In Los Angeles is the superb Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore which I have visited a couple of times. These days I am on their mailing list and here for your interest is a very small part of the latest issue of their newsletter, without any of the graphics unfortunately.

If you would like to be on their e-mailing list, or read the whole of their newsletter, then you will find their e-mail address and website at the foot of this post.

A piece of trivia for NZ readers, Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore is owned by the brothers of Professor Denis Dutton of Canterbury University, and of the superb Arts & Letters Daily internet publication which for me is compulsory daily viewing.


Calendar


Contact us

Dutton’s Brentwood
11975 San Vicente Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90049
310-476-6263
Duttons@earthlink.net



On the web

http://www.duttonsbrentwood.com/


Odds and ends

Hold onto those first editions…….especially if one of them is John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath! At a recent book auction held here in Los Angeles, a first edition of the novel, once owned by Steinbeck’s sister Elizabeth, sold for a record-setting (for a Steinbeck, that is) $47,800. The proceeds from the sale of this copy and several other rare Steinbecks amounted to $200,000, and will be used to refurbish the Pacific Grove bungalow where Steinbeck did much of his work.

Still going strong……….is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Despite an announcement last year that he was retiring from his craft, Gabo (as he is affectionately know in his home country of Colombia) has told friends that he has begun work on another volume of his memoirs. Though it is still too early to be talking up release dates, the eighty-year old (as of Tuesday) author does not appear to be slowing down after all.

Do you youtube?.............While you might not automatically think of the pop culture phenomenon of youtube.com in the same breath as the literary arts, it’s inevitable that a medium that allows users to post their own video would eventually come to include snippets from author interviews and readings. A recent test of youtube, conducted in Dutton’s Brentwood’s back office during a slow moment, revealed that searches on “Chuck Palahniuk”, “Kurt Vonnegut”, “Don Delillo” and “Alice Walker” all yielded clips of varying lengths. “Shakespeare” produced quite a few hits, though, sadly, no videos of the Bard himself. “Thomas Pynchon” netted us his appearance on The Simpsons (with a cartoon bag over his head) and “Charles Dickens” rewarded us with not only a video of an English bloke speed-reading Great Expectations, but also a lengthy (if not entirely scholarly) appreciation of The Old Curiosity Shop by the daringly-dressed Super Amanda. “Laurence Sterne”, sadly, brought up nothing (though “Lawrence Sterne” did offer up Howard Stern).