discount shopping

Bring holiday cheer with sneaks, boots, or books.

Police Will Collect Library Books

"There are subscribers to the library in the ghetto who do not return their borrowed books. Now such 'frozen' readers are put on a special list to be given to the police. The books of such subscribers are recalled by force.

"In especially malevolent cases, people will be punished for keeping library books."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

to free me from their grief

"The summer that my brother died, I moved home to be with my parents, until one day in August my mother told me to leave, to 'go and live your life.' What a gift that was, to free me from their grief. A few weeks later, I boarded an Amtrak train to New York City, my clothes and manuscript in a Hefty trash bag, $1,000 in my front jeans pocket."

~~ from Morningstar: Growing Up with Books by Ann Hood

James Atlas on books

"Several times I've bought a second copy of a book that I couldn't find on my haphazard shelves even though I know it's there."

and

"Like the drinker who trusts his hangover with 'the hair of the dog,' I assuage the anxiety about all the books I've bought and not read by purchasing more. Somehow I imagine that if I buy a book I'll read it,"

~~ from My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale by James Atlas

his books

"Why won't you believe it? she asked. Because I've been to his house, said the boy. So have I, and I didn't see anything to make me think he'd been taken by force. He left because he wanted to. No, she heard the boy say. If he'd left of his own accord, he would have brought his books. Books are heavy, said Mary-Sue, and besides you can always buy new ones. . . . No, I'm not talking about those books, I'm talking about his books, said the boy. What do you mean his books? said Mary-Sue. The ones he wrote and published. He wouldn't have left those behind even if the world was coming to an end."

~~ from 2666 by Roberto Bolano

#GivingTuesday

Consider buying books as an additional act of charity. #GivingTuesday

Self-publishers only, need apply

Make way for a brick-and-mortar bookstore that only sells books by self-published authors!

Bring your own cushioned chair, brew your own coffee, read self-published fiction, hit the facilities, and, well, skip that, and then every six months, claim a large reserve against royalties or don't send yourself any at all!

It's literary paradise, with no wall of Knausgaard to smile at you on the way out the door.

On the other hand, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King, and Walt Whitman are among famous writers who self-published at least once, if not their entire work.

So feel free to free associate freely, and count the recent story of surveillance planes over Baltimore as proof that the authorities' publishers (read "New York") cannot be trusted. Indeed, they would censor away your very best sentences, so just like countless writers scribbling under the yoke of dictatorship in police states, your self-publication is insurrectionary literature (even if it has zombies in it).

So I'll just drive down to Florida, stroll into the store, and select my contemporary classic from current offerings on the shelf.

Welcome to literature, Gulf Coast!

books: 20 + 1

Lying on my couch at an uncommon angle, I looked up at a shelf with a small selection of paperback fiction and saw these ten titles in order: Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula, Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, Arthur Nersesian's The Fuck Up and Chinese Takeout, Chris Offutt's Out of the Woods, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Pynchon's V, and Roth's The Human Stain.

I have so many books in storage and in piles on the floor or shelves in other rooms, yet, possibly, these ten represent in exacting proportion all the fiction I read. Having said that, I soon realize that 30% women might be high, sadly enough, and 20% in translation is low, I think, and it would be weighted more toward fiction from Europe and Russia, not 50/50 between Europe/Russia and Asia. Also, because I anticipated teaching contemporary literature, after 1945, when I drove down to South Carolina, I left most of my titles written before World War II in storage space in Philadelphia.

I do have the white whale and friends, Pierre, etc. on hand, at least a couple of the same Penguin paperback editions I read in college. Of the ten I just named, only Olesha's Envy is one I was assigned to read as an undergrad, but the copy on the shelf is one I procured years later. The British Picador paperback V is one of two editions I've owned, and I bought it in England when I was working as a busboy in Paris and then traveling in Europe the summer and autumn before the Berlin Wall fell. The Crying of Lot 49 rests on a different shelf where I keep the books I've been teaching most recently.

What's on the shelf above the first ten, you ask?

Ha Jin's Waiting, Denis Johnson's Angels and Jesus' Son, Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City, two different editions of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then four Kafka Schocken Classics w/Dad's Kunderas leaning against them. Kerouac's On the Road rests horizontally on top the paperbacks just named.

When Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, my bilingual stack of stories, arrives from Romania, I'll let the copy I keep rest in its alphabetical place, between Kafka and Kundera, on the higher plane of shelf.

Mo Yan

I was browsing Mo Yan novels in the Greenville Public Library, and I came across his interesting choice for a prefatory quotation to The Garlic Ballads:

Novelists are forever trying to distance themselves from politics, but the novel itself closes in on politics. Novelists are so concerned with "man's fate" that they tend to lose sight of their own fate. Therein lies their tragedy. 

~Josef Stalin

I don't think that it invariably requires a Nobel Prize in Literature to sell translated books in the states, but I do know Mo Yan won one in 2012. The books I was looking at in the library appeared worn, to an extent, so I'm guessing that they were on the shelf before that.

As you may know, Mo Yan is a pen name that means "don't speak," and if you follow the link to Wikipedia.org from his name above, you'll see that there was some controversy over his win in light of both his ties to Chinese authorities as well as his Swedish translator's connection to the Nobel committee. I haven't read his writing.