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Are we still coming down from our Halloween sugar high, or are the contents of this newsletter making us shake with excitement? We have signed first editions of Richard Ford's first novel in ten years, The Lay of the Land. Author Melissa Fay Greene's interview reminds us there is no us without her. Plus: new books by Susanna Clarke and Alain de Botton, the making of the dreamiest golf course ever, a paperback release of a P. D. James mystery, and much more! Uh-oh, we're crashing. Need... more... sugar...

NEW ARRIVALS

Back in college, I took a class that spent an entire semester on James Joyce's Ulysses. I've never slept better in my life. While many of my classmates proclaimed it an unprecedented study of a multifaceted work so complex that not one of them ever knew what the hell they were talking about, I was quick to point out that this was hardly the first time such a class had been tried.

My fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Lofton, dedicated an entire term solely to studying the modern classic "Blinky on the Lam." In this picture book, Blinky, an English-speaking frog with an eye moisture problem, is captured by an overzealous child, cruelly spirited from his beloved pond, and dumped into a cold, cramped aquarium. With the aid of a wise goldfish and an excitable hamster named Mr. Chewy, Blinky breaks out and finds his way back to his lily pad.

Mr. Lofton was an eccentric, gray-haired older teacher who would "ding" you for being off in "Hooky Pooky Land," a tactic my college professor never bothered to employ. He spent many long hours covering every aspect of "Blinky on the Lam," from the symbolism of an amphibian who couldn't stop blinking to the many allusions that filled every sentence. The narrator was considered unreliable since s/he never identified his/her relationship with the characters in the story, and Mr. Lofton instructed us to read between the lines to identify Blinky's loneliness in a world with no God. Ultimately, it was even decided that the happy ending was illusory and was merely Blinky's dying hallucination as he lay mangled under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler that hadn't missed him on that highway, as the unreliable narrator had claimed.

That was Mr. Lofton's final year of teaching. I've read "Blinky on the Lam" many times since, and concluded that, while he may have misread the ending, it is a tale that is infinite and contains many more multitudes than anything written by James Joyce. To this day I can scarcely drive past an eighteen-wheeler without checking the tires for a streak of green crushed between the treads.
—Brockman, blogmaster PowellsBooks.blog

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All through the neighborhood Fup roamed, west to Twenty-Third Avenue and as far north as Pettygrove, and finally she visited friends at the Ecotrust Building before returning home.

Halloween — in costume, no one recognized her, not even Zooey. She'd dyed her hair black, put on a heavy, chain-link collar, and rolled in dirt and damp leaves to complete the lived-in look. Goth Cat. Somebody cue up The Cure.

Zooey barked. He was leashed to a bicycle rack in front of World Cup Coffee.

"Shush," mumbled Fup as she made her way past him.

Zooey growled.

"Use your nose," she reminded him, but her familiar voice was clue enough.

"Fup!"

She decided that next year she'd wear sunglasses, preferably with tinted lenses — green, maybe, or yellow or brown, it shouldn't matter. If the world looks different enough through Fup's eyes, maybe it won't be as hard to remember that she looks so different to the world.

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