Indie Holiday Picks on NPR's Morning Edition

One welcome mid-December tradition is Susan Stamberg's interview with several independent booksellers about their favorite holiday picks, which aired today on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. The three booksellers interviewed for "Booksellers Picks for Your Holiday Lists," which is also available on the NPR Website, were Rona Brinlee of The Book Mark in Atlantic Beach, Florida; Lucia Silva of Portrait of a Bookstore in Studio City, California; and Chris Livingston of The Book Shelf in Winona, Minnesota. Each offered their shortlist on-air, with more choices posted online.

Brinlee, a veteran of this annual NPR segment, talked with Stamberg about a few noteworthy titles, including Gone Tomorrow by P.F. Kluge (Overlook), which she described as a "gentle book and funny" about an academic who is riding on his past success with two bestsellers and is expected to produce a third when his perch is threatened by an up-and-comer.

Brinlee's other on-air choices were the nonfiction title The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford (Crown) and the novel The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (Riverhead Books).

Livingston gave a rave review to Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl (S&S), which is set in North Dakota. He characterized the novel as the story of a teacher from Chicago who's "the only young attractive single woman" in all of Owl. All is funny, small-northern-town mayhem until the arrival of a "blizzard from hell."

Livington's second on-air choice was A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats by Spike Carlsen (HarperCollins), which Stamberg said "was not necessarily a guy book."

The Oxford Project (Stephen G. Bloom, Peter Feldstein, Welcome), a collection of photographs of the residents of Oxford, Iowa, promises instant total absorption, said Portrait of a Bookstore's Lucia Silva. The book features recent photographic portraits of almost every resident of Oxford along with photos of their 20-years-younger selves. Subjects run the gamut -- "old hippies, bikers, younger evangelical Christians, WWII veterans, WWI veterans....," said Silva. Customers immediately love the book. "Every time I show someone this book in my store, they sort of sink to the floor and stay there for an hour until they've looked at every single picture."

Silva's other on-air choices were The Economist Book of Obituaries by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe (Bloomberg Press) and Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, translated by Geoffrey Brock (New York Review Books), a children's classic that Stamberg noted was a departure from the Disney version, with a "bad boy" Pinocchio.

These and additional selections featured on the NPR website are:

• All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (Riverhead Books)
• Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman (Simon & Schuster)
• Esther's Inheritance by Sandor Marai, translated by George Szirtes (Knopf)
• The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Harper Perennial)
• The Economist Book of Obituaries by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe (Bloomberg Press)
• The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (Doubleday)
• Gone Tomorrow by P.F. Kluge (Overlook)
• The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford (Crown)
• Mudbound by Hillary Jordan (Workman)
• The Oxford Project by Stephen G. Bloom, Peter Feldstein (Welcome)
• Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, translated by Geoffrey Brock (New York Review Books) Serena by Ron Rash (Ecco)
• So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger (Grove/Atlantic)
• A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats by Spike Carlsen (HarperCollins)