"I grew up in the back of beyond country, so we didn't have bookstores," Alyson Hagy, whose book Scribe (Graywolf Press) is the number-one pick on the November Indie Next List, told Bookselling This Week in a recent q&a. "The library was my absolute favorite place to visit. I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan in the early '80s, so the original Borders was in Ann Arbor at the time. I had never seen such a palace of books, new and used, and I had never been around staff who knew fiction and religion and history. It was just incredible and I would go in several times a week. I didn't know what had been missing in my life.
"Here in Laramie, Wyo., we have this really unique, very small store called the Second Story. It's located in a former brothel and has been run and managed by a series of very smart, book-loving people who just keep all kinds of literature available. The Second Story has been a different kind of anchor to me. It's so wonderfully idiosyncratic; you never know what you are going to find on the shelves because it is so completely determined by the taste of whoever the manager is or whoever the staff person ordering the books has been. So that's very cool, I think."