Destination of the Month: Svalbard

When I was 12 and reading The Golden Compass for the very first time, I really liked the idea of a mythical frozen land in the north inhabited by armored polar bears. It was not until many years later that I discovered that in fact Svalbard--the locale of some grisly happenings in Pullman's meisterwerk--is a real place, and I want to go to there.

It's the smack-dab middle of the year, which means on some parts of the globe it's sunny times all night which is the perfect time to go on your own epic voyage to the frozen north, which is a little less frozen, and has more hours in the day for partying with polar bears.

So I've chosen Svalbard as our destination of the month. Check out our neat display and read The Golden Compass as you sip a beer on a sunny Allston patio and immediately transport yourself, or if you have a few extra kroner in your pocket grab a Norwegian phrasebook and hop on a plane and go party all day(night), but SEND PICS.

Of tiny soaps and books

Let's be honest: whether you're chilling on a cruise ship, lying pool side in a tropical oasis, or hoofing it in the big city, whatever kind of vacation you prefer, your hotel room is your sanctuary. It's the place that anchors you even though it can be as foreign as your environs, where your feet rest, your domination plans take shape, and you can start to remember who you are before you head back out to character-shaping adventures. 

And for those of us who tourist around to bookstores, CNN has a great lil mashup of literary hotels the world over. Though CNN sadly missed Boston's own Omni Parker House, where Emerson and Longfellow had their literary salons and Charles Dickens read from A Christmas Carol in 1867. This week a grip of new guidebooks are swelling our shelves, from the rebooted Frommers EasyGuides, to the new Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2014 (ranking the places to go next year) and, perhaps the most lush and exciting of all, and pertaining directly to places to lay thine traveler's head, the new crop of Mr. and Mrs. Smith guides to the chicest hotels in tout-le-monde.

For the uninitiated, Mr. and Mrs. Smith guidebooks feature lush photographs of lavish hotels--the creme-de-le-creme boutiques--as well as what to do beyond the bedroom. We just received the France and Italy guides, so come snatch them and book your dream room before anyone else. 

You, Too, Can Be On a Boat

According to the New York Times Sunday travel section, it's the time to strike if you're want to book a cruise. The deals are on now and what better way to see swaths of the world AND get away from it all at the same time? I've set up a small subsection at the beginning of our Europe section for cruise guidebooks. So come get LUXURIOU$ and load up on how to be on a boat!

Berlitz Cruising and Cruise Ships 2014  A big ol' guide for the Cruise newbie or afficianado. This is a great book to by right now as you start to plan your cruise. There are reviews of all the lines, itineraries, ideas for how to spend your time both on and off the boat, and while some details may need refreshing over the years, you could really hold on to this for future ideas for planning. This could be your Mediterranean cruise year, and next could be your Alaskan cruise year, and the same Berlitz book could guide you to all your coming adventures.

Rick Steves Northern European Cruise Ports and Mediterranean Cruise Ports  Rick Steves guides are great in general, but particularly on a cruise, if you're a do-it-yourselfer, a little budget conscious and a really excited, open-minded sort of person his guidebooks are AMAZING. Enough information that you can go through even the most overwhelming museums on your own, useful phrases in the back to make a friendly impression on the locals, and exhaustive, frank and practical reviews on everything from where to eat, when it's worth booking an on-shore excursion through the ship, and what is missable and unmissable both on the ship and off. Great for those travelling with or without families, and if you prefer investing your money in lifetime memories over fancy digs.

Fodor's European Cruise Ports of Call  If you're maybe cruising without the kids, if you enjoy the finer things in life, if you have a membership to the MFA AND the Gardner, and would spend a premium for hotels with high-thread-count sheets, Fodor's guides might be speaking your language. Exhaustive guides to the major ports of all the major cruise lines, tips for the sort of food you would eat to have a culinary experience, NOT to run home and tell horror stories about, tips for maximizing your museum and shopping trips in your quick city jaunts at each port. We have them in for Europe and new editions for Alaska and the Carribbean are on the way!

Luminarious New Zealand

This week 28-year-old New Zealander Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to win the Man Booker Prize with her 2nd novel The Luminaries. I haven't read The Luminaries yet, but a reviewer on the BBC called it the "Kiwi Twin Peaks." This alone is sufficient to whet my appetite, but there's a lot to this book, in fact the longest Booker Prize winner ever clocking in at a staggering 848 pages. It follows the story of Walter Moody, who's come to work the goldfields in 1866 New Zealand who stumbles upon a series of unsolved (and possibly related?!) crimes including the disappearance of a wealthy man, the suicide of a prostitute and the discovery of a cache of money in the local drunk's house. I hugely can't wait to dig into this!

Right now it's spring in New Zealand, and if you're considering on taking a second summer for yourself in this beautiful archipelago, December would be a great time to jaunt away from New England and sip egg nog on the beaches of Auckland. If you're planning a trip on the sole basis of having an 848 page novel to read on your way there now, don't stop at Ms. Catton, the Kiwis have a magnificent array of beach reads to bring with you: 

The Bone People by Keri Hulme. The 1985 winner of the Booker Prize, this is one of those books that has a huge cult following but sells steadily despite being a generally unknown book. Without giving too much away, it's basically the story of a woman artist in New Zealand and a young Maori boy who tries to steal from her one night but then returns and their interactions thereafter. It's a bit of a challenge but a rewarding one.

Katherine Mansfield is easily one of the greatest authors from New Zealand, and if you haven't read her yet put Alice Munro down for a sec and read some of the greatest short stories in English. She wrote around the time of H.D. and Virginia Woolf and she's definitely of their ilk though in a class of her own, of course. “The Garden Party” is really great.

And if you haven't read the book that serves as the basis for the amazing film The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, do it now! It draws on Maori myths and tells the beautiful story of a girl born to a patriarchal family who overcomes tradition to prove herself to her traditional grandfather by riding a whale along the coast (which in the Maori legend was done by a male).

Fall is the greatest time in New England, but we all know it's brief, so after the leaves change, come load up on Kiwi-fic and keep summer going year-round!

Around the World in 80 Bites

While literature doesn't get much better than a long, super-descriptive food scene (the meals in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy! The restaurants in Hemingway's Movable Feast! The baked yam in Invisible Man!) it does get better when you are describing in minute detail meals had on epic journeys. There's been a spate of food memoirs lately, and even more recently than that a new crop of food memoirs On Location. There's something nostalgic and comforting reading about the food that people grow up with, and even if it's from a culture entirely foreign to you, what better way to understand cultures than in the food we grow up on. Some of the most beautiful sentences in literature seem to come from whatever gland is deep within us that hold the genuine love, passion and nostalgia for the foods that sustained us when we were young. Here's a roundup of my recent faves, and one I'm drooling to dig into:

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, Anya von Bremzen  This book was such a funtime treat to read. It was equal parts history of the Soviet Union, nostalgic memoir of a not-so-easygoing childhood, and a love poem to a century's worth of food from one of the biggest nations in the world, encompassing such a huge swath of culinary traditions it was dazzling, dizzying, and hunger-making. Von Bremzen is both funny and skilled, she made my stomach grumble embarrassingly over fish bones cooked in butter, something I'd never be interested in eating under normal circumstances. She is a sauce-y wordsmith!

My Berlin Kitchen, Luisa Weiss  On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Luisa Weiss grows up learning to cook and bake in her West German home. As a grown-up in America she returns to the recipes of her youth and tells a beautiful story that instantly transports you to the homey kitchens and worldly restraurants of megalopolis Berlin.

Blood, Bones and Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton  By now you might have noticed that the books in this post present a common color scheme. Red and yellow, the colors of the golden arches, have long been considered colors that will make consumers hungry and therefore to eat more. Perhaps this is true also of books, but when you've got a writer AND CHEF of such superlative skill as Gabrielle Hamilton, you cook drop her sentences in a greasy wax bag and the whole world would beg for more. Simultaneously a memoir, coming of age story, complicated love story, and hilarious if grueling account of the blood and sweat poured into opening her own restaurant, Hamilton's book is beautiful, true and offers one of the most fascinating accounts of understanding hunger in a brilliantly wrought scene that catches up with our narrator on her first trans-atlantic trip in Amsterdam. The simplicity of a small meal of a boiled potato and sliver of cheese has stuck with me YEARS after reading this book. She is SO BRILLIANT WHERE IS HER NEXT BOOK!?

A Fork in the Road, ed. James Oseland  Is a book I haven't even read yet but am salivating to dig into! It comes out in December and my-oh-my: Francine Prose, Andre Aciman, Rita Mae Brown, Marcus Samuelsson, Michael Pollan, Monique Truong, Madhur Jaffrey and a bajillion other writers dish on the best meals they've had abroad. Run don't walk--OH MY GOSH is it lunch time yet?!

Oktoberfest: OR, It Could Be Wurst

The real live Oktoberfest wraps up in Munich this week, though if you're planning on going we still have plenty of great books AND if you plan on bypassing the crowds and going to Munich after Oktoberfest, many of the biergartens will still be around, not to mention all those great breweries, so this exhaustive display in your favorite travel section can help no matter where you plan to drink your beers in October.

The original German-style Oktoberfest has been around in various incarnations since King Ludwig I married a pretty princess in Bavaria. Since then, a huge party complete with many of the beers from the regions spotlighted by breweries have washed down countless Wurst, Brezeln and Sauerkraut for locals and tourists alike always around the end of September to the middle of October. So slap on some lederhosen and get the low-down with Meet Me in Munich: A Beer Lover's Guide to Oktoberfest which breaks down the best tents, what to wear and the whys and hows of all the many Oktoberfest traditions. Also the author's name is Moses Wolf and that in and of itself justifies the price of this beautiful, photo-rich book. And as with most locations in the world, we have quite the Schmaus of more general guidebooks and maps to the region.

For many in New England, the dual signal of leaves changing colors and the proliferation of pumpkin beers signals Autumn time. What better time to hit the road, go on a road trip through the brilliant leaves, stop for a jaunt in an orchard, and to wrap up with a tour to the many magnificent New England breweries? Norman Miller's Beer Lover's New England is an exhaustive list of the best breweries, restaurants and bars in New England. So if you don't want to shell out a tiny fortune to Lufthansa, stay stateside and celebrate your own Oktoberfest, in the prettiest autumnal location in the world!

Conversely, for the armchair tourist who wants to avoid all those Mid-Atlantic leafers scoping out our trees, stay at home with this massive, beautiful World Atlas of Beer. There's a lot of history and science about beer in the beginning, and then broken up by region a rundown of the most popular beers by location. What the locals like, what the international community likes that is produced there, and at what specific temperatures to best consume a beer in a pub in Sheffield. Among many other details. There are also tons of gorgeous photographs. An incredible gift for those upcoming holidays, too, folks.

To keep track of all these beers is the Moleskine Beer Journal where you can write down all the beers you've tasted and what you thought about them BEFORE YOU FORGET. So go out there and toss one back for me! And if you've gone to Oktoberfest or are having your own, tell me all about it in the comments!

Booksmith: A Baedeker

Brookline Booksmith boasts an impressive population of an average of 35 staff. It is a utopia with no political affiliation, religion and a beneficent government by triumvirate of wise elders, one of which operates as acting Matriarch.

Booksmith matriarch Dana

Its high season is the late fall to winter, when the crowds come in droves for the fantastic shopping. A good time to visit would be anytime that they are open, from 7 days a week, Monday - Thursday 8:30am - 10pm, Friday 8:30am - 11pm, Saturday 9am - 11pm, Sunday 9am - 9pm.

Its capital is the stately Books We Love table, located at its Westernmost corridor. Its northern border is the eclectic and funky Card & Gift Room, a sprawling marketplace popular among the young and old.

Explore the vibrant international bazaar at the Card & Gift Room

The Southern border is the Point of Sale Mountain Range, a prominent feature both denizens and visitors can "check out."

Point of Sale Mountain Range

Past this region is the breathtaking New Hardcovers and Fiction wall, a favorite spot of the trendy and intellectual.

Along the Easternmost border of Booksmith is a sweeping theme park for children.

People watch and enjoy an espresso at the delightfully tiny tables

An oft-forgotten yet treasured landscape is the subterranean catacombs of the Used Book Cellar. Built among the ancient ruins of old offices, a video and record store is a twisting labyrinth of half-priced, gently used books with a small staff of well-informed natives that operate on a slightly shifted time zone, buying used books from Wednesday through Saturday 10am - 4pm.

Transport to a landscape of antiquity in the Used Book Cellar

This new edition of the Brookline Booksmith Baedeker is edited by Natasha, originally from the Used Book Cellar but a recent move now allows her to divide her time evenly between her native land and the Travel section, which she now oversees.

Tattoos, Denny's and other Japanese literary symbols

Last week I wrote ad nauseum of my forthcoming trip to Japan. In order to prepare for said trip (and also because I'm super excited) I've been reading all kinds of Japanese literature to get my head in the game as it were. Here are some of my favorites thus far:

Kenneth Roxroth's 100 Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, in addition to Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu's poetry compiled in The Ink Dark Moon are some of the most beautifully selected words placed in a deliberate arrangement ever. I wish I could describe to you how beautiful enigmatic it is all at the same time, reading these are like feeling you're made of glass and slowing filling with curls of smoke. I can't do them justice, just read them all.

If we're going to talk about epic literature from Japan I'd be remiss in not including Tale of Genji. One of the first novels in the world, written by a LADY, it really is the coolest thing ever. But I've never finished it. I'm SORRY! Gosh.

What I have finished are some of the best modernist novels ever. Natsume Soseki could teach Raymond Carver a thing or two about deeply psychological interiority belied by understated language. The Gate is an amazing, slim novel in which the main character and his wife live childless in an idyllic picket fence house. But that's about as peaceful as it gets. The main character hates his job. The couple are spurned by their families as they married without consent, and suddenly his wife's reckless little brother squeezes the strained couple for help on top of it all. So taught, so beautiful, suuuch a good book.

Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes is unmissable, and Yukio Mishima's short stories in the collected Death in Midsummer are among my favorite reads of all time. His characters have amazing strength and fatal flaws and you'll need to read each story several times for the feeling that there's a detail in one word (or absence of one) that casts everything in a new light. I also recently finished Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales ... one story in particular, "The Tattooer" has left quite the indelible mark on me (pun fully intended). This man is an expert tattooer and only tattoos on people when he's inspired, and he finds ultimate inspiration in a beautiful maiden walking down the street. Convinced she is a demonic scroll come incarnate he is gripped with the need to tattoo her, and as she consents the art embellishing her back begins to imbue her with magnificent power. KAPOW!

For a more contemporary Japan (the one I'll actually be in) there is the incomparable Murakami. Thus far I've only read After Dark, to be honest it's a little daunting to decide where to go from there. After Dark is amazing. It's set in Tokyo around midnight and follows all the different sorts of people that only come out at night, in addition to a young runaway who may or may not be related to a rebooted magical Sleeping Beauty dozing in the literal center of the novel. But as I said, Murakami's got sprawling epics and copious short stories. I know I'll love them all but how to decide?! Maybe I'll take 1Q84 on my 16 hour plane flight? I might be able to bang it out...

Destination of the Month: India, or "think pink"

While wandering through the Globe Corner Travel aisle at Booksmith this past week, you may have been drawn in, distracted, or blinded by a display of hot pink books. Could someone please tell me why India again and again gets classified as hot pink?

From the Wallpaper Guide and the Love Guide to Delhi, to The Three Sisters Indian Cookbook, to Siddhartha Deb's new book The Beautiful and the Damned, when it comes to India, book designers seem always to "think pink" (I spent Hurricane Sandy re-watching Funny Face).

Pink or not, if you're looking for literature to guide you into India, we've got it. Read more on our blog at globecorner.com.

Destination: Globecorner.com

If you've enjoyed our weekly Destination and travel-related posts on Brookline Blogsmith, you can continue to read about the favorite destinations, travel escapades, and recent international reads of our Booksmith staff and Globe Corner alum at http://globecornerbookstore.com/blogs/.

In addition to expanding our travel section with over 2,000 new titles, including an impressive array of wall maps, Booksmith recently acquired globecorner.com, an online resource for guidebooks, maps, and travel literature. You can shop online for all your travel needs, or browse the blog, which we'll be updating with travel tips and advice, adventuresome anecdotes from home and abroad, and book reviews on our favorite armchair travel books and literature from around the world.

Join us at our most recent destination: globecorner.com. Happy travels.

Home on the Range

I'm taking vacation next week so that means you're not going to get one PEEP outta me next week. What should you do while you wait with baited breath for tales from the UBC? How about reading some of these books that evoke for me, a native Idahoan, the land of her birth to which she shall travel. Talking about myself in third person is weird.

The most recent book I read set in Idaho was Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams. A tiny little novella epic in scope, it is set in the untamed and the remote wilderness of northern Idaho as the railroads are built toward the coasts. It kinda made me a little homesick. I even craved huckleberries (they grow rampant throughout Idaho) though I never had a taste for them when I lived there.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose are both set in Idaho. Anthony Doerr spent some time there and there are a couple of short stories in The Shell Collector set in Boise, my hometown, that are really well done. Ezra Pound was born in Hailey and Hemingway went there to hunt and then die. We are a hardscrabble folk with a humble literary history, or something, but one book we acquired in the UBC last week really reminded me of home:

But what will I actually read on the plane? Dune by Frank Herbert. He was from Tacoma, and I'm also visiting my adopted hometown of Seattle. And Idaho is famous for its Bruneau Sand Dunes, so it totally makes sense. I'll have 20+ hours on a plane and my water bottle on me at all times just as I had an ice cream sammich on me at all times reading The Hunger Games.

So I'll catch you soon, Boise. I shall eat Flying Pie pizza and Idaho Spud candy and see my toddler niece who was a tiny newborn raisin when last I saw her but now walks, talks, and brushes her own long, glorious golden locks. And Brookline, take it easy on Carl next week while he flies solo. Bring him lotsa Coca-Colas and steak burritos.

Destination: Paradise

I recently received a gift in the mail, a slim volume about the size of an envelope, with a red cloth cover. In plain white letters across the top it read: The Portable Paradise, and, below the title, was a quote from E.M. Forester's A Room with a View" "'Tut, tut, Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker.'"

The author, Jonathan Keates, introduces himself in the beginning pages as a collector of old travel guidebooks. The guidebook, Keates claims, is as valid a genre of literature as Fiction, Poetry, or the Essay. Through an old Baedeker, one might read the world. In the anonymous voices of the guides, as they observe local customs, advise you where to stay, and even in their silence about particular topics, the contemporary reader is offered a vivid glimpse of the history, culture, literature, and mannerisms of the time period in which the guidebook was written.

Delighted as I was by this concept, I was even more thrilled to find, in a recent arrival to the shelves of Destination Literature, an even more comprehensive history of travel--or, if Keates' theory is right--a history of the world through travel.

In Peter Whitfield's Travel: A Literary History is one of the first full surveys of travel literature through history, roving from Marco Polo to Henry James. Beginning with the pre-history of the genre and moving through the Age of Discovery to the Grand Tours of the eighteenth century and the taming of America's wilds in the nineteenth century, Whitfield takes us all the way up to the boom of travel writing over the last century, comparing the works of Forester, Durrell, Waugh, Fermor, Bowles, and Lawrence.

The Baedeker guidebooks, both Keates and Whitfield could tell you, were some of the first replacements of the cicerone, or chaperone, of young people's travels to the continent in the eighteenth century. With a guidebook in your pack, you were free to travel the world on your own. Today we are guided not only by the descendants of the Baedeker, such as Lonely Planet and Rick Steve's, but also have access to innumerable literary guides, as outlined by Whitfield. Comb his survey for writers who have written on your favorite destinations, or simply browse our shelves.

I'm always surprised to find some of my favorite fiction writers not only traveled the world, but wrote about their travels. We have Goethe on Italy and Hemingway on Paris. We have Emerson's English Traits and James' English Hours. Even E.E. Cummings wrote a book on his travels to Soviet Russia. We have the travel writing of Lawrence Durrell, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and Somerset Maugham. Let's hope we are never emancipated from such Baedekers.

Destination: New York City (Part II)

Last week, we traveled to New York City and saw how Teju Cole's Open City (just awarded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award) could, well, open New York to the traveler. But I failed to mention all of the other titles lining our Destination Literature shelves waiting to take you to Boston's sister to the south. Just shelving these books gives me a little thrill, the same kick I get when I first glimpse the skyscrapers of New York City out my bus window.

One of the newest books to read before you go to New York is the recently published New York Diaries, edited by Teresa Carpenter. The book takes the reader through one year, and for each date includes a few diary excerpts from residents in NYC across time (the entries range from 1609-2009). For example, on this day in 1849 William Macready wrote, "Let me die in a ditch in England, rather than in the Fifth Avenue of New York here."

A few days later--but in 1922--Edna St. Vincent Millay reads an article about her book selling 10,000 copies, and strikes a happier tone: "Oh, what a thrilling winter this has been...what fun we've had!--how happy we are." The next day, in 1957, Allen Ginsberg describes New York from aboard a ship: "Past the docks of Brooklyn and black dirty ships' asses stuck out in void green water...the towers of Manhattan spiring and rocking on the Island behind us...green statue standing and turning in the world as we passed."

For more personal accounts of present day New York, check out My City, My New York, in which famous New Yorkers let you in on their favorite spots around the city. Get Kevin Spacey's recommendation on the best pizza joint in town (Joe's), or discover little known spots, like the flower district Nora Ephron frequents early in the morning.

If you're looking for fiction, NYRB has published a few collections of short stories set in the city, including the New York stories of Edith Wharton, a New York native, and of Henry James, whose imagination made frequent returns to the city as he traveled abroad. The collection of his stories, edited by Colm Toibin, includes his famous novella, Washington Square.

And finally, the essay that first introduced me to the city and remains my favorite piece of literature ever written about New York: E.B. White's  classic Here is New York. "A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning," White observes, "The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music to the accompaniment of internal engines."

Read White's slim volume on your next trip down to the city and you are sure to arrive there with an unmistakable feeling, almost a recognition, if not a revelation: "Yes, there is New York."

P.S. As a nod back to Natasha's blog (czech it out), introducing the new Destination Literature section instigated in our Used Book Cellar, and featuring Czech literature, I wanted to mention the recently re-published Conversations with Kafka, by Gustav Janouch, complete with cover illustration of the writer by Maira Kalman. The book, in which a young poet walks around the city with his mentor, Franz Kafka, would make an excellent traveling companion for your next trip to Prague.

Czech it Out!

I want to live inside every
7-11 in Prague

We're putting our own Destination Literature section in the Used Book Cellar because it's an awesome idea and because we just love Jodie and her blogs so much. So Carl and I are rounding up some cool titles that take place in or are written by denizens of cool destinations the world over. And lo, as we pile up books in the section, we notice that we have in particular quite a few novels from the Czech Republic.

"Get intimate with history"

Here's the part first where I show off. Yeah, I've been to Prague. It was pretty rad. A crazy city with stunning architecture, almost untouched by WWII but frozen in time for about 20 years while the Soviets ruled, it now has huge LED reader-boards next to fairy tale spires. The people are sweet. The public transportation is efficient (without being sterile). The beer is great. The food is pork. Basically: paradise.

But back to the Communist part. One of my favorite novels of all time, which also happens to hail from CZ is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yeah, I know it's been around for forever and you don't need yet one MORE pretentious philosophy/English major type telling you to read it. BUT. Seriously, read it. The book starts off with the Prague spring in which the Soviets rolled into town and took over the country. The Czech people were under Soviet rule from 1968-1986 and they were happy to oust them. They even have a museum dedicated to how hard and crappy life was under the communists. The impression this iron fisted rule had on the art that comes out of the Czech Republic is varied. One such novel now in our destination literature section is Jiří Gruša's The Questionnaire. Gruša took a lot of heat for writing a novel in which the protagonist is faced with a bureaucrat and a job application and writes his own surrealist, world-building response to the questions. The book is bold, brave, unlike anything else yet totally familiar. The book David Foster Wallace wanted to write when embarking on The Pale King, or One Hundred Years of Solitude if it were the product of hundreds of years of Bohemian history.

Kafka is (of course) another super-important Czech author. There's a great museum dedicated to him in Prague with some WACKY sculptures of some of the more unsavory scenes from his stories. There's even a street named after him! You know you've made it when...

So come "Czech" out our new Destination Lit section (man, I bet nobody is sick of that pun yet). And while you're at it, sell us some cool books to stock it with. Wednesday through Saturday, 10 AM-4PM.

Note: Blurry, sub-par photographs from the author's travels. Don't judge.