For the Love of Bookstores

In 1997, The Moth began in lower Manhattan as a sort of underground club for mostly everyday folk who yearned to take up the mic and share their personal stories. Twenty-some years later it is now an award-winning series that has a huge following and a podcast as well. This is a how-to book in the best sense, with seasoned directors and writers giving tips and tools for honing the skills to craft everything from a simple wedding toast to a live performance with a large audience of strangers. Teachers, comics, budding writers and wannabes rejoice!

These two extraordinary short pieces of experimental fiction introduce readers to a renowned polymath mostly known for his plays (like the Tony-winning Marat/Sade directed by Peter Brook) and films. In The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, “a micro-novel” from 1960, Weiss creates a mordant catalog of enlivened objects in a boarding house, like a dark, twisted scene from Beauty and the Beast. And in Conversation, he presents three entwined monologues (by Abel, Babel, and Cabel) that show off his passion for the fantastic and the illogical. A post-war Kafka filled with linguistic pyrotechnics and an equal sense of the absurd.

Our National Poetry Month offering this week is McCrae’s new book of poems. It is his eighth in little over a decade, during which he’s published with small, university and larger presses and picked up several awards. Though he says his biggest influences are the metrics of Elizabethan and Renaissance poetry his subjects are both contemporary and biblical. Some are informed by his troubled childhood (kidnapped and raised by his white supremacist grandparents; physical and sexual abuse). His remarkable powers of survival have led to a Harvard law degree and a teaching position at Columbia University. Quite an inspiration.