In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta.

The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''-the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. Anyone who wants anything less is a fool.” Some of the other contributors include Rick Atkinson, Wendell Berry, Ian Frazier, John Grisham, Pico Iyer, Ron Rash, Tom Robbins, Terry Tempest Williams and Simon Winchester.Įveryone who really loves books loves bookstores, and anyone who loves bookstores will appreciate this labor of love.įrom the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. And if you do, it will persist, and small publishers will persist, and actual books will persist. Dave Eggers strikes a characteristic chord: “Maybe it’s the feeling that if a bookshop is as unorthodox and strange as books are, as writers are, as language is, it will all seem right and good and you will buy things there. (And someone else in turn writes of Patchett’s.) Many tell of never leaving an indie bookstore without purchasing something, and most write of discoveries they have found there and/or the thrill of their first reading there.

At least two different authors fell in love and ultimately married because of their interactions at an indie bookstore. Two of the more famous novelists (Louise Erdrich and Ann Patchett) own bookstores but write of someone else’s as “their” store. The contributors write of being introduced to the work of other included authors by savvy booksellers and forging lifelong friendships.

Yet the cumulative impact of this handsomely published anthology is not that of a series of survival stories, holdouts against the tidal wave of technology, but of a literary community that continues to flourish and needs these havens of revelation and sharing. A celebration of the independent bookstore by 84 authors who consider them personally and culturally indispensable and who find the ones they favor thriving and vital, despite common impressions to the contrary.Įarly on, it might seem that too many of these short pieces are repetitive, praising the stores that have hosted and nurtured them as “home,” as the “soul of the community” and other phrases that suggest a bygone era in these days of discount mega-stores and cybershopping.

My Bookstore by Ronald Rice