JVNLA rides the subway 2013!

Last year for the holidays, JVNLA took to the subway to express our love for our books published in 2012.  We snapped candid shots (and some not so candid shots) of ourselves reading as subway passengers looked on with puzzled expressions. For 2013, we simply had to do it again!

We began by posting pictures of us "reading in the wild" on Twitter--including pictures of us reading on subway platforms, at our desks, in bed, etc.--with the hashtag #readersinthewild. Then we followed it up with our adventure reading in the wilds of the subway!

Below, we present this year's candid and not-so-candid shots for your viewing pleasure.

We started at Times Square.  Here, Tara, Jennifer, and Laura read Love with a Chance of Drowning by Torre DeRoche (Hyperion, May 2013). This and all other photos were taken by our excellent behind-the-scenes photographer, Ariana.

Below is a sampling of the 2013 books we brought along.  When we began piling more books onto the subway seats, a mini-avalanche started!

Alice joined Laura and Jennifer to read The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon (Sourcebooks Landmark, September 2013).

The day we chose for subway riding was particularly snowy, and so Jean decided to stay home and read in the warm rather than in the wild!  Here she is reading Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss (Delacorte Press, November 2013).

Certain books inspire certain poses, and so Laura, Tara, and Jennifer couldn't help themselves from looking particularly nefarious while reading the noir mystery Sugar Pop Moon by John Florio (Seventh Street Books, July 2013).

We also couldn't help but crack ourselves up while reading the very funny The Heartbreak Messenger by Alexander Vance (Feiwel and Friends, July 2013).

When the below subway rider saw Royal Mistress by Anne Easter Smith (Touchstone, May 2013), she got so excited she had to read it herself! 

Then, she instructed Laura, Tara, and Jennifer how to properly pose for a scandalous historical novel like this one.

Noticing that some of our books had a certain theme to them, we decided to create our own story: First, there's Love with a Chance of Drowning.  Next comes The Heartbreak Messenger.  Which leads to This Is How You Say Goodbye.

While those of us in New York were in the midst of our subway adventures, Elizabeth was in Wisconsin having her own reading in the wild/transportation adventures! Here she is on bike with Sugar Pop Moon, 101 Quizzes for Couples by Natasha Burton (Adams Media, November 2013), Dead Run by Dan Schultz (St. Martin's Press, March 2013), Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley and Debra McKinney (Lyons Press, March 2013), and more!

Laura, Jennifer, and Alice displayed their favorite parts of Otis Dooda: Strange but True, written by Ellen Potter and illustrated by David Heatley (Feiwel and Friends, June 2013).

Two businessman on their way to lunch were super excited about Otis Dooda too!

As you can see below, Laura, Tara, and Jennifer were each intrigued by Women, Sex, Power, and Pleasure by Evelyn Resh (Hay House, March 2013).

The delicious pie recipes in Sweetie-Licious Pies by Linda Hundt (Skirt! Books, October 2013) got Laura's and Tara's attention.

When the train emptied out, Jennifer had fun reading The Fate of Mercy Alban by Wendy Webb (Hyperion, February 2013).

When it was time for our subway adventure to end, Laura, Tara, and Jennifer got a little choked up reading the last book, This Is How You Say Goodbye from Victoria Loustalot (St. Martin's Press, September 2013).

Thanks for joining us on our subway adventure!

For more about our recent books, take a look through the Recent and Upcoming Titles section of our website--all of the books make for great holiday gifts!

Pie Perfection: Adventures in baking with the perfect cookbook for the holiday season

By Elizabeth Evans

Of the many milestones in a book’s publication, my favorite is opening the delivery box and picking up a finished copy of my client’s book for the first time. I recently opened the delivery box to find Linda Hundt’s charming retro cookbook, Sweetie-licious Pies, published last month by Skirt! Books.

Sweetie-licious Pies is the first cookbook I’ve represented, and I couldn’t wait to see how the photographs, text and recipes had come together. The final product exceeded my expectations--I am so proud of this beautiful package!

Featuring fifty-two original recipes, accompanied by gorgeous photos of Linda’s farm in Michigan and mouth-watering images of the pies themselves, Sweetie-licious Pies is the most heavily designed book I’ve worked with yet. I spent a solid hour pouring over the images and re-reading the heart-warming stories behind the creation of each pie. I was so inspired that by the time I set the book down, I vowed to do something I’d never attempted before--bake.

I do not exaggerate when I tell you I don’t have a sweet tooth. In the epic battle of sweet vs. savory, savory always wins in my book. As a kid, I’d turn over my Halloween candy to my brother and sister with a nonchalant shrug and watch them fight over the spoils. To this day, I’ll take a bag of potato chips over chocolate every time. All of which might make you wonder--why does someone who doesn’t like dessert have a pie cookbook on her list? I’ll tell you--it’s all about the crust. I love pie crust. It’s the perfect savory balance to a sugary dessert, the salty yin to fruit’s sweet yang. On a restaurant menu, pie is the one dessert that tempts me, but I’d never tried to bake my own--until the other Sunday.

With sixteen-time national pie-baking champion Linda Hundt’s beautiful cookbook to guide me, I figured I had a good shot at success. I enlisted the help of my in-house photographer/husband to document my baking adventure.

Here’s a little photo show of how it all went down:

To take advantage of the autumn’s delicious apples, I decided to make “Mom Hundt’s Apple Almond Pie” (p88). I lined up all my ingredients and set to work.

This pie calls for a homemade cream cheese crust. Following Linda’s easy recipe (p2), I used my standing mixer for the first time ever and later shaped the dough into a disk to cool in the fridge.

After the dough cooled in the fridge, I rolled it out and carefully placed it over the pie pan. Then into the freezer it went! Linda always recommends working with a frozen crust.

Next step was preparing the apple almond filling. The smells of cinnamon-apple goodness coming from this pot were incredible! After I assembled the pie and popped it in the oven, my trusty sidekick Finn helped me by licking some of the measuring utensils clean.

Voila--Mom Hundt’s Apple Almond Pie!

Baking this pie was a blast, but the final result didn’t last long. Between a little slice here and a tiny bite there, we polished off the pie in just a few days. Luckily, we had extra apples from our trip to the farmer’s market and most of the ingredients needed to bake another.

Behold Round Two: Grandma Ferrell’s Caramel Apple pie (p146)!

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s had apple pies on the brain. Food and Wine Magazine just named Linda’s “Laura’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Caramel Apple Pie” as one of America’s Best Apple Pies. Check out the mouth-watering slide show in which Linda’s pie has top billing here.

Midwest Living also recently featured Linda and Sweetie-licious Pies. The cookbook is featured as a Midwest favorite in the magazine's Holiday Gift Guide.

So this holiday season, whether you're planning what to give for holiday gifts or what to make for holiday dessert, look no further than Sweetie-licious Pies!

Below are some of the great things people have been saying about Sweetie-licious Pies:

“Linda Hundt brings you the sweetness of pie and blends it with tradition, family, nostalgia, and fabulous recipes into one thoroughly all-American pie cookbook.” --Debbie Macomber, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Starting Now and The Inn At Rose Harbor

“Linda Hundt is like the world's greatest pie librarian and Sweetie-licious is a colorful, approachable, pie-lover's dream. It's as if Linda collected the best possible pie recipes from the world's coolest grandmothers, vintage church supper cookbooks, and route 66 diners, then sprinkled them with her own unique and talented voodoo. Get ready to put this book in your 'most frequently used' part of your kitchen library.” --Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, authors of Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Ingredients

“With the glide of a rolling pin, Sweeti-Licious Pies transports you to Small Town America, where pies cool on the windowsill, there's a watering can in the garden, and everyone gathers for family dinner. Linda Hundt is truly changing the world, one pie at a time. Make mine a slice of The Farmette's Blueberry Basil Cream Pie!” --Judith Fertig, author of Heartland: The Cookbook

A photo journey through BEA 2013

Last week, book madness descended on New York City for BookExpo America (BEA), an annual publishing conference and book exhibition extravaganza for publishers, industry experts, booksellers, librarians, and book lovers.

While educational panels, subsidiary rights meetings, and more take place throughout the conference, the most dazzling feature of BEA is always the Exhibition Hall, where publishers showcase the books they are most excited about for the upcoming fall season or that they have recently published.  JVNLA's books were featured prominently, so of course we hunted them down and snapped some photos in order to bring a part of BEA 2013 to our blog! 

To give you a sense of what the Exhibition Hall looks like, check out the photo below, showing conference attendees milling around several publishers' booths, including Algonquin and Workman.  Now, imagine this multiplied over 760,000 square feet of exhibition space! 

Clearly, many, many eyes were on the look out for exciting, new books.  We were pleased that so many of JVNLA's books were a part of the spotlight!

According to reports from the front at Sourcebooks, the line for a signed galley of Dianne Dixon's newest novel, THE BOOK OF SOMEDAY (September 2013), was long and didn't end until the last copies were given away!  THE BOOK OF SOMEDAY is the story of three women, each caught up in a web of secrets, and one haunted by a nightmare of a beautiful woman in a silver dress.  While we didn't get a picture of the galley line, we did snap one of Dixon standing beneath her cover as it presided over the Sourcebooks exhibition area.

One woman got started reading THE BOOK OF SOMEDAY right away!

The Lyons Press exhibition booth featured ONE PUNCH FROM THE PROMISED LAND: Leon Spinks, Michael Spinks, and the Myth of the Heavyweight Title by John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro (September 2013).  The book is a narrative nonfiction account of the two famous boxing brothers and the divergent paths their lives took.
 

At the Skirt! Books display table, Linda Hundt's recipe book based on her award-winning bakery of the same name, SWEETIE-LICIOUS PIES: Eat Pie, Love Life (October 2013), made passersby salivate.

C.J. Sansom's newest novel, DOMINION (Mulholland Books, January 2014), was an eagerly anticipated giveaway over at Hachette's booth. DOMINION sets readers in an alternate history in which Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940, and, twelve years later, a spy for the Resistance must rescue a man with a secret from a British mental hospital and smuggle him from the country.

Soft Skull Press's booth showcased Berlin Reed's just-released part-food memoir, part-argument for sustainable living, THE ETHICAL BUTCHER: How Thoughtful Eating Can Change Your World (April 2013). 

At the Penguin exhibition area, Jillian Cantor signed galleys of her new novel MARGOT (Riverhead, September 2013).  The novel is a reimagining of the life of Margot Frank, Anne Frank's sister, had she not died in a concentration camp in 1945.

Conference attendees were so excited about snagging a copy of MARGOT that even a baby rifled through the pages to get a quick glimpse of the story!

At Smithsonian Books, YOUR TICKET TO THE UNIVERSE: A Guide to Exploring the Cosmos by Kimberly K. Arcand and Megan Watzke (April 2013) stood out on a display table.

PASSION BLUE by Victoria Strauss (November 2012), a YA novel about a seventeen-year-old in Renaissance Italy sentenced to live in a convent when all she wants is true love, graced the display tables at the Amazon Children's Publishing booth.

BEYOND THE BEAR (March 2013), a memoir about surviving a bear attack and learning to live and love again, written by Dan Bigley and co-author Debra McKinney, was featured in the display racks over at Lyons Press.

Meanwhile, Algonquin arranged its featured books on the walls of its booth.  Just to the right and below the center, you'll find A LIFE IN MEN by Gina Frangello (February 2014), a novel of a woman diagnosed with debilitating cystic fibrosis who takes up her best friend's adventurous lifestyle across many countries and with many men after her friend's tragic death.

Jeryl Brunner signed copies of her newest celebrity travel book, MY CITY, MY LOS ANGELES: Famous People Share Their Favorite Places (March 2013) at the Globe Pequot Press booth.  We snapped a photo of her (center) with her agent Jessica Regel (left) and editor Amy Lyons (right).

In addition to Brunner, Slash Coleman was another JVNLA author selected by Globe Pequot Press to sign books at this year's BEA. Below is the sign announcing the times of the signings for Brunner's MY CITY, MY LOS ANGELES and Coleman's THE BOHEMIAN LOVE DIARIES (Lyons Press, July 2013).

And, here, check out Brunner's and Coleman's books on display at the Globe Pequot Press booth.

As you can see in the previous photo, the cover of Coleman's THE BOHEMIAN LOVE DIARIES features a young boy, shirtless and shoeless, wearing a motorcycle helmet.  Well, that boy made a special guest appearance at BEA.  Here he is below, pictured with the author.  Together, they took the BEA by storm!