Read on Twitter
On this Independent Bookstore Day, love letters to some of my favorites:
The business I think I've walked into most often during the pandemic: @bookwomanaustin. A beautiful bookstore filled with books & the love of books. 45 years strong in Austin.
Next (I'm sticking local for the moment) @MalvernBooksTX, which specializes in small presses & poetry. An astonishing place where you can find books you've never heard of that will become your favorite.
Then @BookPeople! I was thrilled to do an online event but every writer I know longs to be back at the top of the stairs, at the heart of the store. The last literary night of my old world was for Deb Olin Unferth's brilliant Barn 8, 3/10/20.
I have loved reading @laurenthehough's tweets of her independent bookstore tour of New England, including many of my old haunts & favorites. (Here's the soundtrack I hear: )
There's @HarvardBooks, a last piece of my childhood Harvard Square, a glorious upstairs & an amazing basement full of remainders, & one of the best shop windows in bookselling.
Let's not forget comic book stores on Independent Bookstore Day: @myp_comics is also still & beloved in the square, & I left off @AustinBooks, one of my favorite places in Austin.
& @PorterSqBooks, too recent to have been my local all the years I lived in Somerville but somehow still my hometown bookstore: when I read there in 2019, all my pals & many of my former library patrons came.
Speaking of hometowns: the splendid @newtonvillebks, whose only flaw is its geographically inaccurate name (it's in Newton Center now).
& of course @booksmithtweets, a store of my heart & also childhood, where long ago I once was introduced to Nick Hornby after he'd read & he knew who I was & it is still one of the coolest things that's happened to me & really impressed my friends.
I long to visit @RiverRunBkstore again. I think the last time I was there I was with @timkinnel.
In a moment I have to take a break, so two more bookstores for now:
The amazing @ParnassusBooks1, run by Karen Hayes & Ann Patchett. I would say that even if they hadn't chosen my book for their First Editions Club, which sells HUNDREDS of copies of literary books.
Seriously: our bungalow was filled with boxes of book for me to sign. The cat, who likes to gnaw on cardboard, was in heaven. (Sorry, @ParnassusBooks1.)
& lastly (for now), @Prairie_Lights, which has had a profounder effect on my writing than any other bookstore. Among other things, it's the first place I was hand-sold a book (by @paulingram26, of course).
How canny a bookseller is @paulingram26? One of the books he handsold me was Observatory Mansions, by Edward Carey, a year before I ever met the fellow.
