Vacation Do-Overs, co-starring Alison Roman

New Orleans, Friends, and Preorders

Hi all!

This week, I went to the New Orleans Book Festival. I was at the festival for a Read With Jenna panel with Rumaan Alam and Qian Julie Wang and Lee Cole, who should star in the Andrew Bird biopic, and it was quite jolly. You know who’s fun? Jenna Bush Hager. I’m going to quit all my jobs to stand outside the Today Show studio holding a sign with little hearts drawn all over it. Looking at this photo, you just know that none of Jenna’s friends make embarrassing, crazy-eyed faces when a camera is pointed their direction, they all make cute faces. Oh well! Look out, ladies, here I come.

Mostly what I did in New Orleans was talk to writer friends. I think this is why people go to retreats, or residencies, or what have you. I’ve never gone to Yaddo but I have just eaten two orders of hush puppies and many cocktails and sat at a restaurant and talked to Rumaan Alam for 17 hours in a row about writing and publishing and writers and our children and our careers. It was so truly soul-affirming that I didn’t even take a picture. Not of the food, not of Rumaan’s handsome face, nor of his high fashion sneakers. (Qian Julie Wang also had very, very good shoes—in my experience, which I would say is quite extensive, writers’ shoes fall into two categories, utterly chic or downright pathetic—I myself belong to the latter category, alas, but would never name another member.)

Because it was New Orleans, I also ate many, many delicious things. Here are a few of them!

Speaking of food! How about another special guest?

I am not a great cook, but I am an enthusiastic one, and for the past number of years, my main squeeze in the kitchen has been Alison Roman. She isn’t actually there, of course, because kidnapping is illegal, but I use both Dining In and Nothing Fancy several times a week. Alison is a local fave at Books Are Magic, and so when she stopped in to sign books before Christmas, I made her make this little video for me even though she had not showered. That is friendship!

Who amongst us has not gotten accidentally stoned and missed out on something great? You know what you don’t want to miss out on is pre-ordering This Time Tomorrow from your independent bookstore of choice. Please and thank you.

What I’m Reading

Also a Poet, by Ada Calhoun. Oh, Ada Calhoun. Ada is wonderful and prolific and smart and funny and her new book, Also a Poet, is about her father, and about Frank O’Hara, and being a certain kind of New York City kid who turns into a certain kind of New York City adult. If you love the New York School poets and have ever imagined yourself part of a very cool crowd of painters and poets full of artistic cross-pollination, you will love this book. I love this book. I think that being the child of artists forces you to see your parents as flawed pretty early on, or maybe just as differentiated humans who have desires independent of their lives as parents, and this book is really speaking to me. Preorder now, out in June!

What I’m Celebrating

Books Are Magic is one of the finalists for Publisher’s Weekly Bookstore of the Year. I never really believed it when people say “It’s an honor just to be nominated,” but goddamn, it is! I am so deeply proud of Mike and our team. I get so much of the credit for how wonderful the bookstore is, just because I’m the loudest and therefore the most likely to be in recognized in public, but I am just a very, very small part of the machinery. Running a business, especially right now, is an enormous challenge, and it feels really wonderful to be on this list. Shout-out to the other nominees, my friend Danny’s totally rad Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, KS, Madison Books in Seattle, Mitchell’s Book Corner in Nantucket, MA, and Two Birds, in Santa Cruz, CA, and a truly epic shout-out to the entire staff at Books Are Magic, I love this for us!

Preorder This Time Tomorrow here.