That books make us better people, and are the bridges between the islands we risk becoming. That books are how we know and love others, how we stave loneliness and cure our pains. This is the book that encompasses the love and joy that books truly bring. This is truly the book I wish I had written.
Goddammit, everything is the next Harry Potter, or Time Traveller’s Wife, or Book Thief.īut like this book promises, we endure the disappointments for the chance that something will be exhilarating. So many promises and so many galley proofs fall to the wayside. We are so often disappointed – books won in expensive auctions that are just flat soda, stories of the author being picked up from the slush pile and given that special chance. It is rare that a book can so perfectly, completely and utterly capture the heart of a hardened bookseller.
No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the “next big series” until it is ensconced on the New York Times Bestseller list. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and – I imagine this goes without saying – vampires. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like genre mashups a la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. I find literary fiction about the holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful – nonfiction only, please. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be – basically, gimmicks of any kind. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, post-apocalyptic settings, post-mortem narrators, or magic realism. “ Like,” he repeats the word with distaste.
0 kommentar(er)
