The Alabama Book Festival launched a new website last weekend. This year will be the 5th year for the state-wide literary festival. It scheduled to run 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. Saturday, April 17th, in the Old Alabama Town section of Montgomery. The full line up of speakers and authors is listed here and includes notables names Rick Bragg, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines and a gazillion more. The book festival also has a blog and Facebook page.
Are you going?
It looks like Birmingham is loosing another indie bookstore. After almost six years in business and just weeks after setting up their Twitter feed, Linda Brown has sent out a very sincere and personal note about plans to close Milestone Books or at best, let it change hands. I have pasted her message, in its entirety below:
Dear Milestone Friends,
This is a difficult email to send y’all. Around six years ago, a dream turned into a reality, and Milestone Books opened right here in Vestavia Hills. An independent bookstore for independent thinkers.. a community of intelligent, highly educated, upper middle class people. This community had asked for a bookstore for years! And we brought one here. We have become a Partner in Education with the Vestavia Hills School System, a proud member of the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce, and a valued contributor to our local economy. You have told us so often how happy you are that we are here, and we value your loyalty and patronage. And we’ve been successful on many levels, even ending 2009 profitably after enduring a severe economic downturn in late 2007 and 2008.
But now my personal circumstances have changed and I’ve been offered a position with a progressive, growing company here in Birmingham. This job will allow me to be a little more available for my 16 year old twins, who only remember Mommy working at the bookstore. For those of you who may own a small business, you know that doing so requires a 24/7 commitment, and all the blood, sweat, and tears you imagine. But not many people can love what they do every day….and that’s one thing I’ll miss.
So. If you’re down the road of life a little further than me…here’s your chance. The first five years of any business are the toughest. Done. I’m offering my loyal customers an opportunity to take this little bookstore to the next level. If I could stay, trust me when I say I would. But responsibilities as a parent often require a choice…and anyone with children will understand when I admit that right now, this option is the right one for us.
This window of opportunity is small. So if you are interested acquiring the assets of Milestone Books, or the business itself, please let me know by the 17th. If no one steps up by then, we will begin an Inventory Clearance beginning January 18th.
Thank you for your patronage, your encouragement, your prayers, but most of all…thank you for helping me live a dream, if only for a little while.Linda Brown
Milestone Books, Inc.
This is such a shame. The Milestone Books crew love books and the people that buy them. I do hope someone will step into that space and keep things going. We’ll see.
The annual Local Author Expo has been in full swing since 11 a.m. today and ends at 3 p.m. for the day. If you didn’t make it out today, you can go by the Birmingham Library tomorrow (Sat., Dec. 5th) and mingle with some of Birmingham’s literary minds.
Over 140 local authors are attending this year to sell, sign books and meet readers. I haven’t been by today, but I did go last year and posted some photos of the author tables winding around the corridors of the library’s first level.
One thing you are guaranteed, if you you make it by the Author Expo… lots of interesting people talking about interesting local topics.
For 27 years, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been urging readers to send along the best of the worst opening lines for fictitious novels. They are always bad… which is good. And the best are really punny, even funny.
David McKenzie won this year’s contest. You can click through to read his entry. But I actually preferred the runner-up, so I include it below, plus a few others. If you do click through to their site, you can read all of the winners and runners-up in all the various categories.
This year’s Runner-Up was by Warren Blair:
The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.
Greg Homer’s “Vile Pun” category winner:
Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.
Eric Rice won the “Detective” category with:
She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.
One of my favorite “Dishonorable Mentions” this year was penned by Dan Blaufuss:
As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.