Anakalian Whims

Authors Bethany MacManus and A.K. Klemm

A.K. Klemm & Editor/Co-Author Katie Lavois

A.K. Klemm among friends.

My dear friend, A.K. Klemm, has published her first novella: The Bookshop Hotel.

It has a cover.

It has a cover photo.

It contains words she wrote and thoughts she had connected one by one to create something that is now bound and on sale for you to purchase and love.

I have not had the pleasure of picking up my own copy yet (am waiting to do it in person so the appropriate amount of shrieking can follow once I have it in my hands), but I promise, if it contains half the entertainment value of one of her phone calls, and a quarter the creativity of one of many college late night brainstorming sessions, it is absolutely worth curling up with a cup of coffee (for anything she writes will be best complemented by coffee) and giving it a read.

Another gorgeous clearance pull, “The Year of Magical Thinking” caught my eye first with it’s title and second with it’s fabulous opener.

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self -pity.

…

I wrote the words in January, 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

…

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

I had never heard of authoress Joan Didion or her equally famous author of a husband before I brought this one home; even after several Google searches I am not altogether sure how they figure in to the literary and news world she often references. This book, her story detailing the death of her husband, the hospitalization of her daughter, and the year in the vortex that followed, is written almost like a well-edited journal entry. It is a stark picture of the total…

In a few minutes I heard the books’ voices:  a low, steady, unsupressible hum.  I’d heard it many times before.  I’ve always had a finely tuned ear for a library’s accumulations of echo and desire.

Sometimes the best books are stuffed into clearance along with a thousand copies of Jodi Picoult for me to find and adore. “Adore” does not come close to describing how I feel about the slim paperback I pulled from a corner in Clearance Fiction, haphazardly stacked beneath piles of mass produced easy reading after the weekend warriors pawed through and reconfigured the section on a Saturday night.

I discovered this wintry, wistful, quixotic book while the first norther of the season was coming through Dallas. It took me a few days of picking it up here and there to finish it, curled up on my couch with either a cup of coffee or hot tea (depending on the time of day).

I read the entire book in…

It’s happened twice in a week, and they were both women. Anyone ought to have more class than this, but women — especially women — should damn well know better.

Last week, I was at the pharmacy and a friendly lady approached me.

“Matt! How are those little ones doing?”

“Great! They’re doing very well, thanks for asking.”

“Good to hear. How ’bout your wife? Is she back at work yet?”

“Well she’s working hard at home, taking care of the kids. But she’s not going back into the workforce, if that’s what you mean.”

“Oh fun! That must be nice!”

“Fun? It’s a lot of hard work. Rewarding, yes. Fun? Not always.”

This one wasn’t in-your-face. It was only quietly presumptuous and subversively condescending.

The next incident occurred today at the coffee shop. It started in similar fashion; a friendly exchange about how things are coming along with the…