Category Archives: Books

Bookstand Surprise

The Stack

The Stack

It happened. For the first time since I’ve foregone a nightstand with a stack of books for simply a stack of books as a nightstand, I accidentally knocked it over.

“No!” I screamed.

Melinda bolted upright. “What’s wrong?” she asked with immediate and serious concern, as if expecting to hear I’d received a text with tragic news, found a bedbug, or spilled coffee on our all-white bedding.

“My stack!”

The couple dozen books careened and then hit the floor with an awful crash. The titles I’d taken care to sort in a precarious yet specific order were scattered, sprawling indecently, across the hardwood floor in various states of un-read. Pencils that once marked places rolled away. Spines broke. Pages crumpled. Authors who should never touch were spooning. All systems were destroyed.

“Oh no,” Melinda said with a gasp and then ducked behind the iPad. To stifle a smile?? She lives with that 3-foot tall tower of tomes beside my half of the headboard, because she loves me. However, Melinda has ceased expecting it to ever dwindle down to one and then poof! disappear. The moment I finish reading one book; another (or three) instantly replaces it.

Some do linger. I’ve been in the middle of Siberia for months. At Home is just such a nice base. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to reread Stonewall, which came on Monday. Thanks Mr. President! No, wait. Dune (Melinda’s favorite sci-fi story) is next. It is. This time, I promise. But give me a break, some, such as 352-pages of Savage sex advice, just take minute. Yet, others hardly leave my hands long enough to rest upon the top of the teetering pile. And a moment ago, they were all stacked accordingly.

I knelt down to assess the damage. Picking through the wreckage, I discovered a book that I’d intended to give as a gift years ago, but thought I had lost it. How did it end up in my stack? How could I have overlooked it? It was a slim, quiet, beautiful book that could have only been made in Cambodia. Yet, here it was—found—with serendipitous timing. For the first time in ages, I’m seeing the person for whom I’d bought the book on Saturday. What a gift! In so many ways, books surprise me.

Has one surprised you lately?

Egon Schiele’s Women

The first time I saw the Reclining Woman with Green Stockings she was a poster hanging on a dorm room wall. Today, I saw the actual green brushstrokes made by Egon Schiele at the Galerie St. Entienne. And thanks to Jane Kallir’s new beautiful book, Egon Schiele’s Women, I learned her name: Adele.

1917. Reclining Woman with Green Stockings in Egon Schiele's Women

1917. Reclining Woman with Green Stockings in Egon Schiele’s Women

A hundred years ago the Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele along with his mentor Gustav Klimt were stripping their female nudes for the first time of the conventional religious or literary roles expected to cloak women in art–lest they be considered obscene. Not to endow him with too much of a feminist impulse–he was still a product of his bourgeoisie class that married ‘virgins’ and screwed whores–however, Schiele’s portraits presented females as sexually liberated enough to be active participants in their own pleasure.

1914. Nude with Green Turban in Egon Shiele's Women

1914. Nude with Green Turban in Egon Shiele’s Women

Schiele painted females as a Girl Undressing as a Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings as Girlfriends as a Nude with Green Turban or as Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees. His inspirations lined the gallery walls in all of their bruised-fruit gorgeousness as adolescents and women in their own skin.

1913. Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees in Egon Schile's Women

1913. Wally in Red Blouse with Raised Knees in Egon Schiele’s Women

Peep them today or always.

My First Time

It was my honor to blurb Jackson Pearce‘s frank and funny young-adult novel, Purity. Here’s what I had to say for my first book cover blurb:

Out now!

“Reading Jackson Pearce’s Purity feels like talking on the phone with a lively and honest best friend—who is telling it like it is. Shelby reminds us all to be first and foremost true to ourselves. This book is a must-read for anyone thinking about making promises to themselves or others.”

Done any firsts lately?

Lighting Up Broadway

On Monday evening in what would have been pre-theater rush on any other day, I made my way through 42nd Street traffic to the American Airlines Theatre. Melinda and I had 6 o’clock tickets to celebrate Lynn Redgrave’s life.

I met Lynn and her daughter Annabel in 2004 when I was the marketing department of one at the art book publisher for their Journal: A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery From Breast Cancer. I was new to New York and barely 25. I’d only met a few famous people in passing and certainly had never handled one—let alone a Golden Globe winner and Broadway star.

Despite my inexperience Journal was bound to be a success. Lynn was a pro and Annabel alarmingly talented. What was unexpected was how much Lynn would inspire me to become the woman and artist I wanted to be.

“Amy,” Lynn said one evening after the book signing I learned that a greenroom wasn’t actually green. “Very few people will really want to do what you do. Figure out what you want, truly deeply want, and pursue it flat out. You’ll notice that most won’t work as hard as you will, so there won’t be so much competition after all.”

Lynn spoke from her acting perspective. Many may have believed they wanted to be a star but few (even if they possessed the talent) actually endured the constant workweeks, live humiliations, and public invasions of privacy that the profession required. She worked through cancer treatments—always adamant that she wasn’t too sick to work—she worked so she didn’t feel sick thanks to “Doctor Theatre.” She never missed a performance.

Maybe it was her voice training or her English accent but her advice punctured through my self-doubt and New York naivety, and I believed her. Lynn always did have a way of making an audience feel as if she were talking directly and solely to them, alone. I continued to hear her words long after I left the publisher and started to write…revise…write…submit…revise…and eventually publish.

Last May I learned from a Yahoo! headline that Lynn had passed away from cancer: “Actress, Lynn Redgrave, Dead at 67.” I cried at my desk. I remembered typing out the subtitle of their book “A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery from Breast Cancer” at least a zillion times, all the while convinced that she had recovered once and for all. I donated to her memory at The Actor’s Fund. I went to see plays on Broadway—especially the funny ones—in remembrance of her.

Assembling at the American Airlines Theatre for a memorial celebration a year later was fitting. Behind the speaking podiums and larger than life screen rotating photographs of the many Lynns people knew and loved, the stage was set for the current production of The Importance of Being Earnest. I saw Lynn in Earnest at BAM and then here in The Constant Wife. She had invited me for a drink afterwards, making me feel like the most important person in attendance.

Brian Stokes Mitchell opened the evening. Lynn’s sister, Vanessa, spoke. Jim Dale the Georgy Girl songwriter crooned the tune to her memory. Related actors read scenes from Lynn’s own plays Shakespeare for My Father, Nightingale, Rachel and Juliet, and The Mandrake Root. We saw a film montage accompanied by her real-life colleagues Liam Neeson, James Earl Jones, and Robert Osborne. Favorite songs were sung, including Maude Maggart’s “I’ll See Your Again.” Her children spoke. A recording of Lynn accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Image Network closed the evening.

The tribute that touched me the most was from her Dr. Clifford Hudis from Sloan Kettering. He encouraged us not to see a lost battle but instead all the victories of characters performed, art created, and family moments shared since her diagnosis. He concluded by succinctly summing up how I feel saying something to the effect of how humbled, thrilled, and honored he was to play a small role in such a big life.

In the end, there was a standing ovation. Melinda and I clapped in celebration of Lynn and her life, her achievement, her light that had touched all of us and continued to even now on Monday, when Broadway was dark and their stars were supposed to be enjoying their one day off.

Late-Night Literary Affair

Irvine Welsh giving us the grimy at the PEN Speakeasy: Sex; Erotic Reading last night. That’s Edmund White, Honor Moore, and Yael Hedaya behind him—waiting to crack their books, legs, and lips open. The red-lit reading started around midnight with a purity pledge led by Katie Halper and came full-circle with a rim job story a la Sir White.

I shared a crowded elevator with Salman Rushdie and his entourage on the way out. Together we fell flights down, down, down from the Boom Boom Room.

In the Beginning: Sarah Vowell

I went to see Sarah Vowell yesterday at the Brooklyn Public Library, because I was eager to lay eyes on the author of Take the Cannoli for the first time. I know, I know, it was published way back in 2000. But as with most books with titles that don’t start with Old or New and end with Testament, I was woefully behind in reading them. After memorizing line for line, verse by verse, version after version of The Book until I was eighteen, I’ve spent a decade and change trying to catch up on all the rest. Forgive me for just now making it to the V for Vowell section.

I read Take the Cannoli last week. For seven days and seven nights, I dog-eared pages, penciled margins, and smeared the typeface with tears and coffee and soup. I carried the paperback with me as Good Book toting believers do. I drug out the final 219th page, not wanting it to end. I lingered on the last word, “Hon,” unsure of what to do with myself next. I didn’t want it to be over. I wanted the book to go on and on. I sat in limbo until it finally dawned on me that I could probably Like her on Facebook (I was late cracking that book too.) where I sought and found the hoped for afterlife.

From her fan page feed, I discovered that she’d be in Brooklyn on Sunday to discuss her latest, Unfamiliar Fishes, about the annexation of Hawaii. Perhaps it was wishful reading, but I showed up thinking Phillip Lopate—another of my idols—was hosting, instead of Leonard Lopate from WNYC. Vowell and Lopate bantered back and forth like two radio pros somehow managing to make their audience feel included. The San Francisco Chronicle blurb on the back of Vowell’s book totally nailed her: she did wear “her intelligence and wit as comfortably as an old pair of pajamas.” I listened and laughed for the same reasons everyone did. Her wry, canny, cheek, warm-hearted, refreshingly, odd, quirky acuity that all the other blurbs called out. Plus, Lopate punctuated the conversation with word-nerd puns, quipping “Well, Sarah, you must have appreciated the Hawaiian language for all the vowels.”

When they did open up the dialogue, someone in the audience who looked like a mom or elementary school teacher or both asked if Sarah’s Cherokee et al. heritage contributed to her becoming a history buff. She prodded, “Maybe an early education about the Trail of Tears or something influenced you to…”

“The Trail of Tears?” Vowell interrupted her. “I’ve never not known that.” Perhaps sensing that the woman might be asking how she, herself, could instill a sense of history in a child, Vowell went on to acknowledge the Trail’s dramatic reenactment she wrote about in her essay, What I See When I Look at the Face on a $20 Bill, and how it was the first historical event she experienced—well, except for the Testaments—that brought history alive and communicated that the past had something to do with her.

I zoned out and wandered down my own path of things I’ve never not known. Until people started jostling around, standing up, collecting their belongings, and filing through the auditorium’s exit door. It was time to get our books signed, but I wasn’t sure if I needed to go that far. I stood there trying to decide all the way to the front of the line. I overheard the woman ahead of me say, “Just your name Sarah. It won’t be worth anything with mine in there.”

“Yep, only to you,” Sarah responded.

I handed over Unfamiliar Fishes and told her my name. She autographed the $29 hardcover I’d bought expressly for this moment. When I realized what I really wanted. “And if you wouldn’t mind, this one too?” I said, shyly pulling out my crusty Take the Cannoli. “I’ve loved it for a long time,” I lied, wishing it were true and but nonetheless trying to impress my devotion, as recent converts were inclined to do.

She half-smiled and proceeded to personalizethe book to Amy right in the middle of the title page illustration. My name sat next to a box of cannolis that were wrapped up with a bow on top, like a present. Sarah Vowell extended her hand and bestowed upon me the first everlasting gift I’ve ever happily accepted into my heart.