Recommendations from The Bookstore at the End of the World
December 16, 2020
On a good year, everything about the publishing industry seems designed for anxiety: an author’s fear that they won’t be read or understood, a publisher’s hand-wringing about profits and losses; a publicist’s neurosis about shrinking review coverage; a reader’s sense of foreboding about the accumulating stacks on their tables and chairs and floors; a designer’s tension about kerning or whatever troubles designers anyway; and a bookseller’s limitless concern about all of the above, plus or minus the kerning. And this year, with the perfect clarity of two-zero-two-zero, all of that was buried beneath new anxieties: will I ever see my family again? Will I be killed and/or abducted in the street by government thugs? Will my business burn to the ground in a paroxysm of righteous anger at white supremacy? Will my seamless order ever fucking arrive? Why won’t my cousins wear masks? They voted for