Land of Glorious Bookshops
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Dear All,
This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons in these parts. We’re not about to encourage you to go pressing buttons willy-nilly. It’s not just the danger that certain buttons present; lots of buttons don’t even work. You feed some coins into a parking kiosk, poke the button for your ticket, and nothing happens. Your nickels and dimes have been swallowed and all for nothing. ATM touch screens are really just buttons that don’t even give you the simple pleasure of pressing a button inward, and those things are broken half the time. And the buttons on museum demonstration machines? Those hardly ever operate.
However, I’ve investigated the button below, and it does work, and all it does is subscribe you to this newsletter. If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.
Happy Travels
I spent the better part of last week touring the bookshops of Western Massachusetts, and I heartily encourage you to do the same if you ever have the opportunity. It so happens that none other than Kathleen Jennings, illustrator of The Curator, has even drawn a helpful map of them.
First, I dropped into Book Moon in Easthampton, which is owned by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, and which is a bookstore that was seemingly designed with me in mind. They have new books, rare books, and beautifully strange books. Speaking of beautifully strange books: Kelly’s new collection of short stories, White Cat, Black Dog, arrives on 3/28, and it is so endlessly surprising, and so great. You should get it.
After that, I met up with Christopher Golden, author of the superb and alarming All Hallows, which I also heartily recommend. We shared an event at An Unlikely Story in Plainville, another incredible bookshop. The turnout was unbelievable, and Chris demonstrated why he has to balance his writing career with requests to officiate marriages. Here we are post-game with my sideburns
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I wound things up the following night talking with Kelly Link at the wonderful Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley. We had a great conversation, and I loved picking Kelly’s brain about her story “The White Road,” which is my new favorite post-apocalypse story. (If you have a hole in your life now that The Last of Us is on hiatus, it will help to fill it.)
Thank you to everyone who came out. I loved talking to you about The Curator, and about stories, and about cats.
The Latest
I was stunned — in a good way! — to receive the news that The Curator had landed on The Globe and Mail Bestseller List.
The book was announced as the latest pick for Strombo’s Lit. I believe Strombo is giving some copies away on his Instagram, and I’m very much looking forward to chatting with him.
And on a completely different subject, a project I’ve been working on for a long time with my dear friend Jesse Kellerman, a crime comic book called Self Help, was just announced with an eye toward a publication date for the first issue sometime in the late summer:
I’ll have more to say about this in the future, but I’m crazy about the art by Marianna Ignazzi and we are thrilled to be working with Chris Ryall and Syzygy Publishing.
As always, my thanks for subscribing, and in case you ever have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I’m over on Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.
All Best,
Owen
You’ll be glad to know that I finally made it to the hairdresser and got those beasts harvested.