myopicbookstore.com

Sunday, July 13 - Francesco Levato & Kristy Odelius

Sunday, July 20 - David Welch

Sunday, September 21 – Mark Yakich

Sunday, October 12 - Michael Rothenberg & David Meltzer (above; In conjunction
with the Poetry Center of Chicago)

Sunday, October 19 - Brenda Iijima

Sunday, November 9 - Hugh Behm-Steinberg

We aren’t always in the business of recommending movies and tv shows to our customers here at Myopic; above all, we are firm believers in the inner plasma screen served by the antennas and wires that lie naturally between the printed word and the human mind. But, we like the moving pictures too, you know. Especially when they are well done! Recently at the local video emporium (North Coast Video, here in Chicago…great selection!), our eyes scanning ‘pon the racks settled on the new-ish 7 episode HBO mini-series about the life of founding father John Adams. With Paul Giamatti playing the title role and Laura Linney starring as his amazing wife Abagail, this was an easy rental choice.

And we are happy to report that the enterprise is a resounding success! If you are in the pursuit of video happiness, get to watchin’ this ASAP. Featuring a supporting cast worthy of a true Hollywood epic, this series treats the era with respect and the founders’ devotion with sincerity. The costuming and historical details are uncanny…Tom Wilkinson (delightfully) chewing the scenery as Ben Franklin is alone worth the price of admission. The script is also, needless to say, very well done. Based on the award-winning biography by David McCullough, the film (with a few tasteful embellishments) hews closely and accurately to American history.

Honestly, we must admit to you that the story of America’s founders and the decades of uncertainty and struggle for independence never quite gets old to our eyes and ears. No amount of boring high school history lessons can ruin the drama and ultimate suspense of the era and it’s citizens and their timeless struggles. As the Fourth of July holiday and election season approches on the horizon, we are glad to be able to see ever more clearly the events of so long ago and how they still shape our lives and our nation’s destiny.

Just a few days remain before one of the great summer city rituals here in Chicago…the annual White Sox/Cubs series! The rivalry between the two teams is what you might call a little…intense. Geography has a lot to do with it…but hardly explains the breadth of insanity. People get kinda nuts about these games. Like wear t-shirts with dirty words about the enemy/throw stuff at your neighbor’s kids/get wasted on cheap beer and hurl abuse at the elderly kinda intense. Bookstore loyalty is pretty sharply divided, of course. On game days, we have to avoid getting too riled up so the customers don’t panic. Leonard the bookstore cat hides under the couch, and comes out sometime in late August…you know, when the Cubs are always well out of contention. Just kidding! See, folks? It can be brutal.

So, how best to get prepared for bragging and jabbing at the supporters of the other team? We have a few ideas. Eat lots of encased meats, naturally, and bone up on your baseball knowledge! You already know about hot dogs “chicago style” (don’t you?), but how about “Baseball Chicago Style: A Tale of Two Teams One City”? Writers Jerome Holtzman and George Vass scope out the histories of both of Chicago’s storied franchises. These are both writers you can trust…Holtzman is the official historian of Major League Baseball, and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Heck, he even wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry about the national pastime! George Vass is a longtime Chicago sports scribe, with 50 years between the pages of the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times. And what a tale they weave!

From the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series to the Steve Bartman ball, it’s all here. Every stitch of glory, every thread of defeat and the unshakably stubborn hometown pride despite decades without a title (until 2005, that is) reflected upon by two of the games best scribes…who could ask for a better tome about Chicago baseball? Written after the 2004 season, the book covers over a century of baseball in sharp, bite-sized chapters. Stop in and take a look today!

One of the best kept secrets at Myopic is our extensive collection of biographies housed in our becobwebbed basement. Filling over 20 bookcases, the biography section is teeming with journals, letters and memoirs (in addition to bios) of historical figures, writers, philosophers, politicians, and other interesting folk. A recent publication caught our “near-sighted” eyes: Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie. An American human rights activist, Corrie worked with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine, a nonviolent resistance group using human shields to protect Palestinian homes from demolition. Rachel Corrie died in one such operation in Gaza in 2003; she was bulldozed by an Israeli soldier and died shortly after. The British newpaper The Guardian found Rachel’s story so compelling they began publishing some of Corrie’s emails and letters. In 2005, British journalist Katherine Viner and English actor and director Alan Rickman adapted her writings for the stage in the one-woman play My Name is Rachel Corrie. However, it wasn’t until this year, 2008, that Corrie’s journals themselves were published. A remarkably articulate woman, Corrie’s journals encompass her childhood poetry, her angst-ridden college rants, and her passionate advocacy for the cause that claims her life. Like A Woman in Berlin, the diary of an anonymous woman living through the bombing and occupation of Berlin, or Slavenka Drakulic’s memoir on the wars in former Yugoslavia, The Balkan Express, Corrie describes horrific living circumstances and extreme situations; and like both of these women who preceded her, she does so with nuance and grace. She chooses to describe people and situations in all their wonderful contradictions and complexities, and in doing so, she creates a work that steers clear from didacticism and allegory, and is instead a work of pure humanity and beauty.

“Fantômas is the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the arch-criminal anti-hero of a series of 32 pre-WWI French thrillers written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. He carries out the most appalling crimes: substituting sulfuric acid in the perfume dispensers at a Parisian department store, releasing plague-infested rats on an ocean liner, or forcing a victim to witness his own execution by placing him face-up in a guillotine. Fantômas is the master of a thousand disguises and the leader of a vast army of “apaches” (street thugs). His spies and henchmen are everywhere, spreading the seeds of chaos and terror. Fantômas is anyone and no one, everywhere and nowhere, waging an implacable war against the very bourgeois society in which he moves with such ease and assurance.

Fantômas’s crimes are scenes of sublime horror: a rebellious henchman is hung in a huge bell as a human clapper, smashing from side to side and raining blood, sapphires and diamonds onto the street below. Masked bandits brandishing revolvers crash a city bus through the walls of a bank, sending money flying everywhere. Under grey Parisian skies, a horse-drawn cab gallops down the road, a wide-eyed corpse as its coachman. Fantômas strips the gilded gold from the Invalides dome each night; he poisons his victims with deadly bouquets; he crashes passenger trains and destroys steamships. And he escapes justice every time.”

We borrowed that wonderful, juicy description from the marvelous and comprehensive website www.fantomas-lives.com.

Doesn’t that sound like the best kind of book to jump into? We thought so too. Although we were a little familiar with the band of the same name, after reading a story in the newest issue of Arthur Magazine about the long-running series of turn-of-the-century French novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, we were entranced! We don’t see the Fantomas books themselves here at the store very often, but we felt like we should make a recommendation anyway! Regardless, you CAN find your own copy of Arthur Magazine here at the bookstore or at finer record and/or book emporiums near you. If that doesn’t work, or if you need to feed your jones immediately, you can download a PDF of the recent issue of Arthur at their website, and learn about these classics of terror for yourself. Oui!

Did you know Myopic has our own online bookstore? So true! At a super-secret warehouse we keep special tomes that we don’t want to just put on the shelves here in our retail location. Not that we don’t love our regular off-the-street browsing customers, but there are some titles we have to protect with our lives, and that means no touching it until you buy it! Trust us, folks. We have some goodies in that secret warehouse!

After years of super-duper secrecy, now we have been cleared to allow you, the customer, to peek in at this amazing stash! In fact, we’re fully prepared for you to go check it out right now by following this handy

link!

That will take you to our catalog listed on the Abebooks.com website. Dozens of categories, hundreds of titles, all for you too oogle! Over the coming weeks we’ll highlight some of our more amazing titles, and you can snap them up. How does that sound?

It was a dark and stormy–er, snowy–night when we decided to sit down and while away the winter drear with the queen of crime, Agatha Christie. Yes, yes, we know, you are book snobs like us, and you are much more interested in reading your Pynchon, Nabokov, and catching up on your McSweeney’s–but why not take a little detour? With 80 mysteries to her credit, Christie has been translated more than any other author and in her time was only outsold by the Bible.

Why read such drivel, you say? Surely, it’s just smoke and mirrors–crime before it had the clipped pace of Hammett, the melancholy of Chandler, the punch of Fleming…but no–we found the works to be genuinely suspenseful, witty, and charming–filled with observations about human nature and psychology. “And Then There Were None,” “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Three Blind Mice” all find a group of strangers thrown together and stranded. While the first group is on an island, the second on a train, and the third in a guesthouse, all are unable to leave–and are often picked off, murdered one by one, as your potential murder suspects dwindle.

We found these stories riveting, especially on a winter night, shared with a lover under some warm covers. We had our doubts, of course, but then suddenly it was 2AM and we kept reading, pushing through to find out “who did it”! And yes, we know it’s not Tolstoy or Faulkner. And you won’t impress anyone by saying that you finished it (we know that’s why you clawed your way through Ulysses!) but hey, for thrills and fun, and to just survive the brutal grey of Chicago winters, you can’t do any better than ol’ Ag. She might not be the one author you would take with you on a desert isle, but she might be the one you were very grateful someone else packed, as a welcome respite from your Proust.

So, if you want to give her a shot, come on in–we have over 30 titles at the moment anxiously awaiting your arrival in the cavernous, cobwebbed basement…

Spanning over a hundred years and six generations, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, much like Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, has little to do with architecture (or trout). Donald Harington’s rowdy, picaresque novel chronicles one family’s history in the Ozarks, from the time the first white settlers built a log cabin in a virtually empty landscape through to the coming of television in a little town called Stay More. However, this description tells you little about its quirky prose, its sexually charged scenes, its riotous humor, and its breadth of time–its look at the folly which is the human race.

Furthermore, Harington has the ability to pull back from his narrative and comment on the telling, including himself in the novel, as a witness and an active participant in the lore and legend of this now abandoned village in the Ozarks. He is a storyteller in the grand oral tradition, not worrying too much about his facts of his history but nevertheless spinning his tale for an rivited listener, or in this case, reader.

It is not often that a book provokes tears for us jaded misanthropic myopians. But alas, or perhaps aha! this lovely book brought them, along with longing, and joy, and hearty belly laughs. We strongly recommend it!

Myopic has nearly 3,000 rare, out of print books that are a great gift for that booklover in your life! Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, kwanzaa, hannukah, or christmas, a signed first edition copy of their favorite author is sure to ingratiate you with your sweetheart, sibling, or parent…

Our first editions currently include:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, (1st edition, 2nd issue) $300
Daniel Clowes, Ghost World, $290
Klaus Kinski, All I Need is Love, $250
James Joyce, Chamber Music, $225
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, (1st US edition) $200
Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, $190
William Gaddis, The Recognitions, $185
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, $175
J.P. Donleavy, Ginger Man, $175 (original hardcover, Olympia press edition)
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, $110
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey, $80
Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers, $65
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, $95
Hubert Selby Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn, $65
Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor, $65
David Sedaris, Barrel Fever, $70
Denis Johnson, The Incognito Lounge, $65
J.G. Ballard, Crash, $50
Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, $45
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, (First Edition, Third Printing), $45
William Faulkner, The Mansion, $45
John Gardner, Grendl, $45
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Selected Poetry $30
Susan Sontag, I, etcetera, $20

Our signed first editions include:
Saul Bellow, Herzog, $170
Dave Eggers, A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, $125
Spaulding Gray, Morning, Noon and Night, $125
Kenzaburo Oe, An Echo of Heaven, $95
Jim Harrison, Sundog, $100
George Foreman, By George, $95
Neil Gaiman, American Gods, $60
Michael Moore, Downsize This!, $55
Howard Bloom, How to Read and Why, $30
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, $25
Margaret Atwood, You Are Happy, $45
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, $33
Spike Lee, That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, $35
Richard Russo, Straight Man, $35
Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic, $35
Armistead Maupin, Babycakes, $20
Mike Royko, Sez Who? Sez Me, $25
Irvine Welsh, Porno, $24
Johathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn, $45
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated, $40

Other rare books of interest include:
William Steig’s classic children’s story Shrek!, 1st edition, $60
Glen E. Friedman, Fuck You Heroes, 1st Edition, $85. Color and black and white reproductions of Friedman’s photographs of musicians, skateboarders, and fans.
Haymarket Scrapbook, an anthology of essays, newspaper accounts and historical documentation of the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riots. With black and white illustrations and photographs. $25
And hundreds of other books on artists, architects, philosophers, and misfits!