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Penguin authors were real stars at the American Library Association annual conference, where over 21,000 librarians converged in Anaheim in late June. Greg Mortenson and Khaled Hosseini drew crowds of over 1,000 librarians, each in packed Auditorium Speaker sessions. June Casagrande author of Mortal Syntax and Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies performed with Paula Poundstone and other author/comedians at FOLUSA's (Friends of the Libraries) Laugh's on Us panel - always a big ALA highlight event. Smaller themed panels were all jam-packed with attendees this year: Dan Koeppel, author of Banana, was on an Environment panel; Anya Ulinich (Petropolis) and Kaya McLaren (Church of the Dog) stole the show at the First Author, First Book panel; and Bich Minh Nguyen (Stealing Buddha's Dinner) charmed all on an Ethnic Writers panel.

Ron Carlson and Patrick Rothfuss both spoke at the ALA Literary Tastes breakfast, where they received awards for Five Skies (ALA Notable selection for Fiction) and The Name of the Wind (Reading Council selection for Fantasy) respectively. Last but not least, Ellis Avery received the Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book award for The Teahouse Fire at ALA's GayLesbianBisexualTransgendered Round Table Book Awards program. Ms. Avery also performed a tea ceremony on the LIVE at Your Reading Stage on the exhibit floor.

And most of the above authors kept things jumping at the Penguin booth where they met, talked to and signed books for the always incredibly enthusiastic librarians. Alan Walker, Dominique Jenkins and Jim Dassise from the Academic/Library Marketing team, as well as Tiffany Tomlin from the Penguin Speakers Bureau and Fred Huber from Hardcover Sales all staffed the booth this year.

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On a hot and muggy evening last Thursday, July 17, Aleksandar Hemon and Junot Díaz took the stage at in New York's Central Park before a record crowd for a SummerStage reading. The theme was the modern immigrant experience.

Hemon, profiled in this week's New Yorker by James Wood, read first, a hilarious passage about a Bosnian Independence Day (February 29!) celebration in Chicago, from his acclaimed new novel, The Lazarus Project.

Diaz, the hometown favorite, followed with three different selections: some new material, which he introduced as "some crap;" a recently published short piece called "Alma;" and a passage from his Pulitzer Prize-wining novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.