Bookish stuff

 

It’s good when big publishers stand up for bookstores. Simon & Schuster has launched a campaign to help independent bookstores fight back in this time of banned books. Participating indies will receive “Read banned books” merchandising kits, with material to be used in stores and online. There will be special discounts for banned S&S titles, such as Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer. The publisher reports that in recent months the number of its titles banned and/or challenged has increased by 46%. The list includes such classic titles as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, along with a wide range of children’s and young adult titles, including are Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely's All American Boys, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and many more.

The campaign will be a summer one in advance of Banned Book Week which is September 18-24.

Banning books is a funny thing—well, no not funny, because it limits minds, especially children’s. The first banned book I remember is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which no doubt seems tame today. Published in Europe in the late 1920s and not in England until 1960, it was the last book written by D. H. Lawrence (think Sons and Lovers). When an unexpurgated version was offered in 1960 in Britain by Penguin, the publisher was tried under the Obscenities Publication Act. That law stated that if a publisher could prove literary merit, the suit would be dropped. Famous authors testified, Penguin was exonerated and sold three million copies. I remember reading it in college, but I didn’t find it particularly titillating. At the time of his death, Lawrence’s reputation was that of a pornographer who wasted his considerable talents. A sad end.

But you don’t have to be famous like Lawrence to feel the bite of censorship. When my first young-adult novel, After Pa Was Shot, appeared, an East Texas friend told me if her superintendent knew it was on the school library shelf, he’d yank it off. The offense? Use of the word “kike.” An offensive term, yes, but appropriate to time and place.

A review of a book titled Koshersoul: The Faith and Food of an African American Jew, by Michael W. Twitty caught my eye this week. Twitty examines the crossroads of two of the world’s most distinctive diaspora cultures: African Atlantic cooking and worldwide Jewish cooking. Twitty claims the two cultures come together to create a rich food heritage and provides recipes to prove it. He explores how food has shaped the passages of numerous cooks, including his own journey to Judaism. Black Jews, he tells us, are not outliers. I was really curious to see a list of recipes, but none was available, and the book doesn’t come out until August.

And this week, I received a royalty payment from Amazon for A Ballad for Sallie, a book written so long ago that I can’t remember when I wrote it. Probably in the eighties. The report showed a whopping seventy-six cents, which probably means two books sold. Most months, the report shows thirty-seven, and I sometimes wonder if Amazon does that just to keep the book in print, but then I remind myself they are not in the business of charity. I am sad that it’s so overlooked because I like that little book.

Set in Fort Worth, in the time of Longhair Jim Courtright and Luke Short, the story is told by Lizzie Jones, a street kid in Hell’s Half Acre—and that part is true, for back then a lot of children lived on the streets. Lizzie’s fate is entangled with that of Sallie McNutt who comes to town looking for her cousin—and finds he’s been shot. Sallie takes over her cousin’s store, and Lizzie tries to educate her in the ways of the streets while Sallie tries to gentle Lizzie. Woven in are the stories of Courtright, Short, and the great shoot-out, along with the founding of Fort Worth’s first orphanage. It’s based on history, with a few liberties taken. The ballad in the title was because I was at the time enamored of the music of cowboy balladeer Don Edwards—still am. I talked to him once about doing a song for the book, but it never came about. Don was a busy man.

Lizzie spoke the patois of the streets, and I remember the New York publisher who first published it had an editor who “corrected” all her grammatical slips. I had gotten over being afraid to correct New York, and I complained long and loud. And I won. Sallie tried to improve Lizzie’s speech, but that was a different matter. And of course there's a bit of romance when Sallie meets a rancher.

The cover, show above, has absolutely nothing to do with the story. New York designers sometimes have the most stereotypical ideas about life in the Old West.

Anyway, I think it’s a fine little book, if I do say so myself, and I hope more Fort Worth people will discover it. It’s available on Amazon in paper and hardcover and free on Kindle.

Happy reading!