publishing a new book by the actor and activist mike farrell, who is best known for the role bj hike on the tv show m*a sone of the greatest tv shows of all time. and this book, of mule and man is sort of a road book, a road memoir, a travel memoir. and we are putting him back on the road and were keeping him busy. how long have you been publishing books? >> would've been publishing since 1997. we publish literary fiction as the heart and soul of the company. we have a sort of outsider sensibility, though some of our books are quite popular but our books are often sort of provocative in one way or another and we do a little nonfiction as well, political nonfiction. biters include mike farrell, ron kovic, and other sort of cultural heroes of the left. you are not only publisher but you're the founder. how did you get into books? when did you decide to start a publishing house? >> i sort of stumbled into book publishing. it was never anything i intended to do. in my previous life i was a rock 'n roll musician and i spent most of the 1990s touring the world with my band, putting out albums, doing all the th

going over the warehouse stores, cosco and bjs, where i think bjs can be maybe a contender for the discount crown. despite what i say, the stori s perhaps my personal love of shopping at cosco. the store samples i try to make a meal of. how do you think i got rich in the first place. i always fast before going to a ko kosk co. today i want to come back with another retail name in the low-price retail spats, big lots. b-i-g for all of you home gamers. this hasn't been one of my favorite retail stocks but yesterday it reported a monster blowout. that's right. earnings per share coming in at 35 cents, 5 cents more than what the street was expecting. and it raised its guidance for 2009. you know what that is, that is the double play we're looking for and only apple and sales force.com have given us that combination in any meaningful way. you may not know these guys. they operate though out of 1,350 stores in 47 different states. many of them, hikest concentration california, florida, texas and ohio. those first two especially are big beneficiaries of the recovery i'm seeing, especially the recovery in housing, which big lots has som