“I love that book,” says a young woman with dark curly hair, picking up a copy of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

“Me, too,” I say, and tell her about the new biography of Butler, Positive Obsession by Susana Morris, that just came out last week. We enthuse, and compare notes about which of Butler’s novels we like best.

It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and Beth and I have set books out on folding tables on the sidewalk as part of Swarthmore Showcase, an event to introduce incoming Swarthmore College students and their families to what the town has to offer. We’re about a month out from opening the store, and this is a great opportunity for us to dip our toes into bookselling, and also to get the word out about Celia.

Over the course of the day, we talk to families from Brooklyn, Virginia, and Texas—even one mother and daughter all the way from Hawaii. We chat with a group of students from China, Hong Hong, and Korea, and meet a quartet of new faculty members. Two seniors from the volleyball team wander by. Excited to learn about the store, they offer advice about how to get the word to college students. “Postering!” they say.

A doctor who works at Penn stops by, and he and Beth start chatting about The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s extraordinary “biography of cancer” from a few years back. Before you know it, he’s offering to lead a book discussion on it at the store after we’re open.

A girl of about eight is drawn to a unicorn sticker book. Neither she nor her aunt have money with them, but they promise to come back later, and we set the book aside.

Someone I know who is working on a children’s book about summiting Dinali crosses the street to say hello. When I ask him about the book, he explains that it’s not really about summiting, but rather about a man who, facing terrible conditions as he ascends the mountain, realizes that continuing on would be foolhardy. Rather than succumbing to “summit fever,” he makes the hard decision to prioritize safety—his own and that of the others in his team—to ensure he comes home to his young daughter.

These kinds of conversations and encounters are why Beth and I set out on this journey in the first place. They’re the dream of bookselling.

Now, after two years of learning, planning, worrying, and wondering—of deciding which books we should carry, how many acrylic bookstands we’ll need, who should paint the mural that will extend along the side of the building, what angle the shelves in the bookcases should be at, where to hang the book-shaped lights in the children’s section, and ten thousand other crucial questions large and small—it’s finally coming true.

Please join us for our Grand Opening on Saturday, October 4! And on many, many other days as well.

Recommendations

Sisters in the Wind
By Angeline Boulley

My heart races when the handsome Native guy enters the diner. He’s tall and lean, and he glides past my early-morning regulars as if modeling what metrosexual men wear. He smoothly removes a stylish black knee-length wool coat to reveal a black cotton turtleneck and Levi’s jeans. He looks a few years older than me. My silver-haired coffee crew would still call him a young man.

Mr. Model sits in my section, causing butterflies in my stomach to drop like canaries in a coal mine.

In another kind of book by another kind of author, this opening would suggest that we were moving toward a meet-cute, then on to the story of how our narrator and this handsome Native guy will overcome obstacles and end up romantically entwined. But as anyone who has read Angeline Boulley’s earlier books knows, she is not that kind of writer.

Boulley’s first novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter, was a wild success, and I count myself among its ardent fans. That book focused on an unenrolled Ojibwe teenager named Daunis Fontaine who helped root out an opioid ring that was destroying lives in her community. Boulley followed that up with another fabulous YA novel, this one about Daunis’s cousin. Warrior Girl Unearthed focused on the repatriation of Indian remains and ritual objects.

Sisters in the Wind continues the story of Daunis and her family, although it takes a while for the story to get there. Once it does, the book—this one focused on Native (and non-Native) kids in the foster care system—becomes as electrifying, intricate, and emotionally powerful as its predecessors.

The novels in this trilogy are categorized as young adult thrillers, but they are deeply human stories first and thrillers second. As for the YA part, I do think teenagers will devour them, but Boulley is a YA writer the same way Harper Lee was. Which is to say, she’s a writer focused on young people and justice whose books can be read with equal devotion by teenagers and adults.

The Original
By Nell Stevens

There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.

It was a portrait of a haggard old lady—though I believe she was in fact only thirty-two years old—on her knees in a field of mud, holding a blazing torch above her head. Her face was covered in open sores. Her eyes were closed. She had the expression of someone who knew she was dying. Before her on the ground was the mangled corpse of a pheasant. The canvas was very white around the flame, dark everywhere else: the mud, the dying woman’s body, the bird. I believe it was one of the ugliest paintings that ever existed.

I love that first paragraph with its twin electric shocks. First, why on earth would a family set a painting on fire? There must be a good story there! (There is.) And how could a painting possibly come back after being burned?

The second paragraph is strange in a different way: the haggard old lady, the muddy field, the open sores. The unexpectedness of its last sentence—“I believe it was one of the ugliest paintings that ever existed”—made me laugh out loud.

Having read those first two paragraphs, will you be surprised to learn that The Original is a book about a painter? About a difficult and sometimes violent family? About people seeming to come back from the dead? Probably not. It’s all there.

The book is also very much about what it means for something—a painting or a person—to be the original as opposed to a copy, and whether and how it matters. Protagonist Grace has a talent for copying paintings, although she can’t paint from life. Her cousin Charles—or the person who says he’s her cousin Charles, long believed to have been lost at sea—has a talent for seeing who Grace is, despite her attempts at concealment. The pleasure of the poignant unraveling of these mysteries helped make The Original one of my very favorite books of the summer.

Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs

James Baldwin was just ten or eleven years old when he sat down in a darkened movie theater to watch 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing, starring a screen siren who was about to become a source of unlikely salvation. As he would go on to tell it one day, “So here, now, was Bette Davis, in close up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping.” He was transfixed by her eyes, which looked just like his mothers’, a shocking recognition that would allow him to understand, albeit years later, why the man he called his father—who unbeknownst to him was actually his

stepfather—was always at pains to remind him that the large, heavy-lidded eyes he had inherited from her made him “the ugliest boy he’s ever seen.”...

This was a lesson in self-love that would be tested time and time again as he moved through the trials and tribulations of his adolescent years, and indeed throughout the entirety of his life.

Love is the lens through which Nicholas Boggs views James Baldwin in his fascinating new biography. Nearly forty years after his death, Baldwin has been embraced by a new generation for his insight into the complex relationship between race and America, and for the way he wrote about what we would now call life as a queer person (“homosexual” was his word) decades before most writers dared.

Boggs’ opening touches on themes of art, identity, family, and love that will be central to his telling of Baldwin’s story. The childhood sections, like this one, are among the strongest, showing us the miracle that was the writer’s emergence from poverty and violence in Harlem to become one of the leading intellectuals of his day. The kindness and dedication of teachers, both Black and white, who saw something special in him is a large reason for that miracle, and those early relationships shaped who he would become.

As Boggs tells it, Baldwin was always looking for the great love of his life, and his life’s tragedy was that he never found it, at least not for long. At the same time, he was tremendously beloved by many—family, lovers, teachers, friends—and he created communities of chosen family around him wherever he went: New York, Paris, Istanbul, and finally Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Whether early in his life when he was poor and unknown, or later when he was wealthy and successful, he was always generous, ambitious, outspoken, angry, and dependent on cigarettes and alcohol to write.

Before I read this book, I had not realized how deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement Baldwin had been, nor how musical he was, nor how much his views changed over time, even if his basic values didn’t. Boggs skillfully reveals both Baldwin’s constancies and his evolutions, offering a vivid and complex picture of an extraordinary life.

Erratum

In our last newsletter, I wrote, “The star Sirius is part of the constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog, visible in our hemisphere in the summertime.”

That evening, my astronomer friend Eric wrote to gently correct me:

“Actually just the opposite—Sirius is a winter constellation for us (it’s near Orion). But—flipping that idea around—that means that in the summer, it is up in the sky at the same time as the Sun (even though we can’t see it). So (apparently) that is why it’s associated with hot weather—having the Sun and the brightest star in the sky shining down on us makes the days hotter (or so people thought).”

He also sent me this great image of what sunrise would look like on August 1 if you could remove the atmosphere and see the stars at the same time the Sun was up. Thanks, Eric!

To receive this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here.