Bookstore hopping in Asheville, North Carolina » MobyLives

The blog Moby Lives has a nice post today about indie bookstores in my town of Asheville, NC. They profile four such shops, but I recently counted as many as eight in the city, and up to a dozen in the outlying areas.

They are a huge mix: two B&Ns, several used bookstores, a dedicated children’s bookstore (Spellbound), a revered rare/antiquarian (The Captain’s Bookshelf), a bookstore/wine bar (Battery Park Book Exchange) and a couple of indies selling new books, the most famous of which is Malaprop’s. The stores have interesting personalities. Accent on Books was in the book news a few years ago because they had logged numerous orders for the luxury edition of Carl Jung’s $195 Red Book when it was released in 2010. (Must have something to do with the fact that the city has a Jung center.)

I can’t really offer an explanation for the profusion of book haunts, but we do have a university and we’re the state’s leftiest city.

That does not mean these stores are not endangered. And it’s not a given that they are patronized particularly well. There’s a weird split in attitude between downtown and outside-the-city shoppers who don’t like to come downtown and pay for parking. When I recently mentored a high schooler who was writing her own children’s book, she suggested we meet at the B&N at the mall.

"What about Malaprop’s?" I said.

"What’s that?"

Adults have told me the same thing.

Link to the NPR interview with my wife

You can hear my wife Denise Kiernan talking about her new book The Girls of Atomic City via this link from this interview which aired this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

Denise was interviewed along with two of the women she profiles in the book.

The article accompanying the audio link also includes a free chapter of the book.

* * *

Geez, I hope this post comes through okay. Been having problems. More stuff has been going on, too. Will post about it soon.

Denise says...

denisekiernan:

Love that one of my atomic “girls” made this promo for NPR’s Weekend Edition: Colleen Black, 88 years young. Tune in this Sunday, March 3, from 8 to 10 AM to hear more from Colleen, Celia Klemski, and me as we talk about the Manhattan Project and “The Girls of Atomic City.”

The Girls of Atomic City makes editors' lists on Amazon

I have no idea how significant this is, but my wife’s The Girls of Atomic City was chosen for two three nice lists on Amazon:

Editors’ Picks for Best Books of the Month (History)

Editors’ Picks for Best Books of the Month (Nonfiction)

Big Spring Books 2013: History

Photo: Cubicle operators — aka “Calutron Girls” — unwittingly enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. Photo by Ed Westcott courtesy National Archives.

Button Man reviewed on Robert Lopresti's Little Big Crimes blog

Author Robert Lopresti says some nice things about my short story Button Man, in his weekly blog Little Big Crimes. The story ran in the March 2013 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

It’s nice to get noticed by Lopresti, the 2012 winner of the Black Orchid Novella Contest, which is devoted to stories in the spirit of Rex Stout’s creation, Nero Wolfe. Lopresti’s winning novella, announced at the Edgars last year, will run in the July/August issue of AHMM. I know Lopresti only by his work. He’s a hugely prolific short story writer with credits going back to the 1970s!

I actually wrote a first draft of Button Man in a creative writing class back in the mid-1980s. I was still in college, taking a class led by Tobias Wolff. I revised the story for class, and Wolff urged me to start sending it out, but I never did. It sat around in my hard copy files for about twenty years before I digitized it and revised it once again in 2012. Interestingly, the revised version which ran in AHMM is actually closer to the original story. Prior to submission, I ended up cutting two big scenes I remember adding upon the advice of that class. They just didn’t add anything to the story. Must be a moral in there somewhere.

Official Website for THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY

New website. Four cities, four parties.

Denise is announcing a new “official” website for her book this week. With it comes her schedule for events in four cities: Asheville (duh); Oak Ridge; Washington, DC; New York City. All events are in March.

The Death of a Chimp

This op-ed, which appeared this weekend in a Kentucky newspaper, references an article I wrote back in 2002 for Discover magazine, about the strange plight of lab chimps.

Simply put, the U.S. bred tons of chimps during the height of the AIDS epidemic, thinking medical labs would need an animal model on which to test potential treatments. But scientists discovered too late that when injected with the HIV virus, chimps don’t get AIDS the way humans do. That left lots of chimps looking for a place to live out the rest of their natural lives. Since they were infected with HIV and heaven knows what else, they couldn’t be returned to the wild. Either their home labs euthanized them, or they had to to be move to sanctuary facilities.

I just happened to visit one such sanctuary on the day a beloved chimp took sick and died. I went there thinking I was writing one type of story, and left with something completely different. The result won me an award from the Humane Society; Oliver Sacks picked the story for a spot in the Best American Science Writing anthology the following year. 

I still get emails from people from time to time saying how the piece moved them. In hindsight it’s weird to think that I actually struggled with how to write the piece. I was guided in my choices by the advice of a fine editor who asked me: “Why don’t you just tell the story you’ve been telling all of us since you got back?”

The story is included in my ebook of nonfiction pieces, The Scientist and the Sociopath. But you can read the chimp story for free right here.

When the 'Zon Goes Blooey!

Seriously, Amazon, you really want to know what I thought of this title?

Mention of THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY in Oprah's Magazine

Eventful couple of days here on The Girls of Atomic City front.

* The first hardcover editions arrived at home, to Denise’s delight.

* Karen Abbott, author of the NYT Bestselling books Sin in the Second City and American Rose offered up a generous, unexpected blurb:

The Girls of Atomic City is the best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story about a remarkable group of women who performed clandestine and vital work during World War II. Denise Kiernan recreates this forgotten chapter in American history in a work as meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable. 

Anyone who does narrative nonfiction is awed by Abbott’s work, so Denise couldn’t be more thrilled.

* And today came news of Denise’s book’s mention in the March issue of O Magazine. The headline of this spread is How Should I Celebrate International Women’s Day?

* A new website for the book should be going up soon, replacing the existing GirlsofAtomicCity.com. The new design looks amazing. Looking forward to sharing it with you all.

ARM OF DARKNESS is out now!

ARM OF DARKNESS. A mysterious demonic stranger intrudes upon the lives of unsuspecting people, forcing them to make choices with horrific consequences. Six short stories.

* * *

His hand is fashioned from the night sky.

It is powerful, dark, deadly.

He dwells in the world’s oldest mountains and always comes bearing gifts.

Truth is, he cares nothing for you. He is a trickster, a prankster, a demonic being who desires only to wreak casual violence on every human he meets.

He’s about to offer you a bargain.

Piece of advice? Don’t trust him.

* * *

ARM OF DARKNESS contains six short stories—Skullworm, Roadhouse, Glow, Kin, Sunshine Lady and the origin story, Arm of Darkness—for a total of 30,000 words. Three novel excerpts are also included in this e-book.

Available:

Kindle (US)

Kindle (UK)

Nook

iPad

Kobo

Smashwords

Paperback