joshc's blog

At the end of March 2020 we found ourselves making a lot of guesses about how our world would look for, what we thought would be, the next six weeks or so. We guessed it would be important to provide *something* that might help break the isolation of lockdown, something that allowed us to continue connecting with our community even though no one could actually come to the store. We tried a couple of different things including the daily and then three times a week newsletter Shelf Stable.

How could this happen? Like millions of other people I woke up the day after Trump was elected president,  and asked myself how could this happen?

A few months ago, I was visiting a couple of friends of mine, outside in their backyard because, you know, COVID. One of them, a professional baker, said “I have to show you this book” and rushed inside, returning with a coffee-table-book-sized tome. From the fraction of the cover I could see while he carried the book over, I knew exactly what it was.

Although it took a while Hollywood eventually discovered two of England’s most enduring authors and adapted their work into some extraordinary movies and television films. 

A woman rushes to the side of her murdered husband and drinks his blood by the handful. Goddamn, what an image, right? The woman, Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill later composes "The Keen for Art O Laoghaire," a major work of Gaelic literature that is still taught in schools in Ireland today.

Slipping is a novel of the strange spaces in the folds between magic and reality, the in-between places in every city, the stories that fog & change as memory erodes. It's also a story of both personal and national tragedy of dreams deferred and the pyrotechnics of regret.

Star, legend, icon, EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winner) – these are words often used to describe the radiant Audrey Hepburn.  Born in Belgium in 1929, Hepburn lived her early life in the Netherlands, barely survived World War II and afterward moved to London to train as a ballerina.

At this point most readers don’t think of history as “the exact factual record of what definitely happened in the past.” Though there are as many different ways to phrase the idea as there are people expressing it (“History is written by the victors,” for example), I think it’s generally agreed upon that what we call “history” is a group project filled with agendas, biases, contexts, compromises, and broad agreements, that strives to help the present and the future through a better understanding of the past. But what does that idea look like in practice?

Known primarily as a playwright, Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984) also wrote memoirs – An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento:  A Book of Portraits (1973) and Scoundrel Time (1976).  And a novel – Maybe:  A Story (1980).