Bookstories

Ten new contributions from the California section of the McSweeney’sstable of poets and writers, neatly bound in an accordion book. Writers—including Matthew Zapruder, Jesse Nathan, and Jim Ruland, with more to come—explore through short pieces the best bookstore they know of that doesn’t exist. (A bookstore on a boat? Why, yes! A bookstore in which the books grow like fruit and flowers on a single, riotous, store-encircling vine? Okay!) As a whole, the collection celebrates the idiosyncratic, joy-and-dream-inducing potential that is the independent bookstore. And what’s more, this accordion book is unbindable: when its binding is loosed, the pages unfold to reveal a hidden, multi-panel illustration inspired by the California landscape, from Calexico to Copco.