Trooper of the weekend might have to go to Stassie Wickett as she wandered through six different bookstores with me between 8 p.m. Friday night and 9 p.m. Saturday night (though she did get a zoo trip out of it).
Friday night we hit a Barnes & Noble and (as we always do) turned all of the Dzanc titles in the store face out (Matt Bell's How They Were Found; Jeff Kass' Knuckleheads, Roy Kesey's Any Deadly Thing; Jen Michalski's Could You Be With Her Now; and Steven Gillis, not-quite Dzanc title, The Law of Strings). I found Ron Rash's new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay. With my new VIDA buying rule, I wandered about a bit and found Caitlin Horrocks' collection, This is Not Your City. I KNOW I already have this somewhere, but having gone to see her read Wednesday night, I looked for my copy and can't find it anywhere. I certainly don't mind supporting her and Sarabande one more time.
Saturday morning Stassie and I were going to go to the Detroit Zoo. The
weather was beautiful and the zoo had something called Bunnyville going on--the line of cars went a quarter of a mile deep minimum down the ramp of the exit from the expressway. We thought, let's go to a couple of used book stores and kill some time and see if we can't come back in an hour or two when the line is down.
We went to the smaller John King store in Ferndale where Stassie made friends with the store cat ("I shall name you Snickers") and found books by Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, as well as a book by Chelea Handler and one titled Cat Speak (yes, how to speak to your cat...). I picked up a load of books: The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson, The Point by Charles
D'Ambrosio, The Actual by Saul Bellow, The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick, Mischief Makers by Nettie Jones, Aureole by Carole Maso, a trio of Max Apple titles for Dzanc's rEprint series, and Illinois Short Fiction series titles by Peter Makuck and Sara Vogan.
We then hit Royal Oak Books and I found
Bloodshed and
Three Novellas by Cynthia Ozick, two more Illinois Short Fiction titles (Erin McGraw and Susan Enberg) plus Thomas Williams' NBA winner, The Hair of Harold Roux. Stassie found two more cats to befriend (with the new names of Milky Way and Twix).
After a quick respite at home, where I found Leah, New
Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams in the mailbox, we headed to Ann Arbor, with our first stop at Dawn Traeder where there were no cats for Stassie to befriend, but I found Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow and In Search of Nixon by Bruce Mazlish. From there on over to West
Side Books where Stassie picked up more Shakespeare, The Lovely Bones, Jane Eyre, and a collection of stories by Jack London and I picked up Brian Evenson's The Wavering Knife and a signed copy of George Singleton's The Half-Mammals of Dixie.
We also wandered the Vault of Midnight comic store for a
few minutes before
heading over to a pretty well attended pre-opening get together by the folks at Literati, Ann Arbor's soon to be newest open bookstore! It looks wonderful there.
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