We're Baaack!

It is amazing how debilitating this Ohio River Valley crud can be. Sorry to be "off the air" for so long, but we're back, if only slightly.

This week the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded its 2007 honors. The awards were endowed by Joseph Pulitzer after his death to honor excellence in journalism, literary arts, and music. The prizes are administered by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is the winner for fiction this year. Debby Applegate garnered the prize for biography with The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. The award for general nonfiction was given to Lawrence Wright for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. We have all of these titles in stock now.

The prize for history was nabbed by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggles, and the Awakening of a Nation. The poetry prize went to Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard.

Interestingly, one publisher pulled down three of the more prestigious prizes. The Alfred A. Knopf imprint published McCarthy, Wright, and Roberts/Klibanoff.

What I'm reading: Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe & American Imperialism in 1853, by George Feifer.

Oprah's Made Her Pick

and it is (drumroll, please)...The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. This brilliant storyteller (from Knoxville originally) weaves a disturbing story of a post-apocalyptic West.

I've ordered conservatively, so if you want the book right away, please call the store early to be sure you get it now.

This paperback edition had been scheduled for release in September of 2007, but the lure of a March boost must have proved to be too tempting to Vintage, the publisher.

ISBN 9780307387899 (Quality Trade Paperback) $14.95