Michele Filgate
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From THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer
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“Though he labors over his paragraphs longer than just about any writer alive, working his sentences like a cadet polishing a belt buckle, he has not been the most diligent of novelists. He’ll complain to a friend about his lagging productivity and then go off to France for three weeks to hang around. But he’s always working on something: transferring the notes he’s taken on matchbooks, hotel envelopes, and paper scraps into cahiers, scribbling and typing sentences and paragraphs over and over, honing the sentiments. He once referred to himself as a frotteur; he likes to rub a word in his hands. He’s not afraid of obscure or expensive ones. He makes lists of them, or of titles, or of names (for better or worse, he likes arcane ones), or of other writers he feels are ahead of him in whatever race writers imagine that they are in.” — Nick Paumgarten wrote about James Salter for The New Yorker. -
And finally, I asked The Community Bookshop in Park Slope, Brooklyn,to fill out the On The Strand bookshop Q&A.
Recommended novel and why: We recommend Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman because it is brilliant, insane and deserves a wider readership.
Favourite (other) bookshop: Three Lives & Company
Bookshop name and location: Community Bookstore / 143 7th Avenue, Park Slope / Brooklyn, NY (communitybookstore.net / communitybookstore.tumblr.com)
Any information you believe is relevant or interesting: Our store is also home to a store cat named Tiny, who is very popular on the internet. He can be reached via @tinytheusurper.
(photo thanks to Michele Filgate)
- Nell Freudenberger
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this made me sigh heavily, and i thought maybe it was worth addressing. i’ll skip the obvious part about “basic human right” and go straight to why a local bookshop can’t possibly stock all local authors:
- there may literally not be enough space! many local shops are small, and have to make every single book on their shelves count.
- making every book count means making sure that they are stocking topics and authors that appeal to their clientele. while you are, of course, very interested in your book, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your local bookshop’s average customer is.
- which leads me to, trusting local buyers. no bookstore DOESN’T want to make money. no bookstore in the world is intentionally turning down a potential bestseller, be it local or national. every bookstore in the world wants to stock awesome books. they read sales reports, they read trades, they labor over catalogs, they stay up at night worrying about their bottom line. they read EVERYTHING THEY CAN. i have worked for five of them, believe me — this is absolutely true.
so if your local passes on your book, it’s because they genuinely believe that that book will not work for their shop. stocking a book just to stock it means that the bookstore makes less money, the book doesn’t move, and then everyone is sad except for that initial five minutes in which the author is happy to see it on the shelf. that’s not a recipe for success, that’s a recipe for frustration.
also frustrating: facing the intense indignation of local authors when you try to explain to them why you won’t be stocking their book.
I couldn’t agree more. Well said, Jenn!
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I made vegetarian chili last night. Beets and sweet potatoes and peppers = NOMS. (This is my friend’s recipe. Lauren LeBlanc is an amazing cook.)
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“At 26, she already is a sought-after spokesman for symposia on the state of American literature.”
— the Bridgeport Post, January 1965. A pretty stellar group of women, too.
Whoa! I grew up in the town next to Danbury (Ridgefield, CT.) Also, Renata Adler rules. Also also, she’s reading at Community Bookstore on April 17th at 7pm! We’re partnering with Vol. 1 Brooklyn for what’s sure to be one of the best literary events of the year!
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This might be my favorite Philip Larkin poem.
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“ Occasionally, I have students who want to be rock stars. They have started a band, and they are spending their weekends and off hours writing songs and practicing. Without fail, these kids know everything there is to know about new music. They are listening all the time—they can discourse on Bob Dylan as easily as they can talk about the new e.p. from a new band from Little Rock, Arkansas, or wherever, and they have a whole hard drive full of demos from obscure artists that they have downloaded from the internet.
I wish that my students who want to be fiction writers were similarly engaged. But when I ask them what they’ve read recently, they frequently only manage to cough up the most obvious, high profile examples. What if my rock star students had only heard of… um… The Beatles? We listened to them in my Rock Music Class in high school. And… And Justin Timberlake? And, uh, yeah, there’s that one band, My Chemical Romance, I heard one of their songs once.
How awful would that be?
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Young writers, if you want to be rock stars, you have to read. -
“Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time you’ll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there’s no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.” — Eleanor Roosevelt (via my friend Meganne Fabrega) -
.@tinytheusurper doesn’t care for @laphamsquart, even if it is all about him.
