I refuse to sing the jingle “A Great Place on a Great Lake” from 20 years ago, but I still kind of remember it.

Last week we were lucky enough to host Dan Kennedy, author of the upcoming rock-and-roll-corporate-style memoir Rock On, which is coming out in February. (Read more in a previous post). He came to meet booksellers and get his book on our radar. As a contributor to McSweeney’s, you would expect Kennedy would be a very funny guy. But aside from his sense of humor, the most interesting thing that happened in my day with Kennedy and his publishing associate Craig Popelars was listening to him talk about how much he liked Milwaukee.

What did we do? We had lunch at the Soup Brothers (we are soup crazed in Milwaukee—that is definitely worth a separate blog), bought beer-shaped salami at Usingers, had a coffee at the Alterra at the Lake (a converted pump house), visited our shops, and then had pizza and beer with booksellers at Pizza Shuttle. The evening ended with a snowball fight. I guess that makes it a good day, and there’s no time to gripe about how we have no rail, or the various social problems that are exacerbated by power grabs, infighting, and brain drain.

The truth is that I love Milwaukee, and have loved it since I moved here from Queens over twenty years ago. It has issues, but to me, it’s all about expectations—and Milwaukee is generally better than one expects it to be. Could it be better? Yes, it could, and would be, if so many people didn’t leave it for Seattle and New York and Atlanta and Phoenix. (What is with this fear of snow? Doesn’t everyone know that snow equals water equals water crisis averted?)

So since I’ve lived in Milwaukee I have worked for this Milwaukee-area independent. And I know blogs are not supposed to be sales tools, but honestly, how else are you going to know about these beautiful, wonderful books if I don’t tell you about them? So bear with me--here is the cream of the Cream City...

1. Milwaukee at Mid Century
When amateur photographer Lyle Oberwise passed away in 1993, only his closest friends knew that he had amassed a collection of 43,000 color slides. Collector John Angelos and his wife Marilyn Johnson bought the images in an estate sale and proceeded to give a series of slide shows, of which I attended several. His photographs were amazing—they are fifty years of detailed urban documentation, from historic buildings going up to others being torn down. There were parades and show windows and restaurants and beauty contests and jazz concerts and neon signs and trick-or-treaters. Oberwise had a natural eye for composition and a compulsion to collect data. The collection was sold to the Milwaukee County Historical Society in 2003, and this is the first published collection. It’s everything I hoped for—and most people I talk to agree. And the best part—this is just the tip of the iceberg!

2. The DVD of The Making of Milwaukee
For years we have been selling John Gurda’s book The Making of Milwaukee, an exhaustive and elegant history of our fair metropolis written by our premiere historian. The book was adapted into a multi-part series produced by and shown on our local PBS station—a lively Ken-Burns-style extravaganza that I have seen several times. It’s now available on DVD, and has, needless to say, been quite popular.

3. Alfred Lunt’s Cookbook
Lunt and Fontaine were perhaps the greatest stage duo ever. Broadway aficionados are still in awe of them but because they did not adapt well to film and chose to remain on stage, the general public is rather uneducated about their legacy. Not in Milwaukee. Lunt was a local boy who convinced Englishwoman Fontaine that the place to be in the office season was at Ten Chimneys, west of Milwaukee in Genesee Depot. Regular visitors included Noel Coward, Helen Hayes, Katharine Hepburn and Lawrence Olivier.

The Ten Chimneys Foundation has done amazing work restoring the home. I highly recommend the tour—I took my sister Merrill, who is quite knowledgeable about theater (sadly, she no longer teaches at the school I linked to), and we had a blast. You can’t tour the home in the winter, but there is this lovely cookbook/photo album, featuring Alfred’s recipes and fabulously posed (always posed) photographs of Lunt and Fontaine entertaining, relaxing, cooking and farming.

You can also buy the book with a special flip book and two tickets to Lunt and Fontaine's home. We call this package The Ten Chimneys Experience.

What else are we selling? Anything Packers of course, and being that this is their first good season in some time, at least one book about the Brewers, Where Have You Gone ’82 Brewers. (You can tell how much I enjoy sports—I will leave an in-depth discussion of these books to another poster). Another photo collection of Milwaukee called Historic Photos of Milwaukee has done well, and as well as the series staple, Milwaukee Then and Now. The beautiful Milwaukee Sketchbook is a collection of artistic renderings of the city by local art students. And our big local cookbook is still the Junior League of Milwaukee’s Occasion to Gather.

Now all we need is a book about old Milwaukee department stores. But I think they are waiting for me to write that one…

Meanwhile, here are some interesting Milwaukee blogs
http://www.urbanmilwaukee.com/
http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/
http://milwaukeestreets.blogspot.com/

Daniel Goldin Asks Ellen Litman To Explain, Explain

This interview was conducted by Daniel Goldin, the senior front list buyer for Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.

Some questions for Ellen Litman, author of The Last Chicken in America; but first, some jabbering...

Welcome to my first posting on the Schwartz blog, The Inside Flap. I have worked for this group of independent bookstores in the Milwaukee area since 1986, and currently do a bunch of new book buying as well as some manager-y stuff.

I have been told that the key to blog success (blogwise) is linking to other blogs. To that end, I would like to do a shout out to Arsen Kashkashian at Kash’s Corner and Megan Sullivan The Bookdwarf in the desperate hope that they will then link here.

And a special yodel to my sister company, 8CR, who is bloggarific!

I referenced Megan in a Schwartz email newsletter (which you can read here) in which I extolled the virtues of Ben Percy’s short story collection Refresh Refesh. I’m glad to say it’s getting extremely good reviews everywhere, though not everybody likes the speculative stories. I thought it was great the way Percy did a lot of genre bending, yet always stayed connected via setting and themes.

We’re hosting Ben Percy at our Downer Avenue shop on Monday November 5th, along with another budding short story writer, Ellen Litman, author of The Last Chicken in America. The stories take place among the Russian Jewish immigrant community of Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill, centered on one Ellen-like character named Masha. They are funny, provocative, innocent yet worldly, and filled with arresting details, such as the tidbit that her father has a different job in almost every story. And funny, did I mention that? I like funny.

Here, in modern epistolary form, is our Q&A, with one caveat. I lost my original questions and had to reconstruct them.

Goldin: I love your book so much. I hope you don’t mind that I am writing to you out of the blue with these questions. I got permission from your publicist!

Litman: Thank you for your message. I'm very excited about coming to Milwaukee to read at Schwartz! I spent a year in Madison and managed to take a couple of trips to Milwaukee while there, usually to go to readings. And I'm looking forward to meeting Ben Percy. I've been hearing a lot about him lately.

Thank you, also, for your kind words about the book!

Goldin: I’m assuming the book’s somewhat autobiographical. What’s true; what’s not?

Litman: I did live in Squirrel Hill, for 3 years. My family came to Pittsburgh from Moscow, in 1992, and my parents still live there. So, much of the book did come from my experiences of the early years there. I was 19 at the time we immigrated, a bit older than Masha, the main character in the book. But like her, I studied computers at the University of Pittsburgh.

Goldin: What led you to start writing?

Litman: For a while I was a computer programmer, not daring to even imagine I could write in English. (Though writing was what I always wanted to do.) Then, eventually, I signed up for a fiction writing class, and when that went well, I signed up for another one. And so on. I was living in Boston at the time, working for a software start-up. I would get up really early in the morning and write for a couple of hours before going to work. I thought, at first, that's what I would do: work as a programmer, write on the side. Except I was tired a lot and I was starting to realize that I needed to put more time into writing and that writing was becoming a lot more important to me than computer programming. So I followed my teachers' advice and applied to MFA programs.

Goldin: What was the inspiration for this collection of stories? Which story came first?

Litman: The first story I wrote about Russian immigrants in Squirrel Hill actually didn't make it into the book. It was called "Engagement" and I wrote it in the first person plural (inspired by The Virgin Suicides, which I love!). It was my first published story. But in the end I had to leave it out. It was covering the same territory as some other stories in the book, and these other stories were doing it better.

Goldin: What was left out? What was changed? (editor’s note: I find that one gets very interesting answers to this question at readings. I learned that Audrey Niffenegger’s heroine in The Time Traveler’s Wife originally ended up institutionalized—who knew? Try asking it the next time you attend an author reading.)

Litman: There were some other stories that got left out. By the time I finished my MFA (at Syracuse), I had a version of this book ready. Then I had a couple of agents read it, and they pointed out that a lot of the stories felt too similar. So I had to rethink the whole thing. The following year (while I was in Madison on fellowship), I rewrote it. I ended up leaving out 3 stories and writing 4 new ones. Most of the new ones were about Masha, the main recurring character.

Goldin: What are you working on now? More stories or a novel or another hybrid?

Litman: I *am* working on a novel now. A "real" novel, which is to say, not in stories. And it's a whole new game, of course, and I feel like I'm floundering all the time, which I guess is normal. It's set in Moscow during the Perestroika years, so in the name of research I get to re-watch a lot of old Soviet movies.

Goldin: What was the glaring difference to you about life in the US versus pre-immigration, and in this, I'm looking for an unexpected answer, not, for example, that you used to speak in Russian.

Litman: Probably how different people looked. There were various ethnicities in Russia, too, but hardly any people of color. Also, you saw few people with serious disabilities. There seemed to be so many of them in America, it was kind of alarming. Of course, in reality, there had been just as many in Russia, but they were hidden. There was simply no place for them there, no way to go outside, no buses that could accommodate wheelchairs, etc.

Goldin: Who do you like to read a) living b) dead c) famous d) not so famous?

Litman: That's a tough one, because I always feel l'm missing so many. But I'll try:
a) George Saunders, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill
b) Chekhov, Bulgakov, Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy
c) Philip Roth
d) Kelly Link, Gary Lutz

(editor’s note: While we and many independent bookstores carry works from the first nine authors, Mr. Lutz’s collection Stories in the Worst Way, seems to have come out from Knopf in 1996 and is now out of print—alas! For those like me that always need to know more, Mr. Galsworthy’s most famous book is The Forsyte Saga, and he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.)

Goldin: What’s the best Russian book that hasn't been translated into English?

Litman: There's a book I read as a teenager and always loved. It's not even *that* well known in Russia, but among those who've read it, it has sort of a cult following. It's called The Road Disappears into the Distance, by Aleksandra Brushtein, and it's about a young girl growing up in pre-Revolutionary Russia, in a small town that's half-Russian/half-Polish, and gradually becoming aware of some heartbreaking realities around her (poverty, inequality, chauvinism) and what it takes to be a decent human being.

Goldin: Who do you think made the best French Fries in Pittsburgh?
a. Primanti Brothers (multiple locations, but only the Strip District is 24 hours)
b. Original Hot Dog (O's) in Oakwood
c. The Potato Patch at Kennywood Park
d. Someplace else
e. French fries are bad for you

It's kind of shameful to admit, but of the places you've listed, I've only been to Original. Once! What can I say, my parents don't eat out much even now, and as for me, it took me a while to get used to the idea. I think I used to buy cheeseburgers from McDonald's on campus. And coffee. No fries.

Ellen Litman teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
She will be appearing at the Schwartz Bookshop on Downer Avenue, 2559 North Downer Avenue, on Monday, November 5th (2007) at 7 PM. Their phone number is 414-332-1181.