The Book Table

A fiercely independent discounted new and used bookstore. Ten years young at 1045 Lake Street, Oak Park, Illinois.

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We have literary prints from Obvious State! They make great gifts! http://www.booktable.net/literary-prints-obvious-state

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We can’t say enough good things about Alexandra Kleeman’s wild and wonderful novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. That’s why we’ve chosen it as the store’s favorite book of 2015. The staff each selected their favorite books, too, though in some cases it’s their second favorite since so many of us wanted the Kleeman novel for ourselves.

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Color the eleven most recent popes!

The coloring book craze is in full swing. Suitable for both children and adults, you’ll find this new book as exciting as a puff of white smoke.

Yes, we have markers, gel pens, and colored pencils to go with it (and they all include red for Pope Benedict’s footwear).

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We still have tickets available for our exclusive Chicagoland event with Patti Smith this fall! Get them while they last!

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We have hundreds of great British bargain books in the store right now: UK editions of William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Philip K. Dick, Oliver Sacks, Virginia Woolf, Emma Donoghue, Cormac McCathy, P.G. Wodehouse, and more! The vast majority are $7.95 or less. You’ll be able to get a lot of pounds of books for not a lot of £s.

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Small Talk: Open Letter Books

Conversations with editors and publishers of small presses on the value of independent publishing.

Open Letter—the University of Rochester's nonprofit, literary translation press—is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers, co-founded by Chad W. Post in 2007. Publishing ten titles in translation each year and running an online literary website called Three Percent, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that they hope will become the classics of tomorrow. 

The Book Table: Open Letter is housed at the University of Rochester. Would you tell us briefly how and why the press came into being there? 

Chad W. Post: Back in 2007, I was hired—along with Nathan Furl and E.J. VanLanen—to create a "literary program” at the University of Rochester that would support the developing literary translation programs for undergrads and grad students. The goal was to give students working in literary translation access to the wider publishing world. So everyone getting the undergrad certificate, or the MA in literary translation, has to intern with Open Letter, which means that they take a class in which part of the time we discuss how publishing works as a whole, and the rest of the time they work on projects for Open Letter. Projects like writing reader’s reports, doing sample translations, creating marketing plans, proofing forthcoming titles, etc.

The other goal of the press, when it was getting set up, was to create a high quality series of books in translation—something that would reflect well on the university, while also receiving good critical attention and adding something unique and necessary to American book culture. 

TBT: These days, when I think of music, I think of i-Tunes. When I have a question, I turn, increasingly, to Google. And untold millions of people, when they read books, apparently read Fifty Shades of Grey, not that that's a bad thing. The world can feel like a pretty small place. With Open Letter's focus on world literature, I'm curious if and how books, in your mind, make it bigger, slower, more unknown.

CP: That’s a great question. What I find fascinating about working in world literature is the vast amount of unknowns there are, which turns me on in an explorative sort of way. There’s constant dismay about the paltry number of translations published in the United States on an annual basis, which is totally justified (fewer than 600 works of translated fiction and poetry came out in the U.S. last year for the first time), but it’s literally amazing that we have access to books from almost all corners of the globe. There’s a joy to looking into a particular country or region, reading the handful of authors that most people know about, then starting to dig in and find out about who might be worth reading next. It’s like a treasure hunt. But you’re right, there is a delay, a slowness to it. As a publisher, who is putting up $30,000 or so to make a book available to the English-reading world, you want to make sure you’re not making a huge mistake. So you read reader’s reports, talk to others, get sample translations, and, assuming you’re still jazzed enough about a book, you sign it on and receive the finished translation... nine months or a year later. At which point you finally get to return to that passionate interest you had developed some time back. Publishing time is totally fucked up. 

TBT: The press has published more than 50 books from countries all around the world, which sounds like a nearly impossible feat for a staff that consists of four people. How do you discover the books that you decide to publish, without, I assume, the ability to read in dozens of languages? And how do you manage to get them all translated, edited and “out there”?

CP: I wish we had four employees! (We only have three: myself, Nathan Furl, and Kaija Straumanis.) Kaija is the only one of us who is truly fluent in languages other than English. (I can read Spanish, but not at the level of the books I want to publish. I’m not linguistically gifted in that way.) She reads Latvian and German and is our senior editor. But even if there are a lot of books from around the world translated into German, there are many books she’s worked on where she can’t read the original. It would take an essay to fully answer your question, but basically, aside from a degree of trust in the translator (that she isn’t leaving out chapters or rearranging things willy-nilly), there’s an ability editors develop in which you pick out areas that don’t read right, mention them to the translator, and find out that these were the exact sections the translator had questions about as well.

To more directly answer your question though, there’s a lot of work that goes into publishing these books. The basic process is already intense: deciding what to acquire, working with a translator and author, editing the book, designing it, getting it into the hands of booksellers. And then there’s the marketing side of things, which, honestly, never ends. You can never do enough for a book, and almost no matter what you do, there’s no clear-cut way to know ahead of time if your plans are going to “work” and result in thousands of people reading this piece of literature that you’ve been thinking about and working on for two years or so.

TBT: In addition to publishing books, Open Letter runs the online literary website Three Percent (named after the small percentage of books published in the U.S. that are translated), which reviews and maintains a database of new works of translation. How does staying up to date on what other presses are doing inform your own editorial goals?

CP: It sort of opens our eyes to what’s coming out, what’s missing, where we fit into the current landscape, etc. Also, I’m a reader first, then a publisher, so I want to know what’s out there that I can read--in those rare moments when I’m not focused exclusively on our titles. Also, there’s something more community-centric about publishers working in translation. They tend to support each other, rather than fighting for the Next Big Brooklyn Author, so it’s nice to know what everyone else is up to. Plus, I hope that people reading Three Percent find books that they want to read, even if they’re not published by Open Letter. There are so many good books out there, and we want to do our small part to give people access to finding out about them.

TBT: Without overgeneralizing, is there an aspect to American literature, in general (Damn!), that has come to take shape in your mind after years of closely reading works from outside the U.S.?

CP: There are two aspects of American literature that I don’t like, and which definitely come from being exposed to international literature: 1) the reliance of most mainstream American authors on neorealism and the desire to write books based on visual, concrete, straightforward statements and ideas and images. Abstractness has been eliminated from most of our writing, and heaven forbid you don’t create a true plot that advances and unfolds, rather than exploding or digressing or going off the rails in any way at all; and 2) the proliferation of cute, quirky coincidences to drive plots. Most of the American books I’ve read recently use coincidence to such extreme ends that I feel cheated. Station Eleven is a perfect example of this. The odds that five connected characters all survive the apocalypse and are reconnected in the new American is astonishingly low. It’s an insult to the reader to use a device like this and then pass it off as some form of domestic realism.

That’s not to say there aren’t great American writers out there. Marlon James’s Brief History of Seven Killings is wonderful, in part because it is so voice-driven and digressive. The structure of that book works really well. And that’s what I find a lot in the international books I like—authors are much more advanced in terms of style and structure. They don’t patronize their readers. They give readers a chance to engage with a book in ways that go far beyond mere “entertainment.” If I’m only going to be able to read so many books before I die, I’d prefer to read books that challenge me in satisfying, stimulating ways. I don’t need TV in written form. Contemporary international writers are more adept at using the medium to achieve interesting effects. Something that partially comes from being connected to a wider literary culture—one that doesn’t focus almost exclusively on itself.

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Taking a page (or two) from Rad American Women to celebrate, well, rad American women. Lucy Parsons, Patti Smith, Temple Grandin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Baker and countless, nameless others are paid tribute in a book “for the women we haven’t learned about yet, and the women whose stories we will never read.” 

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May the 4th Be With You

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... are celebrating Independent Bookstore Day, Saturday, May 2, 2015! 

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Get Down

As if April wasn’t cruel enough, here comes My Struggle Book 3 and 4 (available Tuesday, April 28, in paperback and hardcover, respectively) by Norwegian sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard. About the book Paula writes, “The novel is an intense meditation on death, parenthood, love, masculinity, money, art, and the mundane inconveniences that loom over it all. In the first volume, the narrator juxtaposes his sullen adolescence and his ineffectual middle age in relation to his father’s death. While Knausgaard’s descriptions of walking to the corner store for cigarettes or scrubbing his grandmother’s bathroom are obsessively detailed, they perfectly recreate the lived experiences that make life feel like a struggle.“ And that’s just book 1!

Find volumes 1-3 in paperback from Farrar, Straus and Giroux at The Book Table and catch up on the 6 part novel being called “an early-21st-century masterpiece.”

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Independent Bookstore Day

The Book Table is an independent bookstore. How independent? Independent enough to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day on May 2 with our mutually independent bookstore brethren across the country. And you can too! Stop in on Saturday, May 2 to purchase your usual three to eleven books, plus custom items available only at independent bookstores like ours. What kind of custom items, you ask? Gosh, you ask a lot of questions. A complete list of items up for purchase can be viewed and pined for here, but for now I’ll just mention the exceedingly limited, signed and numbered giclée print (pictured above) by local comic artist extraordinaire Chris Ware, consisting of images from his award-winning graphic novel Building Stories. The print, as I say, is a limited edition, available only in store on May 2. No phone, online or pre-orders, and as with every custom item on the list, a strict one per item per customer limit. As for our regular section of wondrous, discounted books low in calories, you can buy as many of those as you want. Woo! 

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Just Saying

About a third of the way through Geoff Dyer's 1997 shunted masterwork, Out of Sheer Rage, it becomes painstakingly clear that what you were taught or attempted to teach yourself about "the art of" writing is, frankly, disingenuous. Writing, in the face of Dyer's off-road, antic quest to write a book on D.H. Lawrence, shows itself for what it is, as if for the first time: as freighted, if not failed, and subjective a pursuit as catching, or dropping, a ball.* That isn't to say those who write can be measured in inches of can and cannot but, rather, writing isn't merely right or wrong. The fact that Dyer's book exists (not to mention its having been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award) is proof of this, if only in that Dyer knows he’s “wrong,” knows he cannot, will not write the book he tells himself he’s going to, and proceeds to write it anyway, with something like caution, self-abnegation and, ultimately, disbelief. You catch the ball, you drop the ball, you deflate the ball and fill it with ice-cream: all of it looks good on paper. 

Paul Valery said, "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." Plenty of diligent poets might care to disagree with that statement, but three new releases would seem to suggest that all work--be it fiction, nonfiction or some fuel-efficient bastard child of the two--is discarded, at some point, in search of its subject. In the introduction to Loitering: New and Collected Essays, Charles D'Ambrosio writes, "I worked on each of these pieces a stupidly long time.” Adding, “I wanted the writing to live an independent life... The subjects of these pieces mattered, of course, but it was important to me that the sentences alone do the convincing." The life of the writing, not the writer, is at stake here and, what’s more, at one remove from both the reader and its source. It’s as if the opposite of what we tend to think of as memoir and poetry’s exorcised presence were real; as if distance were taken for granted in every act of close reading. 

D’Ambrosio’s prose is set like a table, not a breath or syllable out of place. But unlike a still life, unbolted together, shakier, making a space for the preconceived accident, miracle, rather, of words meeting up, gathering steam. Reading his work is like learning to speak a new language, in theory. A couple of words here and there you may have missed, but an overall organized pattern of speech commingling with sense like a dream’s excerpt or flight of marmoreal stairs. The Folded Clock, we’re instructed to understand, is less “stupidly long,” less wound up with a mind to send itself off in the world outside its author’s, Heidi Julavits, head. “This book is an accounting of two years of my life,” she writes, and true to her word it is just that: a series of diary entries picked up where its author left off at age 10. And while she is surprised to find that her 10-year-old self reads more like a “tax auditor” than a future writer, the diurnal rhythms of middle-age have ceased to itemize life’s progress in favor of taking it--or being bombarded with it--one day, or piece of a day, at a time. Julavits still very much reflects on aging (at a narrowly imperceptible rate), but she is as concerned with less abstract, more perfunctory matters like whether or not to give her mother a necklace she bought for herself; the kinds of questions that don’t typically count in books about life that ask questions, and yet, the kinds that, like a wind, blow time in myriad, amnesiac directions, as The Folded Clock’s lack of chronology implies or, perhaps, insists. 

It isn’t a question of when in the last book I’ll mention, but who. The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline has a great deal in common with Cusk’s readers, whether we’re novelists teaching in Athens or not, in the sense that we experience her point of view in real time through a series of mostly one-sided conversations, and thus that we know very little about her, except in the way that what’s said is then shaped, as writers are wont to do, habitually drafting a fiction, as Charles D’Ambrosio writes, by which one stays at a remove from the present, in which one is “never alone.” The outline, the rough draft, the idea, is, by definition, just an idea. At best, it’s a placeholder for something greater; something, at least, to work with. Yet these essays and entries and dialogues suggest that beginnings and ends, and the fast and furious conclusions found therein, could themselves use a reminder that all writing, if you’re too careful, will leave you chafing your eraser in the dust or the proverbial glow of your laptop. As David Thomson writes in Why Acting Matters: 

“There’s no reason to call this process ‘rewriting,’ but in casting and rehearsal an alert writer can discover the inner world of his or her play. The interaction may be unconscious (perhaps it is best that way), but it cannot and should not be avoided.” 

The “inner world” these books anticipate, leave room for like an uninvited but not unwelcome guest, or else stop resisting, is everywhere apparent in their process, which includes the time after the book is read. Is the narrator of Outline’s point of view to be believed? Is it accurate to call The Folded Clock a mere “accounting”? Yes and no. It hardly matters. What’s important is that we keep asking. 

* If technique is involved in preparing to be hit with a discreet flying object, I’m unaware of it. 

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Book Club

We took a cue from the only thing we love as much as books to make finding your book club’s next favorite read as fun and easy as getting a drink.  Hand-picked recommendations guaranteed to spark conversation are currently on display. Any questions? Just ask one of our helpful, expert sommeliers! I mean booksellers.

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On the Table: Three Questions for Elizabeth Berg

Elizabeth Berg is the author of many bestselling novels, including Tapestry of Fortunes, “The Last Time I Saw You”, “Home Safe”, “The Year of Pleasures”, and “Dream When You’re Feeling Blue”, as well as two collections of short stories and two works of nonfiction. She has been honored by both the Boston Public Library and the Chicago Public Library, and is the founder of Writing Matters, a reading series designed to serve author, audience, and community. Elizabeth Berg reads from her new book, “The Dream Lover“, Monday, April 13 at The Carleton Hotel. Click here for details.

TBT: The Dream Lover is a novel based on the life of Aurore Dudevant, who left her marriage and French countryside estate to become a writer in Paris under the name George Sand. It's a provocative biography in and of itself. Did you find yourself writing to heighten or to humanize the mystery of her identity?

EB: The truth is, I found  myself writing about her because I thought that anyone who knew even a few of the circumstances of her life would find her as fascinating as I did. Imagine yourself at a party. You sit next to someone you've just met who tells you her father was an aristocrat, and her mother a prostitute. I don't know about you, but right away, I'd be all in--I'd have to send someone else to the hors d'oeuvre table to get some shrimp for me, because all I'd want to do is try to understand how that kind of beginning shapes a life.  And that was just her birth! Her whole life was full of intrigue, drama, contradiction and complication, passion and joy and fury and longing, wild success and spectacular failure. And the people she knew! Chopin, Turgenev, Balzac, Flaubert, Delacroix! Stop me now before I write another novel.

When I think of biography, I tend to think of a tightly controlled excerpt of life bound by external events. How does writing fiction enable you to remain out of control, so to speak, of your character's lives?

This is a complicated question to which I'm going to give a simple answer: one thinks how to write biography. One dreams how to write historical fiction. The biggest thing for me, in this novel, was to convincingly make the case that the greatest love of George Sand's life was not Chopin, as many believe, but rather another woman. And I believe that the alternating having and not having of that relationship shaped her life and her work more than any other influence. I also wanted to show Sand's life as a series of tragedies that moved into triumph. At the end of her life, she was very happy. very calm and peaceful, living out her final years at Nohant, her country estate, amid the birds and the flowers and the peasants she so loved--AND she relished being old! I admire that immensely.

You've written historically set novels in the past (We Are All welcome Here; Dream When You're Feeling Blue), but The Dream Lover is, to my knowledge, the first of your books to task itself with turning the facts of a life into fiction. Is there apprehension in that process? A fear of getting things “wrong”? And if so, what do you do as a writer to listen for your voice amid the voices of history?

Are you kidding? I QUIT when I was writing this book. I called my agent first, then my editor, and I quit. It was too hard, I said. Too hard! But my editor, in her amazing way, talked me back into completing it, and I'm so glad she did. She gave me back some power and trust that I had lost. The Dream Lover is, of all my titles, the book I worked hardest on, and I'm proud of it. As for mistakes, every writer makes them in every book. But I am content in knowing that I did the absolute best job I could, and I love this book. And people whose opinions matter a whole lot of me love it, too. Also, I think it's beautiful: the jacket, the endpapers, the typeface. I'd buy it just to put on my coffee table. Hint, hint.

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Impulse Buys You Won't Regret

Our inaugural Book of the Week was Loitering by Charles D'Ambrosio. Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, calls D'Ambrosio's new and collected essays "funny, ravishing, and deeply honest works of prose, marbled with lexical pleasures." While Colin keeps simply pointing and jumping and humming the tune to "Celebration" by Kool & The Gang. We'll place a new must read book by the register each week for your convenience and general lack of self-control in bookstores. 

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On the Table

Happy New Book Tuesday, readers! Today, David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, comes back to the table with The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Jason says: 

Everyone's favorite anarcho-anthropologist is at it again. This time with a group of essays that serve as the beginning of a left-wing critique of bureaucracy.The man who helped coin the slogan, "We are the 99%," proves once again that he is one of the most original and necessary thinkers (and activists) of our time.

And the blazing orange Penguin paperback edition of Redeployment is also out today. Called "the best thing written so far on what the war did to people's souls" (The New York Times), this soon to be classic work of short stories won the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction.