Amazon Publishing launches Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries series no comments
Amazon announced today a new series of celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl’s favorite and presently out of print books that will be released by Amazon Publishing in print, ebook and audiobook formats. Book Lust Rediscoveries is expected to publish about six titles per year.
About Nancy Pearl from the press release:
Nancy Pearl has been recommending books to readers for decades, and her best-selling book “Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason,” contains approximately 1800 book recommendations. A large portion of these books were either out-of-print or permanently out of stock. Pearl received numerous letters from readers who were eager to read these books, but were having great difficulty finding copies. This dilemma inspired Pearl’s idea to republish a series of her recommended books, complete with an introduction written by Pearl, a list of discussion questions for book groups and suggestions for other titles that may also appeal to the reader.
Called “the talk of librarian circles” by the New York Times and perhaps the only librarian to be immortalized as an action figure, Nancy Pearl has become a rock star among readers and the tastemaker people turn to when deciding what to read next. Having worked as a librarian and bookseller in Detroit, Tulsa and Seattle, Pearl’s knowledge of and love for books is unmatched. In 1998, she developed the program “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book,” which spread across the country. The former Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book, Pearl celebrates the written word by speaking at bookstores and libraries across the country and on her monthly television program Book Lust with Nancy Pearl on the Seattle Channel. She is also a regular commentator about books on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and NPR affiliate stations KUOW in Seattle, WPR in Wisconsin and KWGS in Tulsa. In 2004, Pearl became the 50th winner of the Women’s National Book Associates Award for her extraordinary contribution to the world of books. In 2011, Pearl received both the Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nancy Pearl will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sales of books in the new series to the Nancy Pearl Endowment for Public Librarianship at the University of Washington’s Information School.
The first two books in the Book Lust Rediscoveries Series
- A Gay and Melancholy Sound by Merle Miller. Due April 3, 2012.
Joshua Bland has lived the kind of life many would define as extraordinary. Born in a small Iowa town to a controlling, delusional mother who had always wanted a daughter rather than a son, her anger at him colors his life. His father, a compassionate drinker incapable of dealing with Joshua’s mother, walks out on his wife and son, leaving a vacuum in the family that is damagingly filled by his tutor-cum-stepfather Petrarch Pavan, scion of a wealthy New York family who has secrets of his own. Playing on Joshua’s brilliance, Petrarch trains him to win a nationwide knowledge competition, but Joshua’s disappointing results in the finals are met with anger and disbelief by both his mother and stepfather. If Petrarch was unsuccessful in teaching Joshua the information he needed to win the contest, he had more success in instilling Joshua with the cynicism, self-doubt, and self-hatred that fill his own soul.
Enlisting in the army during World War II, he serves first as an infantryman, where his irreverent letters home turn him into a best-selling author. Then, as a paratrooper, he meets the physical challenges he thought were beyond his reach and helps free the concentration camps before being wounded as the Allied forces free Buchenwald. Back home after the war, he becomes a wildly successful producer—and all of this by the age of thirty-seven. But when his production company flounders amid critical and financial woes, the reality of who he is becomes perfectly, depressingly clear: he has had a lifetime of extraordinary experiences—and no emotional connection to any of it.
- After Life by Rhian Ellis. Due June 5.
Naomi Ash was born in New Orleans and raised by her mother, Patsy, a medium who schooled her young daughter in the parlor-trick chicanery of the trade. From Naomi recreating presences with table cloths to providing the voice of the dead by talking through a fan, their act is part theater, part magic, and a little too much playing with the letter of the law. Eventually they must beat a hasty—and forced—retreat from New Orleans, relocating to Train Line, New York.
A sleepy village founded and inhabited by others with a spiritualist bent, Train Line is populated with card readers, table levitators, and crystal-shop owners. Low-rent “Psychic Faires” are held at the local Holiday Inn, and Patsy’s newest creation, “The Mother Galina Psychic Hour,” is on the local radio station. The town is a curious mix between old school “table rappers” and the New Age, and it is here that Naomi comes of age, learns the trade, and falls in love. But love is not only a many splendored thing—it can be dangerous as well. And for a young woman caught between fraud and truth, between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and between the secrets and lies of her youth, the past and present will come together in a rush of truth and consequence.
