For writer Katherine Powers, getting an agent, getting published, getting reviewed — that was the easy part. But getting her book placed in her hometown public library? Impossible.
Powers is the oldest daughter of distinguished writer J.F. Powers, the first Minnesota author to win a National Book Award in fiction (in 1963, for "Morte D'Urban").
He and his wife, Betty Wahl, also a writer, raised a big family in Collegeville, Minn., near St. Cloud, where Powers taught at St. John's University. Powers was a prodigious writer of letters that revealed his angst and apprehensions about domestic life. He was troubled by spending so much time earning money to support his family when, he felt, he should be writing. ("Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions, or a worm have to fly a kite?" he wondered.)
His daughter collected several hundred of these letters in a new book, "Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942-1963," which was published this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The book, both scholarly and interesting, has been widely reviewed and praised in the Star Tribune, the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.
Recently, Powers noticed that her own library system — the one in Cambridge, Mass., where she lives — didn't have a copy. So she offered to donate one.
No thanks, they said. Powers tried to explain the significance of the book. Still, the library wasn't interested.
"They asked me if the book is on the New York Times bestseller list and when I confessed that it wasn't, they said they didn't want it," Powers wrote on Facebook. "Go away, was the dynamic, community-oriented message."