Loomings (Forthcoming Works)

Two of our clients have received starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews this week.

Here's an excerpt from what Kirkus said about Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (Norton, August 2009):

The umwelt, writes the author, accounts for the fact that different cultures give similar names, such as fish, to wildlife—and has long served as humanity’s most intimate connection to the natural world. By bowing to the rationality of a scientific view of the natural order, we have undermined our understanding of the world. Yoon’s accounts of brain-damaged individuals who cannot recognize and name living things—and of young children’s unquenchable interest, even before they can walk or talk, in the natural world—bring to life the marvel of our intuitive umwelt abilities. We must cling to these abilities if we are to preserve nature, the author argues. Brightly blending scientific expertise with personal experience, Yoon is an outstanding science writer who takes a seemingly dull topic and rivets unsuspecting readers to the page.

And here's a few lines from the review for Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places (Little, Brown, July 2009).

Alaska-based biologist Streever spent a year documenting the nature and science of cold. “Cold is a part of day-to-day life,” he writes, “but we often isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid.” .... With aplomb, Streever charts a meandering course of the land around him, providing an enthralling tour through haunting arctic tundra, permafrost tunnels of 40,000-year-old ice and the winter dens of hibernating beasts.

The Grand Armada (Agency Author News)

It's been a great week for agency clients.

David Mas Masumoto's forthcoming new book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer: Harvesting Legacies from the Land, scored a terrific review from Kirkus Reviews.:

Long before Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver turned to writing about food, Masumoto (Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer, 2007, etc.) was chronicling his work on an 80-acre farm of peaches, nectarines and grapes, as well as vineyards and gardens, in the Central Valley of California... A peach of a book, and with a recipe for raisins in the bargain—worthy of placement alongside the best of Wendell Berry, Liberty Hyde Bailey and other literary farmers.

Client Bruce Barcott's review of Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, by Doug Stanton (Scribner) took the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

Later on in the same issue of the Book Review, you'll find a review of Flotsametrics and the Floating World, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano. Here's a glimpse:

Ebbesmeyer’s goal is noble and fresh: to show how the flow of ocean debris around the world reveals the “music” of the world’s oceans. Ebbesmeyer does this through a series of studies of floating matter that are mostly pretty weird. Hockey gloves, plastic turtles, Nike sneakers — these are Ebbesmeyer’s lodestars, since they are often dumped en masse into the sea and distribute themselves around the world like so many data points on a vast liquid graph. Messages in bottles are also good, since it turns out they too are often put out to sea in great numbers. In the 1950s, the Guinness brewing company released some 200,000 messages in beer bottles. Even today, a few people write in each year to claim their reward.

You can view the full review here.

And it looks like Dan Savage's The Kid will be transformed into a musical this autumn (according to the NYtimes, Saturday, May 16).

Loomings (Forthcoming Works)

Kirkus Reviews just put out a great review of Lyanda Lynn Haupt's forthcoming book, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wildness (Little, Brown, July 2009):

A self-described posthippie ecofeminist offers a quiet, genial book of “hopeful possibility” amid the current ecological crisis.

Wildlife researcher and rehabilitator Haupt (Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks, 2006, etc.) writes gracefully about the interactions between crows and humans in the urban landscape and what those interactions portend for the future of the zoöpolis (where human and animal geographies overlap). For most people, notes the author, crows are the most commonly encountered native wild animal. Her fascination with the unusually intelligent birds began after a long depressive funk. One day she looked out her study window, saw an injured fledgling perched on an electrical wire and took the bird in. While nursing it back to health, she began to feel better. Haupt then spent two years studying the shiny black songbirds in her backyard and neighborhood. Found in growing numbers—there are more than 30 million in the United States—in densely populated towns and suburbs, the omnivorous American Crow thrives on the detritus of modern urban life, consuming everything from road kill to bread crumbs, bagels and McDonald’s fries. The author discovered that watching the creatures mate, nest, forage and help one another encouraged a necessary awareness of the continuity between human lives and that of other species. Like her beloved Thoreau—who wrote, “There is no wildness distant from ourselves”—Haupt celebrates the interconnectedness of all life and urges readers to pay close attention to their home places. The chapter on the habits of amateur urban naturalists is a neat how-to guide for anyone interested in learning how the wild, nonhuman animals around us live. Even though we are unable to view our entire planet, she writes, we can take positive action by cultivating a sense of wonder at the wildlife at our door: “We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth seeing.”

A fresh take on conscious living in the everyday world.

Loomings (Forthcoming Works)

Bill Streever's forthcoming book, Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places (Little, Brown; July 2009), received a couple cool reviews this week.

From Publisher's Weekly:

Cold weather systems the earth needs to thrive is the subject of Streever's well-documented book, using all of the author's expertise from his field trips to the world's most frigid environments. Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, writes of the frostiest experience: “We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force.” Rather than giving the reader a dry, academic lecture on snow, glaciers, wind-chill factors and icebergs, he delivers a poetic, anecdotal narrative complete with polar expeditions, Ice Age mysteries, igloos, permafrost and hailstorms. Two of the most fascinating segments are the arduous task of scientific reconstruction of past climates and the magical navigation of migratory birds to warmer lands. This is a wonderful collection of one man's first-rate observations and commentary about the history and importance of cold to the earth and its occupants.

And Library Journal:

“Open this book to any page and be treated to a tidbit about the cold, its effects on animals, on history, on the world. Do frogs and caterpillars actually freeze solid and then revive in spring? Have you ever heard of the School Children's Blizzard that froze cattle standing in place? What is the difference between hypothermia and frostbite? Biologist Streever explores benign cold, threatening cold, and monstrous/scary cold not only through history and science books but also in person, in Alaska and other frozen spots around the world. The author knows what he is talking about. He has worked in Arctic Alaska and chairs the Science Technical Advisory Panel of the North Slope Science Initiative. This reviewer found Streever's book more consistently enticing than Mariana Gosnell's Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance. Written in a popular, accessible style, Streever's book also includes 34 pages of notes. Recommended for public libraries.”

Loomings (Forthcoming Works)

Carol Kaesuk Yoon's forthcoming book, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (W. W. Norton, August 2009), just received a starred review in Publishers' Weekly. You can view it on their site or below:

In this entertaining and insightful book, New York Times science writer Yoon sets out to document the progression of the scientific “quest to order and name the entire living world—the whole squawking, scuttling, blooming, twining, leafy, furry, green and wondrous mess of it” from Linnaeus to present-day taxonomists. But her initial assumption of science as the ultimate authority is sideswiped by her growing interest in umwelt, how animals perceive the world in a way “idiosyncratic to each species, fueled by its particular sensory and cognitive powers and limited by its deficits.” According to Yoon, Linnaeus was an umwelt prodigy, but as taxonomists began to abandon the senses and use microscopic evidence and DNA to trace evolutionary relations, nonscientists' gave up their brain-given right (and tendency) to order the living world, with the devastating result of becoming indifferent to the current mass extinctions. Yoon's invitation for laypeople to reclaim their umwelt, to “take one step closer to the living world” and accept as valid the “wondrous variety in the ordering of life,” is optimistic, exhilarating and revolutionary.

This is a splendid review and we think revolutionary is the perfect word for Carol's work.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride!

Bruce Barcott, has been selected as a 2009 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author of Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (Random House, 2008) and Measure of a Mountain (Sasquatch, 1997/Ballantine Books, 1999). This is a wonderful recognition of Bruce's talent. You can find the notice listing all of this year's recipients in the April 9th New York Times. Congratulations, Bruce!

Loomings (Forthcoming Works)

Starred review in Kirkus Reviews for Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano (Smithsonian/HarperCollins). Here's a quote:

Lively as-told-to autobiography of a scientist who studied flotsam—floating trash—and revolutionized the study of the world’s oceans. Ebbesmeyer graduated college as a mechanical engineer in the mid-1960s and went to work for Mobil/Standard Oil, which financed the doctorate studies that made him the company’s first oceanographer. Years of traveling the world gave him an intimate knowledge of how ocean movements affect oil rigs, but he grew increasingly fascinated by sea currents and eddies and began to focus on beaches, more specifically on debris deposited there. An epiphany came in May 1990 when a Pacific storm knocked five containers filled with thousands of athletic shoes off a cargo vessel. Nearly a year later, the shoes began washing up along the West coast of North America. With the help of a surprisingly large and cooperative fraternity of beachcombers, Ebbesmeyer tracked the progress of the shoes up and down the coast and as far as Hawaii, producing a groundbreaking study of ocean currents. With the help of maritime and environmental journalist Scigliano (Michelangelo’s Mountain: The Quest for Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara, 2005, etc.), Ebbesmeyer spins a fascinating tale. Even readers with little interest in ocean science will be riveted by the author’s chronicle of the epic travels of oceanic trash; the entertaining explanations of how floating debris guided Christopher Columbus and the Vikings to safe harbors; the horrific stories of men adrift at sea; how flotsam may have triggered the origin of life; and frighteningly, the warnings of the threat that an increasing avalanche of plastic waste poses to the oceans. A captivating account of the man who turned beachcombing into a science.

This is a fantastic, well-deserved perk for an awesome book. Keep an eye out for it in April.

The Grand Armada (Agency Author News)

Dan Savage has been speaking about the passing of Proposition 8, the legislation that has backtracked on and banned legal gay marriage in California. He’s been spotted on the Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper 360, and in the opinion pages of the New York Times.

The agency is proud of his advocacy for equal rights for all, and we recommend the Colbert Report segment as the most fun.

In other agency news, Library Journal named Bruce Barcott's Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (Random House) to their Best Books of 2008. You can find that list in their December issue.

Whaleboats Under Sail: Praise for Books Published

Bruce Barcott's The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird (Random House, 2008) has a spot in the New York Review of Books, in a group review on birding by Robert Paxton. You can find it on page 28 of the Nov. 6 issue. Well deserved and nice work, Bruce!

The Grand Armada (Agency Author News)

We’re breaking out of our blogging silence –blogging is fun, but we’ve had a lot of work on our hands- to share an article Dan Savage has written in light of the upcoming vote in Washington State about Death with Dignity. It is poignant and well-reasoned and deserves your attention. In Defense of Dignity, by Dan Savage

The Chase-- New Title Sales

We just placed Gordon Edgar's Cheesemonger: a memoir with MacAdam Cage. It was a completed manuscript and is already scheduled for 2009! A perfect match for Gordon's winning narrative, progressive politics, and (we must say it) cheesy memoir. Congratulations, Gordon, on the sale of your first book!

Loomings (forthcoming works)

The covers for Lisa Dale Norton's Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (St. Martin's Griffen, 2008) just came in this week. It looks great and we can hardly wait for the book to be out. In the meantime, here's Lisa's blog on the Huffington Post, where she writes about politics and the craft of storytelling.

The Grand Armada-- NEW Agency Author News

We have signed on some exciting new projects by a list of talented new writers:

Gordon Edgar, a cheesemonger at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, is the author of "Cheesemonger," a delicious and delightful memoir on food and politics. His book is just about ready to be sent out; in the meanwhile, get at taste at his website, Gordonzola.

George Hageman is the author and strategist behind the much-followed podcast Military History. He is now working on a book about the same subject. He is also Harvard-bound this fall and just graduated from Lakeside High School-- which we guess makes him our list's prodigy. His final proposal is forthcoming.

Jane Sandor is currently an instructor in English at Mount St. Mary's College. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Alabama, and has had two essays in succession (2006 and 2007) designated notable by the Best American Essays. We're very proud to be representing her first novel, "Alta California," a noir literary truth-hunt a la A.S. Byatt's Possession, set in LA. Her book is about to go out.

Christopher Sanford, MD, wrote the recently released The Adventurous Traveler's Guide to Health (University of Washington Press, 2008). He is a family practice physician who specializes in tropical medicine. We are overjoyed to be working with him on his second novel, "Yellow Jack," the final draft to come. His first novel, Sutures, came out from Soho Press in 1993.

Joe Upton is the author of Alaska Blues (in print continuously since 1977). His new project, "Into the Ice: A Crab Fisherman's Story of One Year on the Bering Sea," is a gripping true story from the frozen Bering Sea and an insight into the industry made famous by the show "Deadliest Catch." His project is ready to be shown.

The Chase-- New Title Sales

Planted in a new publishing house, Masumoto: In a pre-empt, David Mas Masumoto's Wisdom of the Last Farmer has been bought by The Free Press/Simon and Schuster. Mas Masumoto is best known for Epitaph for a Peach and as an organic farming advocate and spokesman extraordinaire. The opening chapter of his forthcoming title appeared in the NY Times Magazine in August of 2007. In from the cold, with a warm and speedy sale: Bill Streever's book, Cold: An Untold Story in a Warming World just went to John Parsley of Little, Brown, due out in 2009. From Publisher's Marketplace

NON-FICTION: SCIENCE Bill Streever, Ph.D's COLD, in which the author travels through four seasons and to all four corners of the globe seeking out supercooling, snowflakes, blizzards, bears, hypothermia, hibernation, and the Year Without Summer, to John Parsley at Little, Brown, by Elizabeth Wales at Wales Literary Agency (World)

And on a more serious note: Nancy Lord's Early Warming: Alarms and Responses from the Climate-Changed North went to (newly-replanted on our very own West Coast) Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint, now in Berkley, California. Nancy just headed to Washington, DC as a Knight fellow. Congratulations to David Mas Masumoto, Bill Streever, and Nancy Lord!

Nantucket Sleigh Ride!

Nancy Lord, author of the work-in-progress on contract with Counterpoint Press, Early Warming: Alarms and Responses from the Climate-Changed North, has just been awarded a fellowship to a seminar on climate change by the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. This is a big deal and out of the 30 journalists awarded the fellowship, she's the only one from Alaska. Congratulations, Nancy!

Cetologists-- agency author appearances

Ellie Mathews' (author of The Ungarnished Truth (Berkley, 2008)) interview on NPR is now up on their website. You can listen to it in its entirety here: Cooking Contest Winner Offers Ungarnished Truth.

Cetologists-- agency author appearances

Ellie Mathews, author of The Ungarnished Truth (Berkley, 2008), a memoir about the Pillsbury Bake-Off, is going to be on NPR's Morning Edition coast-to-coast Friday, April 11. To keep abreast of other appearances by Ellie, check out her website here.

Cetologists-- agency author appearances

Agency author Michelle Tea will be in Seattle on March 28th. Her most recent book is Rose of No Man's Land (Harcourt, 2005), now available in paperback. The Hugo House has a blurb about the event:

"Answered Prayers and Other Tragedies" Sherman Alexie, Michelle Tea, David Schmader and musician Seann Nelson all produce new work that asks "Is the only real tragedy getting what you want?" Also featuring Ben Blum, winner of the New Works Competition. $15-25. Town Hall. Friday, March 28, 2008, 7:30 PM.

The Chase-- New Title Sales

Agency author and artist Leela Corman's graphic novel Unterzakhn has been sold to Schocken/Pantheon. Its release is in 2010, but it's already receiving chatter from the blogosphere. Forward Magazine started running installations from it at the end of February, and you can read an interview with Leela here:

ER: Well, then it seems in your creative process, images of the world surface. If you could say if there is an overarching story you think “Unterzakhn” tells, what is it?

LC: I’d say that I’ve always been fascinated with what’s happening behind the scenes, in seemingly mundane domestic life and in larger matters. I’m very interested in stories that talk about real people living in mythologized situations. Much of the way we ingest history is via official versions of stories — wars, rulers, treaties. But I don’t want to know about the decisions of generals, I want to know about the lives of civilians. That’s where it gets interesting.

Publisher's Weekly had something to say about it, too:

Unterzakhn in The Forward Leela Corman's Unterzakhn is being serialized in The Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in New York City. The comic began serialization on February 29. Unterzakhn revolves around immigrants in NYC's Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th Century. More information can be found at The Forward's website. Unterzakhn will be published in its entirety by Schocken/ Pantheon in 2010. -Comics Briefly, PW Comics Week, March 3, 2008

The Grand Armada- Agency Author News

Agency author, retired Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., has been quoted by William Yardley in his article "In an Answerless Canadian Inquiry, 3 Bodyless Feet," in the New York Times today (March 4, 2008). The article investigates a series of right-foot size 12 running shoes that have washed up (with the feet still in them) on an island off British Columbia.

"Running shoes are quite buoyant," said Mr. Ebbesmeyer, who is completing a book, "The Floating World," to be published by HarperCollins. "They would tend to encase a foot and keep it floating. A body comes apart naturally; it's called disarticulation. The head usually comes off first. The parts of the body that are protected will last the longest. The shoe usually floats soles up, so that might prevent the sea-birds from pecking at it."

You can view more about the macabre article here

Nantucket Sleigh Ride!... cont'd

From the front cover of the The New York Times Review of Books, February 17:

"(Bruce) Barcott deftly unsnarls his story’s many strands and keeps them taut. He explains complicated deals clearly, dramatizes legal proceedings and leads readers on delightful (to this reviewer, at least) excursions into how one makes, stores and moves energy from water; the environmental downside of dams; and how and why animals go extinct. With a deep understanding of so many environmental issues and their larger context, Barcott presents evidence and then states strongly — but never shrilly — what other writers might hedge on."- Elizabeth Royte, New York Times Review of Books

We really can't add much to that. You can read the entire article here.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride!

Late last week the Seattle Times ran a glowing review of agency author Bruce Barcott's just-published book, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw. Here's a quote from the full article:

"Through tough reporting, colorful travel writing and a touch of natural history, Barcott has elevated an obscure environmental struggle to epic status. In doing so, he dramatizes the signal issue of species diversity in a rapidly globalizing world. And he celebrates the heroic and unsung efforts of those "rare and strange and sometimes aggravating" people who work tirelessly to preserve it." -Tim McNulty, Feb. 8, 2008

The Last Flight... has received a lot of wonderful reviews recently. We just heard from RandomHouse that it will be featured on the front page of the New York Times' Review of Books this coming Sunday, Feb. 17. Keep an eye out for it, and three cheers for Bruce!

Loomings-- Forthcoming Titles

We've been dealing with an amazing phenomenon at the agency over the past several months. Two of our authors, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and writer and journalist Eric Scigliano are working on a book titled The Floating World: An Oceanographer's Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of the Oceans' Currents (Smithsonian Books, 2008). It's the story of Curtis's years of work with a worldwide community of beachcombers to track the movement of flotsam through the great ocean currents and gyres. Because of this exciting project, we've found ourselves receiving daily e-mails about the rubber duckies thought to have been floating for a decade and a half on a course from the Pacific, over the Arctic, and into the Atlantic Ocean. These e-mails have come from every continent; from tv shows and major newspapers and magazines, authors and independent journalists, ocean aficionados and average citizens. Most of the inquiries we've received have been about the whimsy of the rubber duck, but many inquiries have also expressed interest in the meaning behind it all: how the ocean moves and what impact the amount of garbage lost at sea means to us and to the world. An article by Curtis was printed in the Wall Street Journal last August. It clarifies some facts surrounding the ducky mystique and is well worth quoting from again:

"I'm sorry to have to give the good people of Britain and Ireland the disappointing news: There is no yellow rubber ducky flotilla approaching your shores... The 29,000 celebrated bathtub toys that fell into the Pacific in January 1992 aren't made of rubber, they're plastic. And they aren't all ducks. They came in four shapes: green frogs, true-blue turtles, red beavers, and yellow crouching ducks -- the latter two have by now been bleached white. Perhaps a hundred of them have made it to the North Atlantic and are now scattered across its vast expanse."-- Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Opinion, Wall Street Journal August 8, 2007 You can read the entirety of Curtis's article here. Though there is no full invasion of bath tub toys approaching the shores of the UK, it's nevertheless stirring to realize how the image of tiny plastic ducks surviving years at sea has captured the public imagination.

The Grand Armada-- Agency Author News

Agency author Scott McCredie and his book (Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense (Little, Brown, 2007)) and his research on balance are the focus of an article by Jane E. Brody today in the New York Times. Here's the start of the article to whet your interest, and a link to the rest that includes some interesting exercises meant to improve your balance:

Scott McCredie is a Seattle-based health and science writer who says he "discovered" what he calls "the lost sense" of balance after he watched in horror as his 67-year-old father tumbled off a boulder and disappeared from sight during a hike in the Cascades. Though his father hurt little more than his pride, Mr. McCredie became intrigued by what might have caused this experienced hiker, an athletic and graceful man, to lose his balance suddenly. His resulting science-and-history-based exploration led... (read on)

Whaleboats Under Sail-- praise for books published

Kenny Fries' new book, A History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (Da Capo Press, 2007) is a recipient of the Gustavus Myers Center's Outstanding Book Awards of 2007. These annual awards recognize titles that advance human rights, and Kenny's book falls into that category with keen insight. Here's a blurb about Kenny's title from the Myers Center's website:

"This is a gem of a story on biological research by Albert Wallacce and Charles Darwin on adaptation,and itnerspersed with this is the author's ways of adapting to fibulae missing in both of his legs. Essayist, poet, and Goddard faculty member, Mr. Fries has written a truly distinctive philosophical and autobiographical examination of the social and political context of ability/disability. He draws the reader's attention via his relationship with his partner to how a society's culture defines the limit of the body as much as a particular individual's bodily condition. Read this dazzling book!"

The Grand Armada-- Agency Author News

Take a look at the December 2nd edition of the New York Times Magazine. Former Washington State Governor Booth Gardner, a client of ours, is the focus of an article written by Daniel Bergner on assisted suicide. Booth is campaigning for assisted suicide; Daniel opposes it. Then, open up to page 46 and read the article by Bruce Barcott, author of Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (forthcoming in March 2008). In "Kill the Cat that Kills the Bird?" Bruce writes about environmental ethics and a current conflict between two different sorts of animal lovers. Here's a quote from the article to pique your interest: "Serious birders compile a list of every species they have seen in their lifetimes. I hadn't come to Galveston to load my wagon,* though. I had come to find out why Jim Stevenson had become the most notorious cat killer in America." *"load my wagon," as Bruce translates elsewhere, means being able to mark off several species of birds as "seen." Next up: Curtis Ebbesmeyer (still), and some exciting news about Kenny Fries

Loomings-- Forthcoming Titles

It's a busy season, but we're taking a moment to share some of the fantastic books our clients have written that will be out and available soon:

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird, by Bruce Barcott (Random House, March 2008)

"Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain) relates the dramatic and heart-rending story of one woman's struggle to save the scarlet macaw in the tiny country of Belize... Barcott's compelling narrative is suspenseful right up to the last moment." -Publisher's Weekly

The early reviews have been enthusiastic. Bruce's book was also a runner-up for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress award.

The Ungarnished Truth: A Cooking Contest Memoir, by Ellie Mathews (Berkley, March 2008)

Ellie's third book, this memoir-in-food describes her experience of entering -and winning- the quintessentially American Pillsbury Bake-Off. If you love ungarnished chicken dishes, click here for her winning recipe: the million dollar chicken.

Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir, by Lisa Dale Norton (St Martin's Griffin, August 2008)

Shimmering Images is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to start writing down their memories for an audience; Lisa guides the reader through how to find the heart of a memory and capture it in writing. As Carol Franco (co-author of the Legacy Guide) says, it's "a must for anyone contemplating writing a memoir."

Up next: Curtis Ebbesmeyer, as promised, and Bruce Barcott in the NYTimes Magazine

Nantucket Sleigh Ride!*

Ellen Forney, graphic artist, cartoonist, and Wales client, has caught a big one. She's the awesome illustrator of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown, 2007)-- which won the National Book Award for YA Fiction. Ellen debuted her next work in progress at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle this past Saturday (11/17). Three cheers for Ellen Forney! *A "Nantucket sleigh ride" refers to the wild ride that sometimes occurred after a whaleboat crew successfully harpooned a whale. Our sympathy is with the whale, but it's an apt description for when a client's work takes off. Next up in "Loomings," Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer will reveal all... about the rubber duckies!