Confessions of an independent bookseller and unrepentant book nerd
Oh yes.
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Things are kind of teary and giddy around here today. I crashed early, hopeful but not sure, but this outside our window assured the ALP and I that hopes have been answered. Now we all get to go to work, glowing.
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Anonymous said…
Were you like me - freaked out on Thursday morning when you woke up, wondering if it had all just been a dream? I was so glad to hear that the results "stuck." Thanks for posting the inspiring election poetry, too!
As a last treat before you start your weekend, you gotta read this brilliant piece by Colson Whitehead about being a writer in Brooklyn. He lives here (in Fort Greene), he loves it, but he hilariously pierces the hype about "Brooklyn writers." Sometimes it's a relief to admit it's just the same here as everywhere else. And Whitehead ends with an extended metaphor from The Warriors . What could be better? Enjoy, you kooky literati borough-dwellers. And happy reading.
One of the best things about being a bookseller, wherever you are, is the possibility of developing relationships with authors that have the potential to go beyond fandom. Because of the serendipity of where I live, I happen to be neighbors to some of the contemporary greats. It's not without its pitfalls though. I remember having a nice chat with a nice lady named Jennifer in the bookstore sometime in Year 1, finding out she had written a book, and picking it up -- and gradually becoming aghast that I had been treating this person as a normal human neighbor, when in fact they were a terrifying genius. The book was A Visit From The Goon Squad , which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Luckily Jenny Egan seemingly forgave me for treating her like a regular neighbor (and for all my other faux pas, including vastly under-ordering for the Goon Squad launch party, which we've hopefully made up for by selling hundreds of copies every year since then and shipping sign...
Richard Grayson is the real thing: born and raised in Brooklyn, he's equally at home in the old neighborhood and the hipster revival. His name may be new to you, but he's been writing fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s, and he often writes about current literary events in New York on his MySpace blog . I'm grateful that he followed up on our earlier email correspondence by writing about his memories of the bookstores of Brooklyn; his knowledge of the borough, and his love for it, is deep and wide. Brooklyn Lit Life Interview Richard Grayson Describe your particular literary project, and your role in it. I’ve been writing stories since the early 1970s. They’ve been collected, rather haphazardly, into various books, but I never intended to write any books. My first three books, published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were all the result of publishers contacting me, taking all the stories I sent them, and working them into collections. Later books were published ...
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Felicia