Hello, Bookstore – Lenox, Massachusetts
As Roaming the Arts reflects on the last year or so, the most heartwarming story about books and the people who love them is the story of a small New England bookstore, on the verge of closing due to the pandemic, and the documentary film made to tell the story of survival.
In 2020, on the verge of closing down, a GoFundMe was started and the owner’s friends, the town, and many others stepped up to save this independent bookstore. It’s a great story, and for this website, at the heart of why our passion for authors and books is a sharing experience.
Check out some of what was said in Print:
In the Local paper.
What Variety said.
(also find stories in the NY Times, the Boston Globe, and many others.)
Our Designer
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David Mitchell
David Mitchell
Location – London (Soho) and around the world.
Check out the 2012 film version of Cloud Atlas on Netflix.
Extended Interview – w/ Neil Gaiman @ virtual Politics & Prose Bookstore
David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: “I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I’d spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself.” Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World. Mitchell’s American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff. (Goodreads)
His latest novel (July 2020) Utopia Avenue tells the fictional story of a British band of the same name, who emerged from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, against the backdrop of real world characters and events.
Check it out on Goodreads (Click cover below)
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Les Standiford
Locations: Florida and others.
Les Standiford
Les Standiford is the author of twenty-one books, including the critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean –a History Channel Top Ten Pick & the One Read choice of more than a dozen public library systems; Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and the Bitter Partnership that Transformed America, and Washington Burning: How a Frenchman’s Vision for Our Nation’s Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army–both publisher’s nominees for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards; The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived our Holiday Spirits (a New York Times Editors Choice); Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction that Changed America (a New York Times best-seller); and most recently, Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, a featured alternate of the History Book Club.
He is also the author of novels, including the acclaimed John Deal mystery series as well as the stand-alone thrillers Black Mountain and Spill (adapted as a feature film).
He has received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami and was appointed holder of the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg for the Spring of 2016.
He and his wife, Kimberly, a psychotherapist and artist, are the parents of three children, Jeremy, Hannah, and Alexander. They live in Pinecrest, Florida, in a home built of native Florida pine and maintained by the spirit of John Deal.
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Wallace Stroby
Wallace Stroby
Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of eight novels, four of which feature professional thief Crissa Stone, whom Kirkus Reviews named “Crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.”
A Long Branch, N.J., native, he’s a lifelong resident of the Jersey Shore. His debut novel THE BARBED-WIRE KISS, which The Washington Post called “a scorching first novel …full of attention to character and memory and, even more, to the neighborhoods of New Jersey,” was a finalist for the 2004 Barry Award for Best First Novel.
His 2010 novel GONE ‘TIL NOVEMBER was picked as a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, as was the second Crissa Stone novel KINGS OF MIDNIGHT. In 2012, the Crissa Stone novels were optioned by Showtime Networks for development.A graduate of Rutgers University, Stroby was an editor at the Star-Ledger of Newark, Tony Soprano’s hometown newspaper, for 13 years.
