Holiday Hours

We will be open 10-3 on 12/24 and 12/31.

We will be closed 12/25, 1/1 and 1/2 for store inventory.

Thanks.

2010 Poetry Picks

"Lament For the Makers" W.S. Merwin, editor.(Counterpoint)
"Low Down and Coming On" James Lenfesty, editor. (Red Dragonfly Press)
"One With Others" C.D. Wright(Copper Canyon Press)
"Mean Free Path" Ben Lerner(Copper Canyon Press)
"10 Mississippi" Steve Healey(Coffee House Press)
"Phantom Noise" Brian Turner(Alice James Books)
"Holding Company" Major Jackson(W.W. Norton)
"Warhorses" Yusef Komunyakaa(FSG)
"Working Words" M.L. Liebler, editor.(Coffee House Press)
"Sharks in the Rivers" Ada Limon(Milkweed Editions)

My fiction of 2010

I decided to switch it up a little this year. I'm doing lists of 10 but it isn't necessarily Top 10 in order--those kind of things bother me a little because it's really splitting hairs at a certain point.

So here are ten books of fiction I found to be thought-provoking or important to me. In no order.

"In a Strange Room" by Damon Galgut(Europa Editions)
"Lord of Misrule" by Jaimy Gordon(McPherson)
"Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" by Yiyun Li(Random House)
"The Instructions" by Adam Levin(Mcsweeney's)
"February" by Lisa Moore(Black Cat)
"Dogfight, a Love Story" by Matt Burgess(Random House)
"Vestments" by John Reimringer(Milkweed Editions)
"What is Left the Daughter" by Howard Norman(Houghton Mifflin)
"Under This Unbroken Sky" by Shandi Mitchell(Harper)
"Lightning" by Fred Stenson(Douglas&McIntyre)

Bullet Point Friday

It's been a busy Friday and with a massive snowstorm(maybe) approaching, all I can put together is some quick but worthwhile notes. My lists of ten in various categories will be getting posted next week starting on Monday. Fiction will bat lead-off.

*Keith Hollihan is reading here on the 15th at 7 p.m. Check this out.

*Here's a little feature on the store that was posted this week.

*I am blatantly stealing this quote from our good friends in New York City at Three Lives and Co. They have a fantastic store and in their December e-mail to customers they included a line from Patti Smith when she was accepting her National Book Award. She said,"Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book.There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book." Hurray for Patti Smith.

*Speaking of hurray, huge congrats to Graywolf Press. They will publish Liu Xiaobo in English.

The new men's lit.

The trend of chick-lit with its bubble-gum covers seems to have passed. And while I am usually hesitant to label most novels as his/her books, I am noticing a new trend. There is a new wave of young men writing novels that are, for lack of a better term, very masculine. It would be too easy to link these books to Hemingway or Raymond Carver. Yet that is what happens.

Benjamin Percy created some waves a few years back with the release of his short story collection "Refresh, Refresh" which was a raw and well-honed grouping of work. He read at Micawber's and his made for radio bass voice only contributed to the manliness. His new novel "The Wilding" is a look at fathers and sons and hunting and living in wilderness. “Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding is a tour de force meditation and treatise on the nature of violence, the violence of nature, man in the wild, and the wild in man—cleverly disguised as a page-turning adventure. Not just a ‘must’ read, but a need read, this book is timely, terrifying, terrific.”
—ANTONYA NELSON

I half-joked with Erin Kottke of Graywolf a week back that they were creating quite the stable of these new writers. Yet, it's true. In March of 2011 they will release a collection of stories by Alan Heathcock entitled "Volt" that seem to be wayward cousins of Percy's writing. All set in an unnamed locale, these are also stories that grab you and shake you and, ultimately, remind you that violence and tenderness are not mutually exclusive.

It's possible that the success of Cormac McCarthy, in film and books(again), has led to this. Or it could be something else entirely. Creston Lea, Keith Hollihan and Donald Ray Pollock are three other writers with new books I would add to this group. While not written for men alone, there is a high charge of testosterone running through the work that cannot be denied.

Ben Percy will be reading at the store on Monday December 6th at 7 p.m. and Keith Hollihan will read from his debut novel on Wednesday the 15th at 7 p.m. "The Four Stages of Cruelty" is a stunner of a book filled with moral questions and answers.

Please do join us for both--you will not be disappointed.

Minnesnowta

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

We are not Politics and Prose

This is a great, but long, article on what every indie bookstore should aspire to be.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/39974/politics-and-proses-social-network/