Lemuria Bookstore Blog

A few months ago I was handed an advanced reader copy of A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano. I had no idea what to expect outside of the fact that Flannery O’Connor was a character in the novel. I couldn’t put it down once I started reading it! And Nan couldn’t put it down [...]

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Dear Listener, For those of you that don’t know me yet, my name is Simon. Lemuria was gracious enough to give me a job about a month ago when my beloved employer Be-Bop Record Shop was forced to close its doors. I am very excited to share my insight on my favorite recent read, but [...]

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At the end of June last year, Adam Ross came to Lemuria for an early stop on his first book’s tour. Mr. Peanut was released by Knopf on June 22, 2010, to great acclaim: master of crime Scott Turow penned a front page New York Times Book Review article, Stephen King blurbed the novel, calling [...]

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I couldn’t resist running this picture or Ace in our print ads the last couple of weeks. It’s rare and cool to have an author who in his former life played SEC football. We Mississippians are always looking for the next big writer to come out of our state – you know John Grisham and [...]

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Not long after I started working at Lemuria last summer, our Random House reps stopped by to pitch some of the upcoming titles to us booksellers.  When they pulled out advanced reader copies of Karen Russell’s  Swamplandia! I thought there was going to be a real knock-down drag-out bookseller battle to see who got their [...]

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On the surface, Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel might seem a bit weird and “out there”, but as the days pass since I turned the last page a few days ago, I am left with the warm, if rather unexpected, feeling that this is a love story, not presented in traditional form, but in Brockmeier’s original, [...]

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“At night, stray dogs come up underneath our house and lick our leaking pipes.” I have read this sentence twice now: the first time as the opening sentence of Mark Richard’s short story “Strays,” the opening story in The Ice at the Bottom of the World; the second time as Mark Richard describes a crucial [...]

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In my previous blog post, I raved about Karen Russell’s short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Since then I’ve received an advance copy of her new novel Swamplandia! which centers on a family from one of the St. Lucy’s stories. Set in the swamplands of Florida, Russell’s novel focuses on [...]

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“Here’s the juice children: If you want to be a writer, if you want to create a Persona and a body of work that is woven in the golden thread of Truth, then you must, before anything else, go out into the world and do some serious looking around . . . [A writer] must [...]

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Maggie triumphantly paraded her latest review acquisition at the desk last week: she got a copy of Mark Dunn’s new book, Under the Harrow. After she read aloud to us the description (it sounds great: some sort of social experiment where orphans are left to create their own society when the only books available to [...]

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