Printed Matters

Daniel Quinn

Borders Across Borders: Just weeks after being added to the Sixth+Lamar development plan and thus posing some serious imminent danger to future neighbor BookPeople, Borders has announced that it will also be opening a store in scenic Logan, Utah, home of the 15-year-old, independently owned and operated Chapter Two Books. Although not right next door, the Logan Borders will be within a mile of Chapter Two, which has some employees worried. "Logan's so small that it doesn't matter where you are, or where they put it," one said, adding that it takes "about five minutes" to get from end of town to the other. "On one hand, we're thinking we'll be all right, but on the other, we're getting kind of nervous." According to Publishers Weekly, Borders will open in Logan's Cache Valley Plaza in November... Back here at BookPeople, a change is taking place: Events Coordinator Peter Duggan is leaving the store today, Friday, Aug. 16. Duggan is the man responsible for BookPeople's calling card: the high-caliber author appearances, book clubs, and local-interest programs that make the store so much more than a place to buy stuff and drink coffee. He'll be sorely missed, but he'll also be replaced by longtime BookPeople employee Alex Pippard, so we must maintain what little composure we might have left... Turns out that one of Duggan's final coups is former Austinite Daniel Quinn (who now lives in Houston), the man whose work (Ishmael, After Dachau) Ray Bradbury said "will be read for years to come." He'll be coming to BookPeople in October in support of his new Context Books release, The Holy (October 11). Many more details later... BlueHen's The Floodmaker, the third novel from Quinn's fellow Houstonian Myléne Dressler (and her first set in Texas), won't be released until fall of 2003, but in the meantime, look for its predecessor, The Deadwood Beetle (see the Chronicle's review at austinchronicle. com/ issues/dispatch/2001-08-31/ books_readings3.html) in paperback on Sept. 3 (BlueHen/Berkley, $13)... And another thing: Just as Neal Pollack is arriving and moving into his new place, fellow talented young author Alexander Parsons is leaving Austin -- where he has lived for about two years -- to teach the talented and young at the University of New Hampshire-Durham, a day trip away from Vermont's Bennington College, where former Archer City resident Mark Jude Poirier will be teaching. Parsons, whose PEN West Award finalist Leaving Disneyland (St. Martin's, $23.95) The New York Times called "skillful and eerie ... he has boldly taken on material outside his own experience when so many first novels have a memoirish feel," recently finished his second novel, titled El Malpaís and set in his native New Mexico.

Chronicle Writers Writing: Amanda Eyre Ward, who has been writing about books here for three years, will see her debut novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, published by San Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage in the spring. From Ward: "It is the story of three women whose lives intertwine over the course of one summer. Celia Mills is an Austin librarian who will try anything -- even an afternoon tryst with an undergrad she meets at the Hyde Park Post Office -- to forget her husband, who was murdered by Karen Lowens. Karen Lowens awaits her execution on death row in Gatesville. And Dr. Franny Wren flees her engagement to a washed-up singer named Nat, returning to Gatesville, her childhood home, where she spends altogether too much time drinking Scotch at the Gatesville Motor Inn Lounge." We look forward to that, as well as the hard-boiled Jesse Sublett's "Johnny Heartbreak" in the upcoming anthology Measures of Poison (Dennis McMillan Publications, $35). It'll be available at the 33rd annual Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, which will take place Oct. 17-20 in Austin (the event's first visit to Texas). Among the many in attendance will be George Pelecanos. Bookmark your brain to check back here for more details.