Jessa Crispin on Dublin’s Winding Stair bookshop
While focusing on things other than blogging this month, I’ve been running a series on independent bookstores. Below Jessa Crispin of Bookslut, just back from Ireland, considers taking up residence in Dublin’s Winding Stair bookshop.
I would like to move into the Winding Stair bookshop in Dublin. I would be perfectly happy living among the leather [...]
Mark Snyder on NYC’s Drama Book Shop
While focusing on things other than blogging this month, I’ve been running a series on independent bookstores. Below Mark Snyder praises NYC’s Drama Book Shop, ground zero for playwrights and all manner of performing arts hopefuls.
We Who Love Books are spoiled in New York with its abundant (though always shrinking) number of quirky used bookstands [...]
Jeffrey Frank on Ithaca’s Bookery I & II
While I focus on things other than blogging this month, I’m running a series on independent bookstores. Below novelist and New Yorker editor Jeffrey Frank (author most recently of Trudy Hopedale) praises The Bookery of Ithaca, New York.
The Bookery is actually two stores — Bookery I and Bookery II — a few steps in [...]
Happy weekend from the banished father
Every time I start to wonder why my mom stayed with my father when they were so ferociously ill-matched, I look at the photo at the top of this post, of her own dad embracing her as a baby.
He looks so grim, so shrunken and defeated, and her forlorn wave matches the sentiment. [...]
Justine Larbalestier on Buenos Aires’ El Ateneo
While I focus on things other than blogging this month, I’m running a series on independent bookstores. Below blockbuster YA author Justine Larbalestier praises the magnificent El Ateneo of Buenos Aires’ Barrio Norte.
The most beautiful bookshop I have ever seen is El Ateneo in Buenos Aires. It’s a refurbished grand theatre and as you can [...]
Liz B. on Portland Maine’s Casco Bay Books
While I focus on things other than blogging this month, I’m running a series on independent bookstores. Below Liz B. praises Portland, Maine’s Casco Bay Books.
A few years ago, I moved from Portland, Maine, to the other Portland, you know, the one with Powell’s. I live in the city that houses one of the [...]
R.I.P. Grace Paley
An hour ago I would have said my week couldn’t get any worse. I would have been sorely mistaken.
Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today one of our best living short story writers, has died. She was 84. Leora Skolkin-Smith (whose fiction Paley created an imprint to [...]
Recapping the Rupert Thomson discussion
Many, many thanks to everyone who came out in the rain last Friday night to hear Rupert Thomson read from and discuss his latest novel, Death of a Murderer, at McNally Robinson.
He was charming and smart, and we had a nice crowd, at least 15% of whom — or should that be which? [...]
James Tata on Portland’s Powell’s Books
While I focus on things other than blogging this month, I’m running a series on independent bookstores. Below writer James Tata praises Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon.
It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here.
When I first visited Portland as a tourist in [...]
Happy weekend from the woman scorned
In this, the final installment of the Love Triangle Letters, my Texan grandmother drafts a note to the other woman’s husband.
“Regardless of what Christine has done I blame her no more than the man. I am a great believer in the ‘Single Standard,’” she begins. She urges him to take Christine [...]
On the Road, by John Kerouac
Kerouac’s own “appealing commercial cover” sketch for On the Road identified him as John, not Jack. (Not only did he write and draw, he sang.)
The Groucho letters
A new edition of Groucho Marx’s collected letters — to E.B. White and T.S. Eliot, among others — marks 30 years since his death.
William Gibson sneaks into his own virtual reading
William Gibson’s Second Life reading got so packed beforehand, he had to enter through the virtual fire escape. (Thanks, Lauren.)
Thomson interview reminder
Speaking of Rupert Thomson: I’m interviewing him at McNally Robinson tonight at 7 p.m.
Drabble on Hardy, fate, & fish
Margaret Drabble acknowledges that she has been “deeply influenced by Hardy and his rather gloomy view of destiny.”
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