A Call From Jersey by P.F. Kluge

Last week I posted a bit about the beginning of A Call From Jersey, the recently published novel by P.F. Kluge, Kenyon College's writer-in-residence and a Berkeley Heights native. You may remember it's about an immigrant who comes over from Germany a decade before World War II began. Within a few years Hans gets a job at the Ballantine Brewery in Newark and starts building a house for his family on Hilltop Avenue in Berkeley Heights. He has a brother, Heinz, who returns to Germany in 1938 and from whom Hans has not heard from since. Or shall I say yet, because when Hans goes looking for Heinz you won't be able to put the book down.

Hans' son George grows up as "college material" in Berkeley Heights, attending a regional high school that drew on "grungy enclaves that staffed oil refineries and old colonial enclaves where genius scientists went to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories. There were Portnoy-ish subdivisons within commuting range of Wall Street and the garment district. There were nests of Old World Italians and Germans and moderately left-wing Jews besides." He becomes a nationally syndicated travel writer whose mediocrity embarrasses his father enough . . to . . . well, you have to read this part yourself. I will just hint that the Berkeley Heights Public Library is involved.

P.F. Kluge will read from A Call From Jersey and one of his early novels, Eddie and the Cruisers ("the book that spawned the movie") at the Berkeley Heights Public Library on Thursday, September 30 at 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. This program is free and open to the public. Bring a copy of his book if you'd like one signed. You can sign up here. We'll be showing Eddie and the Cruisers the previous day, Wednesday, September 29 at 2 p.m.

eBooks Hit a Thousand

Actually there are 973 eBooks available to Berkeley Heights residents at ListenNJ.com, but by the end of the month we'll have passed the one thousand mark. We're not talking free ebooks of dusty out-of-copyright classics, but free ebooks like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
The eBooks are in the Adobe ePub format, which work with the Barnes and Noble Nook, the Sony Reader and the Kobo, the Borders e-reader. Now that Apple and Adobe are taking steps to play better together, the iPhone will eventually be a supported reader (we don't know when).
The easiest way to see what titles are immediately available is to go to Advanced Search and select eBook as the format, check the "Only show titles with copies available" box and click Search. That'll show you about 300 currently available titles. You can also put yourself on the waiting list for up to 5 eBooks.
The eBook will magically disappear from your device on the due date (7, 10 or 14 days after you check it out; your choice). Even if it's turned off (we've tried). Or you can return it early if you hate it (useful because there is a 5-book checkout limit). There is a Quick Start guide available on the ListenNJ site that will help you download Adobe Digital Editions, which is the program that syncs the ebook from your computer to your e-reader.

(Way) Back to School

Lawrence Fuhro, whom the New Jersey Daughters of the American Revolution named the "Outstanding Teacher of American History" this year, has lent the library selections from his collection of rural and one-room school memorabilia. The exhibit is in the lobby of the library until the end of September. I've overheard an older patron looking at the exhibit say, "I had one of those!"
Slates from the 1880s, plus a report card

Larrabee's Lunch Box

This exhibit reminds me of the excellent novel The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig, which revolves around a one room schoolhouse in Montana. We don't have an orrery in our exhibit, but schoolmaster Morrie would have loved to have one of these stereopticons.

The handbell on the far left belonged to Miss Anna Thee, who taught in one-room schools in Nebraska from 1905 to 1945.

The Millennium Trilogy

The library book group will discuss Stieg Larsson's The Millennium Trilogy tomorrow night at 7:30 pm. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the two sequels, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest,  have been huge international bestsellers since their initial publication in 2005. Amazon announced in July 2010 that Larsson was the first author to sell over 1 million books in the electronic format for Amazon's Kindle ebook reader. The Telegraph reports that  "Larsson could become the biggest-selling translated author ever." The upcoming American remakes of the Swedish movie are predicted to continue to stimulate sales of the trilogy. Random House's profits have soared, increasing by a billion dollars in 2010 so far, thanks to it's ownership of the U.S. rights to the books. Libraries can't keep the copies on the shelf;   the nine copies of Tattoo owned by BHPL have gone out a total of 112 times and currently have 5 holds (reserves).

For a thorough summary of the book, take a look at Shmoop's recap.

Berkeley Heights in Literary News?

I know, that was my reaction too. (Free Acres was a literary hotbed what with MacKinlay Kantor and Thorne Smith, but that was over 50 years ago.) Anyway, yesterday I opened the Star-Ledger and read on the front page of the New Jersey section:
"To Finish His Journey, Author Returns to New Jersey":

Author P.F. Kluge’s life has been a global travelogue, taking him far from his childhood home in Berkeley Heights . . .

Not only is P.F. Kluge from Berkeley Heights, but parts of his latest novel, A Call From Jersey, take place in and around Berkeley Heights. A Call From Jersey begins with a German steel worker named Hans, joining his brother Heinz, an inveterate gambler, in New York in the late 1920s. Not too much later Hans tags along with Heinz on a visit to Madame Bey's training camp for boxers in Chatham, watching Max Schmeling prepare for his match with Jack Sharkey. (The road in the following passage is River Road, the valley the land that slopes down to the Passaic.)

I heard a last car pulling out of the orchard, onto the road that led out of the valley where the training camp was located, already falling into darkness, while the sun just caught the top of the trees, beech and oak and maple. This was the first I'd seen of the country outside New York. It was different from Germany, where every inch of ground, field, forest was spoken for. America was untended. Uncared for. The woods were full of fallen trees and branches that no one collected, all that firewood going to waste. I liked it in New Jersey. But not Heinz. He reminded me of how someone sits next to a car that's broken down, waiting for the mechanic to come.

P.F. Kluge will read from A Call From Jersey and from Eddie and the Cruisers on Thursday, September 30 from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Berkeley Heights Public Library. Feel free to bring questions and a copy of one of his books if you'd like one signed.