Viking, $27.95, Nov. 3

Just in time for his talk tonight at the Free Library, we’re giving away a copy of David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory. Obama’s campaign manager, who chatted it up with Marty Moss-Coane this morning on Radio Times, breaks down the road to victory in chapters like “Ecstasy. Agony,” “Agony. Ecstasy,” “It’s the Economy, Stupid” and “Plumbers and Radicals,” hitting on the most memorable moments of the most memorable grassroots campaign in recent history.

From Audacity’s jacket blurb:

This is the ultimate insider story of what many consider the most brilliant campaign ever run, by the man who helped design it and made it happen. Plouffe takes readers from the campaign’s tenative first moments — the hard decisions on whether and how to run — to the powerful election day vindication of Obama’s wins over John McCain in battlegrounds such as Virginia and Florida. Moving through a cross-country backdrop of hotel rooms, debate halls, rallies and airplanes, we follow candidate Obama and his team every step of the way, listening in on never-before-revealed discussions about bold decisions and directions, and how the campaign was reported.

Middle-of-the-book pictures of Barack on a plane, Barack on a podium, Barack on the phone might not be sexy, but the story’s certainly got some meat to it. To win a copy, answer me this:

On Tuesday night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart came up with what fake name for Plouffe’s book?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Book Quarterly Giveaway Week is coming to a close, and since Tuesday was giveaway-less, we’re tripling our efforts today to make up for it.

In the pages of last week’s very-wild Book Quarterly, you’ll find reviews of Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked; David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries; and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. Our critics swooned over these titles, so we figured it’d be nice to share.

But before we do, read snippets of the reviews:

Bicycle Diaries: “David Byrne doesn’t ride a fixie. Nor is he training for the Tour de France. Instead, the former Talking Head represents an oft-forgotten segment of the biking population: commuters who also like to leisurely explore neighborhoods from their banana seats. And Byrne is a famous musician with a folding bike, so he gets around. Bicycle Diaries collects his observations biking in about 15 cities, including Berlin, Buenos Aires and his home base of New York. (No chapter on Philly, sadly.) Everywhere he goes, Byrne maintains an open curiosity about his surroundings, delivered in a smart yet unfussy writing style that isn’t far removed from his lyrics.” —Michael Pelusi

Juliet, Naked: “Annie, railing against a partner she never loved and his obsessive-compulsive devotion to forgotten rock ‘n’ roller Tucker Crowe, posts an against-the-grain review of a recently released Tucker album. Her successful, if unorthodox, analysis drives her boyfriend into the arms of another woman and, like a magnet, sucks Tucker out of his 20-year silence, straight into her English orbit. During those lost years, Tucker surrounded himself with ex-wives who pity him and children who don’t know him. His loneliness, like Annie’s, just slowly happened as life went on around him. Recognizing kindred spirits, Annie and Tucker sweetly and powerfully begin making up for lost time.” —Char Vandermeer

The Lacuna: “A lacuna, Kingsolver’s powerful new novel explains, is ‘an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things,’ and Harrison Shepherd, 11, dragged from 1929 America by his husband-hunting mother, finds one offshore in Mexico. When tides cooperate, his underwater passage leads to a secret opening in the nearby jungle. Later, when Harrison mixes plaster, cooks, types for Diego Rivera and becomes Frida Kahlo’s confidant, he defines lacuna as ‘a missing piece, a hole in the story.’ Kingsolver’s no name-dropper: The passionate painters appear long before they’re identified, and Harrison’s lack of ego — he journals in third person — makes him a wise, incisive observer.” —Mark Cofta

To win a copy of one of these three books, answer this BQ-related (that’s a hint) trivia question:

Maurice Sendak is working on a new children’s book. What’s the working title?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net, and be sure to tell me which book you’d like. One book per winner. Thanks for playing!

Hyperion, 288 pp., $25.99, Oct. 12

In anticipation of Eoin Colfer’s talk tonight at the Free Library, we’re giving away a copy of his just-out And Another Thing … , a continuation of the late Douglas Adams’ sci-fi masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Colfer’s event (7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org) kicks off his U.S. tour — and as a special treat, the library will be giving out “Don’t Panic” towels as well as special limited Hitchhiker’s editions, while supplies last.

Said Colfer (whose first name is pronounced “Owen,” FYI) of the Guide: “Being given the chance to write this book is like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice. For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world.”

From the novel’s press release:

When last we saw Arthur Dent, our towel-toting hero had traveled the length, breadth, and depth of known, and unknown, space. No sooner had he made his way home to (one rather pleasant version) planet Earth than he discovered that it was about to be blown up … again. Since 1997, Hitchhiker’s fans have featured Arthur and friends dead, but now, in And Another Thing … , Eoin Colfer revives Adams’ beloved characters using his own brand of humor to propel them through another intergalactic screwball adventure.

To win a copy, be the first to answer this trivia question:

In City Paper’s Food section last month, we asked a local bartender to reimagine what Hitchhiker’s interstellar cocktail?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Knopf, 688 pp., $26.95, Oct. 6

Our Book Quarterly Giveaway Week continues with A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which, as Janet Anderson points out in her City Paper review, ain’t for kids — especially since it clocks in at a hefty 688 pages. Oof.

Byatt’s novel, about Victorian idealists whose lives aren’t quite as pristine as they’d like everyone to think, is already a best-seller in England and Canada, and was short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. (Her 1991 novel, Possession, is a Booker winner.)

From Anderson’s review:

These middle-class folks engage in the most advanced ideas of their era — socialism, Marxism, anarchism, anti-vivesectionism, theosophy, folklore analysis, women’s rights, Fabianism. They celebrate a modern world of steamships, newspapers and electricity. Initially, it seems, they’re living their utopian vision of human life to the fullest. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear there’s more afoot than individual righteousness. Family lines blur as parentage is questioned; relationships disintegrate as guilt, sex and greed enter the equation. This isn’t a world opened up by enlightenment but real life, where people make bad choices, and connections between idealism and actuality lie only in the imagination.

To win a copy, answer the following trivia question:

What Roman general is the Fabian Society named after?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And check back with the Clog on Monday for a chance to win a copy of Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked.

Doubleday, 480 pp., $27.95, Oct. 13

Headlining our fiction review page in this week’s Book Quarterly, City Paper lit critic Justin Bauer assesses Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Chronic City, which follows the life of “handsome, inoffensive” Manhattanite Chase Insteadman. The author of such crazy-popular works as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude focuses this time on the vapid lives of New Yorkers “wrapped in their own delusions, desires and lies.” Burn.

Says Bauer of the novel, which was recently named Amazon’s Best of the Month for October:

Chronic City estranges Manhattan, literalizing recessionary anxiety by choking the financial district in sinister fog and setting an elemental beast loose on Second Avenue. Lethem’s charming misfit cartoon characters, adrift in this landscape, repeat Pynchonian paranoia as stoned farce, caught in virtuoso drifts of authorial free-association. Each wraps himself tight in alienation or obsession, ensuring that even should their affairs work out, they’re too timid to get their own pants off.

To celebrate the BQ, and in anticipation of Lethem’s upcoming talk at the Free Library, we’re giving away a copy to our faithful readers. Just be the first to answer this trivia question:

Chronic City’s protagonist, Chase Insteadman, was a child star on what made-up sitcom?

E-mail your answers right quick to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And remember, keep watching the Clog through next week for more BQ giveaways and trivia games.

[UPDATE, 1:45 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Marcos, who correctly guessed that Chase Insteadman, Chronic City protagonist, starred in a fictional sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Thanks to all who played!

Nicole Saylor

Anyone out on Second Street between Chestnut and Market this afternoon may have seen one hell of a lanky guy with a busted top hat and an acoustic guitar. If they stopped to listen to him sing, they would have heard tunes about Charles Darwin. Yes, that Charles Darwin.

Educational songs about Darwin and the survival of the fittest were performed on the street by Brett Keyser in full Darwinian-era regalia. It’s a sneak peek of Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man, a one-man show at the American Philosophy Museum dedicated to dispersing the facts on the Father of Evolution.

An employee from Rotten Ralph’s just around the corner came outside with a grin and just had to snap a picture on his phone, but most people just passed by, only somewhat interested. This is a man, a top hat, a guitar and a deep love for Darwin. How could you not watch? According to APS Marketing Coordinator Jackson Shellenberger, they were testing out different areas to have the teaser performances. Northern Liberties was next on the list, but he said that they would be back at Second and Chestnut next Monday at noon.

Oh, and did you catch the sculpted beetle on top of the VW Beetle?

Nicole Saylor

Very clever.

UPDATE: Video of the performance after the jump!

---

Fri. & Sat., Oct. 16-17, 24, 6:30 p.m., Sun., Oct. 18 & 25, 3 p.m., $5-$10, APS Museum, 104 S. 5th St., apsmuseum.org/performance

(more…)

Ballantine, Aug. 25

In today’s Shelf Life lit column, Justin Bauer compares four novelists who grapple with notions of identity — Boualem Sansal, Rawi Hage, Michelle Huneven and Dan Chaon — with varying success.

He particularly dug Chaon’s Await Your Reply:

Chaon’s characters — three sets of them, in three independent, loosely linked storylines — each willingly shuck off the lives they’ve been given. They get into their cars and set off to create entirely new selves, in the barrenness of the Michigan backwoods or an abandoned Great Plains motel or trekking through the Canadian tundra.

On one hand, Chaon’s bleak, thrilling high-wire stories celebrate the freedom of losing yourself, even as this lack of stability opens up his narrative to weirdness and terror. But in showing the ease with which his characters cast off one identity and assume another, Chaon questions the basic existence of a single identity.

Since today feels like the kind of day we’d like to trade our identity out for someone else’s (maybe someone who has Phils playoff tickets?), we’re giving away a copy to the first Clog reader who can answer the following trivia question:

At which Midwestern college does Chaon teach?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. (Go Phils!)

While everybody thrills at the confirmed list of what next Philadelphia International Film Festival will bring to the screen Oct. 15 to 19, nobody’s asked the most important thing — which celebs are coming. The Philadelphia Film Society’s J. Andrew Greenblatt gave me the skippy so far. “F. Gary Gray will bring Law Abiding Citizen along with special guests,” says Greenblatt (teasing Jamie Foxx and/or Gerard Butler?), and Lee Daniels will bring Precious [star Gabourey Sidibe].” Maybe we’ll have more surprises soon.

Knopf, $28.95, Sept. 22

L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy is in Philly this evening, giving a reading at the Free Library. A.D. Amorosi gushed about his new novel, Blood’s a Rover, in CP’s Kaleidoscope:

From the snap-brim-sharp author who brought you the staccato cadences of The Black Dahlia comes what James Ellroy’s called a ghastly tale of political malfeasance and bad juju. The finale to his Underworld USA trilogy, Blood’s a Rover brings something scummy, cold, rapier fast and deeply corrupt: From its first pages, Ellroy comes out shooting, splashing blood across the stinking corpses of Howard Hughes’ Las Vegas, Richard Nixon’s 1968 run for the White House and J. Edgar Hoover’s abusive grasp of the FBI.

Ellroy’s latest is a whopper — some 600 pages of blood-splashing. We’ve got a copy to give away, and all you’ve gotta do is be the first to answer the following trivia question:

By what nickname is James Ellroy most commonly called?

E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win, and in the meantime, get yourself over to the Free Library.

Thu., Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

If you’re only reading the Clog, you’re missing out on info on the upcoming Philadelphia Film Festival. No worries, we have the skinny on our arts blog Critical Mass:

The Philadelphia Film Festival announced it will open with the locally-shot and set Law Abiding Citizen and close with Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, by West Philly’s Lee Daniels.

This year marks the fest’s 18 1/2 birthday … wait, what? And a half? Usually the Film Fest takes place in the spring but when the Philadelphia Film Society split last year, TLA/Cinema Alliance’s Ray Murray kept the season and renamed the venture CineFest, while the Film Society moved to October and retained the name. The fest takes place Thu., Oct. 15-Mon., Oct. 19 and features 28 films from 14 different countries.

Keep reading on Crit Mass.

Hell, why not just add this bad boy to your RSS feed. You won’t regret it.

Photo | J. J. Tiziou

The Champ

For her “Parallel You” performance with Headlong’s David Brick, Nichole Canuso of Nichole Canuso Dance Company took home the $10,000 grand prize — beating out Jenn Rose of Loose Screws Contemporary Tap Company and Braham Logan Crane — as the winner of  the controversial A.W.A.R.D. Show at this year’s Live Arts Festival. Big ups to Canuso, dancer, choreographer and CP fashion plate.

Random House, 144 pp., $17, Sept. 1

It feels like summer today, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t keep this summertime-book-giveaway train chugging along.

Today we’re giving away a copy of New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism — just in time for his talk tonight at the Central Branch of the Free Library.

Here’s what freelibrary.org has to say about Tanenhaus, whose appearance tonight is part of the Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture Series:

Tanenhaus is the author of the National Book Award finalist Whittaker Chambers, a biography of the man whose accusations sparked the post-war crusade against suspected American communists. His new book, The Death of Conservatism, argues that modern conservatism is a counter-revolutionary movement with two sides: “realists� who believe in tradition and “revanchists� who often find themselves at war with the United States.

Mr. Tanenhaus will be interviewed on-stage by Carlin Romano, critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

To win a copy, answer this trivia question:

Sam Tanenhaus can be heard chatting with authors and critics on what weekly podcast?

E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Sam Tanenhaus reading/signing, Tue., Sept. 15, 7:30 p.m., $14, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

Under normal circumstances, the announcement that Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed Iranian coming-of-age story Persepolis will be 2010’s One Book, One Philadelphia would be nothing but good news. After all, it’s the first time OBOP has featured a graphic novel, and the second time in its eight-year history that a female writer’s taken center stage to discuss politics, family and other issues central to OBOP’s mission.

From the press release, embargoed till this morning:

Originally published in France in two volumes, The Complete Persepolis is Satrapi’s poignant, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during a time of political revolution and repression. An outspoken and imaginative child, Satrapi grappled with understanding the ruling power in her country as she witnessed the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the Islamic Revolution’s triumph, and the chilling impact of war with Iraq. Detailed in black-and-white graphic images and accompanied by brief text, Satrapi’s story continues through her years as a young adult, as she finds her way as an expatriate student in Austria. Her first-person point of view presents readers with a unique glimpse into Iran’s political repression, the inner-workings of a family, and one woman’s experience as an outsider both at home and abroad.

But as we should all know by now, the Philadelphia library system is in great danger of shuttering — and we hate to think what might happen to OBOP if, on October 2 (that’s only a few weeks away, far before the January 2010 OBOP), no action is taken on the city’s budget. We’ll have to say goodbye to holds, loans, after-school programs for thousands of young Philadelphians and the amazing programming the Free Library books annually.

Some details from freelibrary.org:

Even as we remain hopeful that the State Legislature will act and pass the enabling funding legislation, we wanted to notify all of our customers of this very possible outcome. If you have any questions about impacts to Free Library services, call 215-686-5322, or visit the Free Library of Philadelphia website at www.freelibrary.org. If you have questions about changes to City services, or if you want to be kept informed about this situation, we encourage you to contact Philly 311 by calling 3-1-1 between the hours of 8am and 8 pm Monday-Friday, and 9am-5pm Saturdays, e-mail philly311@phila.gov, or visit the City of Philadelphia website at http://www.phila.gov.

In the meantime, pick up a City Paper on Thursday to read an interview with Satrapi, who will be at the Central Branch of the Free Library on Wednesday, September 23, to read from Persepolis. Go there — it might be the last chance you get for a while.

Persepolis reading/signing, Wed., Sept. 23, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

livearts-fringe.org

Another week, another Mike Daisey giveaway: We’ve got 10 (ten!) pairs of tickets to the Saturday, September 12, 8 p.m., showing of The Last Cargo Cult, Daisey’s second Live Arts monologue.

Here’s the scoop from the Live Arts/Fringe Web site:

Mike Daisey tells the true-life story of his time on a remote South Pacific island whose inhabitants worship America. There he lived with the cult, hunted feral pigs beneath the erupting volcano of Mount Yasur, and learned of the islanders’ stories of belief, faith, and sympathetic magic. Part adventure story and part memoir, The Last Cargo Cult weaves these stories with a searing examination of the international financial crisis. From the belief in the infallibility of markets to the ultimate achievement in sympathetic magic—money—Daisey wrestles with what the collapse says about our deepest values. He uses each culture to illuminate the other to find—between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern—a human answer.

To win tickets (worth $30 apiece), answer this trivia question:

What is the name of the tiny America-worshiping South Pacific island that Daisey visited before writing The Last Cargo Cult?

E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win! (Side note: Make sure you can attend the 9/12, 8 p.m., show before answering, and please include your mailing address for our records. Thanks!)

[Update, 5 p.m., Friday]: Thanks to everyone who wrote in with the correct answer (Tanna, part of Vanuatu) — this contest is now closed! Have a great weekend and enjoy the show.