Between the Covers

Meet Kristy Kiernan at Books & Books

Friend of the Blog Kristy Kiernan comes over to our side of the state this week to talk about her new novel Between Friends. We're hoping that Kristy, author of the excellent Matters of Faith, has finally learned the origins of the giant chicken who is always fighting Peter Griffin on Family Guy. But if not, her appearance should be fun anyway, as her novels always leave you with a lot to think about.

I haven't yet read the new book, but Miami Herald staffer Hannah Sampson wrote in a review:

"Misfortune shows up early, settles in and makes itself comfortable throughout Kristy Kiernan's new novel. Her perfectly pleasant characters must cope with disease, violence, lost innocence and heartbreak. But somehow, all that bad luck doesn't make the novel bleak. Instead, Between Friends is hopeful in the face of impossibility."  

See Kristy at 8 p.m. Friday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.

Gay book club kicks off in Coral Gables

The Coral Gaybles Book Club kicks off at 6 p.m. April 11 and continues the second Sunday of every month at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave. in the Gables (or Gaybles, if you prefer). Miguel Santana, coralGAYbles member and author, will be discussing his novel, The Marién Revelation, available Friday.

Check out Steve Rothaus' Gay South Florida blog for more info.

Chris Cleave at Books & Books: a spy report

Spy report from Monday night's Chris Cleave appearance at Books & Books, courtesy of Friend of the Blog and Herald reporter Hannah Sampson:

The publisher of Little Bee (that would be Simon & Schuster) doesn't want you to know much about it from looking at the back. They say, instead of the usual plot summary, that "it is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it."

What's the deal with that? someone asked author Chris Cleave at his Monday night appearance at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

"It was rather cheeky of them," the London resident acknowledged before saying he thinks more publishers should follow suit.

So we won't ruin the marketing campaign here, except to say: Little Bee is fantastic, a knockout of a book about two very different women whose lives intersect, then split, then join again.

Cleave, who researched the novel for 18 months, said he drew inspiration from a childhood spent in Nigeria and a temp job working at an immigration detention facility. No more hints now!

A columnist for The Guardian newspaper with a wife and three kids, Cleave says his own life is very dull. "And I like it that way."

At the end of the full-for-a-school-night talk, which included some young creative writing students in the audience, Cleave praised the venue.

"If I had a book store as good as this within 100 miles of where I live, I'd drive 100 miles every day," he said.

Lionel Shriver, Chang-Rae Lee at Books & Books

Monday kicks off a big week for Books & Books in Coral Gables, starting with Chris Cleave (Little Bee) at 8 p.m. tonight. Naturally there are events all week, including Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues, I Am An Emotional Creature), who appears Tuesday at Temple Judea (you'll need tickets for that appearance).

Two other appearances stand out: novelists Lionel Shriver at 8 p.m. Wednesday and Chang-Rae Lee at 8 p.m. Friday.

Friend of the Blog Ellen Kanner interviewed Lee; you can click here to read her story about Lee and his new novel, The Surrendered.

But don't stop there, because Ellen didn't. She also reviews Shriver's latest novel, So Much for That, and her review opens with the following evocative line: "Lionel Shriver shows her characters no mercy."  Shriver is also author of the highly praised books The Post Birthday World and We Need to Talk About Kevin, neither of which I have read, but you can believe that I will.

So get out and about for books this week.

What are you reading now?

``The best book I've read in ages is Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett. It is an enthralling and superbly confident work of art that puts the reader ringside at the heart of a financial crisis, revealing it finally as an emergency of the human heart and its societal urge. . . . This is a big novel and a masterful debut by a writer whose talent is equal to his project and whose project could not be more timely.''

-- CHRIS CLEAVE, author of Little Bee

Cleave appears at 8 p.m. Monday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.

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Taschen store opens on Miami Beach

From Friends of the Blog Sara Frederick (and Juan Lopez and his trusty iPhone):

Taschen, an art book publisher that got its start in Germany 30 years ago, has finally landed in Miami, with a shop in the new 1111 building, 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.

The company, which prints high-quality books about everything from comics to lesser-known art to fetishism, is notable most recently for its 2004 heavyweight: GOAT (Greatest of All Time), a Muhammad Ali bio weighing 75 pounds and filling almost 800 pages. (The Champ's Edition is on sale at taschen.com for a mere $15,000, though you can get the Collector's Edition for $4,500.)

While you might not be feeling that extravagant, the Philippe Starck-designed store, which open Saturday, is worth a look: Check out the floor-to-ceiling murals and hand-poured terrazzo floor made from native South Florida stones while you browse the books.

The opening celebration runs from 4-6 with drinks and music by DJ Faux Real.

Kaylie Jones: A charmed life with a dark side

In one sense, writer Kaylie Jones has lived a charmed sort of life.

Daughter of James Jones -- author of the celebrated World War II novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line -- she grew up surrounded by famous literary figures in Paris and Sagaponack, N.Y. James Baldwin carried her on his shoulders at a civil-rights march in Paris. Willie Morris took her brother to his first baseball game in the States. Not every encounter was comfortable: William Styron propositioned her after her father's death (she said no). A brighter moment: Years later, she and her husband were married by Peter Matthiessen, a Buddhist priest.

And yet, as her compelling Lies My Mother Never Told Me (Morrow, $25.99) reveals, there was a dark side to much of Jones' life. When she was 16, her father died of congestive heart failure, his condition exacerbated by alcohol. He was 55. Her caustic mother Gloria, an alcoholic, waged a particularly cruel sort of psychological warfare against Jones -- who was also plagued by the disease until she quit drinking in 1992.

``One thing people ask when I do a reading is: `How could you tell all this stuff? Aren't you embarrassed? Doesn't it make you feel exposed?' '' says Jones, 49, who lives in New York City and appears Monday at Books & Books in Coral Gables. ``And I say, `No, it doesn't.' Because it's in the past, and I've changed. I don't feel like I've got anything to hide.''

In her memoir, Jones, also author of four novels, reconstructs the highlights and lows, touching on her family's past, her battles with the bottle and the increasingly difficult relationship with her mother. She uses some of her mother's favorite stories -- the tale about Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra and sympathy sex is a classic -- to paint a painfully intimate portrait of the once-glamorous woman with a difficult past who hobnobbed with the famous but was estranged from her daughter when she died in 2006 after a slow, painful descent into dementia.

Click here to read the rest of my interview with Jones, and see her at 8 p.m. Monday at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

Memory fascinates memoirist Malcolm Jones

The capricious nature of memory fascinates Malcolm Jones. What we remember of our past is a vital question to a memoirist bent on exploring life when he was growing up in North Carolina in the 1950s and '60s.

What's most surprising to Jones, author of the elegiac memoir Little Boy Blues, is the startling way in which memories re-emerge.

``I can remember one day I was writing about living with my aunt and uncle,'' says the long-time Newsweek writer, who appears Monday at Books & Books in Coral Gables, ``watching the kids coming out of the school across the street. I wrote that and stopped and stared at it. I had not had that memory until I wrote it! The memory was obviously in my brain somewhere, and for 50 years I hadn't thought of it at all. And all of a sudden there it was, clear as day. That happened two or three times. . . . The mysteries of memory just grow and grow for me.''

Jones turned out to be exceptionally adept at excavating memories of being an only child of parents who lived apart for big chunks of his childhood, officially divorcing (rare in those days) when he was 12. He writes of an early love for marionettes (``dolls,'' according to more disdainful relations) and of later falling in love with music after hearing one of his uncle's old blues records. He never laments growing up an only child: ``It gave me a rich interior life. I learned very early to entertain myself.''

Jones' father drank too much and disappeared for months; his mother -- who is really the focus of Jones' bittersweet story -- suffered and not quietly. Little Boy Blues (Pantheon, $24.95) explores their tempestuous marriage, their extended families and an old-fashioned Southern lifestyle, in which ``[m]y earliest views on life were formed by people who, even when they weren't born in the nineteenth century, saw the world much as it was seen during Reconstruction.'' Jesus was more or less considered one of the family.

Click here to read the rest of my interview with Jones, and see him at 8 p.m. Monday at Books & Books in the Gables

Here's how to get divorced by 30

When you blog about relationships for Psychology Today, you aren't surprised when people you barely know start asking for advice. The questions come even faster once the story gets out that you've written a book on the popular subject of how and why people fall in and out of love.

And yet, says Sascha Rothchild, you can still be somewhat startled by what you hear.

``I was at a party, and it got out that I had written a book about marriage and divorce. This nice gay couple was talking to me, and one guy walked into the kitchen, and his partner grabs me and asks, `If I have a threesome with two other people I don't know, is that considered cheating?' And I was like, `Um, yes!' He was like, `Oh no!' The other guy came back, and I just said, `Good luck to both of you.' ''

This sort of encounter is getting to be routine for Rothchild, who appears Thursday at Books & Books in Coral Gables. The Beach High grad (class of '94) -- daughter of Susan and author John (Up for Grabs, Going for Broke, A Fool and His Money) Rothchild -- has just published her first book, How to Get Divorced by 30: My Misguided Attempt at a Starter Marriage (Plume, $15 in paper). The television and movie writer, who lives in Los Angeles, is breezy and candid about sex, a series of not-so-great relationships and a ``starter marriage'' that she fears is typical for the lack of real thought that went into forming it: ``I was so invested in my timetable that I didn't give myself the option to not get married.''

Rothchild, 33, who was also a creative consultant for the VH1 dating show Tough Love, says that her post-breakup therapy acted almost like an editing process: ``I needed help to get to the heart of what I wanted to say. A lot of emotion came out in the first draft.''

Which was good, given that she did not want to write ``this sweeping book of emotion.

``I definitely wanted this to be fun at times and lighthearted at times and to have the overall sense that you can get married and divorced, and you don't need to buy a villa in Tuscany or go to India to an ashram to get over it. You can just stay in town and deal with it.''

Click here to read my Q and A with Rothchild, who appears at 8 p.m.Thursday at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

 

"Three Cups of Tea" author in Miami

I haven't had a chance to read Greg Mortenson's latest book Stones Into Schools yet, but a trustworthy source (thanks, Sue!) reports that it's even better than his bestselling Three Cups of Tea, about his work setting up schools is Pakistan.

Stones continues where Tea - which surprised me; I didn't expect to like it as much as I did - ended, with Mortenson's work to build schools and educate girls in Afghanistan.

You can see the author at 6 p.m. Sunday at Temple Judea, where he'll appear for Books & Books. Free tickets available at all Books & Books locations while supplies last. I can't imagine this won't be an evening to remember.