott Sparling
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, Jody M. Roy and Frank Meeink

Sophie:
The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks
Tin House Magazine

Emily:
By the North Gate, Joyce Carol Oates
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath

Penelope:
Tabloid City, Pete Hamill
Aftermath, Scott Nadelson
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

We use a lot of shipping supplies here at Hawthorne for books, books and more books!

With so many titles published over the past ten years sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything our authors have been up to. Here are a few highlights from the past several weeks. Please let us know anything and everything that we’ve left out!

Our fall title The Luminist, by David Rocklin, is getting fantastic reviews as he’s traveling around the country for his book tour. Here are some media hits…
www.forewordreviews.com
www.thefastertimes.com
www.nbcchicago.com

Our other fall title Aftermath, by Scott Nadelson, is getting great reviews too as he wraps up his regional book tour.
www.thenervousbreakdown.com/snadelson
www.portlandmonthly.com

Our spring 2011 title The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, is still going strong…
www.thenervousbreakdown.com
www.opb.org

Advance reader copies of our spring 2012 title A Very Minor Prophet , by James Bernard Frost, have arrived!
We’re busy getting review copies organized and on their merry way. Lots of great things in the works for this one. We’ll keep you posted!

Purchase Hawthorne Books titles directly at…
www.hawthornebooks.com/catalogue

The Luminist's David Rocklin is coming soon to a city near you!

David Rocklin’s The Luminist launched this Saturday, October 1st and you know what that means — lots of great author events to follow for Mr. Rocklin! Here’s the current lineup.

Coming soon to a city near you!

Sunday, 9 October 2011 :: 2.00 pm — Portland, Oregon
Wordstock Literary Festival | Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE ML King Blvd., Portland, OR 97232 T: (503) 235-7575 :: David Rocklin will read from his debut novel The Luminist.

Sunday, 9 October 2011 :: 4.30 – 5.45 pm — Portland, Oregon
Wordstock | Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE ML King Blvd., Portland, OR 97232 T: (503) 235-7575 :: David Rocklin will teach the workshop The How and Where: On Setting as Character in Fiction.

Monday, 10 October 2011 :: 7.30 – 8.30 pm — Portland, Oregon
Powell’s Books | 3747 SE Hawthorne, Portland, OR 97214. T: (503) 235-3802. :: David Rocklin reads from his debut novel, The Luminist.

Friday, 14 October 2011 :: 7.00 – 8.00 pm — Seattle, Washington
Elliott Bay Book Company | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122. T: (206) 624-6600 :: David Rocklin reads from his debut novel, The Luminist.

Wednesday, 19 October 2011 :: 7.00 pm — Chicago, Illinois
The Book Cellar | 4736-38 North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625. T: (773) 293-2665 :: David Rocklin reads from his debut novel, The Luminist.

Thursday, 20 October 2011 :: 7.00 – 8.30 pm — Northbrook, Illinois
The Book Bin | 1151 Church Street, Northbrook, IL 60062. T: (847) 498-4999. :: David Rocklin will sign copies of his debut hisotrical novel, The Luminist.

Friday, 4 November 2011 :: 6.00 pm — Atlanta, Georgia
Jennifer Schwartz Gallery | Brickworks at 1000 Marietta St., Suite 112, Atlanta, GA 30318. T: (404) 885-1080 :: Fall Line Press presents a book signing and reading with novelist David Rocklin, author of The Luminist.

Tuesday, 8 November 2011 — Midgeville, Georgia
Georgia College | Midgeville, Georgia :: David Rocklin reads from The Luminist at Georgia College.

Wednesday, 7 December 2011 :: 7.00 pm — New York, New York
192 Books | 190 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 1011. T: (212) 255-4022 :: David Rocklin reads from his debut novel, The Luminist.

Monday, 12 December 2011 :: 7.30 pm — San Francisco, California
The Make-Out Room with The Rumpus| 3225 22nd Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 :: David Rocklin will read from his debut novel, The Luminist.

The Luminist
by David Rocklin
pub. date October 1, 2011
www.davidrocklin.com
www.hawthornebooks.com

The Wordstock hot seat from the 2010 festival.

Only a few weeks away!

We love Wordstock here at Hawthorne Books. We have all sorts of events slated for this year’s festival and I’ve laid them all out for you here. Every year we have a booth at the Book Fair in the main hall and that’s where you’ll find publisher Rhonda Hughes, senior editor Adam O’Connor Rodriguez and myself for a large part of the weekend. Hawthorne Books authors will also be joining us at different times on Saturday and Sunday to chat with folks and sign books too so please come by and say “hello.” See you at Wordstock!

Wordstock readings and workshops with Hawthorne Books authors:

David Rocklin — 2pm Sunday reading with Anna Solomon; 4:30pm Sunday writing workshop the How and Where: On Setting as Character in Fiction.
Scott Nadelson — 1pm Saturday reading with Rahul Mehta; 3pm Saturday workshop In the Beginning: Crafting Compelling Story Openings.
Lidia Yuknavitch — 12pm Saturday panel My Censor Myself with Ben Moorad, Kerry Cohen and Lynn Connor; 11am Sunday panel What’s with America’s Sexual/Literary Hang-up with Steve Almond, Cheryl Strayed and Viva Las Vegas; 4pm Sunday reading with Lisa Wells.
Monica Drake — 1pm Sunday screening and talk about Georgie’s Big Break with Andy Mingo, Brian Lindstrom.
&
Rhonda Hughes, Hawthorne Books publisher — 11am Saturday panel How to Win Over Agents and Editors.
Liz Crain, Hawthorne Books editor — 2pm Saturday panel Every Book is a Start Up.

Wordstock blog posts with Hawthorne Books authors:

Scott Nadelson’s guest blog post and Q&A.
David Rocklin’s guest blog post and Q&A.

Wordstock 2011
October 6-8 at the Oregon Convention Center
www.wordstockfestival.com

Coming soon to a bookstore near you!

On Thursday, October 20, 2011, I will be in the middle of a reading tour for my novel, The Luminist (pub. date Oct. 1st). Almost exactly in the middle, as it turns out. The middle of the journey and the middle of the country. That evening I’ll be reading at a bookstore in Northbrook, Illinois. For anyone outside publishing, or Northbrook for that matter, that might not mean much. For me, I have the date circled. I grew up there.

When I think of Northbrook, I think of two inextricably linked notions: confusion, and bike riding. There was a lot of both.

I spent ages eight through eighteen in Northbrook, a northern suburb of Chicago. I entered (and some say exited) puberty there – confusion. I began to regard my family as people with lives before me and around me and in spite of me – confusion. I began to hear the words of their fights, not just the melody or decibel level – confusion. I entered high school and found myself among new friends. Their faces inexplicably looked older to me, more adult and maybe a little haunted in the way adults’ faces were. I imagined they too were beginning to hear the words of their families.

These people all seemed, if nothing else, headed towards some sort of clarity that I lacked grievously. They seemed to possess ideas of themselves, now and later, when they were older and out of Northbrook.

At home, I thought about who I was, or would be, or could be. Confusion.

Enter bike riding.

I confined myself to Northbrook at first. Starting out in day, coasting down my driveway on Bob-O-Link (I’m not kidding) and through my neighborhood (a little newer, a little showier) and onto an adjacent street that was as canopied with maple and birch – and prewar memories and blue collar lifespans – as my street was trimmed and newly minted. My house sprang up next door to the older Northbrook, that came out of the war I wasn’t born for, and sent sons to the one I was too young to understand.

I would sail by small craftsman houses and into Northbrook’s heart, its downtown. To the hot dog stand or the Chinese restaurant for something greasy, then to the bookstore, then the park and its tornado slide.

The slide had a chain ladder. It twisted. It had a machine-stamped metal crows’ nest and from up there I could see Northbrook open to me, with roads that traversed it and left it for other places. I could see the stone backs of the store I’d been to for my books – comics first, then the thicker pictureless novels when my own mind began to draw for me. From the top of the tornado slide, I could see how to leave.

I would stay up there until the streetlights came on. I don’t know that I gained any particular clarity at the top of the slide – eventually my rides took me to Northbrook’s train station, and from there downtown Chicago – but I found out something on the bike paths I made from the bookstore outward. I found that I wanted to be many disparate and unrelated things. I wanted to be a great hockey player, Bruce Lee, Jaco Pastorius, taller, smarter, better, away.

The only thread between these random pieces was my writing about them. I went to that bookstore, I got things to eat, and I brought it all to the top of the slide because I wanted to be lifted up from Northbrook, just a little bit, so I could see it all more clearly and write things down that made sense, or didn’t. I wanted the feel of pen to paper. I wanted to see it come out of me. What was happening in there on any given day didn’t seem as confusing when stilled in ink.

Eventually I left Northbrook for good. It felt necessary, like stepping away from a painting in order to see its true shape and scope. It felt like I couldn’t really write until I left the place I’d grown up in. I think it also felt like I could not stay where, for so long, I was yet to be. I needed to leave to become something.

Now I’m returning as part of the journey that has seen this novel published. I’m going to read at that bookstore. I don’t see it as the return of accomplished me; if anything, publication only reminds me of how many more stories there are to write. After a lifetime away, I’m just remembering how lovely it was to live up close to Northbrook, and how good it could look at dusk, from the top of the slide.

The Luminist
by David Rocklin
pub. date October 1, 2011
www.davidrocklin.com
www.hawthornebooks.com

Once again the fields we mow 

And gather in the aftermath.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometime during the summer of 2005, while working on a new story, I wrote lines of dialogue that surprised me. “The world died a long time before you were born,” a father tells his daughter and son-in-law, who are shocked and saddened by a recent bombing in Iraq, and even more important, deeply shaken by the slow rupture of their marriage. “There’s no point crying about it,” the father adds.

The lines are meant to be comic, and act mostly to reveal the father’s cynicism, narcissism, and desperate need for attention. But when I wrote them, they also opened up something for me that I hadn’t expected, pointing me to explore an aspect of life that most amazes and baffles me: how we carry the burden of horrific events, of great disappointments, of suffering and grief, and yet continue to pursue our desires, strive toward normalcy and even happiness, and accommodate ourselves to the possibility of failure. Despite the father’s subsequent words about Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the world hasn’t died; it continues to spin its cycles of tragedy and joy, of struggle and contentment, and the best the daughter and son-in-law can do is lean into the headwind and step forward into the unknown.

The story, which wasn’t yet named, eventually became the title piece of my new collection, Aftermath. And though it wasn’t planned this way, it now strikes me as a strangely appropriate accident that the book will be published so close to the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. For a decade we’ve been living in the aftermath of inconceivable horror and sadness, and certainly those events and the horror and sadness and struggle they have since sparked were present in my mind as I wrote the stories in this book, even though I rarely addressed them directly. The world should have died, but it didn’t; we should have given up our striving but we haven’t. Our resilience in the face of suffering, our stubbornness in the face of failure, our stupidity and blindness in the face of repeated mistakes: all of these things continue to amaze and baffle me, but in writing these stories I have come to see them not as an exception or aberration but as the essence of our being, our very lifeblood.

In one important way, the father in my story was right: we’ve been living in the aftermath for far longer than the few hours following a bomb attack, the few months following a break-up, or the few years following a global tragedy. We’ve been living there all along, and its challenges and obstacles, its gloom and hints of light, have given us our strength, our stubbornness, and occasionally our wisdom. “None of this really matters,” the father says later in the story, referring both to world events and to his daughter’s marriage. But whether he’s right or not, his daughter and son-in-law go on living as if every thing they do, every word they say, matters more than the last.

Aftermath: Stories
by Scott Nadelson
pub. date September 1, 2011
www.scottnadelson.com
www.hawthornebooks.com

Scott Nadelson’s short story collection Aftermath is due to spread its wings in just TEN days! Its pub. date is next Thursday, September 1st and with that comes all sorts of great book events throughout the Pacific Northwest. Below is the current lineup. Please be in touch if you’d like to set a reading or anything else for this one.

Friday, 09 September 2011 :: 7.00 – 9.00 pm — Portland, Oregon
Broadway Books| 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR 97232 T: 503-284-1726 :: Please join us for Scott Nadelson’s book launch party for Aftermath.

Wednesday, 14 September 2011 :: 4.30 – 6.00 pm — Salem, Oregon
Willamette University | Hatfield Library, 900 State Street, Salem, Oregon 97301 T: 503-370-6300 :: Scott Nadelson reads from his collection, Aftermath.

Wednesday, 21 September 2011 :: 7.30 – 8.30 pm — Portland, Oregon
The Press Club | 2621 SE Clinton, Portland, OR 97202. T: (503) 233-5656. :: Mountain Writers Series at The Press Club. Scott Nadelson and Lidia Yuknavitch read from their work.

Saturday, 08 October 2011 :: 1.00 pm — Portland, Oregon
Wordstock | 777 NE ML King Blvd., Portland, OR 97232. T: (503) 235-7575. :: Scott Nadelson will read from his collection, Aftermath.

Saturday, 08 October 2011 :: 3.00 – 4.15 pm — Portland, Oregon
Wordstock | 777 NE ML King Blvd., Portland, OR 97232. T: (503) 235-7575. :: Scott Nadelson will teach a workshop titled Compelling Story Openings.

Saturday, 08 October 2011 — Portland, Oregon
Wordstock | Oregon Convention Center :: Scott Nadelson reads from his collection, Aftermath.

Monday, 14 November 2011 :: 7.30 – 8.30 pm — Portland, Oregon
Powell’s Books | 3747 Southeast Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214 T: (503) 228-4651 :: Scott Nadelson reads from his collection, Aftermath.

Friday, 18 November 2011 :: 7.00 – 8.00 pm — Corvallis, Oregon
Oregon State University Library | Oregon State University Corvallis, OR 97331 541-737-1000 :: Scott Nadelson reads from his new collection, Aftermath.

Aftermath: Stories
by Scott Nadelson
pub. date September 1, 2011
www.scottnadelson.com
www.hawthornebooks.com

Portland publishers weighing in on ebooks in Portland Monthly...

Portland Monthly visited Hawthorne Books in the spring for this story about ebooks…
www.portlandmonthlymag.com

The Chronology of Water still garnering rave reviews!
www.word.emerson.edu/ploughshares

Our fall title The Luminist is already building quite a buzz…
www.blogtown.portlandmercury.com

Our other fall title Aftermath is as well. Here’s a recent interview with author Scott Nadelson.
www.cheekteethblog.com

Frank Meeink of Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is the subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary by Joshua Seftel. Here’s a sneak peek.
www.seftel.com

Kristen Wiig is shouting out her optioning of Monica Drake’s Clown Girl…
www.abcnews.go.com

Loretta Stinson, author of Little Green, recently spoke with Portland Tribune about domestic violence…
www.portlandtribune.com

Peter H. Fogtdal, author of The Tsar’s Dwarf, is working on his next novel…
www.fogtdal.blogspot.com

Poe Ballantine author of Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere recently did an interview over at The Nervous Breakdown…
www.thenervousbreakdown.com

James Bernard Frost’s upcoming novel A Very Minor Prophet already getting a lot of advance praise…
www.hawthornebooks.com

We love our independent bookstores and sometimes send them packages such as this one...

It seems like every week there is a new gloom and doom report on books. No one is reading them…the printed book is going the way of the dinosaurs…indie bookstores and small publishing houses are being cornered and eaten alive by large corporations. Roar! Obviously, we like to stay abreast of all publishing and literary news but we need some sunshine every now and again too. That’s why we’re celebrating what we have now in hopes of supporting it well into the future.

This week we put together the India-inspired gift packages shown above and sent them off to some of our favorite indie booksellers along with a copy of one of our upcoming fall titles — The Luminist. We have more packages to put together once we get more books in house so stay tuned. Some of the lovely bookstores that we’ve sent thank you packages to so far include Tattered Cover Book Store, Changing Hands Bookstore, Book Passage, The Booksmith, 192 Books, City Lights Books, BookCourt, WORD Bookstore, Vroman’s Bookstore, Prairie Lights Bookstore and McNally Jackson Books. It’s our way to thank these vibrant, strong, indie bookstores just for being. We love you and we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for you!

We’ve scheduled a lot of great book events in recent weeks for our authors at some of these bookstores and others. Please check out our website so see if a Hawthorne Books author will be in a city near you anytime soon! Thank you for reading! Thank you for writing! Thank you indie bookstores!