Look Who’s Back

Barnes & Noble is buying used books. They're marketing it as a way to sell your old textbooks, but they're buying other books too. They've set up a simple site that lets you check titles and find out if they'll take them and how much they'll pay. You then send your books to Barnes & Noble and they cover the shipping. As far as I can tell, the prices are fairly comparable to what you might get selling your books to your local used bookstore, maybe even a little better.

Here are some more books coming our wayBack when I worked at the bookstore, Elizabeth Crane's When the Messenger is Hot was one of the books my coworkers liked to evangelize about. Read "The Daves" and you'll see why. Crane has a new collection of stories coming out in a couple of weeks called All This Heavenly Glory. Here's one of the stories from the new collection, an amusing take on the personal ad which becomes much more impressive when you realize that the whole long piece is one sentence (unless you think using semi-colons is cheating). Three other reasons to like Elizabeth Crane: She lives in Chicago, the city I currently call home. She was interviewed in Tap: Chicago's Bar Journal. She has a charming, unassuming blog called - for reasons I cannot discern - standby_bert.You may recognize the name Achmat Dangor because his novel of apartheid and its aftermath, Bitter Fruit, was shortlisted for a Booker Prize in 2004. Although the South African novelist missed out on any Booker boost his novel might have received here in the States, the book, which hits shelves soon, will likely garner some prominent reviews. In the meantime, here's an interesting piece by Dangor about South African literature from the Guardian, and here's a brief excerpt from Bitter Fruit.Alicia Erian's debut collection of stories from 2001, The Brutal Language of Love was described as "seductive, erotic, smart and tartly humorous" by Publishers Weekly. Now Erian is returning with her first novel, Towelhead, a contemporary coming-of-age story about a half-Lebanese girl who moves to Texas to live with her strict father. The novel's title comes from the epithet she hears from other residents of her less than enlightened suburb near Houston. A long - and very compelling - excerpt of the book is available here. And for a different taste of Erian's writing, try this story from 2000 in the Barcelona Review.In 2002's Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, Marc Estrin conjured up a second life for Kafka's transmogrified protagonist. In his new novel, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Estrin wonders: what's in a name? Saddled with an unfortunate surname, Arnold is at the mercy of preconceived notions and receives the attention of many unsavory characters. A brief excerpt is available here. Estrin also has a blog that is in its infancy.Look for more upcoming books in this space over the next few days.