Tag: books

After decades on the other side of the table, Cliff Graubart looked right at home at this week's Atlanta Press Club Holiday Author Party, signing copies of his debut short story collection, "The Curious Vision of Sammy Levitt and Other Stories," (Mercer University Press, $26). Since 1971, the owner of Atlanta's iconic Old New York Book Shop has thrown book release parties for his famous writer friends and shoppers, including Pat Conroy, Terry Kay and Anne Rivers Siddons. This fall, to mark Graubart's literary debut, Conroy and Kay returned the favor, co-hosting a Carter Center release party for "The Curious Vision of Sammy Levitt and Other Stories," a heart-warming, fascinating and funny novella and five short stories inspired by the New York native's boyhood growing up Jewish in 1950s Washington Heights.

For the first time in 12 years, longtime Atlanta readers were greeted by an old friend at the Atlanta Press Club Holiday Author Party at 200 Peachtree Street downtown Tuesday night — Atlanta writer Kathy Hogan Trocheck. OK, so technically, Trocheck is an annual attendee at the event, signing her yearly novel under her New York Times best-selling pen name Mary Kay Andrews (her latest release in hardback is "Spring Fever"). But before achieving fame with her Southern-accented fiction, Trocheck wrote 10 mysteries under her own name, most of them starring Callahan Garrity, a former Atlanta Police Department cop turned private eye and The House Mouse house cleaning business owner.

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Acclaimed writer Anne Lamott makes her second trek to Decatur First Baptist Church this year Monday night at 7 with a happy "accident" of a book, "Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers." Back in June, the beloved author of "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" packed the house with its sequel, "Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son" with Sam Lamott, the now-grown subject of "Operating Instructions." During their national book tour together, Sam urged mom to "get with it" and created Facebook and Twitter accounts for her to chronicle their adventures. Her Facebook status updates/miniature essays now entertain more than 87,000 fans. Before hopping a flight to Atlanta, Lamott discussed her slim new 103-page essay on prayer during two days off tour relaxing at home in Northern California.

In his third novel, A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag (Dzanc Books), Josh Russell puts a wry twist on a genre known as “captivity narrative”—typically a story of someone captured by rather uncivilized enemies. His protagonist Hannah Guttentag’s whip-smart and sexy tale, set in early 1990s academia, is instead about being captivated by such savages as librarians, grad students, and professors. Guttentag visits the strange lands of Nashville, Ithaca, and New Orleans—and her studies include Puritan-era women’s narratives. Russell, forty-three, is a remarkably gifted and unpredictable novelist. He grew up in Normal, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Maryland before getting an MFA at Louisiana State University. He worked as a 7-Eleven clerk, a skateboard salesman, an oyster shucker, and an editorial assistant to NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu before landing at Georgia State University, where he is an associate professor of English and codirector of the respected Creative Writing Program.

In South Georgia, high school football lies “somewhere between iconic and mythic,” writes journalist Drew Jubera in his first book, Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team (St. Martin’s Press). Jubera immersed himself in the 2010 football season of Valdosta High School, once the dominant team in the nation. In 2009 the New York Times dispatched Jubera to write about the fallout from a loss to county rival Lowndes High that seemed to mark the official end of the school’s glory days. Jubera realized right away that the story wasn’t just about football, so he spent a year commuting from his home in Atlanta and eventually took up temporary residence in Valdosta.

Atlanta author Drew Jubera's book "Must Win: A Season of Survival For a Town and its Team" doesn't officially debut until Sept. 4, but it's already scored a touchdown in Valdosta, the pig skin-partial Georgia town the veteran reporter chronicles in the book. Earlier this summer, at the Valdosta High football coach's request, Jubera sent his own dog-eared advance reader paperback proof of the project down to help out with the team's annual fundraiser at the Valdosta Country Club.

In 2001 Emily Giffin ditched a fledgling law career in Manhattan and set out for London to write fiction. Five bestselling novels and a few million dollars later, that decision looks pretty good. At forty, Giffin and her husband, Buddy Blaha, are doting parents to twin eight-year-old sons Edward and George and daughter Harriet, who turned five in May. The family recently moved into a $5 million Buckhead manse, and Blaha left a top job at Newell Rubbermaid “to smell the roses before gearing up again,” Giffin says. “We recently went to St. Barts for our ten-year anniversary, and he wrote ‘coach’ as his occupation on his immigration document. I’ve never seen him so happy. It really makes me realize how lucky I am to love what I do.”

In today’s digitized, attention-deficit world, guerilla booksellers must bring intrepid commitment to their work, infiltrating events where bespectacled conspirators are likely to congregate.

Author/Humorist/Drive-Your-Car-Into-A-Guardrail-Funny National Public Radio commentator David Sedaris returns to Atlanta October 27 for "An Evening With David Sedaris" at the Woodruff Arts Center's Symphony Hall. Technically, tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. through Ticketmaster.