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New Books from the Midwest Booksellers Association
The Midwest Booksellers Association promotes independently and locally owned book stores. The Midwest Booksellers featured the the following new books on KARE 11 News Saturday: CRAZY GOOD: THE TRUE STORY OF DAN PATCH, THE MOST FAMOUS HORSE IN AMERICA by: Charles Leerhsen Simon & Schuster "Leerhsen delivers a mesmerizing look into a strange corner of American sports and folk history when Dan Patch became a household word?But the heart of the book is Dan Patch himself, a horse with an almost human capacity for calm and determination that deserves to be rediscovered by a modern audience." - Publishers Weekly
America has never loved any horse more than it loved Dan Patch, the champion harness racer who was nearly destroyed at birth, but who went on to become an undefeated, record-breaking champion. Charles Leerhsen's CRAZY GOOD: THE TRUE STORY OF DAN PATCH, THE MOST FAMOUS HORSE IN AMERICA recreates America at the turn of the 20th century through the story of the greatest sports hero of his day. At a time when the highest-paid baseball player, Ty Cobb, made $12,000 a year, Dan Patch was making over a million dollars. He was front-page news across the country when he broke the record for the mile, and subsequently lowered it by four seconds-a phenomenal achievement that stood for decades. In CRAZY GOOD, Leerhsen reminds modern-day readers just why Dan Patch was so beloved.
Appearances for Charles Leerhsen, author of Crazy Good. Saturday, June 21, 2008 Canterbury Park Horse Track 1100 Canterbury Road Shakopee, MN 1:00-3:00 PM Signing
Saturday, June 21, 2008 Dan Patch Days Signing at Dan Patch Historical Society Booth Savage, MN 4:00-6:00 PM Signing
Sunday, June 22, 2008 Common Good Bookstore 165 Western Ave N St. Paul, MN 2:00-3:00 PM Talk & signing _____________ SHELTER HALF: A NOVEL Carol Bly Holy Cow! Press Fiction "Walt Whitman said, "If you want me again, look under your boot soles." Carol Bly might have said, "If you want me again, read Shelter Half." It is, and will be, Carol Bly's only long fiction, the summation of thirty years of short stories and essays---all the ideas, characters, ethical quandaries, sly humor, voice and wisdom---a capsule of her life's work between covers. The ur-villian, Brad Stropp, the corrupt corporate shills, the besieged wives, the drunks, the heroine, Imogene, who thinks, and feels, and does her level best to live an honest and useful life, while negotiating the comical venality and corruption around her. The scene of the young woman priest confessing her unbelief to the very wise and humane old bishop is a masterpiece within the novel. And novel it is, not a sequence of stories sewn together. In its 300 odd pages, a world is created with great ingenuity that will surprise and delight the reader: a mysterious murder, shadowy characters, small town foolishness, and a heroine finding her path back from despair. This mirror held up to the world, is made with a wise hand that intends to reflect our own face. That is Carol Bly's genius---to bother our conscience, then to show us what a decent, honorable life might look like. Read Shelter Half, my friends, and be delighted and instructed together." -- Bill Holm "Carol Bly writes with compassion, rich detail, and sly humor about a collection of quirky characters who might just comprise our own community. She invites the reader on a pilgrimage to explore the moral workings of a collection of saints and sinners. With the kind of large intelligence that outdistances most writers today, Bly examines the customs and internecine plots of small town life, her ear perfectly atuned to the down-home speech and wry wit of her people. Only Carol Bly could be as funny and understanding and precise about the complications inherent in living side by side with the drunk and dangerous, the profane and avaricious. This is the kind of novel that makes you laugh out loud and look over your shoulder, wondering how the writer knew so much about your secret little crimes. If she skewers us, she also holds out hope that from suffering our own stupidities, we might also learn to be better people and care more about one another. A lifetime of hard fought and hard won wisdom surfaces on every page, and I can't imagine anyone being unmoved by the reading of it. This novel is going to be the book you give, the book you keep, and the book you treasure because we will never see its like again." -- Jonis Agee, Department of English, University of Nebraska Carol Bly, the acclaimed and very well-known Minnesota author, died last December. SHELTER HALF is her final work. --------------------------------------
THE MIRACLE LETTERS OF T. RIMBERG by: Geoff Herbach Three Rivers Press / Random House Fiction
In the tradition of fiction like Everything Is Illuminated and Indecision, this darkly funny yet poignant debut novel follows one man's quest for answers and redemption. After some major screw-ups, our hero T. has lost his job, wife, kids, and mistress. He decides to kill himself, but he feels compelled to write suicide letters, sometimes bizarrely humorous, sometimes melancholy, to everyone from his brother to Brett Favre to Bill Clinton. Instead of sending these letters, however, he hangs onto them, along with a batch of his beat-up journals, and he hauls them around in a backpack on his travels. Why does he go from Minneapolis to Belgium to Poland to Green Bay? His long-absent father unexpectedly sends him a letter and a large inheritance check, but T. wonders how a man who's supposed to be dead can write him a letter. He sets off to find out?and so do we! Geoff Herbach is a cofounder of the Lit6 Project, a Midwestern literary group, and their project Electric Arc Radio, a literary tragicomedy, which has been recorded live and has aired on Minnesota Public Radio. See www.lit6project.com and http://themiracleletters.com/ for more information. He lives in the Twin Cities. The Mission of the Midwest Booksellers Association is to strengthen Midwest independent booksellers and their partnerships within the larger bookselling and publishing community by providing opportunities to network and exchange information, educational programs, and tools to sell books to their customers and to grow a vibrant book culture.
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