PFB Events: February 2017

Winter looks to be coming to an end, at least up at Main and Broadway. and we've lined up a variety of events for the remainder of the month, including one next week that will be standing-room only:

Next Saturday, 18 February, from 7 to 9pm, we're pleased to welcome Lawrence Weschler to Vancouver.  Weschler is a writer of creative nonfiction and 20+ year veteran of the New Yorker whose work encompasses visual-art criticism and in-depth profiles of figures like Robert Irwin, David Hockney, J.S.G. Boggs, and David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, co-founders of LA's Museum of Jurassic Technology.

On the 18th, Weschler will read from, and discuss, his latest book, Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists (Bloomsbury, 2017), a profile of the legendary sound and film editor's other love, astrophysics, and, specifically, "the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe."

This event will be 100% packed out!  Admission is free, as is box wine & the deli tray, but I definitely suggest early arrival if you don't want to be standing halfway down the aisle.  And thanks to our friend Genevieve Fuji Johnson, for arranging Lawrence Weschler's visit.

On Thursday, 23 February, from 7 to 9pm, our friend Robin Bougie launches the 10th anniversary edition of his extreme cinema zine, Cinema Sewer, at Main Street.  Leave the kids at home, but come for chips, free wine, zines, and a variety of shock- & smut- related merch and door prizes.

On Friday, 24 February, we're down at SFU Woodwards for the launch of Jaleh Mansoor's Marshall Plan Modernism (Duke UP, 2017). Free admission.

Finally, because I can never close these letters without a recommendation, Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach, a perennial PFB favorite, has just released a new novel, Son of a Trickster, which reads like an extended riff on Twin Peaks, but with First Nations spirit beings stalking around an otherwise realistically rendered Northern BC.  I devoured this book in under 24 hours, and unreservedly recommend it.

Peter Straub's A DARK MATTER

New Peter Straub novel, a long tale narrated from multiple unreliable points of view which describes, with much stopping and starting and chronological back-and-forth, an act of ritual magic carried out by a group of university kids and a slightly older guru-figure in the late 1960s, its repercussions on their later lives, and, as with all of Straub's novels, the intrusion of the supernatural into the clearly-delineated present day. A contemporary riff on Arthur Machen's 1894 novella "The Great God Pan," one of the creepiest and most deeply ambiguous horror stories ever written, echoes of which crop up in M. John Harrison's excellent, but now sadly out-of-print novel The Course Of The Heart, and in frequent Straub collaborator Stephen King's recent novella "N." (collected in Just After Sunset).

Spurred by A Dark Matter's wonky potboiler plot, gorgeously crafted sentences, and genuine air of supernatural unease, I'm currently rereading his 1999 Lovecraft pastiche, Mr X., which was one of the first books I ever ordered new for the shop, which attracted exactly zero attention and no sales upon its release on our shelves. We still have maybe half a dozen copies of this complexly plotted doppelganger tale in the back room, which turns out to be a very enjoyable read: a tale of a young man, his "evil shadow," and their time-travelling psychopathic killer father, the "Mr. X" of the book's title, who imagines himself the servant of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, and communicates in a kind of pidgin Lovecraftese (Exclamation marks! Deeply purple prose!) that's as dead-on its target as Don DeLillo's Lenny Bruce riffs in Underworld. Funny, scary, and suspenseful in turn, Mr. X is that rarest of creatures, a truly great genre novel.

(Recent short interview with Straub here, plus some pictures of his writing desk and the manuscript of A Dark Matter)

(New Straub-edited Library of America volume of American weird, uncanny & fantastic tales, which we should have in early next week)

Jump Start Your Professional Reading Program

A six-pack of suggestions for platoon leaders, courtesy Small Wars Journal.

I find suggestions for new books to carry in many places. Lists of books professionals in any field are recommending to other professionals are often far more useful to me than mass-media bestseller lists. This is one of the more specialized and interesting reading lists I've recently found online.

(Image credit: US Army Center for Company-level Leaders)

Paul Auster's INVISIBLE

Paul Auster's new novel Invisible, his best since The Invention of Solitude. It's 1967. Adam Walker, a young New York City student and poet-in-training meets, then becomes hopelessly entangled with, a professor who may or may not be an American intelligence operative and his slinky French girlfriend. The shock of a brief affair with the slinky girlfriend either does or doesn't cause Adam to sleep with his own sister. Murder possibly occurs. Adam Walker may actually be "Adam Walker," that is to say, John Smith or John Doe. Adam's story may be a nonfiction memoir that's purposely ambiguous on key details, or a novel-in-parts in which "Adam Walker" is a character created by "Paul Auster." Memoir blends with twice-removed third-party recollections and other texts that keep interrupting, and rewriting, Walker's story. A thoughtfully conceived and gracefully written psychological mystery that keeps you in suspense right up until its ambiguous final page. Disturbing and highly recommended.

Top Ten

Top ten bestsellers, January-early March 2010:

1. Food Rules: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

2. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, by Gabor Mate

3. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, trans. Peavar and Volokhonsky

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

5. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris

6. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

7. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

8. Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

9. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

10. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Surprise #1: Michael Pollan and David Sedaris have a pretty firm lock on 50% of the list.

Surprise #2: no women writers on the list, though we do carry plenty of books by and about women. Some recent favorites: Zadie Smith's terrific essay collection Changing My Mind; Zoe Heller's just-released-in-paperback The Believers; Kelly Link's collections of short fantastic stories, which we specially imported from the US after discovering that no one in town seemed to have ever heard of her; and Nicole Krauss' breakthrough novel The History of Love, which just sells and sells and sells, new or used, has been read by at least half a dozen local book clubs, and is definitely one of the bestselling books in the shop's history.

Leonard Gardner's FAT CITY

Gardner's only novel, first published in 1969 and long out of print. Recently reissued by University of California Press. The story of two washed-up amateur boxers stuck in Stockton, California, and going nowhere fast. Denis Johnson calls it "a book so precisely written and giving such value to its words that I felt I could almost read it with my fingers, like Braille." Adapted by John Huston into a fine film, starring a very young Jeff Bridges and Stacy Keach (1972). We currently have copies.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

This book is really good; I'm rereading it now for a third time. Crawford, who holds a PhD. in philosophy, disliked managerial and administrative work, and took up fixing motorcycles as an antidote to frustration and boredom, and then as a permanent career. Crawford writes plainly and directly about the value of working with one's hands, and how manual labor is, at its heart, a kind of philosophical practice, a means of engagement with the world.

Crawford's work took on special relevance for me last week as Main Street's toilet breathed its last. Confronted with a $125 estimate to repair it, I opted for a visit to Home Depot, followed by several hours of monkeying around on the bathroom floor with brass washers, hoses, and a big pink rubber gasket that looked like something that had recently escaped from a tide pool. No flood, and Main Street's bathroom looks better than it has in years.

New Dispatches From The Land of Molecular Gastronomy

2008's best cookbook, now available in a relatively affordable ($50 CDN, after our standard 20% discount) trade hardcover edition.

Heston Blumenthal's magnum opus, a blend of autobiography, full-color food porn, recipes for oak tree essence, Bacon and Scrambled Egg Ice Cream, "jelly of orange and beetroot," snail porridge, etc., and 100+ pages of kitchen science (detailed instructions for working with vacuum sealers, liquid nitrogen, agar, dehydrators, centrifuges, etc. etc. etc.). Plus illustrations by Dave McKean.

Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck earned three Michelin stars in 2004, never went to cooking school; he's positive proof that genuine fascination counts for more than education.

Major Renovations @ PFB

No posts for a week or two now, because we've been busy upgrading Main Street's front room to cope with an influx of new books and recent arrivals. Lots of new display space for our ever-expanding selection of new books, and a few smaller A-frame units to hold some of the more interesting new arrivals, including Joseph O'Neill's terrific short novel Netherland (Dutch investment analyst lives in post-911 NYC, plays cricket, and registers the city around him in succinct, lucid sentences equally reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Richard Ford); Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife (First Lady to fictitious unpopular president reviews her life); John Huddy's Storming Las Vegas (Soviet-trained Cuban ex-commando and associates knock over five Las Vegas Strip casinos, three armored cars, & etc.), and lots more.

New stereo speakers in the back of the store, too; no more bass blaring at the desk!

"Read Any Good Books Lately?"

Yes: Paul Bowles, The Spider's House (1955).

The Washington Post concurs:

"As Francine Prose suggests in her introduction to the new Ecco paperback edition, The Spider's House should be read by anyone with an interest in either Morocco or terrorism. 'It's very, very strange and disturbing, this place,' observes a lady friend of [the protagonist]'s. 'I don't quite see how you can stay in it. It would be like being constantly under the influence of some drug, to live here. I should think going out of it could be terribly painful, when you've been here a long time.' Bowles also delves into the desperation underlying jihads launched at civilians, no matter where they occur: 'It was not independence they [the terrorists] wanted, it was a satisfaction much more immediate than that: the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the small amount of power necessary to bring about that humiliation.'"

Kem Nunn's The Dogs of Winter -- excellent surf-noir novel set on California's Lost Coast, now in stock at Main Street.

"The Dogs of Winter is a book of big, dark moods. It has about it an electric gloom, part of which has to do with crimes and obsessions, and part with the vivid portraits of the decaying reservations and lumber towns and the cold, cloudy, jagged coastal landscape of Northern California. But most of which has to do with the hard specificity and somber music of Nunn's prose."

Box after box of new mass market paperback science fiction in-house!

Former BC resident Robert Charles Wilson is one most underrated science fiction novelists working today. His Spin (above, winner of the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Novel) has some genuinely jaw-dropping moments scattered throughout it, mostly related to using the effects of time dilation as a potential solution for social problems, a la Chris Marker's La Jetee. Also recommended: A Bridge of Years, Wilson's clever and funny reworking of the plot of the original Terminator movie set in present-day Washington State.

Some Other Good Fantasy Books We Read While Waiting on George

Steve Erickson, Gardens of the Moon

M. John Harrison, In Viriconium

Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer et al.

Tim Powers, Last Call

C. June Wolf, Finding Creatures & Other Stories

("Don't forget Patrick Rothfuss' Name of The Wind," says Bonnie)