emilystjohnmandel:

The American paperback.

:)

This brings me to my last recommendation: The Afterlives of the Saints by Colin Dickey. 1. This is a book about saints. 2. It’s great. And now that we’ve gotten the important part out of the way, I want to tell you that Colin Dickey is so brilliant, it makes my eyes bleed. I try and imagine what the inside of his brain looks like, and all I can see is that scene in Bad Lieutenant when Harvey Keitel smokes crack and takes all his clothes off and cries. What I’m trying to say is Colin talks about things that never even register on most people’s radars. He speaks in a language only dogs can hear. And then translates it for the rest of us. And it’s awesome. I totally would have beaten him up in school for being so smart.

— Liberty Hardy of The Well-Readheads

(Source: bit.ly)

Got your nose in a book?

Guest Post by Unbridled author William J. Cobb

The Birds of Custer County

When he was editing my last novel Goodnight, Texas, the savvy Unbridled Books editor Greg Michalson asked me, “What are all these birds doing in the story?” So for my forthcoming third novel, I placed that obsession front-and-center in the title—The Bird Saviors. Ever since high school years I’ve been an amateur birder: I grew up in a small town on the Texas coast, Rockport, which is famous for being near the wintering grounds of the Whooping Cranes, and a flyover spot that boasts an annual population of over four hundred different species of birds. Our house was smack dab on the shoreline of Copano Bay, near a rookery where we could see Great Blue Herons, Snowy Egrets, and Storks nesting in a thicket of palmetto and live oaks. But The Bird Saviors was composed at my home in Colorado, which has an altogether different cast and crew of bird life, most of them migrants or homebodies in the submontane habitat of my home at 9,000 feet in elevation. Here’s a list of what I often see in Custer County:

Western Tanagers, Horned Larks
Black-Headed Grosbeaks, Lark Buntings
Black-Billed Magpies, Lark Sparrows
Western Meadowlarks, White-Crowned Sparrows
Ravens,  House Sparrows
Mountain Chickadees, Brown Thrashers
House Wrens, Sage Thrashers
Robins, Sharp-Shinned Hawks
Vultures, Western Screech Owls
Pink-Sided Juncos, Grackles
Snipes, Rufous Hummingbird
Redwing Blackbirds, Blue Grouse
Bronze-Headed Cowbirds, Clark’s Jays
Western Kingbirds, Sandpipers
Red-Naped Sapsuckers, Least or Hammond’s Flycatcher
Williamson’s Sapsuckers, Wilson’s Phalarope
Northern Flickers, Kildeer
Kestrels, Mountain Bluebirds
Red-Tailed Hawks, Stellar’s Jays
Swainson’s Hawks, Burrowing Owls
Rough-Legged Hawks, Brown Creepers
Harriers, Evening Grosbeaks
Prairie Falcons, White-Breasted Nuthatch
Great-Horned Owls, Black-Capped Chickadee
Yellow Warblers, Starlings
Broad-Tailed Hummingbirds, Shoveler
Black-Chinned Hummingbirds, Pinyon Jay
Tree Swallows, Cliff Swallows
Audubon’s Warblers, Barn Swallows
Wood Storks, Ash-Throated Flycatchers
Canada Geese, Pine Siskin
Mallards, White Pelican
Nighthawks, Say’s Phoebe
Green-Tailed Towhees, Western Flycatcher
Bushtits, Dusky Flycatcher
Snipe, Vesper Sparrows
Warbling Vireos, Wild Turkeys
Canyon Towhee, Golden Eagle
Peregrine Falcon, Song Sparrow
Gray Jay, Clark’s Nutcracker
Crows, Merlins
Red-breasted Nuthatches, Pygmy Nuthatches
Barn owl, Goshawk
Bobolink, Common Yellowthroat
White-faced Ibis, Clark’s Grebe
Brown-capped Rosy Finch, Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Chipping Sparrow, Great Blue Heron
Pine Grosbeak, Rock Wren
Orange-crowned Warbler, Macgillvray’s Warbler
Hermit Thrush, Hooded Oriole

But what stands out in my mind is less the list and more so the particular remarkable bird encounters we’ve had over the years, like … . 
The Goshawk and the Great Horned Owl: Once we awoke the day after Christmas to see a Goshawk (a kind of woodland hawk, known for sweeping through the trees silently and swiftly, with a noticeable white eyebrow splash) perched on a stump where I split wood, grasping a dead Snowshoe Hare in its talons. Moments later we noticed a Great Horned Owl was perched on a nearby pine branch, and the two were fighting over the body of the hare—one of the biggest rabbits I’d ever seen, with elongated hind feet. We watched them for over an hour, and eventually the Goshawk flew away with part of the hare, and the owl swooped in to snatch what was left. Owls actually love our hillside, and one of my favorites is the Flammulated Owl, a small owl with solid black eyes that visits almost every May, and has a lovely, low call, going boop-boop-boop for hours every night, its plaintive love-call to find a mate. We’ve also seen or heard Barn, Western Screech, Saw-Whet, Pygmy, and Boreal owls on our hillside, and Burrowing owls in the prairie of the Wet Mountain Valley below.
A Rose-Breasted Grosbeak among a flock of Evenings:  I noticed that the American Birding Association recently named the Evening Grosbeak its Bird of the Year, and it is one of my favorites—the males have a beautiful black-and-yellow plumage, with great yellow eyebrows and strong beaks, which in the females is a lovely pale-green color. Every late spring they mob our feeders and swoop and swirl all through our yard, but in the last two years we’ve seen a single Rose-Breasted Grosbeak in the flock, a bird that is not supposed to occur that far west. It stands out quite clearly, with its lovely splash of bright red on its breast. 
Scott’s Oriole: One thing about birding is that you come to realize your world at a more specific, exact level. You come to see it’s not just a “bird,” but something much more specific—the way the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov noted that the word tree is rather neutral, whereas pine, spruce, or aspen conveys something more specific to the reader in the know. Last year I noticed an unusual black-and-yellow bird in the marsh area of my yard, and after rushing to get my binoculars, I spied a gorgeous Scott’s Oriole, not known to be in our area, for a day or two before it flew away. I love Orioles, and the Scott’s is remarkable for its hanging nest, often woven from yucca leaves/fibers. This one is almost like a comic-book bird—sleek, black-and-yellow plumage, bigger than a Robin, favoring arid scrubland habitat, although I saw it not far from our creek. Maybe it was thirsty.
Western Tanagers: These are perhaps the showiest birds of our hillside, with magnificent black, yellow, and red plumage, plus a lovely call, but they aren’t that easy to spot. They often flit around, and although we regularly have a nesting pair in our yard, it’s still a treat to get a good look at one. They look like mountain parakeets, smallish and brightly colored, singing often from treetops or high branches, a splash of red and yellow against the green backdrop of pine needles.
American Kestrels: Lastly, I can’t forget to mention Kestrels, that lovely small hawk often seen perched on the power lines along our county roads—with its bluish wing plumage and cinnamon back feathers, dark face stripes. It’s like a little falcon, swooping over the ditches and kiting over the fields. It’s the last bird mentioned in The Bird Saviors, and one of my all-time favorites.—William J. Cobb

Click Here to read William’s Blog

See William J. Cobb’s book The Bird Saviors

Emily St. John Mandel

bookstalker:

I hope everyone had an enjoyable long weekend! Mine was spent on/in various balconies, backyards and rooftops drinking various beverages. Definitely a promising summer preview.

I’m heading off to Minneapolis this week, so I won’t be doing an events post, but I did want to share a delightful book launch I went to late last week. Brooklyn-based author Emily St. John Mandel presented her newest novel, The Lola Quartet, at WORD Bookstore last Thursday. True to the book’s jazz theme, it was a classy affair.

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Django Reinhardt was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

He’d recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point, he’d promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. “You don’t want to drift through life all addled, Jack,” his mother’s voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he’d spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

He had two jobs after that. There was the job he did for Eilo, the eight or nine hours he spent at her service. Driving to visit and photograph houses, negotiating with the residents of foreclosed homes, writing up property descriptions at his desk. Eilo liked his work. He neither enjoyed nor particularly disliked the occupation. He wanted only to reach the evening, when the real work began. His secret investigation, the story he was tracking, the focused hours spent waiting for Daniel to appear in the doorway of the police station.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small dim room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d’Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d’Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the best music Gavin had ever heard.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet