JWB’s fab titles–in C’ville Saturday, and globally, forever!

For all JWN readers in the Greater Charlottesville area– do come by the VaBook book fair that runs tomorrow, 9am-4pm, at the Omni Hotel. Tell your friends to come, as well! You can see and buy copies of all the fabulous titles published by my company, Just World Books, including the two latest: Miko Peled’s “The General’s Son”, and Jon Randal’s “The Tragedy of Lebanon”.
I know I haven’t blogged much at all this year. But the book publishing has been really exciting– and all-consuming! Our Spring 2012 “list” (inasmuch as we have a “list” as such, which I’ve always resisted doing) is shaping up to be truly great. In addition to those two new titles we’ll have “Watches Without Time: An American Soldier in Afghanistan”, a really important memoir from Matt Zeller, an amazing young man who served eight months in the U.S. military as an embedded combat adviser for the Afghan security forces– and then came back to run for Congress on a strong veterans’ rights platform, in 2010… and “Wrestling in the Daylight” by Rabbi Brant Rosen, author of the “Shalom Rav” blog, which is his own curation of the best of the blog-posts and comments board discussions over at his blog… and which traces his transformation from, as he describes it, “a liberal Zionist to… a Palestinian rights activist.”
(Who knows, maybe Peter Beinart and other present-day liberal Zionists might also make this same journey over the months and years ahead?)
By the way, we’re already taking advance orders for Matt Zeller’s book, over at the webstore… and we’ll hope to take advance orders for Rabbi Rosen’s book soon, too.
Plus, we may well have another couple of fab titles to announce before summer sets in… Stay posted…
For those of you NOT in Charlottesville– a clear majority of JWN readers, I’m sure!– I hope you all know that everyone, all around the world, can now affordably buy JWB’s pathbreaking titles through our new webstore, where you can now get free shipping on all orders greater than $40.
Setting up the webstore, and upgrading JWB’s capabilities in general, has all taken a lot of hard work. But I’m really excited at the team we’ve been building here… and most importantly, at our output!
By the way, I would love to hear from anyone on the U.S. west coast, or in London, who might be interested in doing a bit of publicity and outreach work for us on a part-time contract basis!
This work will include backing up the efforts several of our authors are making to take their books “on the road” with book tours… Miko Peled will be doing a full schedule of speaking events over the months ahead, in many countries, all of which will need a lot of support from us. Check his book-blog here. It has just the first few events listed in the calendar portion there. There will certainly be a lot more, soon! (Also, check out the contest we’re running there. Think of entering it, and tell your friends about it, too.)
Jon Randal will be in Washington DC and NYC in early May. I timed the publication of his book, which gives a LOT of detail about the history and record of the Falangist militias in Lebanon, for this year’s 30th anniversary of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, which were, of course, committed principally by the Falangists, but under the ever-watchful eye (and WP flares) of the area-dominating Israeli military. If you know anyone who wants to do a media event with Jon around his book’s themes, give me a holler.
Matt Zeller will also be doing huge numbers of events around his book, for which we’re hoping to have actual copies in hand at the end of April. He seems to have amazing networks all around the United States, already.
We want to set up a good schedule of speaking events for all our authors, not just these three, at U.S. colleges in the Fall semester. Please let us know if you’re at an institution, or a member of a student group, that has access to some decent program funding and would be interested in inviting one of our authors, so we can start working on the Fall schedules now! Here is the list of all the titles we have on our website so far– and don’t forget Rabbi Brant Rosen, either. (We’ll get his book onto the website very soon. Copies of his book will be available maybe late May?)
So JWN friends, I really hope all of you can help me get the word out about JWB’s authors and their important, discourse-expanding books. If you can help me by doing that, then I promise that in return I will make a lot more effort in the weeks ahead to do some good, cutting-edge blogging here. So many breaking news events to blog about!