While I blocked all mentions of Farmville from my Facebook feed as soon as I realized that I had that power (duh), I do like farms in real life. Very much so. And in snowy, gray February, who doesn’t long for a warm-weather visit to a real working farm, a sunshiny stroll among the baby lambs (*swoon*) and happily wallowing pigs and chickies and such?

Then again, children’s lit is, of course, lousy with farms. There are enough tractors and cluck-clucks and benevolent, overall-clad farmers to make you long for anything BUT the pastoral setting for your story-time travels. I have spent the past year of my life mooing and neighing and baaing, surely more than I have in the past thirty-odd years combined, and there’s more to come. But have I begun hiding all farm tales behind the couch? Nah. I’m cool with farms.

Here we have two groovy farm-related books, one new, one published a few years ago.

Jarret J. Krosoczka’s PUNK FARM tells the story of some rockin’ farm animals—cow on drums, sheep on vocals, chicken on keyboard, goat on bass, and pig on guitar—who kick out the jams all night long. As the band prepares for tonight’s big show, their farm animal fans line up around the barn, waiting to show IDs to the bouncers (that would be the horsies). The band is a big hit, belting out—you guessed it—a rendition of “Old MacDonald,” and ending with a true-to-life, “Thank you, Wisconsin!” The next day, Farmer Joe is bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to work; the animal rockers are much more bleary.

The paintings are lively, colorful, and cartoonish in a child-pleasing way, and while I don’t know about your kid, mine snaps up any opportunity to belt “EE-I-EE-I-O!!” repeatedly. But I can’t help feeling that the book misses some great opportunities. There are so many silly directions you could go with the conceit of a farm animal rock band, right? Instead of much of the story being devoted to several verses of that familiar song, the band could’ve cranked out farm-takes on some classics, hung out backstage with some pretty heifers, and slamdanced (”Careful with the horns, dude!”). And considering that this book came out in 2005 and features a bovine percussionist, I was pretty surprised that a “More cowbell” joke didn’t show up as a wink-wink moment for the parents. And you kind of have to wonder why the concert wasn’t billed “LIVESTOCK”…and so on. Still, it’s a very fun concept, and not just another baby-animals-on-display title.

A totally different sort of farm music can be found in the just-released OUR FARM: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary, by Maya Gottfried and fine artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch. Gottfried imagines the voices of various animals, then lets them narrate the sweet, mostly free verse poems that make up this book. Take the beginning of “Freedom!”, by J.D., a piglet:

I’m free!
And I’m running, and I’m running,
and oh, I can feel the sun on my snout.
There goes a fence post!
(…)

Or this haiku, by Barnaby the rabbit:

See me in the grass?
Maybe I will hop to food…
Or go sniff pansies.

Barnaby, J.D. and the other animal “poets” on display in this lovely book (the lamb on the cover makes me swoon a little every time I look at it) are real-life residents of Farm Sanctuary, a shelter for neglected and abused animals, and a portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated to the organization, which “works to end cruelty to farm animals.” Gottfried captures the animals’ characters—shy, gentle, twitchy, docile, frisky, playful, wise, and so on—in her poems, and their personalities seem equally realized in Zakanitch’s watercolor and ink paintings, which blend into and are accompanied by rough pencil sketches on bright white pages, bringing to mind a young artist’s sketchbook full of inspired doodles dancing with more finished pieces. The whole book feels carefree and springy, artful in a loosey-goosey (sorry) way. (I will not be at all surprised to find it on prominent display at Anthropologie.) It’s nice, too, to see farm animals’ genuine nature represented—the wary eye of a rabbit, the curious gaze of a goat—rather than the ubiquitous anthropomorphic take. I’ll be reading this one to Thalia, living vicariously through the warmth its pages exude, until we can get out and take some farm tours of our own later this spring. . .

Visit the book’s Facebook page.

Literago’s pleased to present Neptune City, a new work in serial by C.T. Ballentine. More installments coming soon. — Eds.

Of course the warehouse, being empty, was considerably brighter than it had ever been during that whole ordeal. Walter wondered, had it always been this dusty? All memories seemed to him nocturnal: an array of colored lights swimming through a field of obscure electronic equipment draped in red satin, Walter wheeling about in an office chair, fetching a drink for one guest, a roach clip for another. All the while trying not to talk too much about Alexis, her absence conspicuous in what had been, primarily, a three month litany of loneliness began with their last kiss at O’Hare’s terminal three. There had been phone calls, sure, but phones, thought Walter, were bullshit.

The dust cast Stockwell in a murky penumbra of filth. Their eyes met with a naked recognition of shared shame. For explanation, Stockwell pointed a pudgy finger at the cell phone nestled into his shoulder’s hollow, no doubt attempting to liquidate what remained of their antiquated assets. Walter retreated to his former office cum bedroom—barren now—the diagrams and flowcharts torn down, the homemade chandeliers gone who knows where. All that remained was one sheet of that goddamned, infernal red paper.

“Must be strange,” said Stockwell, ducking to maneuver himself through the doorframe. “Being back here. Seeing it empty.”

Walter nodded.

“How have you been?” asked Stockwell with an uncharacteristic fragility.

Walter considered an offhanded quip about amphetamines or perhaps some light hearted reference to the week he’d spent certain he would die at Stockwell’s hand, but figured the gravity of the situation was probably best left unmocked and so answered instead with a shrug.

“I’ve been alright,” he added, after a moment. “Or you know, better anyway.”

Stockwell nodded. “Don’t suppose you know anyone looking to buy a reel-to-reel?” He didn’t wait for an answer, moving instead to the main room, pacing among the empty shelves. “We’ve gotten rid of most of it,” he said. “But some of this shit…a four hundred pound paper cutter, industrial kitchen sinks? These things do not move quickly.” Walter lit a cigarette in agreement.

Stockwell turned abruptly, a faint blush showing through his beard. “We gave your share of everything to Quill, you know, considering…”

“Of course,” replied Walter, leaving a trail of smoke to hang lazily in the dust-humid air. He took a seat at the folding table, fidgeting automatically with the fly swatter while Stockwell returned to his phone. The flyswatter, for Walter, conjured images of the first Smith & Jones office, back when the pair had operated in the relative sphere of anonymity to which they would likely return after the press fervor faded. The storefront had been positively overridden with flies. Unsurprising, really, given its equally dusty location in a largely uninhabited, low-rent corner of Chicago’s Paseo Boricua neighborhood, the playground Puerto Rican flags casting an ominous shadow on the front door of the building where Walter and Alexis first met.

He’d gone to the office one evening on a lark, playing straight man to Stockwell who, upon entry, set himself, predictably, to the task of irritating living hell out of both Smith and Jones by offering, unsolicited,  all manner of heavy handed advice on everything from plumbing to payroll. Within four minutes he’d offered to restaff their entire operation. Smith, red faced, failed to allow any of Stockwell’s opinions to pass unchallenged, while Jones resigned himself to sipping bluegrass beer and, occasionally, killing a fly.

The two, Alexis and Walter, discovered some degree of union in their indifference, at first casting errant glances in each other’s direction, later engaging in a clipped and awkward conversation concerning Baudelaire, Godart and a mutual affinity for 7-11 cuisine.

“The Big Poorboy,” opined Alexis. “Is as close to arriving at a class consciousness as any sandwich I know.”

Walter laughed. Alexis furrowed her brow.

“The sandwich,” continued Alexis. “Foodstuff of the proletariat finding its etymology in a goddamned Earl adds a layer of irony which ought not be ignored.”

Then and there, Walter asked Alexis out on a date. Alexis refused, then paused a moment and said, “Don’t get any ideas.”

The pair spent the duration of the summer hiding out in innocuous dive bars and passing notes—Alexis’s being mostly condemnation of their own bourgeois milieu, while Walter’s consisted primarily of sentimentally earnest flirtations. Alexis rejected the notion of a relationship outright, being unable to jibe with any notion as philosophically omniscient as love and, furthermore, refusing to relegate herself to systematic masculine oppression. Once, upon waking in Alexis’s spartan studio apartment, Walter said, “It’s just that I’d be sad if you were making out with other boys.” Alexis scoffed and refused any attempts at spooning for the rest of the morning. Never again did Walter broach the subject of relationships, preferring instead to, when allowed, exist quietly in Alexis’s embrace. The rest of his days were spent meticulously archiving the stack of loose-leaf notebook paper which had passed between their two hands.

Walter looked up at Stockwell whose phone was, at present, sitting idly at his side. “Have you sold the paper shredder?” he asked.

After a pregnant pause Stockwell answered. “We did, yes,” he said. “But the filing office…we haven’t gotten around to that yet. We tried selling it as confetti, but nobody bought that line.”

Walter advanced tentatively toward the filing office’s door while Stockwell looked on apprehensively. He stood frozen before it, until finally, with a cautious reverence, he pulled the handle outward to reveal a waist high stack of paper shreds. Contained therein were all of Walter and Alexis’s notes, in addition to blueprints of various skyscrapers, accounting ledgers both legit and otherwise and internet printouts concerning unified field theory, among other things. All destroyed in one manic burst when things had become, as Walter put it, a little too real.

Walter grinned. Taking a step back, he flung himself into the paper like so many autumn leaves. He lay on his back, tossing paper into the air, watching the corporeal manifestation of a year’s worth of dreams hang in the dust cloud overhead, flittering down onto his body like rain.

"So many possibilities!"

Franny the Bookstore Cat, here.  If you’ll recall, I’m reporting in from the trenches of spending 40+ hours a week in a bookstore.

Lately, at my lovely workplace, we’ve been wondering about the possibility of starting a small press section.  Wandering into Myopic, you see a nice little shelf for McSweeney’s goods. At Unabridged, there’s just about the prettiest row of the solid-color-spined Europa Editions.  And if you’ve ever been to Europe, you know the joy of browsing books by publisher rather than genre or author.

One of the reasons this has been on my mind is the increasing number of small press titles coming into our store.  I’ve been trying to keep a close eye on new releases that don’t show up in major publisher catalogs: things distributed by Small Press Distribution, or not at all.  I know of a healthy handful of people who can spot these titles on the fiction wall by their size and well-designed spines, but I’m wondering if it might not benefit the books to be separated out into a Small Press section.  That way people who love Dalkey Archive, but aren’t familiar with Tarpaulin Sky can find similar books that much easier.

There are a few problems with this idea though, and some logistics to be worked out.

#1: Would sorting these books out into their own section increase or decrease the likelihood of a customer (who’s not particularly interested in supporting small presses) taking a chance on these books?

#2: Where should the line be drawn? Obviously, fledgling and limited edition presses (like Orange Alert or Green Lantern) would be placed in this section, but what’s the upper limit?  Is a press like Soft Skull too big?  Dzanc?  Melville House?  Those three presses all have wider distribution, making them more likely to be ordered to more bookstores. However, it seems each of these publishers are all still on the small side with very easily recognizable styles, not interested in forcing out bestsellers, but in making available books that will engage a more specific audience.

#3: Once this shelf is constructed, should all of the books of each press be placed in small clumps together?  Or should they be alphabetical by author in the hopes people might make discoveries by exploring the whole rack?

Would you be interested in such a section?  This is a project I’m excited about, but I want feedback from like-minded people to kick it off.  Speak, and Franny will make your desires fact.

– Franny the Bookstore Cat

What’s that you say? The holidays are so, like, over? OK, duly noted. But for my first real KL post, I’m going to share one of the books I gave Thalia for Christmas ‘09. Mind you, in the past couple of weeks I’ve compiled quite a list of ideas for future KL exploration, but my favorite of our newest additions seems as good and simple a place to start as any.

A Penguin Story, by Antoinette Portis

Harper Collins

40 pp.

PERFECT FOR: Dreamers, people who want to move away from home, people who have moved away from home, eternal seekers, the insatiably curious, those who bore easily, fans of the color orange, fans of the color green, fans of penguins.

We were already big fans of Portis’s first book, Not a Box, so when I saw this new one from her on The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books 2009 list, it didn’t take me long to decide it’d be one of our Christmas adoptees. And I was in love on first read—in love with Portis’s simple, bold illustrations, rough and clean at the same time; in love with the story, which follows penguin Edna, weary of her home turf, as she looks for that “something else” that she knows must be out there, somewhere. The other penguins just want to play penguin games, but Edna is devoted to her search. And yep, her devotion pays off. Color represents the “something else”: Edna’s North Pole home is exclusively white, black, and blue, and what she finds—the tents and parkas, etc. of a team of research scientists—is brilliant orange.

She shares her discovery with the rest of her penguin crew, and the birds delight in their encounter with the scientists, who offer them an orange glove as a souvenir. But on the final page, Edna, our dear seeker of new experience, stands atop an icy outlook, wearing the orange glove as a jester hat, staring out at the blue, blue sea. “The next day, Edna wonders, What else could there be?” Behind her, on the facing page, a green boat is inching its way onto the horizon. The book’s end papers? Orange (front) and green (back).

I’m sure I don’t have to go on at length about how the theme of this book—the eternal search for the “something else”—should thrill any thinking adult. You’ll get it. That’s mainly why I’ve flipped over it, though it’d be a beautiful winner based on its look and design alone. A kid’s book that feeds the noisy adult mind’s need for meaning as well as it feeds its intended kiddo reader is a rare thing (rarer, maybe, than animated films that do the same?), and this is an exquisite example. And Thalia? She’s hooked too, on those sweet little penguins and the wide swaths of color and the pleasing geometry of each gorgeous page. And she wasted no time learning to see, and point out, the green boat…

I’ve already given A Penguin Story as a gift twice, and frankly, it’s killing me that I can’t show you every. single. page right now. It’s that good. (You can see a few pages, though not my absolute faves, here.)

(”I’ll never get tired of looking, thinks Edna.”)

Hello, all, and welcome to Literago’s kid lit column. It’s pretty simple, really: Chicago has kid lit authors and illustrators, Chicago has kids, Chicago has parents who want said kids to become book-loving, book-devouring geniuses. And finally, Chicago has this fine literary go-to site, and on it a contributor (hi!) with a healthy curiosity about books of the words-&-pictures variety.  Hence, Literago’s new column dedicated solely to children’s lit.

Like the adult stuff, children’s lit encompasses worlds, and I don’t plan to traverse all of them. My exploration will be focused on picture books – from, say, baby-friendly titles up to about age 8 or so. There may be exceptions—say, when I discover Chicagoland middle-grade or YA authors I simply can’t not rave about or pull into our lair for a quick Q&A, or otherwise flirt with and flatter. But mostly, what you can hope to find here is regular dish and dialogue (and I do hope it’s a dialogue!) on marvelous books for the blankie set.

I come to this column bubbling with semi-selfish excitement, but also a lick of humility. As mama to one book-crazy toddlerina, I’m hot for the picture books right now, too—i.e., enthusiasm I have in spades. But let’s face it: The kidlitosphere is richly populated enough already to, well, merit the description “kidlitosphere,” so who do I think I am, hoisting myself all up in here as a children’s lit blogger, adding my tinny chirp to the chorus?

I base my authority on two pieces of cred: A) I am writer of some things that’ve found their way into print, including one quasi YA novel, and B) that bona fide mama status I mentioned just above.

Which is to say: Not that much. But hopefully enough.

If I am so lucky to have other, more seasoned children’s book bloggers out there reading these words? Please do send word (to susannah.felts [at] gmail [dot] com). Take my sweaty, sticky little hand in yours, and let’s play nice. Please: send inspirations, kind nudges of direction, corrections where merited.

What I hope we’ll all get out of this: Inspiration and guidance for your next library or bookstore spree. A glance at the latest and best in newly published picture books. A doorway to the lively chatter in the kidlitosphere. Lively (and by lively, I mean toddler-worthy lively) discussions of kid lit old and new, and of the challenge of raising readers in not-so-book-besotted world (A licensed-character-driven narrative of a world. The question: To Elmo lit or not to Elmo lit?). And, as my toddler would say, with left pointer finger poking vigorously at right palm: “Meh,” or more.

I hope to offer you an idiosyncratic, at times irreverent, take on the books my family and I are digging at a given moment, on our adventures in reading. And I hope to bring in some children’s book writers and illustrators for hearty Q&A, especially those bedded down in, or with even the most tenuous ties to, Chicago. (Shout out via that email address above if this sounds like you; likewise, if you’re a publicist/publisher/author workin’ it…)

More soon, but for now, speaking of irreverence, I leave you with this bit o’ fun: “Mom Takes Children’s Songs Literally,” from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (What are you talking about, “how I wonder what you are”? It’s a star. You just said it was a star.)

Check back soon for official column the first!

Tonight, we’re pleased to present a new column about bookstores, written by Chicago’s own Franny the Bookstore Cat. Franny’s worked in bookstores for nearly twenty cat years, so you know she knows her stuff. Below, the first installment — stay tuned for another early next month.

In this column, I’ll be speaking regularly about the state of bookstores, primarily the independents.  More than ever, it seems, the literary world is in a state of flux.  Online magazines and news coverage are replacing newspapers and glossies as we know them.  Kindles allow you to carry a whole library in your bag. Big box stores and websites are offering bestsellers at less than half their cover-price.

With the fall of big publishing, though, comes a renaissance of small presses, handmade zines, limited edition art books.  I’m excited about the immediacy of the internet, too; don’t get me wrong.  I like that people can hit a button after they read a story I wrote, and tell me how much they liked it.  Ron Silliman gets the bipolarity of the current moment: “we’re simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old.”

I would argue that we’re not mourning yet, because nothing’s been lost.  We’re rehashing, reconsidering, and even reviving.  Certainly, some things are falling by the wayside, and this moment could feel like a dark age of sorts, but only if one is strictly taking into account the merging of major publishing houses to a paltry seven, or the fact that the most dismal statistics report 80% fewer independent bookstores than existed 20 years ago.  In reality, we’re just figuring things out, enjoying the options, not nixing the old to usher in the new.

I’m going to talk about why bookstores still have a place in this world; how they’re a mini-revolution, already in action; how they are still exciting and necessary and sometimes boring and regular in the most wonderful way.  I’m also going to tell you about the things that are threatening bookstores, and make suggestions about how you can have your cake and eat it, too.

First, let me just list a few things that bookstores can do that Amazon cannot:

#1: You can attend live readings with authors where you can ask questions and touch the human skin, probably uninvited, of the writer you so admire.

#2: You can ask booksellers a question, and they will give you impromptu answers they might be basing on the vibe they get from you, or the enthusiasm level in your responses to their suggestions. Sometimes those booksellers smell nice and you develop crushes on them.

#3: You can accidentally find books that you aren’t looking for but absolutely need.  At a website, they might recommend a book in a genre similar to the book you are buying or by the same author, but in a bookstore your eye can catch on that vegan soul food cookbook across the room and only you see it as the perfect companion to Lorrie Moore’s Self Help.

This is just the start. Shall we?