November 4, 2013 On the Shelf Jeeves, Redux, and Other News By Sadie Stein Margaret Drabble: “At parties, after a few drinks, I start asking people to supper, which I always regret.” NaNoWriMo is upon us. Here are some inspirational quotes to help you get on with it. “I do not remember all the details, but I do remember the plot.” Borges as teacher. A nanny to London’s 1980s literary set (part of it, anyway) publishes a book of letters. “The great thing about Bertie is that he is a very generous-spirited, nice chap, with a sunny outlook on life. Forcing myself to think like that was good for me. It didn’t affect the way I speak—I didn’t start saying ‘What ho, old fruit!’—but it did affect the way I think. It made me look on the bright side.” Sebastian Faulks on taking on Jeeves and Wooster.
November 1, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: Early Autumn, or Winter’s Coming By Kelly McMasters “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” —L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables October has turned cold. We’ve had snow the past two days. I’d been dreading the turn of the season, the trees shaking loose their final leaves. From my porch, looking across the bare hills at night, lights shine nakedly on houses no longer obscured. The garden looks dead and dank, no more soft edges along the forest, sounds from the road not so muffled. Everything is stark. Things are what they are. Moody Road Studios marks its one-year anniversary next month and I’ve been compelled to take stock, to really look at the bare hills and valleys. I boxed up my first returns this week, a mix of hardcovers about to come out in paperback and some flopped experiments—design books and art books and a charmingly earnest photography book called The French Cat that I felt sure would be one of my bestsellers but barely moved. The familiar shiver of desperation creeps up my spine as I toggle between the shop’s bank account and the calendar, anticipating the holiday season. The summer crowds died down many weeks ago and I’m beginning to feel like one of those stuntmen stretched between two unhitched train cars, feet on one platform and fingertips clawing at the other. But even if the crowds have died down, the enthusiasm has not, and I think this is what keeps me stretching. During our October reading series—featuring the incomparable Carolyn Turgeon, Kelly Braffet, and Mermer Blakeslee—the crowd was smaller but we still sold out of all three authors’ books. Last week, a friend of the store picked up five copies of Mason Currey’s creativity bible Daily Rituals to give to her kids for Christmas. People have placed orders for more books than ever this month, new titles and old, from Edwidge Dandicat’s Claire of the Sea Light to Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus and Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death and the Changing of Seasons. Just today, three separate visitors stopped by my desk after browsing to tell me how much they love bookstores and can’t imagine a world without real books. Of course, only one of those three actually made a purchase. Their words were still reassuring, even if they didn’t help me stay in business. Ultimately, it’s this love of books that buoys me. Read More
November 1, 2013 Quote Unquote Novena By Sadie Stein No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon—No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member— No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds!—November! —Thomas Hood, from “No!”
November 1, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Self-Help, Self-Hate, Sense and Sensibility By The Paris Review In the last month, thanks to some timely advice from Sam Lipsyte in the Oslo airport, I’ve gone back to two books that I could never get through as a kid: Blood Meridian and Sense and Sensibility. Blood Meridian still defeats me, though I got about halfway through. Does every pueblo have to be ruinous, every puddle some shade of crimson? Will the Judge ever shut up about Darwin? The book it keeps comparing itself to is Moby-Dick, but Moby-Dick doesn’t compare itself to anything, and isn’t—or doesn’t feel—anywhere near as long. Sense and Sensibility, on the other hand, was just my speed. The last two pages are so good, I tore them out and pinned the sheet over my desk as a talisman. (The airport paperback had a painting of Spanish Gibson girls on the cover, and had to be thrown away.) —Lorin Stein First published in 1957, the late Daniel Anselme’s On Leave chronicles one week in the lives of three soldiers, furloughed in Paris. Anselme, a resistance fighter and journalist, interviewed many conscripted men while researching the novel, and its unflinching look at the horrors of the Algerian conflict meant it was initially ignored by critics and never reprinted or translated. A new edition by Faber & Faber brings this “lost novel” to a whole new readership, and that’s a good thing. While it’s not a light or easy read (although David Bellos’s translation is spare and clear), it remains deeply affecting and, needless to say, relevant. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
November 1, 2013 On the Shelf Modern Austen, and Other News By Sadie Stein Informality, sex, reticence, and other challenges of modernizing Austen. Morrissey’s autobiography crosses the pond December 3. Starting today, Amazon.com will start collecting sales tax in Massachusetts and Connecticut. “This so, so, so overdue,” the manager of a Brookline bookstore tells the Boston Globe. Speaking of Amazon.com! The behemoth is launching a digital literary magazine, Day One. Says Daphne Durham, publisher of the adult trade and children’s group, “Literary journals have long been an important part of giving a voice and a platform to new and undiscovered authors … We are trying to add to that tradition in a digital age.” Phew, glad someone’s on that.
October 31, 2013 Quote Unquote Mischief Night By Sadie Stein “I told a story a month ago, for Halloween, about the terrible pranks that were played in Lake Wobegon just before I came along that I never got to participate in. Things such as pushing over an outhouse when some sterling citizen was in it, tipping it forwards so it fell on the door and the poor man had to crawl out the hole. I never did this. It existed for me only in my uncle’s stories, but the stories were severely edited. So I had to reconstruct what happened when an outhouse was tipped, how it must have felt to the man inside and what a pleasure it must have been to the tipper.” —Garrison Keillor, the Art of Humor No. 2