Not American Bookshops (Guardian)

Livraria Lello

Porto, Portugal

Think a profitable store can’t be lush, rich and somehow homely? The velvety Livraria Lello in downtown Porto will change your mind. Not so much the art nouveau exterior as the gold-accented interior with its red carpets, stained glass, wood paneling and flowing central stair case. Walking into this bookstore, we had an insatiable urge to light a cigar (and we don’t smoke) because, well, this is the sort of place it seems like one should do that. And, indeed, this is the sort of place where onecan do that. Cigars are sold in the Livraria Lello’s upstairs four-table coffee shop along with port, coffee (obviously) and baked goods.

El Ateneo

Buenos Aires

Quiz question: Where and when was the first ever movie with sound shown to a public audience?

The answer: The El Ateneo bookstore, 1929.

Of course, this gorgeous building in central Buenos Aires wasn’t always a bookstore. It started its life in 1919 as the Teatro Grand Splendid; more than 1,000 patrons would fill the theater to watch operas and tango performances. In 1928 this space was converted into a cinema. It has been a bookstore since 2000. Happily, the El Ateneo architects included many homages to the building’s theater days including curtains and stage lighting. There’s also a wonderful cafe up on the “stage.” Add to that plush seating areas and a huge selection of literature and you have what is by far the best bookstore in South America, arguably the most luxurious in the world, and #4 on coolest-looking bookstore list.

Shakespeare & Co. Antiquarian Books

Paris

If you’ve seen the movie Before Sunset you’ve seen the inside of the Shakespeare & Co. Antiquarian bookstore—this is where Julie Delpy’s character reunited with Ethan Hawke’s during a book signing.

If you’ve read Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. (and if you haven’t you should) then you are intimately familiar with this bookstore. Time Was Soft There is the lusciously-written memoir of a homeless man who was allowed to sleep overnight in Shakespeare & Co by the store’s communist-leaning owner and then refused to vacate when times turned more capitalist. His bed is still there (see pic, below).

But even if you’ve never seen the Shakespeare & Co. Antiquarian bookstore in the movies, or read about it in books, you’ll step through the store’s doorway and sense that this is the sort of quaint, quirky place that should be in cinema and literature. The isles are piled with books. The writer’s room has a working piano for patrons to play. Poets regularly read their work in one of the back rooms.

And if you can’t get to Paris personally then at least visit the store’s supremely well done website—poking around it is almost as much fun as poking around the store itself.

El Péndulo

Mexico City

Originally this post was envisioned as a list of five bookstores. We had to expand it to six in order to squeeze in Polanco branch of El Péndulo. This bookstore isn’t as amazingly stunning or history-filled as the above five selections are. But it is bright, spacious, huge and gloriously plant-filled. Plus the store (and attached cafe) isn’t shy about using air conditioning, which makes El Péndulo a wonderful literary escape on a hot Mexican day.

Rebels and Tyrants: Notes from a literary underground

A gathering place for adventurous writers like Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William Burroughs and Lawrence Durrell among many others, Shakespeare and Company was far more than just a business, it was a breeding ground and spiritual center for literary pioneers who were drawn to the shop by its enigmatic American owner George Whitman who opened the English-language bookstore in 1951,

Whitman passed away last Wednesday at the age of 98.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen is Finland's best kept literary secret...

In the early 70’s, when he was five, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen lived in a block of flats by the Jyväskylä’s (a city in Central Finland) old cemetery and believed in vampires.

In the early 80's he still had vampire dreams and fell in love with Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

Ten years later Pasi wrote his first short stories. He wan the writing competition of SciFi and fantasy stories four times and then decided to become a writer. 

Now he is an author, but he is also a Finnish and literature teacher in upper secondary school and the father of three sons.

He hasn’t stopped loving vampires, Jeanne Moreau and old film classics.

Books

Where the Trains turn (Missä junat kääntyvät) - Short stories, Portti-kirjat 2000

Lumikko and Nine Others (Lumikko ja yhdeksän muuta) – Novel, Atena 2006

The Zoo That Fell From the Sky (Taivaalta pudonnut eläintarha) -  Short stories, reedition, Atena 2008

The Cinematic Life – a novel (Harjukaupungin salakäytävät) - Atena 2010

Hester Prynne, The Scarlet Letter

Though Hester Prynne, who is condemned by her Puritan neighbors for having a child out of wedlock, is sometimes seen as a victim, she manages to survive with dignity and faith throughout, which we think makes her pretty darn powerful. NPR has described her as being “among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature. She’s the embodiment of deep contradictions: bad and beautiful, holy and sinful, conventional and radical… [she] can be seen as Hawthorne’s literary contemplation of what happens when women break cultural bounds and gain personal power.”

“The relation between literature and liberation runs very deep. From Blake to Ginsberg, Shelley to Sartre, literature has often enough served as an image of creativity from which any authentic politics has to learn. In this sense, all artistic work has an implicit utopian dimension; but the pieces in this splendid anthology are unique in explicitly highlighting this concealed underside of literary art, showing us how to hope and desire otherwise. In a darkening political world, this book deserves a wide readership, as it sheds a light on the present from a possible future.”

– Terry Eagleton

The publication of Portrait in book form in 1916 coincided with one of the most important events in modern Irish history: the Easter Rising (also called the Easter Rebellion), which initiated a bloody war of independence followed by several months of civil war in Ireland. By 1922, in the wake of these conflicts, Ireland had thrown off British rule and transformed itself into the Irish Free State-a body comprising all but the six counties of Ulster (the modern-day British province of Northern Ireland); in 1949 the Free State became Eire, the Republic of Ireland. The Rising began when a citizen army of around 1,000 people occupied Dublin’s General Post Office and several other key sites around the city, read aloud a proclamation of an Irish Republic, and raised republican flags. Britain’s response was swift, violent, and apparently effective: thousands of troops were brought into Dublin; a gunboat was deployed in the river Liffey; bullets, shells and incendiary bombs destroyed much of the city and resulted in approximately 1,500 casualties. Within five days, the rebels surrendered. In the weeks that followed, the leaders of the Rising were executed by a firing squad. These highly-publicized executions sent waves of revulsion across Ireland, made martyrs of the rebels, and solidified public opinion in Ireland against British rule. In the words of Joyce’s contemporary, the playwright Sean O’Casey, “1916 became the Year One in Irish history and Irish life.”

Dylan Thomas, 

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

Last updated: 06 November 2008

Dylan Thomas' collection of short stories was published in 1940.

The title refers to James Joyce's first novel, the semi-autobiographical A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.

Thomas, like Joyce, fictionalises events from his own life. In terms of style, the collection marks a transition period between the obscure, dream inspired prose found in Adventures In The Skin Trade and the comic realism of Under Milk Wood.

Several of the stories explore the developing sexuality of the adolescent poet. In Extraordinary Little Cough there is some humour in the story of a girl he loves, even though he claims to not "like anything she said or did". It is a light-hearted look at young love and the trivial nature of these relationships.

A bleaker vision of sexuality is revealed in One Warm Saturday, when he falls in love with a girl and then loses her in a nightmare world of stairs and doors. In these stories love is a frustrating and unsatisfying experience.

For Thomas, the most important relationships are masculine friendships. The Fight details the odd development of a friendship that begins with a fight between two boys, and results in the decision that they will, for fun, edit a paper.

Similarly, in Where Tawe Flows he attends a meeting of men who plan to collaborate in the writing of "a Novel of Provincial Life". Friendship and the creative process are closely linked with each one aiding the development of the other.

As Thomas developed as a writer he also developed as a drinker. Old Garbo sees him revelling in the taste of beer with "its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths". He then goes on to describe a night of legendary and comic indulgence. The events of which are material for his writing and he promises to "put them all in a story by and by". The story shows how careful he was to cultivate his persona as a bohemian alcoholic and a writer.

The Portrait stories, unlike his earlier ones, follow more closely the rules about narrative structure, but he retains the familiar themes of love, death and religion. His approach is a more humorous one and there is a move away from the intense introspection of his poems. Eventually, in Under Milk Wood he will go on to examine the interactions of a whole community.

Five Stories Courtesy of The Paris Review

ON THE SHELF

Faulkner, Munro, and Bribery!

July 6, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

A color-coded Sound and the Fury, just as Faulkner intended.

Are girly themes having a moment?

A beginner’s guide to Alice Munro.

In defense of cursive.

Oxford University Press is fined for bribery.

Stay tuned for our new season of Indie Reviews by Micah Loosen, David Brisben, Alison Morris, Daniel Kine, and other enemies of bland books. 

Jane Austen ring goes up for auction

A Trip to the Literary Pawn Shop

A ring once owned by author Jane Austen will be auctioned by Sotheby's later this month. Austen, the author of the much-loved novels "Pride and Prejudice," "Sense and Sensibility" and "Emma," never married or had children, but the ring has remained in the possession of her family since her death in 1817. Scholars had been unaware of its existence, and it is expected to sell at auction for $31,000 to $46,000.

The ring is made of gold with a cabachon blue stone of natural turquoise. It is, as Sotheby's auction house notes, in a simple style Austen wrote of sympathetically in her work. In "Mansfield Park," Fanny Price is given a gold chain by her cousin Edmund, who tells her, "I consulted the simplicity of your taste."

The jewelry is given to Fanny "in all the niceness of jewellers packing," just as the ring remains in its original box. It comes with letters dating back to 1863 describing its provenance: The ring was passed from Jane Austen to sister Cassandra Austen to sister-in-law Eleanor Austen to niece Caroline Mary Craven Austen to niece Mary A. Austen-Leigh to her niece, Mary Dorothy Austen-Leigh, then to her sister, Winifred Jenkyns, who passed it to her descendants.

The ring will be offered at Sotheby's English Literature, History, Children's Books and Illustrations auction on July 10. The auction includes many sets of letters, and superb copies of the "Shakespeare Fourth Folio" (est. $124,000 to $186,000), Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre" (est. $93,000 to $124,000), and Charles Darwin’s "On the "Origin of Species" (est. $77,000 to $108,000). It also includes fine first editions of Jane Austen's novels "Mansfield Park" (est. $4,600 to $7,700), "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" (est. $3,800 to $5,400), "Emma" (est. $15,500 to $23,000) and "Pride and Prejudice" (est. $31,000 to $46,000).

A Guide to Independent Bookstores in Los Angeles

Beyond Borders and Barnes & Noble, Los Angeles is home to a decreasing amount of great independent bookstores. Some are practically cultural institutions, part of LA's short history and community. Others carry certain genres of books or collectibles. Often these indie booksellers host cool readings and book-related events.

Some worry that these smaller book retailers are at risk of extinction--being swallowed up by corporate bookselling giants and online shopping. When Dutton's Books of Brentwood (founded in 1961) closed its doors, a range of news sources like the Los Angeles Times and LA Observed, reported a wave of sadness among natives, and loyal customers like Dustin Hoffman and Diane Keaton.

Whether you're a book nerd or an occasional reader, a fan of fiction books or children's books, or someone who likes to support small businesses, you'll want to check out this small sampling of shops—if at least for their positions on LA's cultural map.

The Bodhi Tree Bookstore

Want to get the latest Eckhart Tolle book so you can infuse your life with positive energy? Or looking for a great power yoga DVD? Since 1970, the Bodhi Tree has been the hub for self-help and spiritually related books, DVDs and goods. Celebrities like Nicholas Cage, Claire Danes, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Boreanaz, and Rick Rubin have found their Zen, and then some here. The store's used books branch is located right behind the main new books shop. Their adjacent annex hosts readings and workshops on popular subjects like The Artist's Way and everything from the Mayan calendar to spiritual healing.

NOTE: The Bodhi Tree Bookstore (in its original incarnation) is set to close after Christmas 2011.

8585 Melrose Ave.

West Hollywood, CA 90069-5199

Book Soup

This bookstore's motto sums it up: "Bookseller to the Great and Famous." Since the '80s, this incredible spot has been selling a range of new books to Angelinos in need of inspiration. One of its greatest assets might be its impressive collection of art books. Book Soup is also great for city guides and entertainment industry biographies. Just next door to the main shop, readings are held. Some past guests have included Mohammed Ali, David Mamet, Annie Leibovitz, Jena Jameson, Shaquille O'Neal, Robert Evans and Viggo Mortensen.

818 Sunset Blvd.

West Hollywood, CA 90069

Dawson's Books

Sadly, LA's oldest bookstore closed its doors in the summer of 2010. Dawson's first opened in Downtown in 1905 and then moved to Larchmont Village in 1968. However, owner and book expert Michael Dawson is maintaining a related business online. His specialty is rare books about LA and California history, as well as photography--some of it by well-known artists like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Dragon Books

Written up in Vanity Fair, this small Beverly Glen/Bel Air retailer bills itself as "a rare and antiquarian bookseller." A collectors' paradise, it showcases books and book-related collectibles which may be a little rich for some people's blood. You may be flipping through some of the literary artifacts upstairs, for instance, and run across an item for tens of thousands of dollars. Handle with care! But Dragon Books also has far more reasonable volumes. The store is irresistibly charming in a nostalgic way, recalling an old-fashioned study, library or gentleman's smoking room.

2954 Beverly Glen Circle

Bel Air, CA 90077

Skylight Books

If you're an avid reader who lives on the East Side, chances are you've at least heard of Skylight Books in the Los Feliz area. The hip bookseller says it has a clientele of local artists, musicians, writer and scholars. Its inventory includes everything from literary fiction, music and children's books to graphic literature, film and theater, and LA local culture books. It posts a list of indie bestsellers as well as a list of cutting edge "next" indie literary works. Skylight also throws author events and fiction, non-fiction, poetry, solo and group readings.

1818 N. Vermont Ave.

Los Angeles, CA 90027

Specialty Book Browsing for the Avid Collector

Book Collecting & Care

Locating Out of Print Books - Composite Materials

What is book collecting?

A Literary Outlaw in Paris: Interview With Dennis Cooper

  

by Brian Joseph Davis

(Originally for The Huffington Post)

Dennis Cooper's fiction has always been unshakable, with every spare word counting -- and bruising -- but his new novel The Marbled Swarm pushes a lush complexity to the front of the work. The wordy narrator is a dandy Parisian cannibal who preys on Emo boys and conspires against painfully bourgeois families. There's also a time-and-space defying chateau. This makes for a horrifyingly effective -- and surprisingly funny -- gothic tale at first but as the narrator brings us into his world with his wandering, stuffed sentences, the novel begins to linguistically unravel into the swarm hinted at in the title. With Cooper having spent much of his time in France over the last several years, away from his native Los Angeles, The Marbled Swarm seems explicitly continental, with touches of theOulipo Group's literary capering and a tasteful amount of cult-Euro name drops, from Isabelle Adjani to Alain Robb-Grillet.

I spoke with Cooper as he was finishing his North American book tour.

Brian Joseph Davis: Was there anything in particular you were reading or watching that informed The Marbled Swarm? Its language is certainly different from the minimalist style of your earlier books.

Dennis Cooper: Well, I wanted to build a voice that was beholden to French literature, and particularly to its avant-garde wing, which had such a huge impact on my writing from the outset, but was kind of polluted with my own voice, which is very American, I think, and specifically Los Angeles-centric in its flatness and in its attempt to induce some kind of poetic trance within its limitations. But I wanted to be very careful not to end up imitating particular writers' styles, so I went out my way to avoid reading any French fiction or poetry while I was writing the novel in hopes of achieving a kind of prose that would have a French vibe rather than writing that would display obvious French earmarks. Instead, I studied a lot of French films, thinking they would be a source far enough away from fiction that nothing from them would get noticeably grafted on. The films that had the biggest impact were Alain Resnais' Providence, both because its meta-fictional central conceit had a relationship to mine and because it's a very French film that is crosshatched with an English text and actors, and Eric Rohmer's Perceval les Gallois, which is a film largely set outdoors but shot on a highly stylized indoor sets, because I was very interested in how strangely it used very artificial representations to play with viewers' ability to suspend belief.

BJD: The narrator is playing a predatory game in the book but he is also playing linguistic games on the reader. Was that kind of Nabokovian teasing in your original plan for the book or did that voice come in later drafts?

DC: That teasing was there from the very beginning, or, rather, the novel's style was constructed in order to enable that kind of linguistic game playing. What entered after I'd established the voice and was elaborated on in later drafts were the writing's props, as I think of them: the secret passage-laden chateaus, the tricky relationship between flat pictorial illustration/animations of people and places as employed by Japanese anime and manga and Disneyland and so forth versus the more fleshed out representations that fiction allows and basically demands, the actor versus "real" person motif, the play with surveillance, and so on.

BJD: How do you think your nomadism between Europe and the U.S. has altered your work? The Marbled Swarm has a haunted Europe sensibility, akin to a late-Buñuel film but there are also moments only an American would think of, like when the narrator confesses that he first mistook the chateaus of France as "Disney castles."

DC: Having lived the great majority of the time in France for the past six years had a giant impact, as did my not yet having learned to speak or understand the French language with much sophistication. On the one hand, I live here, and I have gotten a grasp on how the French view their own culture and country -- enough so that, say, when I saw Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, I shared my French friends' amusement and feeling of being charmed by how extremely American and romantic his view of France is -- but, on the other hand, I haven't lost my long term, very American presumptions and reference points. The interesting thing for me is that I'm able to straddle the two perspectives and feel them both in a way that's both comfortable and conflictive, and it was precisely that in-between viewpoint that I wanted to represent in the novel's narrator, whose voice is fatally ruptured and flawed by its American influence.

BJD: Why do we keep writing novels? There's some nagging truth to the narrator's statement "I've never read a decent novel in my life unless skimming fifteen pages of Houellbecq's Platform to make conversation counts." I could comfortably stay in the art world, or poetry, and make "book" projects, with quotation marks. But I try to leave that world every few years to make books without quotation marks; I think mostly to see if I can. For you, there are the theater and music collaborations, which have to feel much different, more immediate, than novel writing. What does story telling in this 50 to 100-thousand word format still hold for you?

DC: No, the novel is still the form I feel most dedicated to and the one in which I feel most wholly at home. The theater and music collaborations are extremely interesting, but, partially due to the lack of full control that comes with collaborating, I continue to think of them as places to experiment with my writing, to escape fiction temporarily or to use as opportunities to gauge my abilities and test their limits. I feel like I'm utilizing and fooling around with fragments of my talent when I work in theater and music. There's something of a relationship to the writing of poetry, but I always feel as though there is a big limitation to how much I can do and give to those kinds of work. There's just something about fiction, and most especially about novel-length fiction, that feels far more conducive to what I want to do as a writer than any other form. Other than wanting or maybe even needing that much room to get at what I have to say, I really don't know why.

jean-joseph rabéarivelo

by Kristen McHenry

Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo lived his short and tumultuous life on the island of Madagascar during the time of French colonial rule. He was born in the capital Antananarivo (Tananarive) in 1901 to a mother who had once been a Malagasy aristocrat but who lost her property and fell into poverty after French colonization.

Rabéarivelo attended mainly French Catholic schools, until being expelled at the age of 13. After a brief stint in public school, he dropped out entirely and worked at various odd jobs, all the while reading voraciously and teaching himself everything he could about poetry. He eventually found low-paying work as a proofreader at the printing house Imprimerie de l’Imerina, a position he retained until his death in 1937.

During Rabéarivelo’s lifetime, the French placed heavy restrictions on writing in Malagasy (the native language of Madagascar), and all texts written in French by the Malagasy people were automatically classified as French literature. Rabéarivelo acted as a sort of dual ambassador for French literature as well as traditional Malagasy literature. He was heavily influenced by both the French Surrealists and the pagan/folkloric traditions of the native Malagasy.

He wrote in French and Malagasy, and was as deeply invested in preserving Malagasy literature and language as he was in expanding on the work of the French Surrealists. Rabéarivelo translated several works of Malagasy into French. He encouraged French-language texts by Malagasy writers to be recognized as Malagasy literature.

In part because of his commitment to both languages and traditions, Rabéarivelo was held in suspicion and banned from traveling by the French government, yet he was never fully embraced by his native Malagasy. He resisted definition and continued to pursue his poetic vision while confined to a life of relative poverty on the island.

He started a literary journal called Capricorne, contributed articles and critical essays to numerous publications, mastered the Spanish language, and translated many poems. Over the course of his lifetime, seven volumes of his poetry were published. His accomplishments were accompanied by agonizing personal difficulties, including drug addiction, depression and physical illness. He married in his early 20s. He and his wife had five children, including a daughter who died at age 3.

In spite of his personal anguish, Rabéarivelo’s poems reflect an ethereal, mythic universe and a deep connection to the natural world. In the poem “You There,” Rabéarivelo speaks of a mysterious symbiotic connection to the earth, birth and growth:

You there
standing naked!
You are mud and remember it –
actually you’re the child of this parturient dark
who feeds on the milkstuff of the moon,
then slowly grows into a trunk
above this low wall the dreams of flowers crawl over
and the smell of summer at a lull.

To feel, believe, that roots push from your feet
and slide and turn like thirsty snakes
down to an underground spring
or clutch the sand,
and marry you to it so soon — you, alive
tree, unknown, unidentified tree
swelling with fruit you’ll have to pick yourself.

His poem “The Three Birds” also reflects an affinity for the spiritual reflected in the natural world:

The Three Birds

The bird of iron, the bird of steel
who slashed the morning clouds
and tried to gouge the stars
out beyond the day
is hiding as if ashamed
in an unreal cave.

The bird of flesh, the bird of feathers
who tunnels through the wind
to reach a moon he saw in a dream
hanging in the branches
falls in tandem with the night
into a maze of brambles.

But the bird that has no body
enchants the warden of the mind
with his stammering aria,
then opens his echoing wings
and rushes away to pacify all space
and only returns immortal.

Rabéarivelo’s unusual use of language is present in this translation of a traditional Malagasy poem, “Lamba.” An excerpt of that poem reads:

Few trees bloom without leaves,
Few flowers bloom without perfume
and few fruits mature
without pulp you have the foliage,
you have the perfume,
you have the pulp of the old tree
that is my race in lamba.

Your name rhymes well with legs
in this long that I chose
to protect my name of the forgetting,
in this language which speaks to the soul
while ours murmurs to the heart.

Your name rhymes well with legs
with the legs which cover
your transparent sharpness:
But you, you rhyme well with several other things in my thought.

Your appearance rhymes with rocks, in Imerina.
When there is feast and that the crowd goes on terraces:
With the strips of peaceful egrets
which come to arise on the forests of rushes
as soon as the sun capsizes.

Petri Liukkon, at Books and Writers, says of Rabéarivelo: “By replacing the reality of a colonized civilization with his own images, he created a new isolated world, full of melancholy and bitter-sweet beauty.”

In spite of his quiet rebellion against French control, Rabéarivelo’s lifelong dream was to live and write in France. An opportunity arose for him to represent the colony through a special French program, but it was denied when a group of basket-weavers were selected instead. Grief-stricken by the death of his daughter and feeling that he lost his last only chance to realize his ambitions, Rabéarivelo committed suicide by poisoning at the age of 37. Some reports claim that he recorded his dying moments in his journal.

Unfortunately it was very challenging to find a wide selection of Rabéarivelo’s work online. But don’t despair! Rabearivelo’s book Translated From The Night is available through the publisher Lascaux Editions, with English translations by Robert Zillar.

Note: Translations of “You There” and “Three Birds” by Kelli Boyles.

Kristen McHenry works on poetry by night and health outreach by day. She created and facilitates the Poet’s Cafe, a weekly poetry workshop for homeless teens. She shares poetry and her thoughts on writing at The Good Typist.