"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
For our first bookseller interview, we visit Alice's Bookshop and its proprietor, Luke Terbutt, to discover the stories behind second-hand books, the (real) job of booksellers and what we can learn from all that marginalia.
"There is often an intimate and, necessarily, emotional connection that people have with books. Some find it very difficult to part with their own, let alone those of a dear family member."
Luke Terbutt
At the end of 2015, Maple Street Book Shop will close after fifty-one years. We celebrate a New Orleans institution.
We're not telling most readers anything they don't already know: community bookstores are not places simply to buy books. They are hubs, they are second homes, they are places to receive comfort, places of laughter and hope and revelation.
Whatever you believe about reading, you know the ways that great sentences stay with us. They’re the ones that we find ourselves repeating as we walk down the street on a Wednesday afternoon long after the book has gathered dust on the shelf. The ones we underline or copy into a notebook for some future purpose we can’t name. The ones that send a charge up our spines.
We begin our new series Anatomy of a Sentence with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and our favorite third sentence.
We continue through Africa in our Reading Around the World series. This time, join us in Somalia with Nuruddin Farah and his masterful Hiding in Plain Sight.
"If the paranoid regime of Siad Barre won't allow me to return because of my writing, then my work must be worth continuing. I must write something worthy of the challenge." Nuruddin Farah
Our series on reading around the world continues in North Africa.
“You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you; and from then on, it falls into the habit of grasping things in your place, it takes over your mouth like a lover’s voracious kiss.” Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
In Part 2 of Reading New Orleans, George Bishop discusses his love of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.
"I grew up a hundred miles away … and the rare excursion to the big city was always an adventure for us. New Orleans was exotic, rich, dirty, dangerous, debauched, historic, decrepit, rowdy, bohemian... We loved it."
As we approach the ten-year anniversary of you-know-what, we offer a break from the “K” word with some of our favorite New Orleans novels and passages you may not have read (or would like to read again). With special guests Paula Morris (Part 1) and George Bishop (Part 2, coming soon).
New Orleans is charming and infuriating in equal measure — though, of course, all cities inspire love and frustration in their inhabitants.
At Sacred Trespasses, we declare the start of every year The Year of Reading Dangerously.
On this site—written by readers for readers—you will find reading recommendations, occasional interviews with authors, news of international literature and notes on the reading life.
Please join us as we read dangerously and promiscuously.
To receive notifications of new posts, please sign up via our contact page with the subject "Subscribe."
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
