Lemuria Bookstore Blog

Yesterday, I finished reading the young adult novel and one of our upcoming Oz First Editions Club picks: The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens. It was an action-packed adventure starring three young orphans who are far from ordinary and are beginning to discover their destiny. But I don’t want to talk about it too much, [...]

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It’s a good day to be at Lemuria. Karen Russell will sign and read this evening starting at five. I’ve been anticipating this event since months before Swamplandia! came out, when, to use Kaycie’s phrase, there was a “knock-down drag-out bookseller battle” over advanced copies of the book (yes, I was involved, and yes, I [...]

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Diane Ackerman has written a book about the brain; she’s written a book about the holocaust and one about gardening. Her writing is always vibrant and intimate, but with her latest book, she has explored the territory of her own nightmare: her husband’s stroke which left him unable to communicate, and its aftermath of rehabilitation. [...]

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I’ve found myself unmotivated to read lately, and I think it’s because I haven’t come across a book I wanted to dive into head first. I sped through Etgar Keret’s collection of short stories, The Nimrod Flipout, a few weeks ago, and it was good, but short stories don’t keep my reading fortified like novels [...]

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I love architecture and design books. From shabby chic to the gaudiest luxe, if the pictures are gorgeous and the text’s more than just a description of the picture, I’m in. Lemuria is featuring two of our design books now — a new book on Ken Tate’s houses in the South, including Mississippi and New Orleans, [...]

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Ellen is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office on the army base of Fort Hood, waiting to hear the results of a test. The waiting is making her thoughts run wild; she fears that her cancer’s back, that insidious disease that has taken her breasts already, and that has in many ways [...]

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Emily just returned from the Winter Institute book conference in D.C. and brought me a gift from one of the bookstores there: an old Yale Shakespeare copy of The Tempest. The book itself isn’t extremely rare or valuable or anything, but it has character, and best of all, it is small. I had been wanting [...]

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Many textual purists are balking at NewSouth’s decision to publish Alan Gribben’s edition of Mark Twain’s “companion boy books,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In his edition, Gribben, a Twain scholar and professor at Auburn, has replaced the offensive terms, both “nigger” (so prevalent in Huck Finn) and “injun” (Tom Sawyer), with [...]

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I read V. S. Ramachandran’s book Phantoms in the Brain several years ago, and though I’ve always been drawn to science writing for the layman, this book was a bonafide page turner. Like Oliver Sacks, Ramachandran uses strange cases and patients that he’s worked with to talk about how our brains work. In fact, one [...]

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When I went home for Thanksgiving my dad told me he’d been trying his hand at bread baking. His loaves, a sort of sourdough born of the book Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart, came out golden, with a crunchy crust and a crumb that was both chewy and fluffy. In other words, he [...]

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