Wild Mushrooms from Mary Oliver and Other Adventures in Bookselling

Working the Provincetown summer season is the kind of extreme experience which bonds the people who have done it, and which is hard to explain to those who have not. Working long hours non-stop to make the majority of your annual income in about 100 days, while trying to maintain a positive attitude toward the tourists who are both bringing the money and making your life hell, you seem to enter a tunnel that excludes other realities until the light of Labor Day dawns. Or maybe this is just my lame-ass excuse for not posting on this blog for four whole months.

In any case, the day after Labor Day, the whole town seems to exhale a sigh of relief that's nearly audible. Suddenly everything is easier, lighter, slower. And perversely, as things go in this bi-polar little town, this new, quieter reality quickly becomes boring. Along with fewer crowds and less stress, there's also less money and a lot less happening. So one day in late September, I was sitting at the Provincetown Bookshop feeling bored. This, I thought, was really a nothing day -- not much business, no excitement. Then I realized that in that same day I had had face-to-face conversations with not one, but two Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, Michael Cunningham and Mary Oliver! So much for the boring life of a Provincetown bookseller.

Michael Cunningham is known chiefly as a fiction writer. He is the author of The Hours, as well as By Nightfall and A Home at the End of the World, among other novels. He also wrote a lovely, book-length essay that was far and away Provincetown Bookshop's biggest best seller of 2012, called Land's End: A Walk through Provincetown. It is probably the single best book about Provincetown, certainly the best book about Provincetown as it is now (or was around the turn of the millennium). At the height of the season, we were ordering it by the carton and selling 4 or 5 copies a day.

Michael first came to Provincetown as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, and he still spends summers here. As is typical of a small town, I know Michael to say hello to, but I didn't know how to contact him to ask him to sign his books. So -- again taking advantage of that wonderful small-town thing -- I sent him a note addressed to "Michael Cunningham, Provincetown, MA 02657." Our intrepid postal workers worked their magic, and Michael dropped by the bookstore to sign some books and chat. If, like me, your heroes are writers, then you know it doesn't get much better than this. 

But wait. There's more! That same day, I had gone by Mary Oliver's house (notice how casually I drop that line) to pick up a big load of books that she signed for the Provincetown Bookshop. This is doubtless the single biggest perk of my job: I'm the lucky woman who gets to deliver and pick up the literally hundreds of books that Mary Oliver graciously signs for the Bookshop. At the same time, I get to pet Ricky, the new dog, and schmooze a little.

Mary Oliver is, of course, Provincetown's national treasure, the great nature poet of our time. She was described by The New York Times in 2007 as the best-selling poet in America. (I just looked on Amazon and saw that her new book, A Thousand Mornings, is their number two best seller in poetry, after Shakespeare.) Her nature-centered poetry is accessible and inspirational, in the tradition of Frost and Dickens. She is also famously private, letting her work speak for itself. The opportunity to interact with her -- as a townie and a bookseller, decidedly NOT as an adoring fan -- is a wonderful thing. As a token of thanks after she signed the first load of books, I brought her flowers from my neighbor's garden. Perhaps in return, or maybe just because she had too many, she offered me wild mushrooms she had picked that morning. I know nothing about mushrooms, but I believe these were Golden Chanterelles, bright orange, big and meaty. At her suggestion, I sliced them, sauteed them, and ate them plain for breakfast.

They were delicious!

Back to Bookselling

After almost a year of unemployment, I have a summer job, managing the Provincetown Bookshop! This is wonderful for many reasons. One is that I love bookselling. Another is the Provincetown Bookshop itself. In a world where bookstores are becoming extinct, the Provincetown Bookshop is a dinosaur among dinosaurs. Not only is it a local, independent bookstore, but it is the kind of old-fashioned literary bookstore that has a large poetry selection and carries all the classics (from Austen to Zola). As a friend of mine once said, "It's the place to go when you need a copy of The Iliad." It has many treasures.

The Provincetown Bookshop is a very local bookstore, with lots of books about Cape Cod. Their current bestseller is The Outermost House by Henry Beston, beautiful nature writing about a year in a dune shack on Nauset Beach -- in 1926! They carry books by local authors past and present (which happen to include Norman Mailer, Eugene O'Neil and Mark Doty). Longtime Provincetown resident Mary Oliver signs every book of her poetry in stock. Fabulous filmmaker John Waters used to work there. The bookshop was founded in 1932.

All this history can lend the store a somewhat fusty, musty aura. In fact, many people believe that it is a used bookstore (probably because that copy of The Iliad can sit around for a couple of years before it's needed). The owner and staff tend to believe that people either know their way around books or they don't. Hence there is little to help them find their way. The signs appear to have been scrawled by hand sometime back in the Fifties, probably the same summer that Tennessee Williams was at the Atlantic House, interviewing Marlon Brando for a spot in A Streetcar Named Desire. I can't wait to get in there!

Meanwhile, I have to brush up my bookselling. As you probably know, the art of bookselling is not so much to share the books that you love as to recommend to people the books that they will love. This requires a lot of information about a lot of books that you personally don't even like. I might be fine recommending mysteries, but I need to have some ideas on other fiction, biographies, non-fiction, poetry, fantasy, etc. Even dystopian young adult fiction: I'm sure some tween will want to know about another book as good as The Hunger Games.

This is where you come in! I need to know some of the best new books that are out there, and I want you to tell me. Please leave comments in answer to two questions:

• What was the best book you read in the last six months?
• What is the book you're most looking forward to reading?

Of course I also need to know why -- what makes it so good, or why are you interested? And it's only fair if I start.

I had real trouble picking out the best book of the last six months, and not from a surfeit of candidates. Many were enjoyable but few were memorable. But then I remembered Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill.  After excoriating depressing British police procedurals in a previous blog I rediscovered Hill's wonderful constabulary team of Dalziel and Pascoe.  Over a couple of dozen books, Hill has created almost Shakespearean characters and plots, mixing high tragedy and low comedy in quintessentially British fashion. In particular, Superintendent Dalziel rivals Falstaff as a force of nature -- vulgar, canny, and damn near omnipotent.  Midnight Fugue is one of Hill's best because it's so tightly structured, set in a 24-hour time frame when Dalziel returns to duty after a near-death experience. As The New York Times Book Review said, "Hill writes of these tricky matters in a fluid and witty style that eventually lifts the old lion from his torpor and restores him to roaring health."

The book I'm most looking forward to is Alison Bechdel's new graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? Bechdel is the brilliant cartoonist who drew the strip Dykes to Watch Out For throughout the Eighties and Nineties (from Bush Senior to the end of W, in fact). Her graphic memoir about her father, Fun Home, was smart, sharp, funnny and painful -- sometimes all in one frame -- plus classical allusions (Icarus/Daedalus, James Joyce, etc.) and fine, detailed pen-and-ink drawing. Even Bechdel's old, highly topical comics are worth re-reading, given all they pack into the language and the visuals.

Now it's your turn. Tell me about the best and most exciting books out there. And I'll tell you tales of the old curiosity shop, I mean the Provincetown Bookshop. Leave a comment.