D'Souza

​So there's Tony D'Souza hanging out at Hartford Coffee Company in Tower Grove South one day this past December, when his phone rings. And it's Hunting Lane Films, the production company that optioned the film rights for his third novel, Mule, which came out in September.

"I hadn't heard from them in a while," D'Souza recalls. "And they're like, 'Uh, we've got something to tell you.'"

Hunting Lane is a small production company that specializes in indie films; its greatest service to the moviegoers and Internet meme-makers of the world thus far is helping to launch and perpetuate the career of Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson and Blue Valentine. When D'Souza sold the rights to Mule, the tale of a young couple that tries to weather the recession by embracing a career in drug-trafficking, he expected, based on the company's reputation and the modest sum it paid him, that the result would be a flick with a budget too small to get a star like Gosling. On the bright side, they might be willing to settle for an unknown screenwriter like, say, Tony D'Souza.

The news Hunting Lane had that day in December did concern the progress of Mule the film. But it wasn't quite what D'Souza had expected.

"They said, 'Todd Phillips at Warner Brothers wants to make the movie.'"

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​It's been a year since St. Louis's independent booksellers banded together to form the St. Louis Independent Bookstore Alliance in order to fight the threat of Amazon. It worked: The only bookstores that closed in St. Louis this year were part of the Borders chain. The Alliance sponsored bookstore bus tours and speed dating nights and, every week, put out a list of the bestselling books in the St. Louis area.

In many ways, the St. Louis bestsellers don't differ much from the rest of the country: We scooped up copies of The Help and Go the Fuck to Sleep and The Hunger Games just like everybody else. But local readers also pushed several local titles into the top ten: The Light Bringer by local cops Chris DiGiuseppe and Mike Force; First Kill, the first volume in Heather Brewer's Slayer Chronicles series; Amanda Doyle's amazingly comprehensive Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis by and for St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood; and, best of all, Noir at the Bar, a collection of crime stories edited by Jedidiah Ayres and Scott Phillips, who donated the profits to local indie Subterranean Books.

After the jump, the list of the year's bestsellers, based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

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Georgia Scott

​Georgia Scott has been a visual journalist for The New York Times, run a bookstore/cafe in Harlem, traveled to 57 countries, published an international study of headwraps and has now produced a book which may have one of the most provocative titles we've seen in some time: Down There: Narratives About the Joy, Aroma & Overall Existence of the Bush. And, no, that's not metaphorical.

This weekend, the St. Ann native will return home to give a trio of readings at MoKaBe's Coffeehouse (Saturday, February 4, 7 p.m.), Rue Lafayette Café (Sunday, February 5, 2 p.m.) and Subterranean Books (Thursday, February 9, 7 p.m.) to get St. Louisans in the mood for V-Day. A few weeks ago, she talked to Daily RFT by phone from New York about books and bushes.

Daily RFT: What inspired you to put this book together?

Georgia Scott: I was at a Thanksgiving dinner party with friends from a lot of different cultures and the subject of sex came up in a way it never would have if we were all back home with our friends. People really opened up. At the time, I owned a coffeehouse and bookstore [Globetrippin International Coffeehouse and Bookstore]. It was a really intimate place. I started asking people, what do you do down there? What's your bush like? It took off. There were so many things I didn't know.

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​Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 22, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

It's election time, which, as you know, means smearing all over the place, including depictions of First Lady Michelle Obama as an Angry Black Bitch. With all due offense to the First Lady's attackers, we'd like to point out that the original Angry Black Bitch actually lives here in St. Louis and is one of our city's finest bloggers.

A new entry onto this week's bestseller list also addresses issues of race and gender, though in a more academic mode: Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry. Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans and a soon-to-be-pundit on MSNBC; she does not, however, appear to paint her face, at least not in public.

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Kholood Eid

One of the reasons we're number eight.

​It's that time of year again, the only time of year when anybody outside New Britain, Connecticut, pays any attention to Central Connecticut State University. This morning the college released its annual ranking of the Nation's Most Literate Cities, and the results are heartening: St. Louisans may not be the richest or the best-educated citizens in this fair land, but we live in the U.S.'s eighth most literate city. Last year we were ninth. See? Progress! And, oh yeah, there were 75 cities in the rankings.

St. Louis, according to the data, has the fifth-highest newspaper circulation, publishes the ninth-highest number of magazines and journals and is tied for the seventh highest number of bookstores per 10,000 people. And, aside from Cleveland, St. Louis has the most extensive library system in the country. (It's unclear, however, whether the survey included the County Library and the Municipal Library Consortium, or if it confined itself to the city library.)

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Read it and weep. Like, a lot.

​Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 15, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

The children and adolescents of our city are in an apocalyptic mood. They have placed all three volumes of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy on this week's bestseller list, plus Legend, Marie Lu's tale of murder and betrayal in a post-apocalyptic version of America; Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, about the fate of the residents of the titular institution; and The Fault in Our Stars, the latest by John Green (who, we must admit, is one of our very favorite YA authors) about true love between two teenage cancer patients. Yep, very cheerful reading.

The adults, meanwhile, may be feeling apocalyptic, too, but they're distracting themselves with guidebooks (Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis by and for St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood by Amanda Doyle), picture books (Go the Fuck to Sleep and Goodnight iPad), funny books (Lunatics by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel) and books about baseball players (The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach) and vampires (A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness). Is this just proof of the great philosopher John Hughes' most famous axiom, "When you grow up, your heart dies"? Discuss.

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​Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 8, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

Bob Reuter's got a band (Alley Ghost), a radio show (Bob's Scratchy Records on KDHX (88.1 FM)) and now a book of photos, Light Fuse and Run, that made its debut on the St. Louis bestseller list this week at number 6. This is Reuter's second book and features photos (from film! how amazingly retro of him) mostly of people and things in his South City stomping grounds.

Back on the list this week is The Light Bringer, a supernatural police thriller by two local cops, Chris DiGiuseppi and Mike Force; Amanda Doyle's super-guidebook Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis by and for St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood and Freedom, by super-famous former Webster Grovian Jonathan Franzen.

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Kholood Eid

Back in 1912, it cost $1.5 million to build a marble library. Even allowing for inflation, that's still equivalent to less than half the cost of the current renovation. What a bargain!

​One hundred years ago last Friday, the Central Library downtown opened its doors for the first time. They closed them again a year and a half ago for a massive $70 million renovation project that would bring the library into the twenty-first century.

The project is still only two-thirds done, but since the library's centennial could not go unmarked, Mayor Francis Slay (or, rather, mayoral staffer Josh Wiese on behalf of his boss since Slay had a prior commitment) issued a proclamation in a brief ceremony inside Christ Cathedral Church across the street. (There would be further festivities on Saturday at various library branches, including the construction of a model of the Central Library from Legos.) Then the library's director, Waller McGuire, led a brief tour through the construction site.

It was the second such tour led by McGuire -- Daily RFT was there for the 2011 edition -- and the director was proud to point out all the progress that had been made in the past 365 days. The library will reopen to the public by the end of the year; a gala reception is scheduled for November 17.

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​Here's your weekly St. Louis bestseller list for the week ending January 1, as compiled by the St. Louis Independent Booksellers Alliance and based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

The bestseller list for the last week of 2011 is out, which means the year is finally over. Onward into 2012, we say! Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis by and for St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood by Amanda Doyle continues to dominate the adult list and on the kids' list, the odds are with The Hunger Games, as they've been for most of the year.

Mad Madame Lalaurie, the grisly tale tale of a New Orleans society women who was discovered, in 1834, to have the bodies of tortured and mutilated slaves in her attic, returned to the bestseller list this week. One of the book's authors, Victoria Cosner Love, is the administrator for the First Missouri State Capitol in St. Charles.

Also back on the list is Winter's Bone by Ozark author Daniel Woodrell. (Does this have anything to do with the fact that the movie adaptations of both Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence?) If you'd like to learn more about Woodrell, check out this 2006 profile by former RFT staff writer Ben Westhoff.

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Are good witches banned from the Salem Public Library, too?

​It's probably entirely coincidental that the Ozark town that keeps a strict filter on its Internet browsers to ensure that none of its patrons happen to stumble on any websites about Wicca is called Salem. Or that the library director is named Glenda. But it does make a lawsuit, filed yesterday in the U.S. district court by the ACLU on behalf of a Salem resident named Anaka Hunter that much more entertaining.

As it happens, Hunter is neither a good witch nor a bad witch. She just happens to be part Native American, and, curious about her heritage, went to the Salem Public Library one day in July, 2010, to use the computer to do Internet research on Native American spirituality. Every site she tried was blocked by the library's Internet filtering system.

Puzzled, she asked Glenda Wofford, director of the Salem Library, what was going on. Wofford explained that the sites -- as well as sites devoted to Wicca, astrology and paganism -- were blocked because the library considered them related to the "occult" and "criminal skills."

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