My Goodreads Review of The Signature of all Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. I gave it 5 stars, which is unusual for me. It’s the best book I’ve read in a while and it captivated me and made me think.
I admit I never read Eat, Pray, Love; personal memoirs don’t interest me much. But when I heard that Gilbert had created a work of historical fiction I was fascinated. I was definitely not disappointed.
This week, some bookstores I discovered to add to my list of bookstores I want to visit:
The town of Hay-on-Wye is a small town (population 1500), but it has 30!!! secondhand bookshops. It also has an annual festival in May known as the “Woodstock of the mind.” Might have to get over there soon!
The store that started me on this discovery of Hay-on-Wye is Murder & Mayhem, a mystery bookstore.
Another bookstore in the UK, where I hope to visit next fall, is Golden Hare, in Edinburgh. The city has many bookshops, as noted in this article on Travel the Bookshop Trail from travelbetweenthepages.com. The article contains a “Bookshop Trail” app which helps viewers get from bookstore to bookstore in this wonderful city.
Also this week:
A bookstore in Los Angeles called “The Last Bookstore,” which started out as sci-fi, what the owner calls “Post-apocalyptic,” and now is fun and weird. Check out the photos in this article from i09.
J. Clifton Spargo, who, by the way is the Provost’s Fellow in Fiction at the University of Iowa, just down the road from me, wrote this great post on Glimmer Train about writing historical fiction. Sprague is the author of Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.
Sprague says:
Many conversations about historical fiction get bogged down in the “what,” in debates about specific requirements a novel must fulfill to qualify as historical fiction. From my perspective, however, the real urgency resides in the “why.” Why bother to tell this story of the past at all? Why now? Why again? There must be some way in which the story you tell about the past impinges on our present.
Glimmer Train is a quarterly magazine of short fiction. Glimmer Train has been discovering, publishing, and paying emerging writers since 1990.