Genre: Not Genre-Specific

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. "I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel," says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. "My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler's."

Art from Up Is Up, but So Is Down, a collection of writing and more than 125 photographs, book covers, and flyers that illustrate the dynamic, subversive work of the literary community known as "Downtown."

The papers of poet Robert Bly were purchased earlier this month by the University of Minnesota Libraries for $775,000.

Nearly five months after New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus surveyed several hundred writers, critics, and editors to name the best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years (Toni Morrison’s Beloved)...