Happy Friday, everyone!
Did you miss Bookriot’s feature on bookstores in weird and wonderful places? From barns to boats, abandoned trains to haunted houses, the descriptions of these stores will leave you itching to travel.
Photos courtesy of the Gallifreyan Detective tumblr.
Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly checked in on six indie bookstores opened within the past two years—from Scuppernong in Greensboro, NC, to Bookbound in Ann Arbor, MI—to see how they’re faring. As Scuppernong owner Brian Lampkin said, “There’s a growing shop-local movement. People are so ecstatic to have the downtown come back.” His NC store, which emphasizes literary fiction and poetry, also boasts an ambitious events schedule. Good news: they’re thriving!
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In author news, Ecotone and Astoria to Zion contributor Karen E. Bender‘s story collection, Refund, was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. In a collection ostensibly fueled by money, Refund is also grounded by the “subtler preoccupation [of] the eroding effect of emotional want.”
Brooklyn readers: you won’t want to miss the opening of Cage Dies Bird Flies, which features a series of eighty-one paintings by Dale Williams with text from Lookout author Ben Miller. The exhibit will run from March 27 to April 5 at Gowanus Loft. You can also catch Ben at several Boston events this spring.
If you missed her earlier this week, take a moment to listen to funny and brilliant writer Rebecca Makkai talk about place in her story “The Way You Hold Your Knife” from Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade.
Also this week, the Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, published a lovely short essay, “Days and Nights of Candlewood,” by longtime Ecotone contributor Paul Lisicky. You can read more of Lisicky’s gorgeous prose in the tenth anniversary of Ecotone, coming in May.
And don’t forget to join us for our AWP mingle on April 9 with the Common, New Directions, Archipelago Books, the New York Review of Books, and Ecotone. We’ll also be at book fair tables 1018 & 1020 throughout the conference.