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Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
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Wal-Mart
An article in The Book Standard details how Wal-Mart is planning to reach out to (rather than destroy) community businesses it resides next to. Specifically, they touch on indie bookstores:
“It’s difficult to compete with Wal-Mart on price,” admitted Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman, “but there are some things a small business can do that [Wal-Mart] can’t.” For instance, independent bookstores can provide a specific niche in the market or have literary programs like author readings.
Excuse me, but niche market!? Seems like Wal-Mart (as it so often does) has things precisely backwards. Aren’t independent bookstores stocking a broad range of thousands of titles, whereas Wal-Mart is stocking the same 20 bestsellers that you can pick up at finer supermarkets and airports across the country?
I’m wondering what brings in more customers–the megasellers at Wal-Mart or the collective range of books at an independent bookstore? Not to mention, don’t these niche indies stock many of the same titles you can get at Wal-Mart? (Just because they’re independent doesn’t mean they don’t sell the books that regularly top The New York Times bestseller list.)
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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I love Wal-Mart!