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Bookstores
In Maybe on a Tuesday, this space inadvertantly became a platform for the marvelous TransAllegheny Books of Parkersburg, West Virginia. It only seems fair that a litrag like this one pay tribute to the altar we all owe our allegiance to, the bookseller's. This time, I'd like to direct your attention to another corner of Appalachia — Asheville, North Carolina. Malaprop's Bookstore & Cafe is the small-town distillation of independent bookstores beloved of larger cities like Boston or San Francisco. It's not large (though the space is beautiful), but it manages to present a selection that is utterly lacking in mediocrity. Every single title I picked up looked well worth my while. Asheville itself is a beautiful city, framed on every side by the Blue Ridge Mountains and an excellent stop in its own right, beyond Malaprop's.

Blogs

Strange Maps
Got itchy feet for an unreal country? Strange Maps posts the world in cartographies we aren't taught in school.

Giornale Nuovo
"Mr. H" presents Giornale Nuovo as simply "an accumulation of inconsequential notices in the shape of a web-log," but even the most cursory look through the archives reveals that the important word in that description is not "inconsequential," but "notice."

London: The Way We See It
Every week, this site dispatches native Londoners through their city to a particular street, and charges them to return with photographs of whatever catches their interest. It's both a way of engaging with their city and of showing how no place looks the same seen through different eyes.

Short Fiction
"The Sleeping Beauty; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spindle: A Tale of Love and Presents As Told By M. L. Tobin, esq."
It is, in fact, just as funny, if not funnier than the title lets on. For those of us who grew up on fractured fairy tales like The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, this is Sleeping Beauty as Disney couldn't possibly touch.

Books

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
When I moved to California last summer, this was the one book I brought with me, rather than waiting to have it shipped out. The conceit is simple: Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sit together and speak of the cities Polo has seen across the great Khan's empire. Calvino's luminous prose and expansive imagination turn this travelogue into a penetrating exploration of human complexity, in all the different shades of shadows on all the different walls in all the different sunlit places in the world.

Italian Folktales, collected and edited by Italo Calvino
In case we ever feel ourselves giving in to the temptation to paint folk tales with the rosy sensbilities of the Victorian era, Calvino presents us with a thick counterbalance to any notion of nicety. These stories are from all over Italy, and none of them are very long in and of themselves. Over and over again, though, we find ourselves struck with their starkness. They are frank, casually fantastic, and often horrifying. They're also wonderful examples of how foreign — and fascinating — a country the past is.