Emily St. John Mandel

May 26

Friends of booksellers, assemble!

Word comes from my friends at the The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, Chicago, that one of their booksellers, Jon Fullmer, and his wife Amelia, have lost everything after a devastating apartment fire on May 24. Their first child is due next month. Until their renters insurance kicks in, they’ve got nothing.

And not to distract from the real tragedy of losing all their day-to-day belongings, they also lost all their books.

We can help! The main link is a Paypal fundraiser.

And you can also check in over at the Book Cellar’s site (http://bookcellarinc.com/) or their tumblr to learn more details about where to send books and such.

May 25

L’édition française de mon premier roman, Last Night in Montreal.

“Django Reinhardt was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.” from The Lola Quartet (via unbridledbooks)

May 23

Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati: best known for their books, but secret latte-art geniuses.

May 21

“He’d recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point, he’d promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. “You don’t want to drift through life all addled, Jack,” his mother’s voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he’d spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.” from The Lola Quartet (via unbridledbooks)

May 20

Asheville, North Carolina. Went for walk. Found piano in alley.

May 19

My favourite building in Columbia, SC.

Detail of a rusted out rail car, Columbia, South Carolina.

May 16

“Is your character Gavin based on a vampire?” the interviewer asked.

“No,” I said.

May 9

Unbridled Books: The tattoo story:

unbridledbooks:

The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin’s high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She’d fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer…