Had a wonderful if sweaty trip to New Orleans last week.
Great food, great music, and great bookstores.
First up, Faulkner House:
Faulkner House is a tiny little shop just off Jackson Square. Its two rooms (really, a main room and a hallway) are lined from bottom to top with literature, poetry, and philosophy. I can’t overstate the excellence of the collection in here—all kinds of rare and beautiful tomes, signed stuff, local and localish stuff, etc (local gal Anne Rice was the closest thing I saw to genre fiction). It’s great to walk into a bookshop and see a near-complete collection of new NYRB volumes stacked prominently upfront along with new novels by Richard Ford and Teju Cole.
I picked up this handsome illustrated edition of Thomas Bernhard’s Victor Halfwit, the handsomeness and bigness and luxuriousness of which simply doesn’t come across in this lousy iPhone pic:
Random framed shot:
And a random two-page shot with glare:
My wife picked out three lovely editions from Everyman’s Library Pocket series, poems from Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson, and Emily Brontë:
The owner and the manager were very kind, knowledgeable, and tolerant of my questions about what kind of stock they moved (biggest seller, unsurprisingly, is Soldier’s Pay).
Info for Faulkner House, via bookmark (the manager put one in each book I bought):
A few days later after a three-Bloody-Mary-breakfast I stumbled into Crescent City Books:
This is a great shop that, like Faulkner House, doesn’t waste precious shelf space on glitter vampires or self-help books or novelty cookbooks. Lots of art volumes (many rare and in German, French, Italian, etc.), a large poetry section, philosophy, history, etc. Lots of great old prints too. And an old cat, who was basically boss of the place.
They also carry physical copies of Rain Taxi, which I haven’t seen in years.
I picked up Masquerade and Other Stories after a Biblioklept commenter recommended Walser (by way of Kafka). I read about half of this over the next few days (full review to come):
Biblioklept 
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I hope you liked the Walser. I must admit, looking over the stories in this collection (which is the longest I’ve seen in English) in the amazon preview thingy, I have read almost none of them. The collection I’m familiar with is the Selected Stories (as well as three of his novels, one of which has a brilliant introduction from Sebald), published by NYRB, which is currently out of print in favor of the pretty recent Berlin Stories, which to the best of my knowledge is far inferior. In the collection I read, the stories were sorted by date, and by about 1928, I thought the stories read as though written by a crazy person, and not really in a good way, but in a very sad, confused, strained kind of way. However, up until 1925 or so, Walser could pack the tiniest sentence, or insignificant even with an effortless and incredible amount of humanity and truth. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the full review.
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Thanks so much for the suggestion, Udder—the Walser is great stuff. I’ll have to track down the NYRB edition with the Sebald intro (especially if it has different stuff). I may have to plagiarize your description of his sentences in my review . . .
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Being from New Orleans, I’m totally partial to it. Do you get to eat over at Cafe Du Monde? God I miss my Southern summers!
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I love that cat. I love that store. I love that city.
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