John F. Blair, the Winston-Salem based publisher, had several interesting items in its most recent newsletter:
• Several of their distributed lines had winners at the Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards.
In the short stories category, it was “Binocular Vision,” by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books) that was named the gold winner and “God Bless America” by Steve Almond (also Lookout Books) won an honorable mention.
“Binocular Vision” was reviewed here July 13 by Deal Safrit, (http://www.salisburypost.com/Entertainment/071512-book-binocular-vision-qcd).
In the anthologies category, “27 Views of Chapel Hill” (Eno Publishers) won the bronze award.
• Publishers Weekly’s recent review of “Losing My Sister” (Blair) by Judy Goldman says the book “beautifully renders the complexity of sibling relationships with candidness, tenderness, and sorrow … (and) speaks to the human ability to forgive and attain a measure of peace amid loss.” This memoir by award-winning poet and novelist Goldman will be in stores in October.
• The July 15 edition of Kirkus Reviews contains a review of Frye Gaillard’s latest offering, “The Books That Mattered” (NewSouth Books), which is due in bookstores in September.
Kirkus writes: “Though subtitled ‘A Reader’s Memoir,’ it’s more than that. A mix of biography, autobiography and literary criticism, the result is a heartfelt love letter to literature…. (It is) an exuberantly written account of one writer’s leap toward understanding life’s intersection with literature.”
Gaillard is writer in residence at the University of South Alabama and author of more than 20 books. Gaillard has also received the Clarence Cason Award and the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year Award.
He is a former Charlotte Observer reporter.