All Hallows Read

Bindlestiff Books is accepting donations of children’s books for All Hallow’s Read: a spooky book swap that will be held at Woodlands Cemetery (40th & Woodland) Sunday, Oct. 25, from Noon to 4.

Reading: Adrift in a Vanishing City

Vincent Czyz, author of Adrift in a Vanishing City (Rain Mountain Press, 2015), will read from the book (many reviewers call it a novel, he thinks of it as a fiction collection) at Bindlestiff Books Sunday, Oct. 11, at 4 p.m. Its preface is by internationally renowned science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, who taught at Temple University for many years before recently retiring.

“I could speak at length about how much I admire Czyz’s considerable talent, his fictive range, his willingness to plunge naked into the gutter, leap after stellar contrails, his grasp of how ravenously one body grasps another, or of how his impossible apostrophes out of the night are the necessary utterances that make life possible, confronted with the silence of the day, with the deafness of those who never hear.”  — Samuel R. Delany, preface to Adrift in a Vanishing City

Adrift in a Vanishing City is a collection of short fiction in which the characters  from one story often cross texts and appear another. Adrift navigates a landscape of obsessive love, dead-end streets marked by the invisible graffiti of the lives lost in them, and distant cities—Budapest, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris. Space and time become so malleable echoes of the obliteration of Sodom and Gomorrah whisper beneath the summer moon as it arcs over the fields in Kansas, bringing the reader to the understanding that everything is a part of the moment on which we stand overlooking our lives—a moment called now.

“Deeply romantic (in the best sense) and darkly evocative, Czyz’s lush style explores regions well beyond simple narrative, probing the constantly shifting, oblique connections between failure, memory and the forever-incomplete nature of human desire. A moody, gorgeous and formally innovative collection, Adrift in a Vanishing City deserves a wide audience among readers who understand that fiction is about more than getting a character from one room to the next.” –Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times

“The writing, more like poetry than prose, calls attention to language, to the fullness of a word, a sentence, with the purpose of expressing inexpressible emotions and experiences. Think of Proust’s Remembrance of things Past or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or, more recently, William Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows. […] Vincent Czyz’s Adrift in a Vanishing City is just this sort of work: lyrical and pensive, an odd and often beautiful portrait of longing.” –Capper Nichols, Minnesota Daily

Vincent Czyz is the recipient of the 1994 W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction. The 2011 Truman Capote Fellow at Rutgers University, he has placed stories in Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Georgetown Review, Quiddity, Tampa Review, Tin House, Louisiana Literature, and Skidrow Penthouse, among other publications.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.

Closed Friday

Bindlestiff Books will be closed Friday, Sept. 25, for a major building repair. We will be open regular hours (Noon to 7) on Saturday, and Noon to 5 on Sunday. We may open as late as 3:30 Thursday, our normal staffer was called out of town for work that day.

Bindlestiff Best-Sellers

These are our best-selling titles for the last month (in descending order of sales):

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Stella Whiteman, Control Alter Delete: A Novel

adrienne maree brown & Walidah Imarisha, editors, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI 

Breasts in Art (children’s board book – this is no longer in print, and we are down to our last few copies)

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Dr. Seuss, What Pet Should I Get?

Daniel Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior: A Novel

Carson Ellis, Home (children’s picture book)

Cory Silverberg, What Makes a Baby (children’s picture book)

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (graphic novel)

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: And Other Stories

(It’s a longer list than usual as we had a several-book tie for the last slot)

Dollar Stroll/Phobos Reading Thursday

In conjunction with the Dollar Stroll Thursday, Sept. 17, Phobos (Philadelphia’s weird fiction magazine — about to celebrate the release of its third issue) will present a reading by several local authors. Some spooky stuff, but the reading is open to anyone who wants to read a short piece, regardless of genre. There will be refreshments. The reading will start until 5:30, and run through the Dollar Stroll.

(Of course we’ll also have a selection of dollar books and other items out front, and will keep the store open late for your browsing convenience…)