Rick Simonson

Laboring Away
September 3, 2007

Monday of Labor Day weekend it is. Though our stores are, for the most part, open for business, there is a degree to which this feels like one of the few holidays where some of us feel in sync with the larger public. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year, with all their highs and lows, are too wrapped up in retail mania enjoy. One hears of publishing colleagues, or sees/knows others in the public at large, going here or there, 'getting away.' Not so for us on the front lines. Memorial Day has, except those funny years when BEA/ABA was at the beginning of May or sometime late in June, almost always been wrapped up in getting ready to go. Either one is in motion, already traveling. or it's coming in on the holiday to collate invitations and prepare backlist orders. The 4th of July is certainly there; things get good and quiet with New York and publicity calls. But it is also high season for sales reps. One has to bloc out actively where they're concerned if one wants to stretch the holiday out, so as not to work the 3rd or 5th ... and yes, there have been overtures about working on the 4th.

Labor Day has its own unique place. It does mean something different if there are children about to start school - retailers dealing with that traffic certainly have it busy. It is, while the air is still warm, windows open, the blackberries ripe and all over the place, a chance to do a little sorting and sifting before the various kinds of busyness kick in once again.

Not that it is all idleness here on the home front: catalogs for lists to be bought soon are here for perusing; the makings and fixings for a busy October readings calendar are here, and there's a major to-do list of all kinds of correspondence. It'd now Monday afternoon ... and I do intend to tackle all those things yet before the weekend is over. Ha.

Some of those things will be waltzed with. But something else has also gotten quiet and still enough, that some more extended reading has finally happened. A few are books coing out down the road - early next year - for which I owe/will owe people some notes: Micheline Aharonian Marcom's breathtaking novel, or extended prose dream-poem, Draining the Sea (Riverhead); the Canadian edition (Gaspereau) of Robert Bringhursts's book of essays, The Tree of Meaning, coming in Januiary from yet-again reconstituted Counterpoint; and the U.S. debut of a German-language novel that some of us have been hearing about from friends elsewhere, Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon (Grove) - this is still in progress, and I am in no hurry to finish. More on those in time.

More currently in terms of imminent release, there have been Caryl Phillips' Foreigners (Knopf) - a writer whom someday readers will really discover, writing in overlays of the past with this quiet voice like no other; Saudi novelist Raja Alem's My Thousand and One Nights  (Syracuse), dwelled upon somewhat a few posts back; David Peace's breakout (it would so appear) novel, Tokyo Year Zero (Knopf), first championed, to my knowledge, among our ranks, by Paul Yamizaki of City Lights; and, presently, the Giller Prize-wnning first literary publication of Weinstein Books, Toronto physician Vincent Lam's book of linked stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures - an engaging book that in lesser hands could have been pedestrian but here hits the higher planes many a-time.

There are other things, too - re-readings of Rebecca Solnit, poetry by C.D. Wright, Ellen Bass, and Donna Masini, and one that certain noisy/nosy neighbors have been clamoring that I get to, John Marzluff and Tony Angell's bestselling (for Elliott Bay) In the Company of Crows and Ravens (Yale). I think that before I get to all the paperwork cited above, I better heed the corvids' caws, and go out and read them some stories about themselves.

Posted by Rick Simonson on September 3, 2007 | Comments (0)