I’m still feelin’ the love from this amazing gathering of 500+ independent booksellers from all over the U.S. They held a big reception on Friday night for a few dozen of us authors, including heavyweights like Tobias Wolff, Augusten Burroughs, Andre Dubus III and Ethan Canin. We sat at tables lining the walls, madly signing galleys for the booksellers. I was at the Algonquin table with Jack O’Connell, author of The Resurrectionist and four other novels. Jack and I had a steady line of people for two hours. What a rush! They were all buzzing about Mudbound, which apparently got some strong recommendations from respected booksellers (thanks again, Joe Drabyak) during the seminars they attended earlier that day. I got to meet a number of the booksellers I’ll be seeing during my tour in March and April, including Mary Gay Shipley of That Bookstore in Blytheville and Betty Jo Harris from Windows a Bookshop. And my local bookseller, Suzanna Hermans from Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, was there — a nice surprise, to see a familiar face.

The highlight of the event for me was getting to meet Ethan Canin, one of my favorite writers. He gave me a signed galley of his new novel, America, America, inscribed with his address (!) so I can send him a copy of Mudbound. I would have traded him a galley on the spot but we were completely out.

After the reception Algonquin hosted another splendid dinner for Jack and me and two dozen booksellers. What a wonderful bunch of people: intelligent, curious, funny, passionate, Mudbound-loving. Move over, librarians — I think booksellers may just be my new favorite sub-species of humanity.

Did a signing at this semi-annual meeting of librarians and the people who love them — namely, publishers, writing associations, database salesmen, library chair manufacturers, etc. Heaven, to be in a football-stadium sized room full of avid book-lovers. I signed 400 galleys of Mudbound in a little over two hours, at the end of which my fingers were about to fall off my hand. Must think of a better (and shorter) inscription than “To Soandso, With best wishes.” I put “Happy reading!” on a couple of copies before deciding it lacked a certain gravitas, not to mention truthfulness. Whatever else Mudbound may be, it’s hardly a happy read.

That evening, the lovely folks from Algonquin treated me and fellow Algonquin author Aaron Lansky to a magnificent seafood dinner at The Striped Bass restaurant. Aaron is the author of Outwitting History, The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. In 1980, at the age of 23, he and some friends set out on a mission to save Yiddish-language books, only 70,000 of which were thought to be in existence. 27 years later, he and his National Yiddish Book Center (which he founded) have collected some 1.5 million volumes. As you might imagine, Aaron is considered godlike among librarians, who apparently came in droves at 8 a.m. to hear him give a talk about his work. (Yours truly was sleeping off the effects of the aforementioned dinner.) I’ve just started the book, and it’s poignant and funny, a real romp. No wonder Aaron is known as “the Yiddish Indiana Jones.”All in all, great fun. Hopefully the booksellers in two weeks will be an equally enthusiastic bunch.