Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

… reviews Susanna Sonnenberg’s Her Last Death.

(Signed copies — available here!)

Read Lauren’s review of How to Shovel Manure and Other Life Lessons for the Country Woman here.

Today’s cookies are chocolate chip.

A kid from the Voice of Small Business (the NFIB) stopped by yesterday, to talk to me about protecting my interests, specifically about his concern regarding a payroll tax (?) proposed by Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, something I can’t even find anything on now. He handed me a bunch of paperwork to look at, so I looked at it. The tax seemed to have something to do with lost income, protecting folks in the event of it. Anyway, the NFIB was afraid that if the tax got approved, it would get out of control. I told him I don’t know, I might need that kind of safety net myself someday. Maybe I’m all for it. I told him I don’t know too many small business owners who are payin’ guys like you to walk around. He said, Oh, we’ve got over 5000 members blah blah most of them with five employees or less blah blah. He said they were just trying to give small business a voice in Congress and blah de blah. I said I think business has got a plenty of voice in Congress, too big a voice blah blah, and it seems like taxes just keep going down and the rich keep doing better while everyone else falls further behind blah blah … I went on. His eyes glazed over. My blood went up. On Dec. 18th, right smack in the middle of the holiday season, these right-wingers send this tow-headed College Republican in to waste my time talking about tax relief.

They really should send these College Republicans to Iraq. Every last stinking one of them. And leave them there.

Anyway, I set cookies out today. They’re good. We have lots of great books to look at. Happy holidays.

The new issue of Camas (the literary magazine of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana) has just arrived. It includes new work by Chad Dundas, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Gary Hawk, and many others. Camas sells for $7.50.

I admit, I enjoy recommending the 25th anniversary edition of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to Christmas shoppers because of its title. I will also admit that Mr. Hyde is a professor at a college I recently attended. I will further admit that the new cover, complete with a pink, watercolor heart, implies a reduced badass factor.

However, none of these admissions reduce the merits of the book itself. It seems to be pretty much the same as the old classic, except for the updated preface and afterword, the slightly-lame cover, and the new-and-improved subtitle (What was once the ambiguous “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” has been changed to the more precise “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.”)

Hyde combines anthropology, economics, fairy tales, art history, and even a bit of gender studies to articulate his notion of a”gift economy,” particularly in the world of art. The detailed readings of Whitman and Pound may interest literary aficionados, and his writing on the gift economy is considered an authoritative text, but the real linchpin of The Gift is the chapter entitled “The Commerce of the Creative Spirit.” In this chapter, he hits upon the purpose, nature, and source of human art. An excerpt:

“The true commerce of art is gift exchange, and where our commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in its use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world–an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of gifts, be it the community or the race, nature, or the gods.”

Her Last Death, the memoir by Susanna Sonnenberg, is reviewed in Entertainment Weekly.

Read the Missouian article here.

Please plan to attend the free event for Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey, Monday the 17th of Dec. at MCT.

We have signed copies of Grand Obsession and Her Last Death, major books by two of our best local writers, available now.  Perri Knize‘s public reading/signing will happen this Monday the 17th, starting at 7 pm., at MCT. Food and beverages will be provided.