BEA 2013

Shelf Awareness

BEA 2013: Book & Author Breakfast Storytellers

The critical importance of storytelling in our culture became the theme of yesterday's adult book and author breakfast, featuring Ishmael Beah, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Wally Lamb. The event was emceed by Chelsea Handler, late-night TV talk show host ("I'm very excited to be up this early.") and author of Uganda Be Kidding Me (Grand Central, October).

Ishmael Beah, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Chelsea Handler and Wally Lamb

Handler said she was "always excited to be involved with anything with respectable authors and to be involved with the book community at all since I have a television show on the E! Network. So, I'm grateful to every individual here who goes out and sells our books and has our books in your stores and everything you do for the book community."

Beah, whose next book is The Radiance of Tomorrow (FSG, January, 2014), also expressed gratitude to the audience "for making our work possible; for making our work accessible to the readers. We're still around so that means you're doing a great job."

Noting that his imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling in his small village in Sierra Leone, Beah said, "At a very young age, I learned the importance of actually telling stories.... The most important part of my work is to share the story, to write the story." He recalled a saying that "when you write a story, when you tell a story, when you give out a story, it is no longer yours.... Whoever takes it in, it becomes theirs. So you only become the shepherd of that story."
"There could be no better transition for hearing about storytelling than my belief that history at its best is about telling stories," noted Goodwin, whose upcoming book is The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (S&S, October). She said she "will always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families, and the public figures we have respected in history really can live on so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives."

Lamb's new novel is We Are Water (Harper, November). "We are governed by three basic instincts," he observed, "the need to find food so we won't starve, the need to satisfy our sex drive so we won't become extinct and the need to understand and interpret the world around us on some intellectual level." Ultimately, he said, "thinking leads to reading and writing, which is where you and I come in." --Robert Gray

BEA 2013: Pictures from an Exhibition

The BEA exhibition hall opened Thursday morning, with booths filled with books and authors. Snaking throughout the hall, like bookish conga lines, lengthy queues of happy fans (cleverly disguised as booksellers) waited to have books signed by their favorite writers. Anyone caught standing still in an aisle for more than a couple of minutes was likely to be asked which author's line they were in. The general mood, however, was a blend of patience and pleasure.

At the S&S booth, Lauren Weisberger signed copies of Revenge Wears Prada (June), the eagerly anticipated sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. In her new book, it's a decade later, and Andy and Emily have teamed up to start a magazine.

The cover art for the third book in Veronica Roth's series was revealed  recently; she signed posters for Allegiant, coming from Katherine Tegan Books in October.

In a fascinating conversation held at the Downtown Stage, Chuck Klosterman (I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real & Imagined), Scribner, July) asked some great questions and Jonathan Lethem (Dissident Gardens, Doubleday, September) answered them, in depth, offering an intriguing glimpse into his writing process. (We'll have more on this event next week.)