Kate Braid Reads @ PFB

Kate Braid, poet and winner of the Pat Lowther Award, will be reading as part of the UBC Creative Writing Department's Locution series tomorrow night, November 5th, in Main Street's front room at 7 pm. Other readers include Jay Torrence, Tenille Campbell, Kevin Spenst and Christine Leclerc. Limited seating; if you don't want to be sitting on the floor in the front row, better plan to arrive by 6:45 pm or so. Books and beverages will be available for purchase; the event itself is free.

Richard K. Morgan Video Games

[posted by James N.]

Science fiction author Richard K. Morgan is writing 3 video games for Electronic Arts (the same company adapting Dante's Inferno into a game).

All 3 games are described as works of science fiction, which makes sense.

I, personally, would play the crap out of an Altered Carbon game. Or a Market Forces racing game!

(via)

Shop Class as Soulcraft

This book is really good; I'm rereading it now for a third time. Crawford, who holds a PhD. in philosophy, disliked managerial and administrative work, and took up fixing motorcycles as an antidote to frustration and boredom, and then as a permanent career. Crawford writes plainly and directly about the value of working with one's hands, and how manual labor is, at its heart, a kind of philosophical practice, a means of engagement with the world.

Crawford's work took on special relevance for me last week as Main Street's toilet breathed its last. Confronted with a $125 estimate to repair it, I opted for a visit to Home Depot, followed by several hours of monkeying around on the bathroom floor with brass washers, hoses, and a big pink rubber gasket that looked like something that had recently escaped from a tide pool. No flood, and Main Street's bathroom looks better than it has in years.

A New Bookstore With Only Good Books

While recently in NYC I had the chance to visit 192 Books in Chelsea, a new bookstore that can't be any larger than Main Street's front room. What impressed me most about my visit was that every single book in the store seemed to have been chosen by someone with taste. There were no NASCAR cookbooks, no soap opera biographies, no books about UFO abductees or terrible Da Vinci Code knockoffs in sight. The history shelf only consisted of 100 titles or so, but every book on it looked interesting and worth reading.

Buoyed by my visit to this bonsai bookstore -- like Powell's, only smaller! -- the staff and I have decided to devote just as much of our attention to new books as to used ones. Our new book selection has doubled in the last two months, and, over the next four to six months, we'll expand it again, until we have most major new releases in house, plus a selected backlist of books we're always asked for, but seldom see second hand. All new books will still 20% off Canadian list price, as will special orders. We can now order any book currently in print in North America, and hope to add one or two UK-based distributors in the near future, for hard-to-find British mysteries and science fiction.

As always, if you have comments or queries, please get in touch; we are always happy to hear from you.

Wild Thing, I Think You Move Me

Special fur-covered edition of Dave Eggers' The Wild Things, loosely based on the Spike Jonze screenplay loosely based on Maurice Sendak's fondly-remembered-from-childhood picture book. Not available from PFB -- as with most of their limited edition releases, McSweeney's is selling this one themselves, but we'll have the regular trade edition by the middle of next week.

Stephen King's "The Cannibals"

70 page PDF of lost 1980s King typescript available for free download, courtesy SK.com. New SK doorstop -- 100 characters! 1000+ pages! -- on the way in early November.

New Dispatches From The Land of Molecular Gastronomy

2008's best cookbook, now available in a relatively affordable ($50 CDN, after our standard 20% discount) trade hardcover edition.

Heston Blumenthal's magnum opus, a blend of autobiography, full-color food porn, recipes for oak tree essence, Bacon and Scrambled Egg Ice Cream, "jelly of orange and beetroot," snail porridge, etc., and 100+ pages of kitchen science (detailed instructions for working with vacuum sealers, liquid nitrogen, agar, dehydrators, centrifuges, etc. etc. etc.). Plus illustrations by Dave McKean.

Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck earned three Michelin stars in 2004, never went to cooking school; he's positive proof that genuine fascination counts for more than education.