Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore - Hardcover

Shea, Suzanne Strempek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807072583 ISBN 13: 9780807072585

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2004

Synopsis

One afternoon in 2001, while she was recovering from treatments for breast cancer, Shea got a call from a friend who was looking for help at her family's bookstore. Janet Edwards expected no more than help spreading the word, so she was surprised when Shea offered to take the job herself, seeing it as a way to get out of her pajamas and back into the world. But over the next twelve months, Shea unintentionally realized a dream that so many book lovers harbor: She became a bookseller. From St. Patrick's Day - for which she arranged her first window display - through National Poetry Month, Mother's Day and Father's Day, the all-important summer reading season, the crucial Chanukah and Christmas gift rush, then back again to piling up stacks of Joyce and maps of Dublin, Shea lived and breathed books in a place she believes sells "ideas, stores, encouragement, answers, solace, validation, the basic ammunition for daily life."

About this title

About the Author:

Suzanne Strempek Shea, winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of five novels, Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, and Becoming Finola, and the three memoirs Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, Shelf Life, and Sundays in America. She lives in Bondsville, Massachusetts, and sells books at Edwards Books in Springfield, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

To fill the time as she recovered from cancer and chemotherapy, Strempek Shea volunteered at a friend’s independent bookstore in Springfield, Mass. An accomplished novelist (Around Again; Lily of the Valley), Strempek Shea felt at first like a spy—"a farmer hanging around the dairy section"—as she observed customers in constant discovery of books. Despite the bleak reason for her new job, she embraced it with delight and here recounts her sojourn at Edwards Books with humor and passion. Not a great deal happens though, even during the coverage of 9/11. She looks at the small, independent bookstore, and how it stays in business. Although she can’t help making fun of the inane questions she’s sometimes asked ("What would you recommend for a flight to California? I’ll be sleeping most of the time"), she lovingly portrays devoted book folks, such as "the tiny older woman who arrives on her payday to buy two or three more mysteries. The young woman who received the call that the latest of the Gothic novels her mother collects have arrived." The author also shares droll, albeit tacitly self-promoting, insights on the tour for her latest book ("there are maybe forty people at my reading, and I even know two of them!"). As readers absorb the life of the bookstore and author, many will be tempted to look for the titles she drops throughout the work. Book enthusiasts who pine for a friendly, like-minded community will love this light, funny memoir.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0807072583
• ISBN 13: 9780807072585
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 223