Y’all know that I love the library, but one of the aspects I love most is being able to sample, to see if there’s a match for my reading taste before I purchase. It’s an hour’s walk—there and back, in total—but I can plan to avoid the rain. (I
Well, mostly I’m not: as it is for many of you, it’s fiction that tugs hardest at my heart. But Bron’s personal reading project for 2026 is headquartered here, and I liked the idea of seeing how comfortably just two volumes of non-fiction could nestle into my stack each
I was reading Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as the borrowing days approached—days at the end of March, thought to have been borrowed from April so that winter could last just a few more stormy days. We had a most magnificent storm, which
For ReadIndies this year, hosted by Kaggsy, I’ve written about presses from Minneapolis Minnesota, during the democratic crisis unfolding in the United States: Graywolf Press | Coffee House Press | Rain Taxi Magazine. (I should have included Milkweed Editions there!) Presses that push the boundaries and invite readers to
Perhaps independent presses are most vital in their willingness to confront, to engage with ideas and possibilities that make readers uncomfortable. Consider Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s book about reading James Baldwin and William Styron, which opens with this epigraph from Raoul Peck’s J’étouffe: “Forgive me in advance,
