Booksellers Highlight Summer Favorites at BEA

"The Frontline Booksellers' Summer Picks," part of the programming at last month's BookExpo America, featured a panel of independent booksellers who each highlighted a handful of their top spring/summer picks. The panel included Mark LaFramboise of Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.; Laura Grey of Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Kari Patch of Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Jessica Stockton of McNally Robinson in New York City; and Stuart Hecht of The Book Vault in Wallingford, Connecticut. The progam was sponsored by Pages Magazine.

Grey introduced the panel and explained that the scheduled host, Robert Gray, formerly of Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, was unable to attend for health-related reasons. By way of introducing the booksellers' handselling favorites, Grey read from a posting on Gray's blog, www.fresheyesnow.com. In "What Is Handselling?" Grey describes the act as "a private conversation between one bookseller and one reader. Sometimes it's about sales, and sometimes it isn't. Great handsellers don't just 'sell' you a book anyway; they make it irresistible, passing a gift from reader to reader."

Here are the panel's summer favorites:

Laura Grey

• Voices of Time: A Life in Stories by Eduardo Galeano (Metropolitan)
• Come Together, Fall Apart by Cristina Henriquez (Riverhead)
• Theft by Peter Carey (Knopf)
• The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories by Valerie Martin (Vintage)
• Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (Delacorte)
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Algonquin)

Jessica Stockton

• Adverbs by Daniel Handler (Ecco)
• Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage, Michael Mikolowski (Illustrator) (Coffee House)
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Random House)
• The Lost Colony Book One: The Snodgrass Conspiracy by Grady Klein (First Second)
• Sacco And Vanzetti Must Die! by Mark Binelli (Dalkey Archive)

Mark LaFramboise

• Whistling Season by Ivan Doig (Harcourt)
• Taking Care of Cleo by Bill Broder (Handsel)
• Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly)
• River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler (Houghton Mifflin)

Kari Patch

• Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (Puffin)
• The Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock (Houghton Mifflin)
• The Horizontal World by Debra Marquart (Counterpoint)

Stuart Hecht

• The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)
• Grail Conspiracy by Joe Moore, Lynn Sholes (Midnight Ink)
• The Book of Flying by Keith Miller (Riverhead Trade)
• A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon)