Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

Larry McMurtry

Books: A Memoir

Simon & Schuster

More than forty years into his career as an antiquarian bookseller (not to mention his other job as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist), Larry McMurtry has paused to reflect on a life hawking secondhand tomes in Books: A Memoir. Given his accounts of the shops and bookmen who’ve succumbed to mortality and economic reality, much of this amounts to an extended shout-out to the dearly departed of the signed-first-edition-with-fine-dust-jacket set. There’s a winning poignancy to McMurtry’s affection for his fellow eccentrics (such as one San Francisco shopkeeper who offered binoculars to scan the titles on his top shelves) while his self-deprecating attitude toward his own novels—“Three or four were really good. None, to my regret, were great”—suggests that he would be happier as a book scout who writes than the other way around. This is a peripatetic collection; its short chapters bounce between anecdotes from the trade, like when a partner of McMurtry’s sells a $100,000 Winston Churchill limited edition, and personal reminiscences, like his first book sale, in 1962, to pay the hospital after his son, James, is born. The effect is not unlike perusing the volumes at a high-end estate sale: It’s worth pawing through the ordinary to ferret out the gems. Simon & Schuster, $24

Doug Dorst

Alive in Necropolis

Riverhead Books

The real-world town of Colma, California—home to about 1,600 residents and more than two million corpses in seventeen cemeteries (motto: “It’s great to be alive in Colma”)— provides an odd but effective setting for Alive in Necropolis, the quirky debut novel from Austin resident Doug Dorst. To the occasional surprise of the living, the restless spirits of Cypress Lawn rise up from their graves and squabble over everything and nothing. (Who knew the dead were so petty and contentious?) More significant to the plot are Colma’s flesh-and-blood citizens, namely rookie cop Michael Mercer and sixteen-year-old Jude P. DiMaio, who meet when Mercer finds the boy in the cemetery late one night drunk, drugged, and nearly dead. Jude, the overprivileged but underloved son of a renowned film director, won’t spill the beans on his partying pals—that would be uncool and ruin his chances with the hip kids. But Officer Mercer can empathize with Jude: He’s been the odd man out for years as his friends acquired better jobs, bigger houses, and sexier partners. Eventually it becomes clear that Alive in Necropolis’s characters are defined by what they want, not by who they are. And what better metaphor for unfulfilled desire than the walking dead trying to find closure for life’s unfinished business. Riverhead Books, $24.95

Sichan Siv

Sichan Siv

It took the San Antonio resident thirty years to write the memoir Golden Bones—a reasonable time, perhaps, to assess a life that includes an escape from Cambodia’s killing fields and stints as both a New York City cabbie and a deputy assistant secretary of state under George H. W. Bush.

Describe the horrors that took place in Cambodia in the seventies.

The Vietnam War spilled over into neutral Cambodia. The 1973 Paris Peace Accords ended the war, but in 1975 the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, became unexpectedly victorious and killed anybody they considered an enemy of their “revolution.” About two million people died of summary executions, exhaustion, and starvation.

How did you escape?

I was working for [the relief agency] CARE and was to be airlifted out by the U.S. Embassy. I missed the last helicopter by thirty minutes. I survived one year of forced labor, and in February 1976 I jumped off a logging truck and made a three-day trek to Thailand. That June I arrived in Wallingford, Connecticut, with $2 in my pocket.

What does “golden bones” mean?

Cambodians refer to somebody who is blessed and lucky as a person “of golden bones.” When people from my father’s village learned that I had not only survived the genocide but had gone to America and was working for the president, they told me that I was truly a man of golden bones! HarperCollins, $25.95 (Read the full interview.)

Golden Bones: Sichan Siv, published by Harper.