The Inner Sanctum

NPR.org lists Memory Wall: Stories (Scribner, Paperback: 9781439182840, eBook: 9781439182857) by Anthony Doerr under “New in Paperback: The Week’s Outstanding Softcover Releases”!


Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr’s collection of stories is about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman’s secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In “The River Nemunas,” a teenage orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. “Village 113,” winner of an O. Henry Prize, is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seed keeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in “Afterworld,” the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.


Click here for NPR’s feature.


Click here for a video of Doerr discussing his inspiration for Memory Wall.

See below for an update on upcoming publicity for all Simon & Schuster adult imprints in this week’s edition of the SOURCE!

TITLES IN THE NEWS

HOW THE END BEGINS, Ron Rosenbaum 
9781416594215, Simon & Schuster, $28.00
Click here to listen to Ron Rosenbaum discuss the threat of nuclear war on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation”
Click here to read Rosenbaum’s article on Slate.com

BUZZ-WORTHY REVIEWS

THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT, Carol Edgarian
9781439198308, Scribner, $25.00
Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times:
“Carol Edgarian’s Three Stages of Amazement shares a surprising amount of common ground with last year’s most argued-about novel, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.”
Click here for the full review
Look for the New York Times Book Review review, Mar. 6

ANNOUNCEMENTS
BASEBALL IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN, John Thorn
9780743294034, Simon & Schuster, $26.00
MLB names John Thorn “Official Baseball Historian”

MEMORY WALL, Anthony Doerr
9781439182802, Scribner, $24.00
Winner of The Story Prize, click here to read more

Take a minute on this busy (and very cold!) Monday to read Anthony Doerr’s essay on the joys of reading. I promise you, it’ll brighten your day. Doerr’s stunning 2010 collection of stories, MEMORY WALL: Stories (Scribner, 9781439190050) recently won the 2011 PNBA Book Award – to celebrate this fantastic honor, he wrote this fantastic essay, titled “Books, Memory and the Twelve Bright Stars Scratched Across Page 302.”  Here’s a highlight:


“It is the weather in which one reads a book that interpenetrates the paper. It is the mood one is in, the mindset one carries, the hunger in one’s gut, the quality of the sunlight falling across the page. It is the little coffee stain on page 29, the twelve bright stars scratched ecstatically across page 302.


Maybe, rather than copies, a more precise way to think about books on the shelves of a bookshop is to think of them as something closer to recipes. The execution of a recipe, after all, depends on a thousand variables: elevation, humidity, the freshness of the vegetables, the temperature of the oven, the kind of metal in the pan, how much wine the cook has been drinking.”


Read the entire essay, here. 


Earlier this month, Scribner published Doerr’s first collection of short stories, THE SHELL COLLECTOR: Stories (Scribner, 9781439190050). Click here to read an excerpt.