Borders, a 40-year-old book seller, is seeking approval to liquidate after it could not get any bids to keep it in business.

The chain, with 399 stores in total, including 15 in Massachusetts, could start liquidation as soon as Friday if the judge approves their bid in court on Thursday.

Borders will ask the Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York to allow it to be sold to liquidators, including Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Brothers Group of Boston. The company could go out of business as soon as September.

Liquidators will dissolve the lease agreements Borders had with its landlords and auction them off in two rounds, scheduled for August and September, according to DJM Realty, a unit of Gordon Brothers.

“We are in the middle of a having a lot of conversations with retailers, and some landlords wanted their spaces back,” said DJM copresident Andrew Graiser, according to the Boston Globe. “It’s early, but there’s certainly some good interest in a number of these locations.”

Several locations in Massachusetts, including the stores at Downtown Crossings, CambridgeSide Galleria, Legacy Place in Dedham, Mansfield Crossing, Marlborough, Methuen, North Attleborough and Kingston are expected to be auctioned.

Borders attempted to stay in business with a $215 million “white knight” bid by Najafi Cos., but the bid dissolved when creditors and lenders objected to the deal, arguing that the chain would be worth more if it liquidated immediately.

‘‘We were all working hard toward a different outcome, but the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, e-reader revolution, and turbulent economy, have brought us to where we are now,’’ Borders Group president Mike Edwards said in a statement.

Borders currently employs 10,700 people, all of whom will soon be out of a job if liquidation occurs.

In a statement late last week, Amazon heralds the coming death of paper books. Can’t you hear it? Ever since e-book readers came on the market few years ago, e-books have slowly risen to over take paper books as the number one go to for books now a days.

Here are some bullet points from Amazon.com in regards to their news:

• Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
• So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon’s print book sales, [has] resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital. Free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.
• In the five weeks since its introduction, Kindle with Special Offers for only $114 is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family in the U.S.
• Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010
• Less than one year after introducing the UK Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, even as hardcover sales continue to grow. Since April 1, Amazon.co.uk customers are purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than 2 to 1.

What does this news eventually mean?  Paper books are becoming relics of a by-gone era and soon to be museum show-pieces to show our descendents how we read books. E-books are cheaper to create as well as buy, and you can receive them instantly once paid for which only makes sense as to its growing popularity. And that is why the future is upon us. Go forth and read.

After all my talk about the Thrift Store Christmas Challenge, I thought it only fair to share the best finds. Here are the cute, interesting and enviable gifts that victoriously emerged from The Challenge. Feel free to take notes, and yes, it is ok to be jealous.

Owl Book End:

Owl Bookend

Old, interesting, and decorative books:
As I’ve mentioned before, old books are great gifts because they can serve several purposes beyond the oh-so-traditional use for books, reading (yawn). I got a 1930’s English textbook. When I’m not leafing through the pages to find hidden love notes or rhetorical theories from 80 years ago, I can put the book on a desk or by a lamp, and BAM! Instant bookish ambience. In my opinion, that is one of the best ambiances you can achieve. Well, a French bistro feel is nice, too. But, I’m nearly positive you’ll also like bookish if you try it.

Vintage Books

Sconce

Framed Music Man Soundtrack Record:
And here’s a perfect example of finding a great present for a music lover in your family. My brother-in-law received a framed Music Man soundtrack because he loves musicals, especially Music Man. Not only is it a meaningful gift, but also is visually interesting. And in this day and age, it is universally considered cool to have a record in your house, since, you know, those are, like, totally outdated.

As you can see, Thrift Store Christmas is possible. So even if you have to be especially budget-conscience this holiday season, you can still hunt, shop and buy gifts your friends and family can proudly display in their homes. Now that is a great Christmas success story if I ever heard one.

Boston book lovers, rejoice!

You can finally back off the edge of your seats: The Boston Book Fest recently announced the lineup for its second annual bibliophile’s paradise, taking place in and around Copley Square on October 16.

The Festival has incorporated a wide range of authors and other media experts as panelists and moderators into its 2010 program. Alongside journalists, comedians, architects, designers, actors, and television and radio hosts are over 130 world-renowned writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Here are some highlights of celebrated writers in each main book category:

Fiction

Dennis Lehane

If you haven’t yet read Dennis Lehane’s books, you’ve probably at least seen one of the movies based on them: “Mystic River”; “Gone, Baby, Gone”; or more recently, “Shutter Island.” The Dorchester native also penned “Prayers for Rain,” “Sacred,” “The Given Day,” and “A Drink Before the War” (winner of the Shamus Award for Best First Novel), among others. To top it all off, Lehane recently edited and contributed to the hub-centric short story collection “Boston Noir.”

Kelly Link

Not only does Kelly Link write short fiction about, as The New Stateman put it, “pirates and wizards, undead babysitters and dueling librarians,” she also runs Small Beer Press and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She lives in Northampton and has one short story collection, “Magic for Beginners,” available for free downloading in case you want to read it now to prepare for meeting her in October. Her other collections are “Stranger Things Happen” and “Pretty Monsters.”

Brunonia Barry

Brunonia Barry worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for nearly a decade, but returned  to Massachusetts (who wouldn’t?) and opened Smart Games, a puzzle company, with her husband. Her self-published novel, “The Lace Reader,” created a media sensation that sparked a bidding war, landing her a $2 million book deal. Her second novel, “The Map of True Places,” was published in May.

Non-Fiction and Memoir

Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande, author of New York Times bestseller,”The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He’s also a staff writer for the New Yorker, which recently published, “Letting Go,” his look at the current state of end-of-life care inAmerica. In 2006, he received the MacArthur Fellowship (you know, the “genius prize”) for his practical improvements to surgical practices.

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn is an accomplished poet, but he is probably best known for “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” a Boston-based memoir about homelessness which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. His new memoir, “The Ticking is the Bomb,” was released in early 2010. Flynn has also been a ship’s captain, an electrician, and a caseworker with homeless adults.

Da Zheng

Da Zheng received his Ph.D. in English from Boston University after immigrating from Shanghai 1986. He currently serves as an Associate English Professor at Suffolk University. Zheng’s cultural biography, “Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveler from the East,” explores the life and work of the Chinese immigrant who wrote and illustrated travel books about the West from an outsider’s perspective.

Bill Bryson

Bryson’s Web site brags that he is “is the UK’s biggest selling non-fiction author since official records began.” Born in Iowa, Bryson spent the majority of his life living and writing in the United Kingdom (apart from a brief stint in New Hampshire in the 90s). He has written 17 books on travel, the English language, and science, including “The Lost Continent” and “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which won the Aventis Prize for Science Books as well as the Descartes Science Communication Prize. They’re awards justly won: Who besides Bryson (and Mel Brooks) can tackle the history of the world with such awesome wit?

Poetry

Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch credits Emily Bronte for his love of poetry. He holds a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. His books and essays have received a slew of awards, including the Lavan Younger Poets Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association, among others. Hirsch is a poetry columnist for the Washington Post Book World and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Jill McDonough

A poet with work in The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and Slate, among others, Jill McDonough is an adjunct English professor who teaches creative writing to incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Habeas Corpus,” was published in 2008.

Kevin Young

Publisher’s Weekly has stated that, “In just ten years since his debut, Young has become a leading poet of his generation.” Kevin Young has published six books of poetry, including March 2010′s “The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing.” He is a professor of creative writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

All of the Above

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most celebrated fiction writers of our time. She’s written novels for adults, young adults, and children; short stories; poetry; drama; essays and non-fiction; and has edited nearly 20 anthologies on various subjects, including H.P. Lovecraft, mother-daughter fiction, and cats. Her latest award is the Fernanda Pivano Award for American Literature, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of her achievements. She’s lived in New York, Wisconsin, Michigan (she calls Detroit her “great subject”), and New Jersey, and it’s up to us to give her a warm welcome in Boston.

In addition, the panelists and moderators for the day’s events include some familiar names in the publishing and media worlds, including Helene Atwan, the director of Beacon Press; Peter Kadzis, Executive Editor at the “Boston Phoenix”; Tom Ashbrook, journalist and host of National Public Radio and WBUR’s “On Point”; Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University law professor, writer, and winner of the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award for his human rights advocacy; and Faith Salie, radio host (or, you might remember her as Sarina Douglas on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). The events schedule and specific locations will be announced after Labor Day.

A full list of attending authors and media experts, with bios, is available here.

Da Zheng, a participant in the upcoming Boston Book Festival, is the author of "Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveller from the East." The book, published by Rutgers University Press in April 2010, is a cultural study of the Chinese writer whose 26 published works cover art, writing, travel, poetry, memoir, and children’s stories. Zheng is also an English professor and director of the Asian Studies program at Suffolk University. He is planning a similar project on Shih Hsiung, a writer who adapted the popular Chinese story, "Lady Precious Stream," into a play that ran for 1,000 nights in London and was later invited to Broadway.

Zheng sat down with Blast ro chat about his book, e-books, and the future of publishing, as well as offer some advice to aspiring nonfiction writers.

BLAST: How would you classify your book?

ZHENG: t could be a textbook. It would be very useful for Asian-American studies, and also for Chinese culture studies, even for American studies. People could learn so much through this book, in terms of the 20th century east-west cultural history. But I don’t think that most books from university publishers sell very well, because they are academic. But I tried to make it both. In between. Interesting and academic.

BLAST: Tell me about the book. How did you find your subject, and what about his life interested you?

ZHENG: I started to know Chiang Yee when I was in China. He had a book called "Chinese Calligraphy." I was interested in calligraphy, so I read through it and found it fascinating. So, with other people, I translated that book into Chinese and it was published in the 1980s. Then, I came to the States and I saw a copy of "The Silent Traveler in Boston" on the coffee table of my host family. It has Park Street Station; it is a familiar scene. But what caught my attention is the name Chiang Yee in Chinese. I realized that he is the same author of "Chinese Calligraphy," which I had just translated. I thought he was just an artist, without knowing that he was also a famous travel writer. My landlady told me that this was a very beautiful book, so I began to show interest in him. I read more and more, and I became fascinated with him.

BLAST: Do you have plans for any future books or writing projects?

ZHENG: Most of [Chiang Yee's] works were in English, so people in China do not know much about him. A publisher in China wants to translate his books on New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Paris into Chinese, so I am working on his biography. It will help.

BLAST: I noticed that it is not available as an e-book. Is that something you would ever consider?

ZHENG: Maybe I can make a suggestion to my publisher!

BLAST: How do you feel about e-books? Are they a good progression for publishing?

ZHENG: You want my honest opinion? Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I haven’t read a single volume of an e-book. But I know it is an inevitable trend. In fact, when I was in China, I walked into one shopping mall, which had a small section of computer technology. A lot of computer producers had rooms there, and one of them was selling e-books, like a Kindle here. It’s fascinating! It has over 400 books, and you can download as many as you want. I thought it was beautiful.

I understand it is inevitable, and the younger generation, like my son, is always asking me to consider it—an e-book of my book would help spread the word, and get more people to read it. I would definitely ask my publisher.

BLAST: I assume you don’t have an e-reader, then?

ZHENG: No, not at this point.

BLAST: Tablet computers like the iPad are making even large format and photo-heavy books possible in e-book format, and some people are predicting that the traditional print book will be dead within five years—which is really scary. Do you think that print publishing will continue on, or is it in serious danger?

ZHENG: My son is always trying to push me toward e-books, e-technology. I subscribe to the newspaper, and he always says to visit Boston.com. But I still love the papers! When I go over the old newspapers, I find a lot of articles that I can revisit, that I missed. I understand that more and more companies do e-form with or without the paper editions, but still I feel that paper books should still exist even after five years. For example, just the other day, I spent a lot of time trying to find some information, and I couldn’t get enough. So I went to the Suffolk Library, and I found a complete collection. Everything was there!

Even though, I have to admit, more and more now, I get my information through online sources. It is much easier; just a click away. But I don’t think it can replace the paper format.

BLAST: Do you have any advice for young people who want to get nonfiction books published?

ZHENG: I would say find a subject which interests you. Write with a passion, and be patient. Now, rejections come less and less. Just be persistent. Someday, you’ll find a niche.

Da Zheng will be on the "Mystery, History, and Art Across Three Continents and Two Centuries" panel, scheduled for 1:30-2:30 PM on October 16th in the Trinity Church Forum. His co-panelists are Elyssa East, author of "Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town," and Erica E. Hirshler, who penned "Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting." The panel will be moderated by Megan Marshall, author of "The Peabody Sisters."

There are some stories that unite Bostonians — that get even chilly New Englanders talking on the T, on bar stools, or in line at Dunks. Usually there’s a ball involved, or a demented referee. If the Boston Book Festival has its way, though, the story that brings us together this fall could be literary in nature.

For their recently announced initiative, "One City, One Story," 30,000 copies of a short story by an established local author will be bound into booklets and circulated throughout Boston. In the weeks before the second annual Festival, to be held in Copley Square on October 16, copies of the featured 5,000- to 8,000-word story will be available for free at the Boston Public Library, in subway stations and at other public locations, as well as on the Festival Web site.

Says Boston Book Festival Executive Director Emily D’Amour Pardo in a press release, the booklet will be "beautiful, lightweight, and easy to carry, and the online version will be available to anyone who wants it."

The initiative was inspired by the Brooklyn-based One Story literary magazine, which mails one short story to subscribers every three weeks. According to One Story’s Web site, the booklet format "allows readers to experience each story as a stand-alone work of art and a simple form of entertainment" and is "designed to fit into your purse or pocket, and into your life."

Says Boston Book Festival Founding President, Deborah Z Porter, "stories were requested from almost two dozen established authors who have ties to New England," and the final selection committee, made up of "a designee from the Mayor’s office, several branch librarians, several Boston Book Festival Board members and one or two other representatives of the community," will pick the winner from the best four or five manuscripts. The featured writer, whose name will be announced later this summer, will make multiple local appearances in the weeks prior to Festival and will lead a talk at the event. It’s a great opportunity for the writer, but the real focus of "One City, One story" is to get readers talking to each other.

"We love the idea of many thousands of people in Boston reading the same story and talking about it against the backdrop of the Boston Book Festival," explains Porter. "Boston has a passion for reading. We want to explore this further by uniting the city around a single story and examining it from the many different perspectives that exist here."

Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino shares her vision. "’One City, One Story’ is a wonderful idea for engaging many people in the joy of reading for pleasure and a great way to start a citywide conversation about a work of fiction," he said.

At a time when library branches are closing around the city, obituaries for the book are being written every other week and media is increasingly tailor-made for "niche markets," it will worth seeing if, just for a couple of weeks, the Boston Book Festival can get us all on the same page.

Jason Rabin of the Blast staff contributed to this report

When you’re writing a book about the military, this critic thinks, you’ve got to be a great writer. You have got to know what you’re doing, and you have got to understand the shark-infested waters you’re swimming in.

A bad book about the military will do one or several of the following things: 1) reduce the troops to tropes; 2) wave a flag; 3) become an excuse for an author to enter into a partisan argument between himself and the reader’s sensibilities; and 4) read like a Michael Bay (or, if in the 90s, Jerry Bruckheimer) movie.

I just finished reading an earnest attempt at macho beachside literature, “Horse Soldiers,” pitched to me by the PR company slinging the book as something for Dad on Father’s Day (which was Sunday?). My dad’s a retired Commander in the US Navy, so I couldn’t really think of the book without wondering how he would feel about it, and the military has kind of seeped into the back of my mind and informed, I’m finding increasingly as I get older, how I look at most things.

As such I feel compelled to discuss further the risks of writing a sensationalized take on military strategy, to elaborate on my negative review of the book, which should appear on Blast sometime this week.

The thing is this, at bottom: Nobody’s going to go to a book about military strategy, especially the War On Terror, without a political position of their own. I, myself, think the entire affair was ruined the moment the Commander in Chief decided not to pursue Bin Laden, so, within those confines, the Horse Soldiers’ mission (to fight Al Qaeda) wasn’t really the issue. The issue I had with the book was more that it didn’t do what it could to treat the soldiers as people, and instead gave us a Tony Scott movie with a pair of protagonists, a faceless enemy and a host of extras.

It’s about, I suppose, “supporting the troops.” The author, Doug Stanton, did a monumental amount of research to put “Horse Soldiers” together, and it shows. But Stanton’s encyclopedic amount of interviews and legwork produced not a book full of humanity, but a book full of pop and action. I didn’t care about the people whose lives were at stake in the war, and I didn’t get a sense of how their campaign fit in with the rest of the war, and these two things made the book into an excercise in sugar-spinning.

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I get, in fact. The book’s got staying power; I’ll give Stanton that.

An original story by Blast writer Roger Gude

It was hot and sunny as Henry Splinter tossed a ball up into the air. It was way up there, yardsticks high. The audience sat comfortably tan or flushed in the face. There were couplets of attendees fanning themselves with conversations until the umpire quieted them. The umpire sat on the edge of the court with an umbrella and bottled water and watched Henry with desperation. After all, the umpire’s job depended on Henry; well, it depended on every tennis player, but most importantly on Henry at that moment. The ball boys and girls were all where they needed to be and there were white lines framing action. Henry knew he had to do something to the ball floating above his head. His body was already arched; his arm drawn back and his feet ready to lift themselves off the ground. One swift overhand slam shot the ball towards the net. It was too close. The umpire raised his voice and called “Let,” as the neon ball slapped the top of the net.

Henry paced at the baseline and waited for his opponent to ready. The tennis ball sprang back up from the ground and he watched his opponent shuffle around his own baseline in navy blue shorts that swayed in unison with his body and the rare breeze that rushed from the top of the arena down into the faces of the crowd. There was sweat on his brow, it was shiny, and depending on the angle of his head you couldn’t see his face. When Henry did catch a glimpse at it, his eyes were darting left to right at the crowd around him.

Henry’s opponent wiped his brow and readied himself; knees bent like arrowheads, and squinted between the sun and the court at Henry. Henry tossed the ball up again, high above his head, his body arched and his feet left the ground, slamming the ball over the net. He was quick to ready himself after the serve. His coach always reminded him to be ready for a return no matter how much better you think you are. Henry didn’t like that he was thinking about his coach right then. It distracted him, and when his opponent returned his serve he almost didn’t have time to set his body up for a strong, two handed backhand. The thought of losing a match today frightened Henry. Just a couple years ago he was ranked third in the world, on the court that day he ranked somewhere in the twenties and found himself caught by an unranked African at what Henry thought was the end of his match.

Henry faced the left side of the court; his whole body faced that side, and stepped into the return quickly. The top spin he applied to the tennis ball he prided himself on. He managed to do that with a backhand every time and most other players couldn’t handle it. When he first made a name for himself two years ago on a misty grass court in the dead of summer, he knocked the number two ranked player, Leonardo Sandal, a man not unlike every other skilled tennis player out in a quarterfinal bout at Wimbledon. Henry only made it one step further.

He regained his footing on this desert colored clay court and the crowd gasped as his return made his opponent lunge. Good, he thought, he won’t beat me. Henry won that point and continued to win every point for the rest of the match. He beat his opponent, Tsonga Djimbe, 6-3, 6-1, 6-0. It was a clean sweep pretty much and the news broadcasters and the fans draped themselves over the guardrails of the stadium in an attempt to get Henry’s attention. Two young Americans with red and white face paint waved an American flag up and down. Cameras in the stadium matched Henry and the American flag on all the oversized screens above the crowd.

On his way to the locker room a few people stood around handing out directions to anyone. A twenty something man with a polo shirt and khakis and a camera around his neck stood with them. He acknowledged Henry and smiled with everything but his eyes. Henry wanted to ignore him but he flashed a bright white light at Henry and developed a picture for some paper somewhere. Henry blinked rapidly and thought about breaking the camera. Just a thought. If he did anything, the inevitable lawsuits would put a strain on his bank account and he needed money. His wife waited in the locker room.

#

In Henry’s awkwardly lit locker room were his wife, Melanie Splinter, and his niece Vanessa. Melanie wore her brown hair in a ponytail, up in a pink visor, and had a natural tan about her. Henry knelt down and hugged his niece.

Henry spent a lot of time playing tennis because he loved it but the way his wife and niece dressed and acted. It told Henry they didn’t feel the same way. He loved the intensely intimate atmosphere of a duel between two people and when he hugged Vanessa it reminded him. The amount of pressure on the tennis player’s shoulders gave him confidence; every success or mistake rested solely within himself. He thought of people like his wife and niece who wore Polo shirts and khakis to these games; you know, those people who spent a significant amount of time buying merchandise rather than enjoying a good match. They were just one big vampire, sucking all that was good out of it.

Henry was bitter and cynical, and some would say without cause. In the locker room after his match, that was all that he was. His wife had begun to sigh as she watched him caught in a stupor. His mind was completely detached from his body and she read it through the dullness of his eyes and face.

Six months ago Melanie started to notice the amount of time Henry spent just zoning out. The first time she noticed it, he had been sitting in the living room with no television on, no radio, nothing, in a pair of pajama bottoms and his father’s beaten up posture. He looked awake and he was breathing, but he sat like royalty. Eyes straight ahead until somebody asked for them. He snapped out of it a couple seconds after she put her purse down on the coffee table. The same thing happened the next day. This time he was sitting in the kitchen with a warm cup of coffee and an unfolded crossword puzzle hardly filled.

She thought he was depressed but Henry wasn’t only depressed. He was distracted too. Depression wasn’t something that Henry really needed to deal with or address. Sure he was depressed, but that depression he always muffled with a pillow in the back of his mind. Not to say that he never dealt with it, but he was stronger than it. It all had to deal with spirit, for Henry. If you’ve got enough spirit, he used to say, you’ll ace it every time. Sometime around his peak, after he’d reached the highest point he was going to reach in his career, he started to lose spirit.

It hit him heavy one night after practicing for a few hours before his next tournament. When he was twenty-three and finding his name on sports networks worldwide calling him the next Pete Sampras, he had it all. He had everything he’d asked for as a child. He had fame, health, a wife, a salary. He rode that wave for as long as he could and he felt it slope downward once some new talent joined the circuit. Once he lost. He was never going to be that good again and it tore him apart. He didn’t know how to replace what he’d lost; he wanted to get it back. If it was something in particular, a technique, he’d fix it as quickly as he could. But, it wasn’t any specific thing. It was more like he’d lost a persona. He’d lost that spirit of youth and confidence he’d once had in just about five years time, that fast.

In the green tiled locker room, where the fluorescent lights flickered from a bad electrical current, where Henry’s wife stood with all her weight on one leg and his niece squinted her eyes even harder than Henry did, he couldn’t take his eyes off Melanie. She still had everything he’d lusted after when they first met. Although her skin crinkled around her eyes a little more when she laughed and her body had filled with age. When he could see her bra strap, it paved valleys in between her soft skin. They were his, his little villages in between mountains, where he’d call himself mayor when his fingers dug under them. She had some success in selling real estate around St. Louis and people still acted like she was something special. Henry didn’t think he was good enough for her sometimes, or more that they both differed enough that he could never find himself committing as sincerely as some other people would whenever the two of them would go out to eat or have sex.

“That was a tough match, baby,” said Melanie. Her tone wasn’t pleasant when she said baby.

“Huh . . .” Henry said.

“Don’t say too much at once,” Melanie said, resting one hand on her hip.

Her hips were already starting to look like her mother’s. “What do you want me to say? I’m tired.” He paused and looked up at the lights and shut his eyes tight.

“Well I thought you did great, Hank!” said Vanessa. She smiled at Henry sitting slumped over with his elbow on his knee in a chair with his duffel bag and racquet next to him. Henry smiled back.

“Don’t worry honey, he’s upset right now,” she said and winked at Vanessa, who smiled and asked if she could go. Melanie told her she could wait outside.

Henry and Melanie had been taking care of Melanie’s niece for a few months now. The child was sent to them as a last resort. Melanie’s sister was the only other surviving member of her immediate family, and she wound up dead last May. The coroner pronounced it as a heart attack . . . at thirty-three . . . Vanessa didn’t have anywhere else to live. She told a policewoman about Melanie, and the next thing Henry knew they had something like a daughter.

“So, do you want to talk about this?”

As you celebrate Earth Day consider books which focus on Green and Sustainability issues. Whether your focus is on eco-friendly building and design or just easy every day solutions, we encourage you to take a look at some of our suggestions. Now there are more and more options to be eco-friendly without sacrificing style, taste or space.

It’s Easy Being Green by Crissy Trask
In It’s Easy Being Green you can learn how to make better choices for the environment. This is what the busy person needs to start making changes today. Get informative, comprehensive and practical information for adopting greener buying habits and identifying earth-friendly products; shopping for green products online; participating in online activism; and learning from over 250 eco-tips for cultivating a sustainable environment.

Some very simple tips include installing rain gutters and rain barrels to collect rainwater from your roof to use in the garden. Shifting appliance use to off-peak hours. Making your own household cleaners instead of relying on toxic commercial products. Or submerging a plastic bottle in your toilet tank to save one quart of water per flush and thousands of gallons a year.

This book concurrently presents a plan, tips and an Internet resources list that you can use to follow-through on good intentions. An extensive product labels list is also provided to help interpret how some foods are produced. If you haven’t invested in substantially greener behaviors, consumerism and politics because you didn’t know how or thought it was difficult, help is here: It’s Easy Being Green is a handbook for all those who aspire do more to protect the environment but want it to be simpler.

Microgreens by Eric Franks
This can become your guide to growing nutrient-packed greens. Microgreens-vegetables harvested soon after sprouting-are expected to be one of 2009′s hottest food trends.‚ With simple instruction, Microgreens teaches how to plant, grow, and harvest microgreens from one’s own garden. The small amount of space needed to grow microgreens-a porch, patio, deck, or balcony will do-allows anyone to easily incorporate them into their daily meals, and the greens’ nutritional potency make them a must-eat in a healthy diet. ‚ Some of the microgreens discussed include amaranth, arugula, basil, beet, cilantro, cress and mustard.

Green by Design: Creating a Home for Sustainable Living‚ by Angela M. Dean
In this book, Dean offers specific, hands-on advice for creating sustainable homes. The book’s four primary chapters cover design intent, design process, design strategies, and design specifics. Each of these chapters provides some information in the main text, then conveys a lot more information through detailed case studies. Although it is not a detailed reference guide, this book does provide a solid overview of green building for homeowners. So, if you are planning a remodeling in your apartment or venturing into buying a new house you can find out what options you have ‚ to create a environmentally aware home.

(ARA) – There’s an old saying that learning from the past can help you prepare for the future. This doesn’t just apply to your own past mistakes, but also means taking in the lessons of those that came before you. Whether you’re an adult or you’re in seventh grade, reading about mythology and the classics is not only entertaining, it can be like reading an ancient version of today’s news.

“If I had to choose a few books for our leaders today to read they would be Vergil’s Aeneid and some Greek and Roman classics,” says Marie Bolchazy, executive vice president of Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. “The classics are the foundation of our civilization, and we still live by and debate the same ideas they did back then, whether we realize it or not.”

Bolchazy recommends four books that have a wide-ranging appeal and can get anyone up to speed on how our past informs our future:

• “Vergil’s Aeneid,” translated by G. B. Cobbold:
  An action-packed epic tale, the Aeneid is the story of a man whose city is destroyed by war, who struggles to find a higher purpose in life and leaves the woman he loves to fulfill his destiny. The eternal struggle between good and evil is featured in this fast-moving history of Rome. The debate over war and morality could just as easily be taking place in the halls of Congress or the opinion pages of today’s newspapers.
• “Classical Considerations — Useful Wisdom from Greece and Rome:” Even thousands of years ago people knew that wisdom comes from sharing ideas with each other and with those who have gone before. In this book, a diverse group, including students, a psychiatrist, Vietnam veterans and no less an authority on leadership than Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, share in their own words how these ancient writings have influenced their lives.
• “The Epic of Gilgamesh” by Danny P. Jackson: The epic of Gilgamesh goes back to 2800 BC. Translated for the first time in the 1850′s, this ancient work, which predates the Bible, created a theological stir in Christian Europe. The story of the flood, the myth of the loss of immortality due to a serpent and the civilization of the first male are some of the stories found 2,000 years later in the Bible. The historical hero Gilgamesh goes through various stages of manhood — hormonal, intimacy, empire-building, awakening, search for immortality, finally obtaining the herb of immortality and ultimately losing it to a serpent. This Bolchazy-Carducci edition has been favored by the Great Books Foundation and Prentice-Hall (which includes it in their literature anthology), and was translated into Turkish. It is also published with a Hebrew translation. The epic is read by thousands of students in college and high school, with 15 original illustrations in color and 18 illustrations depicting the ancient world of the Mesopotamians. The epic is extremely important in comparative mythology and religions.
• “When in Rome:” When you just can’t bring yourself to sit down with heavy themes like the battle between good and evil, you can laugh and learn with a book of cartoons featuring Julius Caesar, Medusa and the Trojan War. Because, after all, if you can’t laugh at history, you won’t learn from it.

  Courtesy of ARAcontent

  ]]> http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/entertainment/comics/literature/learning-about-the-past-can-help-you-prepare-for-the-future/feed/ 0 http://blastmagazine.com/the-blogs/overthinking-it/overhyping-it-watchmen-companion-books/ http://blastmagazine.com/the-blogs/overthinking-it/overhyping-it-watchmen-companion-books/#comments Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:52:15 +0000 Steven H. Bagley http://blastmagazine.com/?p=10631

  Okay, so I went to see that little movie based on some four-color funny book that just hit theaters, “Watchmen,” and maybe it was the inundation that comes along with every big-budget movie like this, but when I finally got to see how Zach Snyder, David Hayter and Alex Tse rendered their homage to Alan Moore’s work, I was underwhelmed.

  If only because, jesus, it’s like you hear “Birdhouse in your soul” every day for a year, right, then you go see Barenaked LadiesThey Might Be Giants? And they play it live and the whole crowd is erupting but you’re just sort of whelmed, neither over-nor-under.

  But I’ll tell you: the Film Companion and Art of the Film coffee table books? They are so cool.

  If only because, well, they’re clearly written by people who are very passionate about the comic, its philosophy, its meanings, and how its visual representation, as a comic (or a film) makes the philosophy and themes of the story reality. They’re both written, in short, by more or less complete nerds.

  It’s weird. I was captivated by both books when I sat to read them a couple of weeks ago, before the movie came out. I couldn’t look away. The amount of work and detail that made it into the movie’s production was borderline fetishistic. It was the creation of a world.

  Maybe I’m a process person, finding the work that went into the movie more enthralling than the movie itself. Anyway, check the books out. You will not be disappointed.

  ]]> http://blastmagazine.com/the-blogs/overthinking-it/overhyping-it-watchmen-companion-books/feed/ 2 http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/a-blast-tale-wood-and-metal-and-plaster/ http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/a-blast-tale-wood-and-metal-and-plaster/#comments Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:43:04 +0000 Roger Gude http://blastmagazine.com/?p=9621

  An original story by Blast writer Roger Gude

  I was eating hot air when mom told me we were out of gas. I didn’t like that she included me, I wasn’t out of gas. She neglected to buy gas in the last town we had passed through, that’s why our car came to a sputter halt on U.S. Historic Route 66. Hell, I was downright pissed that we were here. It was hot, I wanted to be somewhere else, and mom had been regurgitating her failing relationship with my father for the past two days so much so that I couldn’t stand sitting in this beat up station wagon anymore.

  “So?” I said.

  “So. . . we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere, it’s hot, I’m grouchy, and-”

  “Just shut up Mom, you put us here.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. You wouldn’t be anywhere without me. Now help me find my phone, I should be able to call someone to help us out.”

  I crossed my arms as she got out of the car. This 1987 station wagon was a joke. It’s the year 2005 and she’s still driving her dad’s car. It was two years ago today that she got the keys to it. Her father passed away hiking up Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland, he slipped on a rock, and when she met with the rest of her family to receive his will all he left her was a set of car keys and some memories. This thing has over 100,000 miles on it and guzzles gas like a champ. The engine coughed like someone with emphysema every time we started it up and the metal surrounding the radio kept me from tampering with it. It heated up fast in the sunlight. The tires reeked of use and as nice as wood paneling goes for the color of a car, it’s time had passed.

  I watched mom shuffle through her purse in the backseat, her expression of desperation faded when her fingers rubbed against the familiar grooves of her cell phone. The leather on the seat had started to boil my skin. I was used to the heat by now, even the way the leather grabbed onto my skin, but the metal on my seatbelt made me hiss as I feigned interest at her. We couldn’t get reception out here. Satellites don’t care about us.

  “Found it!” she exclaimed.

  “Great. . .”

  After about fifteen minutes of fidgeting with her phone she gave up. I’d begun to watch the road through the passenger’s side rearview mirror. I watched the wavering heat rise from the pavement and listened to the wind tickle my ears. She said something about her phone not working. She decided that our only plan of action was to hitchhike to a gas station. My tennis shoes hadn’t seen a good walk in a while and I was glad to get away from this old, four-wheeled cocoon, plastered with images of my father and mother’s failure.

  I got out of the wagon, opened the backseat door, it took two pulls of the handle to get the door open, and grabbed my duffle bag. It was a heavy log with a strap attached. Mom was struggling with her three suitcases and oversized purse when I walked around the back of the car and grabbed one of them for her. They all matched, had jewel encrusted initials on the top, S.K.O., and shined like wasted money. But the worst part about them was the fact that they weren’t even very big. The suitcases were small and cute and matched and that negated the idea of a suitcase in the first place. A suitcase should be practical and carry as much as possible without breaking bones instead of being cute and impressive to people who don’t travel.

  It took us a couple hours of walking through the heat before we took a break. I finally agreed with her when I couldn’t take her whining anymore. She’d been telling me to take a break every fifteen minutes with excuses ranging from, “My feet hurt,” to “I feel like I’m about to die,” and my nerves were bound to concede. That and the fact that my clothes were plastered to my skin, my hair was drenched, and this damn suitcase was killing my arm were about all I could handle. We found a few large boulders off to the right of the highway and sat near them, flirting with shade.

  “What’s in those suitcases, anyways?”

  “Nothing really,” she tugs at her shirt and straightens her shorts out, “just some clothes and stuff.,,” She lights the cigarette. “It’s important to me. You wouldn’t want me to throw away all of you comic books because they were too heavy would you?”

  “No, but I didn’t bring all of my comic books on a trip across the country, now did I?”

  She didn’t respond.

  I watched the cigarette smoke leave her lungs and wondered how that could offer her any relief. She’s filling her body up with something from outside for just a couple seconds and for what? Satisfaction? You can’t be satisfied this way. Relief is nice, but temporary relief should not be a goal. We human beings should try and obtain permanent relief and as much as we want to take a drag from a cigarette permanently that just can’t happen, well it could I guess, but those people would smell horrible and die in a couple years.

  Watching her sit there with her cigarette in her mouth made me feel the heat even more. It was a stupid idea to travel across the country in the middle of the summer. It made sense to vacation to the south in the winter time; cold hurts because the spring and summer make use forget about it, but huffing across the country when I should be back at home playing video games and smoking pot made me boil.

  Her oversized glasses, her obviously dyed brown hair lightly framing her sweat profile, and her consciously slumped posture under the shade of the rocks made me despise her. I don’t know why she got to me so much when we first took a break; I think it was my arm. The muscles in my arm were fighting each other and it felt like both sides were losing. The pain from carrying the largest of the cute suitcases for a couple hours was catching up to me and venting on her was the best I could do to alleviate myself. But who was she feeling? I was the only one around for the next 20 miles or so and she was acting like at any moment some mechanic with broad shoulders would appear out of thin air and whisk her off her feet.

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  They’ll rot your brain. They’ll make you lazy. They’ll demagnetize your moral compass and turn you into a sociopathic monster. They’ll sabotage your ability to function in the real world.

  Sound familiar, gamers?

  In the 1950s and 1960s, critics claimed a new form of mainstream entertainment, comic books, were going to do just that. However, many comic book lovers grew up to be productive members of society, and one even wrote Pulitzer Prize winning novel on the subject.

  In the mid-19th century, such criticism was heaped on Penny Dreadfuls — the popular, cheap, serialized stories that young adults, particularly males, devoured. The Penny Dreadfuls were so popular that boys of limited means would band together, pitching their money into a communal pot to buy one issue, which they would then pass around, taking turns until everyone had read.

  Today, the same charges have been leveled at video games. From politicians to religious groups to parents associations, the critics have been persistent in their doom and gloom toward the impact of video games on culture.

  But there’s a growing body of scientific evidence that says, in some cases, video games are better for you than books.

  “New technology and new media have always been met with skepticism and predictions about their adaption and areas of use, but they have rarely been accurate,” said Erik Hoftun, publisher of The Book of Games Volume 1 and 2.

  Education, in particular, is one area in which Hoftun feels games haven’t been given their due.

  “Of course I am not advocating video gaming as a total substitution for reading,” Hoftun says. “[But] sooner or later, educators are bound to discover the incredible educational potential of video games.”

  In The Book of Games Vol. 2, Hoftun illustrates his point with the US state of West Virginia.

  West Virginia has one of the highest childhood obesity rates in the country. While books, by their passive nature, couldn’t possibly address a problem like obesity, there was no such limitation on video games. West Virginia began offering the popular title, Dance Dance Revolution, as an alternative to standard gym exercises in 157 schools.

  The move was a hit, eliciting enthusiastic participation in students who were otherwise apathetic toward physical education.

  In another example, The Book of Games Vol. 2 highlights a school in Norway, Vear Elementary, which implemented DDR as an alternative to traditional physical education. They met with great success, according to teachers in the BoG, with the educators going out of their way to note that the children often wrote and performed better in class after the physical activity provided by the game.

  These anecdotal examples are backed by research. As cited in the BoG, a study reported on by Reuters followed 50 children between 7 and 12 years old over 24-weeks. Results showed that children who played physically active dancing games for 30-minutes or more per day maintained and even reduced their weight.

  And the benefits extend beyond those offered by exercise, Hoftun adds.

  “All video games, and adventure games in particular, encourage scientific method of the purest kind. They follow the classic formula of trying something, failing, try something different, and figuring out what works,” Hoftun said. “In scientific terms: Develop hypothesis, test, prove or disprove, adjust hypothesis, test again. So if you want to develop small scientists, get the kids away from their passive book reading, and have them play video games.”

  Currently the United States public school system is ranked 18 out of 24 according to a 2003 study done by UNICEF.

  In the report, countries such as South Korea, Japan, Finland Austria and the United Kingdom beat the United States. Another study done around the same time, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, gaged the overall progress of the average US student. In the 4th grade, US students rank as well as their counterparts in higher ranked countries. However, by the 12th grade, US students had fallen behind by a significant margin.

  James Paul Gee, Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has argued for years that video games would go a long way toward reversing that trend.
  “Better theories of learning are embedded in video games than many children in primary and secondary schools ever experience in the classroom,” said Gee in a 2003 interview with The Observer. “If schools want to engage their students in the same way as computer games, they need to drop their snobbish antipathy and begin learning from them instead.”

  ]]> http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/technology/books-vs-video-games/feed/ 1 http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/technology/zero-cost-self-published-pocketbooks-empower-authors/ http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/technology/zero-cost-self-published-pocketbooks-empower-authors/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2007 07:00:46 +0000 Vivian Lee http://blastmagazine.com/2007/12/zero-cost-self-published-pocketbooks-empower-authors/

  Authors of all genres and walks of life now have the option of harnessing the power of the electronic age — publishing their own books to computers and iPods and selling the works for free.

  Using software developed by Florida-based MediaClick Inc., anyone can create a “PocketBook.” This zero-cost self-publishing format groups all kinds of multimedia into an interactive package.

  There are a ton of possibilities with these visual podcast-slash-multimedia learning guides, ranging from the simple one-chapter quickies to complex volumes. The textual content has the ability to link to both graphic and media files.

  Each chapter of a PocketBook ends with a short quiz. All of this is done with the help of a simple interface that compiles the data and generates the PocketBook.

  The concept of a PocketBook is to “provide instructional content in an interactive format that facilitates comprehension of the material and provides the patron with validation that the information is understood correctly,” says MediaClick. With the inclusion of interactive features such as video lectures and quizzes, the company hopes to parallel the learning experience of a physically attended lecture.

  In addition to instructional e-books, PocketBook Maker also allows authors to publish their own books without the hassle of traditional publishing methods and costs.

  “PocketBook authors can bypass (these) costs,” said Steve Cox, president of MediaClick. “This is a publishing model that will allow a new breed of authors to showcase their work without risking or paying anything.”

  Butch Hamilton, author and search engine optimization specialist, concurs with Cox’s outlook. “Self publishing services usually cost a few thousand dollars, however, PocketBook publishing is basically free and my books will be exposed to millions of potential eBay buyers. This is too good of an offer to pass up,” he said.

  Authors can publish their work via the eBay PocketBook download store, which charges a 30 percent selling commission but lists the items for free. After purchasing a PocketBook from the eBay store, the package is digitally transferred to the buyer’s computer, along with the PocketBook Library management system to allow playback of any of the multimedia books.

  The upgradeable Library also has the option of formatting the PocketBooks into file types playable on iPods. MediaClick is also looking to expand its outreach in the future to other successful media playback devices.

  Authors will still be subject to market demands and reviews of their material. Cox said that the key to an author’s success will depends on buyer feedback. “We intend to drive huge numbers of potential buyers to our eBay store and buyer satisfaction is guaranteed so it is very important that the author publishes quality material.”

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