Today was a really slow day at Book Expo America, which is not a good sign for the publishing industry—Saturdays are usually the most hectic of the expo. I talked with a lot of professionals in the industry about how they believe the show is going. The responses were all very similar: Though they thought the show was pretty dismal professionally (low traffic, and not much to be excited about in the fall), nearly everybody was personally having a great time because they were able to take their time and talk to old friends. The pace wasn't as breakneck as at Book Expos past. Interesting upcoming books include new novels by Jonathan Lethem and Lorrie Moore and Ted Kennedy's biography.

At the end of the day, people started drinking on the show floor. Marvel Comics hosted a 70th anniversary party with free drinks and yummy appetizers. One company lined their booth with sand, made margaritas, and had bikini-clad ladies showing people their new Cool-er e-reader. Basically, the Cool-er is a slimmed-down, DRM-free Kindle with an iPod scroll wheel. Having handled one of them (the e-reader, not the bikini models), I have to say that if I were going to get an e-reader, I'd probably get this one. It's simple, streamlined, and it looks and feels nice, too.

And here are the books that I got today:

I picked up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is a special preview of the upcoming Eoin Colfer continuation of the late Douglas Adams' beloved sci-fi comedy series (which I am against in theory, but I had to pick this up because, well, train wreck), A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis (with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem), a long-out-of print but critically acclaimed novel from 1971 that the wonderful folks at the New York Review of Books have finally brought back into print, Unreasonable Men, by Paul David Pope, which is the story of the National Enquirer (Pope is the son of the Enquirer's founder), and a fat stack of comic books from Image Comics (whose publicity person, Joe Keatinge, is a goodwill ambassador and ardent supporter of comics). There's a young adult superhero comic called G-Man: Learning to Fly by Chris Giarrusso, the first issue of Image's gorgeous Popgun anthology, and the first three volumes of Image's Ted McKeever Anthology, which includes his early series Transit, Metropol, and Eddy Current. Not pictured is Jutta Richter's young adult novel Beyond the Station Lies the Sea, which is a weird German book published by Milkweed Editions about a kid who gives away his guardian angel. I can't wait to fly home tomorrow and start reading all these great books

I interviewed mystery author Alan Furst today at BEA. Furst is the author of ten historical spy thrillers set in Europe in the 30s and 40s. He was a genuine delight—at the end of the interview, he gave me his home phone number in case I needed more information, which is, I think, a first for me; I've never had an author do that before.

Furst wrote for the Seattle Weekly back in the 70s when it started. He mostly wrote a football column, but he eventually started writing a serial for the paper that he says was "terrible. I tried, I did the best I could. It ran every week and it had its own sponsor—Yukie and Wendy's Hair Salon—and it was very popular." Furst says the story "went from Seattle location to Seattle location," and it featured many types of people he saw in Seattle at the time, "the Jewish charity lady from Mercer Island and...the vet from Vietnam. "

Furst is a meticulous researcher—his books are packed with period detail, lovingly rendered—and he says that nowadays it takes him "about three months" to research a book and then "about a year to actually write it. It used to take longer, but "I've written ten books on the time period" and so he's got quite a library set up at home. Also, "I didn't have the internet for five books. It made everything better."

He's always had an interest in history—on reading my name tag, Furst immediately asked if I was related to the Constants who fought in the Revolutionary War and insisted that I research Benjamin Constant. That said, his interest in World War II-era Poland and France was a "complete insane accident" that came about when he went on assignment to Moscow for Esquire magazine. "I'd never been in a police state. It had a really heavy effect on me." Soon enough, Furst says, "I decided that I wanted to read a panoramic spy novel set in the 30s and 40s. And it didn't exist! If you ask most writers, they'll say that they wrote the book that they wanted to read." He's happy being a bestselling author of books set in a very particular time period. "I'm never going to change. Every time I write one story I find two more."

I'll be running the interview in its entirety—about his influence and his wonderful supporting characters and more about his time living in Seattle—once I transcribe it. Furst is coming to town on June 11th at Third Place Books. If you're into espionage, his books make terrific summer reading.