My Bookstore

Title: My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop
Published by: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc.
Genre:
ISBN13: 978-1579129101
Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Odyssey Bookshop

Overview

Martha joins over 80 writers paying tribute to their favorite bookstores. Writers including Wendell Berry, Isabel Allende, Terry Tempest Williams, Louise Erdrich, and Dave Eggers offer enthusiastic, heartfelt, and sometimes humorous ode to bookstores and booksellers--places they often call their second home.

When you think of your favorite bookstore, what comes to mind? Is it the physical space? Books stacked in rows and piled high, labeled with staff recommendations? Do you think of the owner who knows each of her customers by name and can always press into your hands the perfect book that you're sure to love? Or is it the intangible thing that draws you there: the anticipation of a new discovery, or the feeling of community or of being home?

In My Bookstore, 84 of our favorite writers put all of these thoughts and feelings into words in a one-of-a-kind collection that expresses their adoration and admiration for bookstores all across the country.

The relationship between a writer and his or her local store can last for years or even decades. Often it is the author's local store that supported him during early days in his career and that continues to introduce and hand-sell his work to new readers. But, as many of the authors also point out, writers are also readers and customers. For them, as for most of us, a bookstore often serves as the anchor for the community in which we all live and work--the place that introduces us to new authors and ideas and that sets out children on a path to becoming lifelong readers and lovers of books.

With contributions from some our most celebrated authors and an introduction by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Russo, My Bookstore is filled with essays that are smart, charming, deeply moving, funny, and exceedingly well-crafted. The entire collection is a joyful celebration of our beloved bricks-and mortar stores and a clarion call to readers everywhere at a time when the value and importance of these stores should be shouted from the rooftops.

Critical Acclaim

A "handsomely published anthology. Everyone who really loves books loves bookstores, and anyone who loves bookstores will appreciate this labor of love."
—Kirkus Review

"The all-star contributors include John Grisham, Chuck Palahniuk, and Ann Patchett, but the true protagonists are the bookstores and the dedicated professional who bestow them with novel-worthy character. There is Howard Frank Mosher's Galaxy bookshop in Hardwick, Vt, the only bookshop to have once had a drive-thru window... The overall goal prevails: to thank, protect, and preserve these cherished spaces."
—Publishers Weekly

"Perfectly charming."
—20SomethingReads

From "The Odyssey Bookshop"

"For a region that claimed Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur as locals, the Odyssey is the very embodiment of what residents value: Literature is an important as breathing."

Martha Ackmann