& presently not even that!
06.03.2026 17:05
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& presently not even that!
A customer came in yesterday wanting to dig deeper into the work of William H. Gass. This is decidedly not a daily occurrence, and buddy was I ever attentive. (Turns out our copy of IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY was MIA, alas.)
Álvaro Enrigue holding his new novel “Now I Surrender” in our small but mighty bookstore.
Love it when old friends make a trip to see our new digs.
You could’ve just asked somebody, “Am I a dork?”
This dude is somehow younger than me. He looks like a bowel obstruction. Not “has” a bowel obstruction, but *is*.
It’s juvenile to laugh at a name, but “Markwayne”?
Kristi Noem unclipping her extensions tonight, massaging her scalp, and throwing the still barrel curled locks into the flame. It’s supposed to show her the future but it’s been wrong before. As they burn, a vision emerges. She looks closer. It’s a dog with a gun
My flight back to SF from Brussels was once re-routed via Tokyo.
Draft King prop bets on weekly BookScan numbers.
I’ll take Ideology & Blood Money for $1000.
www.thenation.com/article/poli...
I’m not the greatest husband in the world, I know, but I am sitting in a dark car at nearly 3:30am waiting for a red moon in the sky because “this is a celestial event, Brad!”
A Winter Institute tradition the past couple of years is mulling over whether we should revive the podcast.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...
I wrote my doctoral dissertation (mostly) on The Confidence-Man. Such a strange, defiant novel.
Damn near endless.
I’m not so sure about the trend toward “trust me, I’m the good billionaire ….”
Got my first tariff bill for a shipment of books from abroad. Was set contesting on the grounds that books are exempt. But it turns out that according to the US border officials our shipment of tariff-free books included a few hundred dollars worth of dog collars and muzzles.
It's sort of delightful that more small busineses have embraced how ineffectual social media is for anything other than personal amusement &/or expression of joy, rage, fear, etc.
That’s good. Unfortunately the expense of everything else has probably outstripped the improvement. Lol
I know. It’s one of those things we all know, and the temptation is just to say, “that’s how it is now! So sad!” I’m clinging to naively hoping we can sometimes adjust things to an extent.
She is!
I likes what I likes.
The speed-dating thing is likely the main revenue stream for the ABA to pay for WI. I get that. But this also means it is, for bookstores, an assignment; and for publishers, often prohibitively expensive. Neither sits very well for me.
& honestly, it does seem like you could manage the crowds at a big tradeshow in much the same way you do with speed dating. ("Different cohorts have access to the floor at different times, e.g.) & yes, I know I should (& have) told the ABA this, not you lot.
The high cost of the latter pays for a big chunk of the conference, I know, but it is this high cost that is also extraordinarily prohibitive. Maybe tradeshow floors are a sunk cost for the publishers, too. Most of our business is, frankly. But they are where I actually can engage a press best.
I've now been to ten (I think) Winter Institutes. And while I do not know that the bulk of the scheduled programming is *for* me -- personally or otherwise -- I obviously do place a certain value on it, albeit a mostly intersocial one. My one plea: more tradeshow floor; less publisher speed dating.
It’s in the Gospels somewhere that a single dragon fruit smoothie washes away the sins against the flesh inflected at a bookselling conference. I’m an ex-seminarian. Trust me.
This smoothie had better save my life. No pressure.
The sequel: "No, really. I'm going to leave this party within minutes of arriving."
I’m waiting for the truly honest one who phoned it in completely.
Asked an author this week, “So nobody else is around right now, you can tell me: is your book good?”