People

To some, "stage magic" means a man in a sequined vest doing a series of cheap tricks one after another, to the accompaniment of fast and repetitive music.

Longtime North Carolina bookseller Wallace Kuralt died on Saturday, December 13, in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Kuralt, brother of the late CBS journalist Charles Kuralt, had been treated for Merkel cell carcinoma, a skin cancer, for nearly two years, as reported by the Raleigh News & Observer. He was 64.

"A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak is like having your grandmother in the room with you," said Renee Poussaint, executive director and co-founder of the National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP) and co-editor of the collection of oral histories that tell the first-person stories of African-American elders, both the nationally notable and

Michael Hoynes, ABA's marketing officer, who helped the association build Book Sense into a vibrant national marketing program with over 1,200 participating booksellers, will be leaving ABA at the year's end. "I thought it was probably a three-year assignment, but it just ended up being five," Hoynes told BTW at ABA's Tarrytown, New York headquarters.

From the moment a farmer's hoe digging turf unexpectedly reveals the perfectly preserved severed head of a beautiful young red-haired woman, Erin Hart's debut novel, Haunted Ground (Scribner), captivates the reader with its parallel tales of two women -- one recently mysteriously missing and the other executed during the 17th century.

"The first objective is to make the statement that poetry and poets are just as important as novelists," said Scott Griffin, the founder of the Griffin Poetry Trust, which awards two literary prizes annually for poetry written in English. The prizes are worth C$40,000 each. One will go to a living Canadian poet, the other to a living poet from any country, including Canada. Poets Billy Collins (U.S.

Robert Kaplow has recently returned from Carnegie Hall. And no, he didn't get there by practicing -- well, an instrument, anyway. For the last 20 years, however, Kaplow has been writing and performing for NPR, teaching high school English, and authoring six books.

Here, Andy Weinberger, co-owner with his wife, Lilla, of Readers' Books in Sonoma, California, takes a look at customers who take it upon themselves to act as morality cops, and he makes the case for tolerance, diversity, and the public's right to information. This column originally appeared in the November/December issue of "One for the Book," an occasional newsletter from Readers' Books.

By Andy Weinberger

Homer Hickam, author of the November/December Book Sense 76 Top Ten novel The Keeper's Son (Thomas Dunne), said he knows what people are most interested in reading about: "Other people."

It was his own interest in other people -- specifically, his father -- that turned Hickam into a keen reader and a budding writer at a precocious age.

The King County Council of Seattle is presently considering a resolution to oppose any amendments in the USA Patriot Act that it deems to infringe on the constitutional rights of its citizens -- including Patriot Act amendments that allow for invasion of privacy, expanded government surveillance, and denial of due process, as reported by the Seattle Times.

Vittula, as Mikael Niemi explains in his first adult novel, is short for Vittulajanka, a district located in the Swedish village of Pajala. It's a place where the winters are long, cold, and dark. But it's also a place where the joys of being a teenager burn vividly.

By Kelly Justice of the Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia

As I head into this holiday season, I'm doing it without the guidance, support, and expertise of one of the best booksellers with whom I've ever had the privilege of sharing a stool behind a counter. Steve Richards passed away suddenly from a brain infection on October 21, and the bookstore's owners and I and the rest of the crew of the Fountain Bookstore are devastated at this unexpected loss.

Self-assured and passionate describe both the stories in How to Breathe Underwater and their author, 30-year-old Julie Orringer. This debut collection, published by Knopf in September, showcases the considerable talents of Orringer, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Cornell University and a recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she now teaches.

It's almost a given that anyone who achieves distinction as a writer will have started reading at an early age, encouraged by a sympathetic adult.

Such was the case with Edward P. Jones, whose highly praised first novel, The Known World (Amistad/HarperCollins), a September/October Book Sense 76 pick, has been nominated for this year's National Book Award.

Newtonville Books in Newton, Massachusetts, part of the Boston metro area, was conceived five years ago by an M.B.A. student at Boston University's Graduate School of Management. Writing a business plan for a new enterprise was the sole course requirement for one of Tim Huggins' classes, and he took the opportunity to create a viable design for his longtime passion, bookselling.