Flavorwire presents a list of its ten favorite bookstores in the United States and requests that you “buy something fer crissakes.”
Flavorwire’s Top 10 Bookstores in the United States
From Wharton to Woolf
Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
“I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome.”
Nonfiction writing might work wonders for history books, but the heart of the genre is still the essay. In a piece for The Morning News Martin Connelly discusses his youthful resolution to be an essayist, which he quickly forgot and then gradually remembered. There are also ironic license plates, convicts and a baby, just to jazz everything up a little bit.
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Why On Earth
“Why on earth would you start a literary magazine?” In an essay for The New Yorker Stephen Burt offers a wide variety of answers, from promoting a new genre to promoting one’s friends. His article pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s lit mag question and answer: “What is the wider cultural influence of literary magazines? I am not sure there needs to be one.”
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A Less Dangerous Game
“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided later, lying in his bed, after they had played several rounds of various games, and didn’t hunt one another at all.” You probably encountered Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game at some point during your educational career — you definitely never came across this “comforting and anodyne” version, though.
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Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week are Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary, Ingrid Betancourt’s memoir Even Silence Has an End, The Prizefighter and the Playwright, a book about the unlikely relationship between George Bernard Shaw and boxer Gene Tunney, and the poetry collection Human Chain by Nobel-Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney.
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How 3d Projectors Make 2d Movies Worse
Roger Ebert explains how the time-consuming process of changing the lenses on complicated new 3d projectors is diminishing the theater-going experience.
Phil Klay on “War Literature”
“I’ve been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don’t think there is anything.” The Daily Beast interviews Phil Klay about the National Book Award, Redeployment, and the concept of war literature.
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Pointing this out one more time: Why are we applauding a piece that starts out with a baseless assertion that “Bookstores are dying”?
Can we stop saying this? Please? As though it’s a fact, or really, at all relevant to what any of us are trying to do? Can we please remember that all my go-to indies — McNally, Word, Greenlight, Idlewild, Powerhouse, Desert Island — have OPENED, not closed, in the last 6 years, and no one seems to want to stop tossing around depressing, unfounded conventional wisdom?
Oh, just presenting someone’s utterly subjective top-ten list, not applauding it per se. It gave me a whole new list of stores of that I absolutely have to visit someday; I’ve only been to two out of the ten.
WORD, Greenlight and McNally Jackson are my go-to bookstores too! I know most of the booksellers in those three stores by name; they’re wonderful places, and it’s great that they’re there. At the same time, I feel like every second or third issue of Shelf Awareness brings news of yet another independent bookstore closing, so I can’t necessarily fault the writer of this piece for sounding the alarm.