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PW Picks: On Sale the Week of February 6
This week, picks take us to thrilling territory, onto alternate worlds, back to the Renaissance, and into the Mumbai slums. Plus: a comedic memoir, a “magically delicious” YA series kickoff, and more.
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PW Tip Sheet: This Has All Happened Before
Barnes & Noble has just announced that it won’t be carrying Amazon-published titles. Independent booksellers are balking too. Why does this all sound so familiar?
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Art Check: First of the Steampunks
In their latest illustrated volume, Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett re-team for a look back at the forgotten pulp hero of American “invention fiction” from the late 1800s, inventor and adventurer Frank Reade.
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Questions for a Bookseller: Outwrite Bookstore in Atlanta, Ga.
Many in the publishing industry were saddened to hear on Thursday, Jan. 26, that Outwrite Books & Coffeehouse, which had served the GLBT community in Atlanta since 1993, had closed its doors.
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On-Sale Calendar: Week of January 30, 2012
Your quasi-comprehensive list of releases for the January-February crossover, intuited by psychic government agents sequestered in a secret missile silo behind 24 inches of solid concrete.
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PW Picks: On Sale the Week of January 30, 2012
This week: policy primers; fiction popular, thrilling and imported; pioneering gay writers in the U.S.; Rabbi Shmuley’s controversial return, How to Be Black, and a posthumous Diana Wynne Jones picture book.
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Excerpt: My So-Called Reproductive Imperative
With the question of gay marriage looming large in the U.S. political landscape, Beacon releases a new title by scholar-author Hanne Blank on the origins of the label used to describe “traditional” married couples.
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The Internet is Not a Force of Nature: A Q&A with Rebecca MacKinnon
In Consent of the Networked, researcher-advocate Rebecca MacKinnon dissects the issues surrounding civil rights, democracy, and internet institutions that aren’t always looking out for users' best interests.
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PW Tip Sheet: Shame on Today
What’s wrong with morning-show producers? Were they not read to as children? Were they traumatized by Charlotte’s Web? Why else would disregard the winners of the highest children’s book awards in the land?
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PW Tip Sheet: Snug as a Book in a Custom-Fit Table-Shelf
Just what you uninhibited book hoarders need: give San Francisco architect/artist Lisa Finster a stack of your favorite books, and she’ll create a beautiful coffee table with perfectly-carved spaces for each volume.
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Not Often Surprised, But Continually Amazed: A Q&A with Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian
In We’re With Nobody, readers get an insider’s perspective on the business of digging up dirt on the campaign competition, an arcane but vital political art known as Opposition Research.
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On-Sale Calendar: Week of January 23, 2012
Your semi-complete list of releases for the last full week of January 2012, first discovered etched into the walls of ancient Aztec temples, and only recently translated by a mysterious band of archaeologist-monks.
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PW Picks: On Sale the Week of January 23, 2012
In picks: a lady's lit-fic one-two punch, novels from three genre favorites, an Adult-YA face-off, foreign relations, European history, Kennedy nostalgia, and social psychology. Plus: Weetzie Bat! (Gesundheit!)
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Art Check: Living Small
Adding to the series that began with 1973’s Shelter, green architecture pioneer Lloyd Kahn presents Tiny Homes, which celebrates (in some 1,300 photos) domeciles measuring fewer than 500 square feet.
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PW Tip Sheet: And I Feel Fine
I may get flack for this, but I’m one of the many deluded souls in America who have bought the Mayan Calendar-inspired 2012 apocalypse scenario whole hog. Like I suppose it is for others, this kind of (black) magic thinking provides a measure of comfort and hope when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the major problems facing the world—-like, say, when they're pointed out to me by a slew of this week’s titles.
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On-Sale Calendar: Week of January 16, 2012
Your complete list of releases for the third week of 2012, lovingly compiled in the dead of night by off-duty elves hired by the Tip Sheet through a wealthy retired shoe cobbler.
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PW Picks: On Sale the Week of January 16, 2012
Michelle Alexander and Deborah Scroggins each examine one of America’s great moral quandaries, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman examine one of America’s great political quandaries, and novelist Jason Heller poses a quandary for America: are you ready for the second administration of William Howard Taft?
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Back on a Raft with Taft: A Q&A with Jason Heller
In Jason Heller’s debut novel, Taft 2012, the journalist and author imagines a present-day campaign for William Howard Taft, whose presidential aspirations have reawakened a hundred years after the end of his one and only term.
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Questions for a Bookseller: Type Books in Toronto, Ontario
If you've been on the internet this week, chances are you’ve already seen the incredible stop-motion viral video made by animator Sean Ohlenkamp, his wife, and what has to be a large group of improbably patient volunteers, called The Joy of Books. The Tip Sheet spoke to the co-owner of Type Books, where the video was filmed.
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Excerpt: Esther Had Changed
In Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, a terrifying, world-threatening illness has turned the speech of children into deadly poison for adults; the suburban couple at the center of the action, Sam and Claire, have become de facto hostages of their own daughter, Esther, and the rest of the neighborhood kids.



