Western book Roundup

Montana Book Awards, “Obit” on Stage, and More

By Jenny Shank, 3-10-10

It might not be spring yet, but it sure feels like it here in Colorado, where our piles of November snow have finally started to melt and some crocuses are peeking out of the ground.  With the change in season comes a bunch of regional book awards and event announcements:

• Stories on Stage, a Denver theater company that presents literature through performances by professional actors, will present The Stories of Your Life based on the work of Jim Sheeler on March 13 (5 & 8 p.m., Jones Theater, DCPA). Sheeler, a former reporter for the Rocky Mountain News who won a Pulitzer Prize for his series Final Salute (later published as a book of the same name), honed his skills as a journalist by writing obituaries.  He collected his favorites in the book Obit: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People who Led Extraordinary Lives, which Peggy Lowe reviewed for New West.

• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Great Falls resident Jamie Ford is the winner of the 2009 Montana Book Award.  School Library Journal described the plot of the book in this way:

“Henry Lee is a 12-year-old Chinese boy who falls in love with Keiko Okabe, a 12-year-old Japanese girl, while they are scholarship students at a prestigious private school in World War II Seattle. Henry hides the relationship from his parents, who would disown him if they knew he had a Japanese friend. His father insists that Henry wear an ‘I am Chinese’ button everywhere he goes because Japanese residents of Seattle have begun to be shipped off by the thousands to relocation centers. This is an old-fashioned historical novel that alternates between the early 1940s and 1984, after Henry’s wife Ethel has died of cancer.”

The Montana Book Award is only the latest in a series that Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet has won.  As Ford notes on his website, the novel has also been an “IndieBound NEXT List Selection, a Borders Original Voices Selection, a Barnes & Noble Book Club Selection, Pennie’s Pick at Costco, a Target Bookmarked Club Pick, and a National Bestseller. It was also named the #1 Book Club Pick for Fall 2009/Winter 2010 by the American Booksellers Association.”

The Montana Book Award Committee also chose four honor books: The 600 Hours of Edward by Craig Lancaster (Riverbend Publishing), The Big Burn by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen (Penguin) and Stick Horses and Other Stories of Ranch Life by Wallace MacRae (Gibbs Smith).  The award reception will be held on April 8 during the Montana Library Association Conference in Bozeman.

It’s heartening to see the mix of books by small and large publishers together on that list, and the honor adds another interesting chapter to the journey of Craig Lancaster’s novel, which he originally self-published.  On the other end of the publishing spectrum, Reif Larsen reportedly received nearly a million-dollar advance for his The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.  (Check out Allen M. Jones’ essay about the book, which points out a few discrepancies in its details, such as its depiction of fireflies in Montana.)

• Speaking of books that have been featured at Costco, the book buyer there has selected Aryn Kyle‘s The God of Animals for her Pennie’s Pick for March.  This selection by Costco is one of the last major windfalls left for an author in what is soon to be a post-Oprah Winfrey Show landscape. 

As Denver literary agent Kristin Nelson, who represents Jaime Ford, recently told me, a book club selection by Costco or Target, or a featured slot in grocery stores virtually guarantees a book will sell a lot of copies.

This couldn’t come at a better time for Kyle, who grew up in Grand Junction, Colo. and lived for several years in Missoula.  Her first story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me, will be out next month, and the Costco selection for her novel should win her some new fans.  Kyle’s story “Take Care” is up on Five Chapters this week. (Via Fiction Writers Review.)

• Everyone with spring fever should certainly head to Tucson for the second annual Tucson Festival of Books, held March 13 and 14 on the University of Arizona campus.  The folks who planned it seemed to have gotten it right on their very first try, drawing over 50,000 people to last year’s events.  Dozens of authors will be there, including Elmore Leonard, Timothy Egan, Jamie Ford, and one of my favorites, Ron Carlson.

• Denver’s Dave Cullen won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award in nonfiction for his book Columbine.

• Literary Arts, the people behind The Oregon Book Awards, are currently accepting applications for the 2011 prizes. Books published between April 1, 2009 and July 31, 2010 by Oregon authors are eligible.

• On March 14, Janet Kay, who divides her time between Montana and Wisconsin, will read from her debut novel, Waters of the Dancing Sky, at The Grizzly Claw in Seeley Lake (4 p.m.).

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