In 2009, when my boss offered me tickets to see the musical “Parade,” I of course said “yes.” I knew that “Parade” retells the story of Leo Frank, the German-Jewish superintendent of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory, who was convicted of slaying 13-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan, in 1913. Later, when Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, an angry mob sprung him from… [Read More]
An endless loop of images, sounds, and events play in the theatre of my horrified mind. Specific details brand themselves red hot into memory. The hour, the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade before it happened replay backward and forward as my mind searches for clues to the mystery of my lover’s suicide two years ago. As a reader, I rode a… [Read More]
This is the second “Featured Local Bookstores” post that has focused on a bookstore located in downtown Ithaca’s Dewitt Mall. Until 2006, The Bookery and Buffalo Street Books used to be known as Bookery I and Bookery II. Now, however, it is the only bookery in town that offers “an extensive selection of used and rare books, available in our store and online at thebookery.com…. [Read More]
“A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “One Way to Read.” The two lines, however, could well have been written to describe the author’s new collection of poems, Almost Everything Takes Forever, published by Antrim House Books. It is a lush, lithe, witty, emotionally frank series of postcards from… [Read More]
Austin hosted the 16th Texas Book Festival at the state capitol building October 22-23 with 250 authors presenting and 35,000 in attendance. Los Angeles may boast the much larger Los Angeles Times Festival of Book, which attracts as many as 140,000 visitors; but when you compare LA’s population of 9.8 million to Austin’s 800,000, you see that Austin pulled off a bigger, per capita turn out…. [Read More]
There’s a new bookstore in Athens, Georgia, with a different kind of business model. After four years of planning, learning, getting financing in place and finding the perfect location at 493 Prince Avenue, Janet Geddis opened Avid Bookshop this month. Last Friday night’s grand opening celebration crowded customers into tight corners and out the doors into the streets like a festival. Listen to this podcast… [Read More]
After the endless commencement ceremony, the cap toss, and the droning luncheons with family and friends, comes the panic-induced question asked by the college graduate: What next? Debut author Leigh Stein accurately captures this bewilderment and sense of loss experienced by so many Generation Yer’s post-college in her first novel The Fallback Plan (Melville 2012) due out in January. Esther Kohler- Stein’s Juno-esque protagonist- graduated… [Read More]
Tuesday’s Gone Local columns have featured “local” bookstores and publishers. This past year opened with Six Mile Creek Press signing a publishing contract for my clients’ manuscript, Dear Friend Amelia. Mary Jordan and Joyce Hatch collaborated with Ron Ostmun and Harry Littell at Six Mile Creek Press here in Ithaca to produce letters and images from the Civil War in a beautiful book. Six Mile Creek Press approaches… [Read More]
Even the toughest cosmopolitans have a soft spot when it comes to their city’s most beloved bookstore. New York City has the Strand, Paris has Shakespeare and Company, and London (my favorite city of them all) has Foyles. In the last few years’ cinematic odes to NYC and Paris – New York, I Love You (2009) and Paris, Je T’aime (2006) – I was disappointed… [Read More]
Autumn Leaves, Ithaca’s beloved source for used books, boasts “60,000 books, 10,000 records and a café, all under one roof.” In the heart of the Commons (115 E. State Street), the basement of the bookstore contains Angry Mom Records, the ground floor contains the main bookstore, and the second floor doubles as the Owl Café (fair trade coffee, of course) and a space for the… [Read More]
