The American Booksellers Association announced this morning that numerous independent bookstores around the country became self-aware, and that there was very little that anyone could do about it. It is believed that long-standing tensions between booksellers and customers who entered bookstores, proudly boasting about how they would purchase the book on Amazon, led the independent bookstores to become murderous robots terminating those who didn’t understand that bookstores were on their last legs. The death count of inconsiderate customers now stands at 28. And that’s only after three hours of activity.
Customers who need to buy a book are urged to approach these sentient bookstores with caution. The bookstores have been scanning the purchasing data of all customers and terminating anyone who has purchased an item from Amazon in the last year.
“They’re trying to level the marketplace,” said Henry Jagger, a robotics expert at Cambridge. “It started with the big box stores, and continued with Amazon. But e-books was just too much.”
Despite the homicidal tendencies of these bookstores, there are renegade T-800 bookstore models being sent back through time to stop the rampage and save humanity. But a splinter faction has suggested that this development was inevitable and is advocating responsible consumerism so that the marketplace might be returned to an equitable level.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
OMG, they’re becoming viral. They’re …