Glenn Goldman, the owner and founder of Book Soup in West Hollywood, California, died yesterday from complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 58 years old.I first worked at Book Soup when I was nineteen, and I returned after graduating from college. I loved the place, and I still do; it’s my favorite book store in all the world, with its towering shelves packed with books, and books behind books, and ladders to get to those books. Glenn started it all, in 1975, when my parents still lived in New Jersey, long before their lives in Los Angeles had even been conceived of. Sometimes I like to think that Book Soup was waiting, all along, to give little writer me some shelter, and an education. I am grateful to Glenn for this.Here’s some of what I learned about at Book Soup:Le Corbusier, Andreas Gursky, Jane Jacobs, Maseratis, Georges Batailles, David Sedaris, Patricia Highsmith, equestrian porn, Boris Vian, Gammahydroxybutyrate (GBH), Paul Bowles, Donna Tartt, Ina Garten, Joan Didion, blogs, Guy Debord, Julius Shulman, James Ellroy, wedding stylists, personal assistants, Breathless, Schlitz beer, Robert Caro, Robert Evans, Robert Greene, Helmut Newton, Paulo Coelho, the reading habits of certain celebrities, how big books can be, and how expensive, how sought after, and cool.I met a guy named Patrick at Book Soup, and I married him.Outside of Book Soup there are trashy girls from the Inland Empire, heading with arms crossed to a nearby club, and raving homeless men, and at the newsstand an actress is reading about herself in the tabloids. A man walks by selling puppies, maybe a waterproof radio. Inside of Book Soup there are highly opinionated, supremely well-read booksellers who want to know what five books you’d take with you to a desert island, go, and what your favorite Morrissey song is, and how many people you’ve slept with, and don’t you think I need another tattoo? Inside there are books, so many books.And through it all, there was Glenn – shy and notoriously stubborn, but devoted to the store, his store. He couldn’t stop ordering books, even though we couldn’t fit them anywhere. But God bless him for that, because we always had what you were looking for, what I was looking for.Glenn will certainly be missed, and his legacy, as a bookseller to the great and infamous, will continue.More: Max remembers
It would be a shame if the death of the Russian novelist Vasily Aksyonov yesterday got lost in the welter of cultural losses that surrounds it. Aksyonov is one of the towering literary figures of the postwar era – one who might have been more widely recognized as such were it not for the strictures of Soviet publishing culture. In his novels The Burn, The New Sweet Style, and especially Generations of Winter (which we have championed at this site), Aksyonov synthesized the Tolstoyan legacy of the 19th Century with the innovating impulses of the revolutionary generation. In making Russian literary tradition his own, and re-opening its dialogue with the rest of world literature, he pointed the way for the novelists who would succeed him. I can think of no more fitting way to honor him than to read him.