Book Sense Author Finds Inspiration in California Bookstore
Accountant Tess Uriza Holthe did not begin the writing class at her favorite bookstore with dreams of completing a novel. At the time, writing was a hobby. However, when Linda Watanabe McFerrin (author of The Hand of Buddha, Coffeehouse Press) -- who was teaching the class "Life into Literature" at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California -- gave her students an assignment to write about a family myth, a treasure chest of memories was unlocked for Holthe.
A brilliant young lawyer practices in a small town in the Deep South; respected and beloved, he's elected to the state legislature. He continues practicing law while serving in the House of Representatives for years until a case about rape and revenge changes his life forever.
Mark Kurlansky has become a veritable regular on the Book Sense 76 List. The hardcover edition of his The Basque History of the World (Walker) appeared on the November/December list in 1999; the hardcover edition of The White Man in the Tree: And Other Stories (Washington Square Press) was on the January/February 2001 list; and The Basque History of the World paperback (Penguin) was featured on the March/April Book Sense 76 in 2001.
Ernest Hebert, novelist and Dartmouth professor of writing, has taken to the open road for a book tour with stops at about 15 Book Sense stores. His work of historical fiction, The Old American (Hardscrabble, University Press of New England), set in the New England frontier during the French and Indian Wars, is based on the true story of an English settler kidnapped by an Algonkian king, Caucus-Meteor.
Karl Kilian, owner of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, is determined to try to put his city and his store on the literary map. "[The University of] Houston has this very good writing program … and it's made serious inroads to the consciousness of the city. But we still don't figure in nationally," he told BTW. "When times were better, [Brazos] bookstore itself could hold events ... but we're off the map in terms of author tours."
Ask Solomon Jones, author of Pipe Dream, (Random House/Striver's Row) what finally turned him away from a crack-addicted life that began in 1990 and he will answer quickly, "I turned to the Lord." Taking pages out of his own life, his novel Pipe Dream catapults readers inside Philadelphia's underground drug world to solve a murder mystery.
Last spring, out of the masses of books energetically offered at BookExpo America 2001, Jim Harris, owner of Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, Iowa, found himself compelled to pick up and read an advance copy of The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout (Ruminator), he recently told BTW.