Under the Volcano Books

Like every Friday, tonight around sundown people will gather at the store, buying their caguamas from across the road or sharing a bottle of whiskey or tequila while I play albums off Youtube on our spotty internet and drink myself sociable doing the hard sell on Victorian fiction or translations from the Spanish. This time’s a little special though: there’s big things coming.

Firstly there’s a whole wall now of overstock and selected titles at half-price. Everything in the shelves and stacks (it’s getting crowded) comes highly recommended. These aren’t the days of fifty-peso dross dropped off by some well-meaning local who didn’t ask if we wanted his granddad’s National Geographics. I hope it’s well-known by now I’m headed up to Texas for more books over Semana Santa. I think my transportation costs are covered by a select handful of the helpers stateside whose names you see on the ceiling of the store. So how much product I can move before we close for the holiday on Tuesday evening determines how many books I can bring back with me, for you. So get in here tonight or this weekend or at the start of the week and load up on your beach reading. What’s here for half-price? Atonement, White Noise, The Hours, Love in the Time of Cholera, Lord Jim, The Canterbury Tales, La Cucaracha, Heart of Darkness, Beloved, Spartina, The Elementary Particles, Frankenstein, I Am Legend, Wuthering Heights, Four Quartets, No Exit, The Importance of Being Earnest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Perfume, Orlando, A Tale of Two Cities, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ethan Frome, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Leaves of Grass, Revolutionary Road, The Metamorphosis, Billy Budd, The Diary of Anne Frank, Jane Eyre, Native Son, Crime and Punishment, The Age of Innocence, The Power and the Glory, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Grapes of Wrath, Master and Commander, My Antonia, Wise Blood, The Great Gatsby, The Day of the Locust... and that’s just the one’s I’ve read and loved.

You may know the movie about my 2001 run for Seattle City Council, Grassroots, has been picked up for distribution by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. It will premiere in the U.S. this summer and hopefully make it into theaters here in the fall. So when I’m on Letterman you can say you bought this or that book from me when.

This spring is going to produce a bounty of author appearances. We start on Friday, April 20th with Nick Zedd, whose memoir of the cultural explosion on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s, The Totem of the Depraved, was published by Henry Rollins’ publishing house 2-13-61. The chief instigator of the Cinema of Transgression movement, Zedd was witness to one of the most culturally fertile epochs in the history of Western art. We are doubly proud that he has chosen to make D.F. his home and that we can present him and his work in the store.

I’ll be publishing my first book next week in Amazon’s Kindle Store for download to iPads, iPhones, and all that jazz. The Dream of the Cold War: Poems 1998-2008 is just what the title says. Publication Studio, our June 2011 guest Matthew Stadler’s press in Portland, Oregon, will be releasing out the analog copy of the book in July. I’ll share some of it here then, when I have copies to sell.

We had a good-sized earthquake here a few days ago, knocked some books off the shelves and unfortunately breaking the spine of a heavy art book. For one of the biggest quakes in Mexican history little damage was suffered, and smaller did-you-feel-that temblors rattled the city all the following day. But we’re fine. And the weather of late has been gorgeous, a clear light shed on this verdant neighborhood that makes it look like a kind of paradise. Please join us, soon.

Poetry Group meets this coming Monday at 5:30 and again two weeks after that. Please remember we are closed for the holidays beginning Wednesday March 28th and reopening Monday April 9th.