RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth NH -

You want Spivet! You've got him.

Tom — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:06:19 +0000

We've been getting alot of calls about wunderkind Reif Larsen's novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, ever since the Boston Globe gave it a great big write up this week. Well I'm happy to say that Michele, our events co-ordinator, is way out ahead on this kind of thing, and has already secured Larsen for a booksigning on June 26th at 7pm.

You can read the Globe article here.

Jody's winning poem!

Michele — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:28:22 +0000

It's probably no surprise that most booksellers are also writers themselves. We're very proud of our very own Jody Hetherington, who just was named a winner in the 2009 Maine Literary Awards, sponsored by the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. You can see her superb poem, winner in the Individual Awards for Unpublished Work Poetry category, below. Jody also received an Honorable Mention for her fiction, "House of Words", in the Individual Awards for Unpublished Work Fiction category. Go Jody! It's only a matter of time before we're hosting her as a featured reader and published author at RiverRun!

either oar

First, find a boat. It helps

to have a dream of water still

lapping in your ears and the salt

of regret in your eyes. Stay

within thought of the ocean, and listen.

Music at RiverRun: Subject Bias and Hateful Little Cakes

Tom — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:04:42 +0000

We occasionally have music concerts here at the bookstore after hours. If you've never been to one, I encourage you to come this Saturday (that's April 11th) at 9pm to hear Hateful Little Cakes and Subject Bias.

Watching a show at RiverRun is a special experience. Everyone is there to listen to the music-- there's no espresso machine chuggin in the background, nobody talking loudly and drunkenly into their cell phone. Everyone is paying attention.

Both bands on Saturday night are great. Hateful Little Cakes are from here in town, and are much nicer than their name suggests. They play a kind of folk/electronic mix that I really like. Subject Bias is out of Portland, Maine, and play well written alternative pop. They've got great voices and are a really tight band.

Author interviews, blogs, literary links, and social networking

Michele — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:38:59 +0000

I've been busy these days not just booking and running author events here at RiverRun, but also interviewing authors and writing book reviews. When Jedediah Berry and Samantha Hunt came to Portsmouth last month, I had a chance to talk with both of them about their thoughts behind their novels. Now I have interviews with them published in the April issue of Bookslut. Did I mention we have signed copies of Jedediah's book, The Manual of Detection, and Samantha's book, The Invention of Everything Else?

One Dog Year

Tom — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:38:12 +0000

Thank You! We just turned Seven Years Old!

Thank you, thank you! There is no RiverRun without you. We should be experienced enough by now to feel like old hands, but the publishing world keeps shifting under our feet. No matter how well we do our job, there are parts of this industry over which we have no control. For some reason, they wont listen to me when I tell them how to run their businesses.

Kindle, Borders, and Beyond

A Big Muggle Hug For HP7

Tom — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:23:34 +0000

I probably look silly for making this post, but on Tuesday night I was in a really foul mood, due partly to the horrible cold I have that will not go away, due partly to this seemingly unending winter. I needed a new book to read, but I wanted something that I knew would whisk me away. So I climbed into bed with Harry Potter VII, and it was the perfect choice. Snape was leering, Malfoy was snivelling, Hedwig was smoldering, and Bill and Fleur were getting married. In moments I was gone.

When I was younger I used to read my favorite novels several times, but these days I have about 150 books in my to-read pile, so it seems counterproductive to re-read. I had forgotten what a great feeling it is to come back to a favorite book and discover that it's still great.

"Start spreading the news..."

Michele — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:18:23 +0000

I love New York City. Ever since I went there to see my first musical when I was a kid (Carousel in Lincoln Center), I've fallen in love with the bustling city, filled with the most fascinating people, plenty of pigeons, street vendors selling sausages and pretzels, the famous and the very not-so-famous walking the same streets, giant billboards, and so much more to fill a book, or lots of books. Colson Whitehead wrote a well-known love-letter to his city, called The Colossus of New York. It's one of the best books I've ever seen that honestly captures all the euphoria and craziness of the Big Apple. The miracle of it all is the book is slim. He's economical in his ode to the city, and yet he says more with a few words than many authors do with paragraphs and pages of description.

I'll be thinking of Whitehead as I visit New York tomorrow and Friday to meet with publicists about summer and fall author tours.

Where the heck are those paintings??????????

Tom — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:52:39 +0000

I'm looking forward to Ulrich Boser's appearance at the store this Wednesday, the 25th, at 7pm. I love books about art, and art theft is always fascinating. It seems strange that galleries have millions of dollars worth of paintings on display, but generally poor security systems and underpaid and under trained gaurds.

Twenty years later, there is still no solid lead on where the paintings are. Although Boser has made some headway in determining who might have committed the crime, those people certainly no longer have the paintings.

So somewhere out there is a Vermeer, a Manet, two Rembrandts, and several other paintings worth an estimated 600 million dollars. The largest unsolved art crime of all time.

We have a new literary series at The Red Door!

Michele — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:08:23 +0000

I can't contain my excitement over our brand spankin' new literary series that we're launching this week. Martini bars and writers go together very well, and that's why we've partnered up with The Red Door in downtown Portsmouth. We'll be hosting a bunch of innovative, talented contemporary authors at The Red Door on an ongoing basis, and we're kicking it off on Tuesday, February 24th at 7pm with comic novelist G. Xavier Robillard. He'll be reading from Captain Freedom, a novel that is praised by RiverRun staff favorite Christopher Moore as ""a truly funny and energetic romp of a social satire, a terrific send up of not only of superheroes, but the cult of personality in general."

The Bleak Midwinter

Tom — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:57:24 +0000

This is a good time of year to pick up a book about a far away land. Or, a nice big think novel that you can really get lost in (and use for kindling if the electricity goes out again). One of my favorites from last year that fits in both categories is called Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. It's about 900 pages, and is all about modern day India. Almost all of the Indian novels I'd read to date were set sometime in the past, often around 1947 when the country became independent (Midnight's Children is a phenomenal example of this). Sacred Games takes place now, and it is a crazy swirl of religion, crime, pop music, history, terrorism, and romance. The plots are meandering and only twine together far into the novel, but that's half the fun.