This week's Email

Click here for our events calendar to preview upcoming events through the end of October.
Click here for more complete descriptions and to buy signed copies online.
Members always save 20% on event books. Click here to register!

MEMBER DISCOUNTS THIS MONTH

As a benefit to our members, all cookbooks on our shelves will be 20% off throughout the month of September. Don't forget that our usual fall storewide member sale will take place Friday-Sunday, September 10-12, and members receive a 20% discount on nearly every book and 15% off nearly CD and DVD in the store that weekend.

NAIBA LEGACY AWARD
Eileen Dengler, president of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, wrote a very nice tribute about us last week with additional contributions from Rick Atkinson and Howard Norman. Thank you, Eileen and NAIBA members! Click here to learn more.

PARKING LOT TO BE RESURFACED
Our landlord will be resurfacing the parking lot behind the building on Sunday, September 5.  Therefore, it will be generally unavailable to customers on that day. All cars must be off the lot on Saturday evening, after close-of-business at 10 p.m. Very early on Sunday morning, the work team will remove the bike rack and planters.  The surface will be laid that morning and needs sufficient time to dry.  Probably by 2 p.m. on Sunday, it will be firm enough for pedestrian traffic, but not cars.  By Monday morning at 8 a.m., we expect that it should be ready for vehicular traffic.

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We are currently highlighting our display - Around the World with Books - featuring novels for travelers. This week we want to draw your attention to Russian classic fiction.

Though implausible, the most chortlingly funny book I’ve read in years is about graduate school. Elif Batuman - blogger, New Yorker writer, and madcap academic - is a disarming story-teller; her relentless enthusiasm for books is contagious. In the seven essays of THE POSSESSED: My Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15), Batuman recaps her immoderate enamorment with Russian literature and how this love leads her to Stanford’s Comp Lit department and a cohort which she likens to the spiraling madness of Dostoevsky’s Demons (a. k. a. The Possessed). Her love also takes her farther afield, to a mystifying summer in Samarkand studying Old Uzbek epics; to an International Tolstoy Scholars Conference and suspicions of foul play; and to the Neva River to investigate the curiously sinister backstory of an ice palace for The New Yorker. Familiarity with Babel and Bakunin aren’t prerequisites; Batuman’s book is a clever treatise on the reasons we read. - Lila Stiff

In July, she appeared (along with John Waters) on Michael Silverblatt's program "Bookworm" on KCRW, to offer her top ten list of Russians to read. Click here to see her selections on our website. The Possessed was one of our 2010 Summer Favorites and is discounted 20% to P&P members.

Click here to see more our booksellers' recommendations, sorted by regions of the world.

And it so happens that Penny du Bois is teaching a class this fall on Chekhov!

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CHEKHOV IN ENGLISH
Thursdays, September 30 - November 4, 2 to 3:30 p.m.

The time is past that we must identify Chekhov with the picturesque decline of Russia under the Tsars or with the distorted image of his work projected by the Soviets. Chekhov has become an honorary world citizen, read and performed widely, studied, admired and imitated by writers and thinkers in many languages.

Chekhov opposed theory and made fun of people who expected a better world to follow abstract principles. But his understanding of a vast range of characters is based on a definite attitude to life. “Pitiless” he was called, also tender and compassionate. Can we discern in the stories and the plays a definite moral attitude? He was able to observe and laugh at the foolishness and blindness of many different kinds of people, all struggling to survive, some forced to give up consoling images of themselves. We will be looking for the steely moral backbone that allowed him to pass through judgment to acceptance, and for insights into the stories which will help us to see how he created a new kind of writing for the theater.

We will discuss a selection of Chekhov’s stories and then read "The Cherry Orchard". The text will be THE PORTABLE CHEKHOV (Penguin, $18). For the first class, participants should read "The Name-Day Party".

The cost is $80 for members and $100 for non-members. Register at Politics & Prose or by clicking here.

Penny de Bois introduces herself:

I have always been a student of literature, at Harvard and Cambridge Universities, have taught at Harvard, Barnard College, in Belgium at the university in Namur, Catholic University in Washington, and for a long time in private groups.  The modern period - i.e. early 20th century - and English are my 'field' but I have taught what I wanted to learn, a huge variety from classical writers to present day avant-garde writers with special favorites Homer, Naipaul, Coetzee, Elizabeth Bishop, Kleist, Sebald, Nabokov and Vasily Grossman but this leaves out a lot of time spent on French authors and poets Spanish, English and Polish. My teaching concentrates on the particular experience and task of reading responsively to an individual author, thus on the complexity of reading itself.

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These titles were store favorites when they were in hardcover.

A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL (Penguin, $16) is the most intellectually invigorating book I've read since college. With the sharp eye of a scholar and the passion of an activist, Rebecca Solnit explores the tiny, evanescent utopias that arise in the aftermath of disasters. She argues that our natural response to catastrophes like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 is a fleeting joy and heightened, altruistic sense of purpose (rather than the looting and mayhem the media portrays). Most intriguingly, she suggests that post-disaster behavior lets us glimpse alternative ways of living. Solnit seeks to challenge and unsettle the reader, and this powerful work succeeds on every page. - Elizabeth Sher

WOLF HALL (Picador, $16), the latest Booker Prize-winner opens in 1527, as Henry VIII is trying to get rid of his wife of sixteen years, Katherine. He is interested in Anne Boleyn, a well-connected young woman at court who has kept him interested by refusing to consummate their relationship until they are married.  Thomas Cromwell is the King's man to move things along. Cromwell's eye is on the main chance. "You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook." Although society no longer burns people at the stake or beheads them, jockeying for political position and religious hysteria endure. The book's appeal is not only in its oft-told story, but Hilary Mantel's particular telling of the story. Humor and horror are close together—that is a characteristic of Mantel's writing and what gives her narrative so much power. - Mark LaFramboise

In THE FAMILY ALBUM (Penguin, $15) Penelope Lively paints a wonderful portrait of an ostensibly perfect family. Parents Alison and Charles, six children, and one au pair live at Allersmead, a shabby-genteel, sprawling Edwardian edifice where the huge kitchen is the heart of the home. Alison prides herself on her mothering, cooking, and homemaking and frets when family life is beyond her control. Her husband Charles remains aloof, constantly locked in his study while he researches and writes books. Most of the family scenes are presented in flashback as each of the adult children returns to the childhood home; thus memory is of keen interest here, along with a dark secret from the past. - Barbara Meade

Click FICTION or NON-FICTION to buy these books and to browse a more complete selection of recent paperback releases.

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P&P Members always save 20% on our top twelve FICTION and NON-FICTION hardcover bestsellers.

Click the titles to read more about these books and to buy them from Politics & Prose.

FICTION

1. Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22)
2. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson (Knopf, $27.95)
3. Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, $26)
4. The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman (Dial, $26)
5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (Random House, $26)
6. The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer (Knopf, $26.95)
7. Faithful Place, by Tana French (Viking, $25.95)
8. Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster, $25.99)
9. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson (Random House, $25)
10. My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson (Knopf, $26.95)
11. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, $24.95)
12. The Rembrandt Affair, by Daniel Silva (Putnam, $26.95)

NONFICTION

1. Composed, by Rosanne Cash (Viking, $26.95)
2. Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship, by Gail Caldwell (Random House, $23)
3. The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27)
4. Four Fish, by Paul Greenberg (Penguin, $25.95)
5. Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt (Penguin, $25.95)
6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot (Crown, $26)
7. Silk Parachute, by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)
8. Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life, by Dave Kindred (Doubleday, $26.95)
9. The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, by Richard Rhodes (Knopf, $27.95)
10. Lyndon B. Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 36th President, 1963-1969, by Charles Peters (Times Books, $23)
11. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant (Knopf, $26.95)
12. Through a Dog's Eyes, by Jennifer Arnold (Spiegel & Grau, $25)

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If you can't attend a talk, but would like to reserve a signed copy or a recorded author talk, click the title links to purchase online. P&P members save 20% on these author event titles.

Thursday September 2

Aviva Kempner - Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
7 p.m. Kempner's film uses vintage clips, behind-the-scenes-footage, and interviews to trace the life and work of Gertrude Berg, who wrote, starred in, and produced the first successful American sitcom, "The Goldbergs," which ran from 1949 to 1956, and earned Berg the first Best Actress Emmy. Kempner will be joined by Susan Stamberg, NPR special correspondent and a contributor to the film. Copies of the DVD are available for sale.

Friday - Monday September 3-6

LABOR DAY WEEKEND - NO EVENTS

Tuesday September 7

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (translators) - Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

7 p.m. Beauvoir's monumental classic on the place of women in society originally appeared in English missing 15% of its text. Now, 60 years after that truncated edition (produced by a retired zoologist with college-level French), the complete work is available in English. Borde and Malovany-Chevalier will discuss the continuing relevance of Beauvoir's book.

Wednesday September 8

ROSH HASHANAH - NO EVENT

Thursday September 9

Richard Thompson - Cul de Sac Golden Treasury & Keith Knight - The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain't Dead

7 p.m. In conjunction with the Small Press Expo (September 11-12 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center), we're delighted to host two artists who excel at contemplating the minutiae of everyday life and making it hilarious. Thompson's strip is focused on a loveable family in a suburban development, while Knight's is told through the eyes of a city dweller.

Friday September 10

James Sturm - Market Day

8 p.m. Co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies, Sturm has set this beautifully crafted historical fiction in the Eastern European countryside of the 1900s. His day in the life of Mendleman, a carpet peddler, uses spare narrative and finely-honed images to achieve a powerful emotional resonance.

Friday - Sunday September 10-12

P&P Fall Member Sale
All weekend long, Politics & Prose members receive discounts on nearly everything currently in stock. Most books are 20% off, most CDs and DVDs are 15% off. If you are not yet a member, it's a great time to sign up and take advantage of these and other discount opportunities. 

The same discounts will apply to shopping completed online when members purchase items currently on our shelves between Friday, September 10, 12:01 a.m. and Sunday, September 12, 11:59 p.m.!

To see the complete schedule and to purchase any of the above books, click here.

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Thursday, September 16, 7:30 p.m.

Friendship Heights Village Center
4433 S. Park Ave.
Chevy Chase, MD

MARTHA GRIMES
THE BLACK CAT (Viking, $25.95)
The prolific writer Martha Grimes presents her latest murder mystery as the inimitable Richard Jury returns in a thrilling tale of mystery, madness, and mistaken identity. A young woman has been murdered behind the local pub. The only witness is the establishment's black cat, who gives neither crook nor clue as to the girl's identity or her killer's. Please sign up in advance for this FREE event by calling the Village Center at 301-656-2797.

Tuesday, September 21, 6:30-9 p.m.

The Transition Network (TTN)
One Washington Circle Hotel
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire Avenues, NW
KERRY HANNON
WHAT'S NEXT?  Follow your Passion and Find your Dream Job (Chronicle, $22.95)

From a former mortgage banker who's back in the classroom to a tough cop turned Nashville music agent, these in-depth testimonials offer encouragement and advice from real people who have changed careers mid-life. Kerry Hannon, a personal finance editor and retirement correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, will present an exciting roadmap for anyone looking to make their next job their dream job.

TTN is a community of women over 50 who are navigating career transitions, broadening horizons, celebrating life, exploring options, and making connections. For more information and to register for this dinner meeting ($40; $35, TTN Members), contact Clare Donaher at cdonaher@starpower.net or visit www.thetransitionnetwork.org.

Thursday, September 23, 7:30 p.m.

Friendship Heights Village Center
4433 S. Park Ave.
Chevy Chase, MD
JANE SMILEY
PRIVATE LIFE (Knopf $26.95)
Ms. Smiley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for A Thousand Acres. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006.

Her riveting new novel traverses, from the 1880s to World War II, the intimate landscape of one woman's inner world: of the little girl within the hopeful bride, of the young woman filled with yearning, and of the faithful wife who comes to harbor a dangerous secret. It is also a heartbreaking portrait of marriage and the mysteries that endure even in lives lived side by side. A masterly, unforgettable novel from one of our finest storytellers.

Please sign up in advance for this FREE event by calling the Village Center at 301-656-2797.

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Please join us when story time resumes after Labor Day on Monday, September 13, 10:30 a.m. BearSong, the Guitar Man, will be back after several years' hiatus, leading stories, songs, finger plays, and more for children from birth to 4 years old and their caregivers.

Teachers - from pre-school through grade 12 - and school and public librarians are eligible for Politics & Prose's educator's discount program.  To qualify for a 20% discount on books purchased for your classroom or library and a 10% discount on personal purchases, please bring a current ID for the 2010-2011 academic year to the children's and teens' department to update your file.

CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE WEEK

(20% off through 09/08/2010)
Intricate, gorgeous moths flit across the page. Snails feed in the growing darkness. A spider's web sparkles in the moonlight. These are just a few of the scenes depicted in Joyce Sidman's (Red Sings from Treetops, Ubiquitous)newest book of nature poems. DARK EMPEROR: And Other Poems of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99) tells the tales of the woodland animals that emerge as the sun sets. Rick Allen's breathtakingly detailed woodcut illustrations illuminate Sidman's verse. A must-have for lovers of poetry and nature alike, this beautiful book includes informational side panels about nocturnal creatures. Ages 5 and up - Amy Kane

Read about - and buy - more of our favorite books for children by clicking here. 

Click here to shop more of our 2010 Summer Favorites online.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS!
MOCKINGJAY (Scholastic, $17.99), the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy by best-selling teen author Suzanne Collins has just been released. Mockingjay is discounted 20% to everyone who buys it at P&P. Read it today, because on Thursday, September 23, 3-4:30 p.m., Suzanne Collins will be at Politics & Prose.

We are excited about hosting her and look forward to having you join us. Even though Ms. Collins is not speaking, she is eager to meet her fans and very much wants to answer your questions as you go through the signing line. Please note: Due hand strain, Ms. Collins will be "signing" books with a special stamp custom created exclusively for Mockingjay events. Make sure you pick up your signing line ticket when you buy your book. You must buy your book from P&P to participate in this event. Click here to buy your copy of Mockingjay and to read more information about this book-signing!

For upcoming events and more from the Children and Teens' Department, click here.

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NEW

Bill Frisell, BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS (Savoy, $15.98) – Guitarist Bill Frisell has had a wonderful interplay with other string players during his career, whether violin, steel guitar, or cello. His new trio with long-time cohorts Eyvind Kang on viola and Rudy Royston on drums continues this winning streak. Melodically thrilling originals are interspersed with standards old and new: "Tea for Two" by Vincent Youmans; "Benny's Bugle" by Benny Goodman; "Keep on the Sunny Side," by the A.P. Carter; and the title track by Stephen Foster. Another beautiful release by Frisell.

Richard Thompson, DREAM ATTIC (Shout Factory, $15.98) –Singer, songwriter, and masterful guitarist Richard Thompson, pioneer of the British (Folk) Invasion, has made classic albums with Fairport Convention, with Linda Thompson, then as a solo act. His songs and guitar playing (both electric and acoustic) are in a class by themselves. He unveils 13 new songs, recorded live with a versatile quartet during a West Coast tour.

REISSUES

Frank Sinatra, SEPTEMBER OF MY YEARS (Concord, $11.98) – Sinatra selected some memorable songs for his thematic album from 1965 that looked at the passing of time. Surrounded by luscious arrangements by Gordon Jenkins, Sinatra sings the title song, "Don't Wait Too Long," "It Gets Lonely Early," "Last Night When We Were Young," and "September Song," among others. Bonuses include a live version of "This Is All I Ask," and the single of "How Old Am I?"

Miles Davis, BITCHES BREW: LEGACY EDITION (Columbia, 2CDs & DVD, $22.98) – The 40th Anniversary Edition of Miles Davis's pioneering album (with lots of added material, including a DVD of previously unissued live performance from Copenhagen, in November, 1969, featuring a band of superstars: Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette. The package also includes a 24-page booklet featuring an essay by Greg Tate.

Click here for more reviews and news. Please call us at 202-364-1919 to order these CDs.

• András Goldinger

UGETSU (Criterion Collection, $39.95)

Weaving together two well-known fables, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, is a work of stunning beauty. The movie takes place in sixteenth century Japan, amid an ongoing and bloody civil war. Genjuro, a potter, and Tobei, a peasant, leave their families to go on a dangerous trip into the city to sell their pottery in the hopes of achieving their separate dreams of riches and increased status. What they find, however, is that these dreams of lust, and this obsession for power and fame, only lead to tragedy. Mizoguchi's film traverses a fine line between the dreamworld and reality, mixing the supernatural easily with the misfortunes of life. This Criterion Collection production also includes a full length documentary on Kenji Mizoguchi and a booklet which includes an essay and the stories on which Ugetsu is based. This is a movie which will leave you stunned, amazed, and completely awestruck. Highly recommended. - Adam Waterreus