The Bookies – truly, a bookstore like no other in the heart of Denver, Colorado – prepares for their Zola opening.

Pictured here (left to right) are Larry Yoder, Cae Dornfeld, Jessica DeLoy, and Susan Tracy, who between them have decades of bookselling experience.

While The Bookies’ fan base is strongly committed to the rich store experience The Bookies provides, they have customers who are also sometimes looking for ebooks.  Now, for the first time, fans of The Bookies can purchase those ebooks in a way that directly supports their favorite store.

The curational expertise of these kind of booksellers is at the heart of Zola – we couldn’t do it without them!

Take a look at Larry’s Father’s Day list of books dads really want to read here:

https://zolabooks.com/list/fathers-day-3

And visit their Zola storefront at https://zolabooks.com/profile/thebookies to pledge your support.

Thanks, Bookies!

by Kelly Gallucci

If my nose isn’t crammed in a book, it usually can be found leading me towards something delicious. So receiving a copy of Mad Hungry Cravings and being told to go blog about a recipe was a dream come true.

There is no shortage of temptation in this book. But if we’re taking true cravings—the kind that cause your stomach to burst out in a hungry symphony in the middle of a quiet room—then only one dish can satisfy me: mac and cheese.

I have obsessively loved mac and cheese ever since I was a kid, to the point where I’m sure my roommate and I single-handedly supported the Kraft company throughout our college years. Making this is nonnegotiable. Failure to do so is sacrilege.

So you ready? You hungry? Let’s go create liquid gold!

***

Step One
Assemble your supplies and preheat the oven to 375º.

Supplies
- 1 pound elbow macaroni
- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 quart whole milk
- 12 ounces shredded cheese of choice! (Cheddar, Munster, Monterey Jack, etc)
- 1/4 teaspoons freshly ground pepper
- Pinch of cayenne pepper
- 1 1/2 cups panko bread crumbs (for topping)
- 1 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted (for topping)
- Franks red hot (for serving)
- Laptop (If you don’t cook while listening to Pandora you’re missing out my friend)

Step Two
Heat a large pot of water on the stove and then head over to your grating station.

I decided to go with a sharp cheddar—gotta love a cheese that bites back—and Monterey Jack.

Step Three
Once you’ve grated, either put the cheese away or resign yourself to the fact that you will eat it. It’s fine—follow your cravings. This is why you smartly bought more cheese than the recipe calls for.

Step Four
Once your water is boiling, add pasta. After 6-7 minutes—you want it al dente—drain and let sit. Don’t rinse! Rinsing pasta makes it more difficult for sauce to stick to the noodles and you do not want that.

Step Five
Melt four tablespoons of butter over medium-high heat. Once melted add in flour and whisk constantly until golden. In less than two minutes you’ll be in a butter-scented heaven.

Step Six
Whisk in milk and bring to a boil. Leave boiling and whisk constantly for about five minutes—until thickened.

Optional Step
Get bored whisking constantly and take selfies for your blog post.

Step Seven
Remove from heat. Slowly stir in your cheese.

Step Eight
Listen to the comforting growl of your stomach as the cheese melts and convince yourself it’s a stupid idea to just pull out the spoon and eat cheese soup. (Do any of you love cheese as much as I do?)

Step Nine
Sprinkle in black pepper and cayenne pepper. (Two dashes if you like things on the spicier side—the cayenne truly adds something special to this dish, don’t skip it!) Stir.

Step Ten
Dump Carefully pour elbows into the sauce mixture and stir until fully coated.

Step Eleven
Butter a large baking dish—around 13×9 is fine.

Pour in mac and cheese.

Step Twelve
Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a medium saucepan. Add 1 1/2 cups of panko bread crumbs. Stir.

Step Thirteen
Sprinkle bread crumb mixture over the mac and cheese. Use as much as you want. I sensed I was using too much and kept going. Learn from my mistakes.

Step Fourteen
Give in and take a bite. Die a little inside then put that delicious masterpiece in the oven.

Step Fifteen
Set the timer for 18-20 minutes. From here the choice is yours of what to do next. I chose waiting impatiently, eating more cheese, and ignoring the growing pile of dishes.

Step Sixteen
Pull it out of the oven when golden brown.

Add Frank’s RedHot.

Get yourself a gorgeous fork-full and enjoy your life.

Serves 6 (or 1…judgment-free zone here)

***

This is only one of the many recipes I’ve made from this book and honestly nothing has come out badly. The directions are simple and easy to follow. The food comes out tasting fantastic and you will not be disappointed. As the great Michael Scott once said, “You know what? If I were allergic to dairy, I think I’d kill myself. Cause this is way, way too good.”

Credit for recipe: Lucinda Scala Quinn, Mad Hungry Cravings
Credit for legend-dairy joke: Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother

From the illustrious house Scribner, publisher of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Wolff and, today, Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, to the new publisher Emily Bestler Books, home of Vince Flynn, Sister Souljah, and Brad Thor, the houses that comprise Simon & Schuster are among the best in the world.  We at Zola are especially pleased to make available books from Zola friends Isaac Marion, Daniel Wallace, and Audrey Niffenegger – WARM BODIES, THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF ROAM, and HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY.

The list of fantastic books is long – including current fiction bestsellers THE NEXT BEST THING by Jennifer Weiner (who did a great mother’s day list for us!), DADDY’S GONE A HUNTING by mystery maven Mary Higgins Clark, THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS by M.L. Stedman, BONES ARE FOREVER by Kathy Reichs, UNDER THE DOME by master novelist Stephen King, BLACK LIST by bestselling stalwart Brad Thor, THE LAST MAN by Vince Flynn, Zane’s ADDICTED, and Stephen Chbosky’s THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER (recently a film starring newcomer Ezra Miller), as well as nonfiction from groundbreaking comedienne Carol Burnett, CARRIE AND ME, volleyball star Gabrielle Reece’s MY FOOT IS TOO BIG FOR THE GLASS SLIPPER, the phenomenal hit STEVE JOBS by Walter Isaacson, PROOF OF HEAVEN by notable neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, WHO OWNS THE FUTURE by genius technologist Jaron Lanier, and BRAIN ON FIRE by Suzanne Cahalan (who did a great Q&A with us).  There are also scores of perennial classics such as FAHRENHEIT 451 (we miss you Ray Bradbury!), THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls, ANGELA’S ASHES by Frank McCourt, THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway, WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams, MY SISTER’S KEEPER by Jodi Picoult, and DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY by Douglas Adams.

Of course, exciting as it is to load all of these great books, it’s only one publisher among many we’ll be turning on in the coming weeks and months (which is why if you search for certain eBooks, writers, and publishers, you may not be able to find them yet).  And we haven’t started pricing as competitively as we plan to; once we have a few more publishers, we’ll be turning on algorithms that make our prices consistent with other leading retailers.  But one thing at a time…

Or maybe two things — we’ve also made some new functionality live: the ability to send messages to people who follow you.   For the first time on Zola you can connect with friends, recommend books to them, and have a conversation on the site about those books.  In the coming weeks we’ll be unveiling other social functionality on the site and in the Zola Social Reader for iPad/iPhone.  So keep checking in, or sign up for our newsletter to hear about all the new developments in the weeks and months to come!

And as always, please let us know what you think, good or bad, at support@zolabooks.com.

Many thanks,
Joe Regal
Co-founder, CEO

Courtesy the Topless Pulp Fiction Club 

by Alexander Nazaryan

There are many ways to read a book. One of them is to do so topless.

That, at least, is the premise behind the Topless Pulp Fiction Club, a small group of young women who have taken to gathering in city parks to read their favorite works of fiction sans brassierre or any other covering.

Going topless is legal according to New York law. And reading topless is fun, according to Topless Pulp co-founder A.A., who would not divulge her real name because of privacy concerns.

The club is a celebration of a woman’s freedom to bare her breasts and read a book at the same time — a reminder that not all nudity has to be salacious or even sexual, she says.

“A friend and I decided to start a group to take advantage of the legal rights we already had but weren’t using,” A.A. says, noting that she wanted to enjoy the same freedom as men who freely lounge on park grass with no thought of exposing their chests, whether they be pale, flabby, hirsute, tattooed or some grotesque combination of all of the above.

As for the club’s concentration on the lurid midcentury fiction known as “pulp,” A.A. explains, “Pulp fiction is fun because it’s one of the few genres in which the women on the covers of the books might be wearing less than we are.”

Certainly, there’s no lack of sexual suggestion on the covers of not-quite-classics like “I Should Have Stayed Home,” “Titan’s Daughter” and “The Baby Doll Murders,” the last of which concerns a femme fatale who “could look like a wistful child and she loved to play games — such as murder, man and marijuana.”

Yikes.

However, A.A. notes that despite the club’s explicit endorsement of what may fairly be called trashy stuff, members are not restricted regarding what they read: “We’ve had members turn up with Steinbeck and Faulkner, ‘The Hunger Games’ and Anais Nin, ‘Lolita’ and ‘House of Leaves.’ Something mischievous and fun seems to fit the spirit of the thing, maybe something with a hint of provocation to it. But really there’s no book that can’t be improved by being read outdoors while the sun and the breeze play across your bare skin. Why do you think the term ‘beach reading’ was coined?”

But the women of the pulp club are not just sun-lovers.

Indeed, they even hold their gatherings in the winter, when most New Yorkers seek to cover every inch of explosed flesh. As photos of club gatherings from this last winters attest, these women intend to do just the opposite.

A group of semi-nude reading outdoors in a public park is sure to attract stares, but A.A. says this is less of an issue “than you might think. Less than we expected going in, certainly,” she continues, explaining that “New Yorkers are a jaded, seen-it-all bunch, far too worldly to be stopped in their tracks by the sight of a bare breast. We’ve gotten more positive comments from women saying ‘You’re wonderful’ and ‘I wish I could do that’ than we have catcalls from men.”

In other words, this is not exactly your aunt’s suburban book club. And that’s probably a good thing.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/new-york-bookworms-strip-topless-pulp-fiction-club-article-1.1340864#ixzz2TBl8NJK1

Jen Campbell, who works at a bookstore in London, heard so many crazy things in her line of business that she decided to compile the funniest and most outrageous ones into a book: Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores. Below, a sampling of some of the most outlandish things heard at Campbell’s bookstore and shops across the U.S. and Canada.

1.
Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Bookseller: Er…do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.

2.
Customer: Did Charles Dickens ever write anything fun?

3.
Customer: I read a book in the sixties. I don’t remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?

4.
Customer: I’ve forgotten my glasses, could you read the beginning of this book to me to see if I like it?

5.
Customer: Do you have any second hand crosswords?
Bookseller: You mean crosswords that have already been filled in?
Customer: Yes. I love crosswords, but they’re so difficult.

6.
Customer: What books could I buy to make guests look at my bookshelf and think: ‘Wow, that guy’s intelligent’?

7.
Customer: Do you have any books by Jane Eyre?

8.
Customer: Do you have this book (holds up a biography) but without the photographs?
Bookseller: I think the photographs are published alongside the text in every edition.
Customer: Why?
Bookseller: I suppose so you can see what everyone looked like.
Customer: I don’t like photographs.
Bookseller: Ok.
Customer: Could you cut them out for me?

9.
Customer: I’d like to buy your heaviest book, please.

10.
Customer: My children are climbing your bookshelves. That’s ok, isn’t it? They won’t topple over, will they?

©2012 by Jen Campbell. From Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores. Overlook Press. All rights reserved

For full article on Parade.com http://www.parade.com/11229/parade/10-weird-things-customers-say-in-bookstores/

Zola Books is thrilled to welcome more publishers to our site this week: Workman Publishing (with their fantastic imprints Algonquin, Artisan, and more), Graywolf Press, and HCI Books.  The addition of these publishers brings an even greater mix of titles to the growing list of books we have for sale. Highlights from Workman include bestselling fiction WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, A RELIABLE WIFE, THE REVISED FUNDAMENTALS OF CAREGIVING, AN ARSONIST’S GUIDE TO WRITERS’ HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND, MUDBOUND, and BIG, BAD LOVE, as well as THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE, and CANDY FREAK.  Workman also published perennial non-fiction bestsellers WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU ARE EXPECTING, THE SILVER PALATE COOKBOOK, STITCH & BITCH, 1001 PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE, and the modern classic WHEN PARENTS TEXT.

Graywolf Press, one of the hottest independent publishers today, boasts an impressive array of books, too, including the breakout success OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Patterson and WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel, and the newly anointed Pulitzer Prize-winning LIFE ON MARS by Tracy K. Smith.  On the nonfiction side, HCI Books publishes many backlist favorites including the New York Times bestsellers A BOY CALLED IT and ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS, not to mention THE VELVETEEN RABBIT.

Help us welcome these publishers to the ever-expanding Zola Books community!

And of course stay tuned as we add features and functionality (and more books!) almost every week….

The attached photo comes from: http://bornandbread.blogspot.com/

by Caroline Acebo

Twenty-seven-year-old Manhattan native Jessica Soffer recently stopped by the bookstore she frequented as a child, McNally Jackson, to read from her newly published first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. Joining her for a post-reading Q&A was Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award in 2009 for Let the Great World Spin and Soffer’s MFA professor at Hunter College.

Looking like a proud father, McCann encouraged Soffer to bask in the evening’s celebration. “These are the moments we teach for,” said McCann, who has a row of books in his office written by previous students.

Apricots—the story of two women who find desperately needed companionship through a shared love of food—was born in a workshop led by McCann. According to Soffer, the source material was a 700- to 800-word “staccato recounting of a woman’s life of pain from the time she was a young girl to the time she was an adult. It was really dark.”

Yet McCann urged her to expand the story.

“For the first time, I felt like there was a character I met that I latched onto that seemed like she could have legs,” Soffer said, “that she was more than just a character in a story, more than just a figment in my imagination that I could build a whole world for.”

Apricots is not autobiographical, though Soffer admitted to previously pilfering material from her life: “I think writers need to get a certain kind of autobiography out of their system. Constantly, I think writers go back to scenes again and again and to memories again and again. Once they’re out, they can move on and write something that is actually creative and can actually be smart and they can develop a world that really feels unto itself a world.”

So what about her own relationship to food? “My father’s mother was a healer in Baghdad and very conscious of the ways food can do more than nourish us, but sustain us. Iraqi Jews ate according to color. They do not eat any black food—they would peel an eggplant before eating it. They ate brightly colored food to encourage happiness. If you wanted to find love, you would eat certain foods—it’s all very spiritual.”

As for what’s next—the question everyone’s been asking her lately—Soffer isn’t sure. But she’s excited.

“I am so anxious to work on another big thing. If there is anything I’ve learned from this process it’s that I love writing.”

Novelist André Aciman signs at 192 Books

By Kelly Gallucci

“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I listening to this crazy person?’” André Aciman humorously interrupts his own reading of his latest novel, Harvard Square— the semi-autobiographical story of the friendship that forms between the nameless narrator, a Harvard graduate student who can be read as Aciman, and Kalaj, a loud, opinionated Tunisian cab driver.

Seated in the middle of 192 Books—a bright bookshop in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that brings together lovers of both art and literature—Aciman smiles warmly at the intimate crowd of listeners, a varied mix of tight-vested professors and girls in towering stilettos.

“He’s always so bristling with anger,” he continues. “But he’s having fun, and if you can read him as a person who does it all for effect, you can see how a person like that can be charming.”

He flips to other dog-eared passages, always about Kalaj. Having read the book, I enjoy watching the crowd’s reactions to the sharp and witty prose.

Finally closing the book, Aciman takes questions.

Why call the book a novel and not a memoir?

“Life has no narrative. There is no climax. When you start to select the things that happen you’re cobbling them together. You’ve created a narrative. You no longer remember what it looked like before and what you altered becomes fact. Memoir and novel…once I’ve written it down it’s impossible to distinguish between what truly happened and what you think happened.”

Why such a strong focus on Kalaj?

“At Harvard, I felt everybody knew what their place was and that I was let into Harvard by mistake. I believed I had fooled them and they were going to find out at some point! To tell this story, I needed someone to feel that out other than me—I needed him as a shadow-self, to speak about the fear and frustration and insecurity.”

He also addressed the Boston Marathon bombing—the two men connected seeming oddly reminiscent of the two friends in his novel.

“I was in Boston last week…So many journalists are trying to understand what happened there in Cambridge—calling me and asking questions. One brother saying that he has no American friends and another who does.  And I like…Well, not ‘like’ but, you know, how the one who is still alive was normal. He was tweeting and he had friends and was social. And the other one just couldn’t quite hack it in America. The difficulty that I have is that the young kid looks exactly like one of my sons, so I want them to give him a second chance—which is ridiculous because he killed people.”

When I go up to speak to him afterward, words tumble excitedly from my mouth faster than he can likely comprehend. He does catch that I loved his novel, and his smile grows.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Truly, thank you.”

by Josefina Massot

As I walk into the endless warehouse of a room that is The Strand’s fifth floor, Junot Diaz and Hilton Als arrive onstage. Diaz needs little introduction: in 2008, his Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao garnered widespread praise and a Pulitzer; his short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, has critics in a frenzy. Als writes for The New Yorker, but tonight he’s simply Diaz’s friend: they’ve shared late dinners, time-travel theories and half-jokes about fathers who, says Diaz,“drive past the house and call that a visit.”

There must be over two hundred of us here, and what really strikes me is our range: from the suits in the first row to the students in the aisle, from the preppy girl with bright pink nails to the nerd who bites his with neglect. Dominican natives, Bronx-born Latinos, all-round Americans and I—the uprooted Argentine—make a company of sundry folk worth a Chaucerian prologue.

Diaz talks about the usual Junot Diaz things—race, machismo, the DR—but (perhaps because he’s talking to a friend) he also talks about Junot Diaz. He talks about a family who, years ago, was ready to love him for how many neighborhood fights he won or bulls-eyes he hit on the rifle range, but not for reading Samuel Delany’s sci-fi. “Anormal!” they’d say. “Go outside and play!” He talks about a post-dictatorship Dominican culture that prized external markers of success, and a father who demanded that he met them: “If I ironed my clothes every day, [he] would like me.” He talks about his child’s need to please his father, his family, his scene in Santo Domingo and later Jersey.

It may seem as though adult Diaz has shunned this need; we’ve come to know him as a badass geek, a writer whose propelling engine “doesn’t…want popularity.” And yet, to this day, he will not discuss his art during Christmas dinner to avoid feeling anormal: he will talk sports instead. “I’m still auditioning for my family’s love,” he admits. His father’s ghost visits when he writes—a command to be successful and renowned—and he must stifle it in order to produce good work. No wonder he’s impatient when a middle-aged woman asks how he’s managed to transcend his past: “Who says I did? I have to live with it!”

Living with it, for Diaz, is writing about it. As a selfish reader of his fictions, I can’t help but bless the pain that drives them.

Yesterday thousands of investors, job seekers, and general startup enthusiasts flocked to Pier 92 for the second annual NY Tech Day. NY Tech Day describes itself as a massive science fair where entrepreneurs exhibit their tech-based companies to the masses. Over 400 startups were present, ready to show themselves off to the over 10,000 attendees. There was a great range of industries represented including fashion, music, online dating and, of course, book publishing. Zola Books was present and accounted for via our Director of Product Management DongWon Song, Product Manager Luke Gilson, and COO Michael Strong. “It was great to be a part of this amazing event and to have the opportunity to meet so many folks from within the tech community,” said Song. “We made some great contacts and are already looking forward to participating again next year.”