McNally Robinson NYC

September at the bookstore, the fall books coming in like a tidal wave, eighty, ninety, one hundred boxes a day, dozens of books per box, work these days is like bailing out a sinking ship. But, also like putting the best the present has to offer out on display. Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, and more on their way. Out of all of human history, America’s fall 2007 books need not be ashamed.

When we raise our heads from bodily lifting thousands of pounds of books into the store, our beautiful view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral is obscured by the implacable vulgarity of the San Gennaro Festival, New York’s oldest and largest street fair. San Gennaro brings one million people to our neighborhood, one million people almost to the foot of the bookstore, and yet it is terrible for business, the wild card in our P&L, making us perhaps the only bookstore in the country with a September sales slump. For ten days this loud, bright, crowded, filthy fair stands between us and people interested in quiet contemplation through the written word, and for ten days every year I wonder if the fears of self-declaring literary standard bearers are justified and literacy is doomed. The immense popularity of this street fair can not auger well for literature or, indeed, for anything at all that seems worth preserving. It’s like a European parody of America, obesity for sale stall after stall in flavorless, greasy food, and stupid games to win toys shipped from (Read more...).

I recently had the good fortune of meeting the lovable, talented Nathan Englander, and when I asked him whether the protagonists of his recent novel end up married or separated, he looked surprised for a moment, and then said, “Oh, a real reader’s question.” He had been immersed for days in interviews with the press, who apparently never ask such sentimental questions, but when he goes on tour he’s barraged with them. Showing me as much compassion as he does his characters, he didn’t make me feel like an idiot when he refused to answer.

In our bookclub here at the store, I’ve noticed that readers tend to judge characters not as artistic creations who may be used symbolically, but as people who “piss off” readers with their ambivalences and failings. I have long marveled at popular culture turning celebrities into moral examples, as if Hollywood is our tawdry Mount Olympus, but perhaps it is only natural to turn celebrity lives into narrative art, as narrative arts are the touchstones of our moral lives. Which makes me wonder, why would no critic ask that question? And why are novelists increasingly content to leave us hanging? Can you imagine Homer, or Tolstoy, or Dickens leaving us hanging? Is this an innovation borrowed from short story writers? From quantum physics? From World War II? From real life?

I’ve just seen that the new Irene Nemirovsky translation is coming this fall, reminding me of the relief with which I read Suite Francaise (Read more...)”

Before I opened the bookstore, and indeed for the first few years of its life, I was uncomfortable drawing gender lines around serious fiction. The many readers I speak to every day have slowly drawn them for me. There is no book I wouldn’t recommend to a woman, but there are many brilliant, important books I would never recommend to a man. When I was in sixth grade, a young adult writer visited my girl’s school and told us that he wrote about boys because girls and boys read about boys, whereas boys won’t read about girls. I would take this a step further: regardless of the gender of the protagonist, if the author is a woman, odds are that men won’t want the book.

This is hogwash that perpetuates more hogwash, a mindset that makes it harder for women writers to compete, as intellectual women read men, and men read men, and women’s fiction becomes increasingly tainted by the whiff of “emotions”. I’ve had dozens of male customers tell me that they prefer not to read fiction by women because it is too much about relationships - of course not meaning to say that men write novels about hermits, but rather that men can subjugate relationships to art or to action and women can’t.

This sexist segregation is infuriating, but from time to time it is nice to retreat to our private side of the line, a place where few men tread, the same way that I would sneak away with my (Read more...)>

Rather out of sorts the other day, the internet was down, and I’d just finished a very emotional novel that needed to sink in for a few hours before I could start another. I looked at the books I keep on my desk, and among them was the sixth volume of Anais Nin’s journals, which I opened at random, thinking of Dinah in Adam Bede divining God’s will by opening her bible at hazard, and I read:

Resistance to writing is a frequent experience with many writers. Henry Miller in Paris much preferred to write forty-page letters, Durrell writes of preferring to build a wall, and I at times enjoyed painting, bathing the dog, stacking wood for the fireplace, etc., more than writing. But when I am typing a diary (now volume 79) the entire life is re-created and it is such an intense pleasure to re-create a moment of life and love that it is worth the struggle. Often I did not know what I had done, or that I had done it. It was when I seemed most careless and casual that I would miraculously give the sensation I had experienced sur le vif. Writing is a curse only when there are no readers. Almost every other occupation gives more pleasure: cooking, sewing, gardening, swimming, but none of them give back the life which is flowing away from us every moment.

There is an odd symbiosis between reading and writing. Reading about the primacy of writing in Nin’s life made (Read more...)>

There is something special about February, something miserable that can’t be duplicated any other time of year. Just as retailers say they can’t make Christmas in July, I say, I can’t make utter, systemic despair anytime so well as in February. Since becoming a bookseller, it could be that my February blues are even more profound, as work piles up during holiday shopping, and in January, honestly, I’m too tired from December to really eviscerate the piles and start fresh. And then those piles are engulfed by miserable February and the piles start to burden like regret, taking on the power of the undoable only because they haven’t been done. Although, long before the bookstore opened, every February of my adult life felt worse than all those previous. Every February, I remind myself of the old woman saying to Candide of their fellow passengers, “if there is one found who has not frequently cursed his life, and has not as often said to himself that he was the unhappiest of mortals, I will give you leave to throw me into the sea, head foremost.” This February, in addition to the usual stuff, I found myself feeling really down about the state of the contemporary novel and the lack of support that we, the literary industry, give to experimentation.

I read The Curtain, Milan Kundera’s wonderful new book on the history and art of the novel, and it is so brilliant on the subject that I couldn’t help but think that (Read more...)>

I was in New Orleans over Christmas, volunteering with ACORN, spending a week of mornings gutting houses whose wet drywall and insulation are rotting their frames and attracting termites. It was a vivid trip, and in the flooded neighborhoods I mostly sat stupefied in the passenger seat of our rental car, watching the streets like a slideshow. In contrast, the French Quarter was even more beautiful than I’d remembered, and its ridiculous aspects more forgivable, because its aura of living history is suddenly manifest.

I have in my pocket while I type a red marble taken from a pile of moldering drywall, pocketed because it felt wrong to let anything normal get thrown in the heap, but there were thousands of moments like that in the Ninth Ward, glimpses of quotidian life hog-tied by leagues of devastation. It seemed like anyone with a camera could be an artist there; among so many luminous details, one need only point and shoot. Or so I thought until we got our pictures back. Remarkably, even the picture of the dog skeleton still on its chain does not inspire a second glance. I’m buying Polidori’s book and tossing our snapshots. No question, art is best left to artists.

As always when confronted with political catastrophe, I question my priorities and wonder what I’m doing fussing around with a bookstore when I should be manning the barricades. Then I visited Faulkner House Books. This beautiful store, in a former home of William Faulkner, (Read more...).