Lemuria Bookstore Blog

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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Larry Brown wrote a most earnest essay on his aspirations to be a writer. I am not sure if it has been published before, but Sonny Brewer has included in his new book, Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Aspiring Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit. Reading Larry Brown’s essay, I got all teary eyed [...]

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Like most of us, John Grisham bumbled around a lot until he found his niche in the world. Not like most us, he became the best-selling author we know today. His essay gives us a glimpse into this young-hearted journey. “My career sputtered along with little to add to the resume. Retail caught my attention, [...]

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After completing his freshmen year at The Citadel, Pat Conroy goes back to spend the summer with his family. A summer of work is on the horizon for him and his mother has some ideas about that. She introduced him to Father Stewart in Omaha. Enjoy this excerpt from Conroy’s essay entitled “Deacon Summer”: “‘I’m [...]

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That’s Santa Sonny Brewer with John Evans when he came to Lemuria last year. Below you will find a letter Sonny wrote to accompany his new book, Don’t Quit Your Day Job. After some conversation between Sonny and John–filled with a wonderful misunderstanding about the book–Sonny decided to collect stories from writers about the day [...]

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Since Lemuria has selected all four of Tom Franklin’s published works for our First Editions Club, I asked John how this all came about. John first met Tom Franklin in the early 90s when he was traveling from his hometown in Alabama to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he was working on an MFA in fiction at [...]

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