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
Je Ne Sais Quoi
In her controversial book The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Minae Mizumura argues that English, thanks largely to its global predominance, threatens to lessen the diversity of expression in the world. At Bookslut, she tells interviewer Corinna Pichl about her book, her issues with lingua francas and things you can say in Japanese that you can’t say in English.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Eugenides, Hollinghurst, Kadare, Butler
One of the biggest literary releases of the year is out today, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Read the book’s opening here. Another literary heavy hitter out today is The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. One of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s masterpieces, The Palace of Dreams, is now back in print in English, and Blake Butler’s memoir Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia is now on shelves.
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The Importance of Literature
“Our bookstores hold a place in our communities where people go to escape their lives, to talk to a real person and just sit in a comfy chair surrounded by personally curated literature. This is what we do, who we are, so let’s make an extra effort to step away from our desks and computers and provide a safe and compassionate place for people to share their anger and grief today.” In the wake of Monday’s tragedy, Boston’s bookstores figure out how to deal. And at The New Yorker, a poem for Boston.
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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.