Pulpfiction Books

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YVR's legendary independent bookstore. Est. 6/00. 'The pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will.' (Gramsci). 2024 Certified Living Wage employer.

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gotta love how contemporary publishing is 30000000 beautiful, deeply felt, finely crafted books with 7.5 readers each whose authors are just barely making a living, and like 4 books that financially support the whole apparatus, each of which has comprehensively and unforgivably destroyed society

[Media] phone call: Are you seeing an uptick of interest in HILLBILLY ELEGY? PFB: Ahahahaha fuck no.

"We'll worry about Stillson later, Daddy, he's in the dead zone now."

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Now, who would like to see pictures of my 1978 visit to the offices of MAD Magazine.

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I looked it up and it turns out there were zero book related deaths in 2023 and so far none in 2024 so, I don’t know, books may not be the problem.

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In memory of Shelley Duvall, I'm making my essay on Altman's abrasive, despairing, transporting masterpiece 3 WOMEN free and open to the public. A challenge of a film. www.patreon.com/posts/46391545

I Would Like to See It: 3 Women | Gretchen Felker-Martinwww.patreon.com Get more from Gretchen Felker-Martin on Patreon

-Can I leave these with you? Bought 'em, ate all I wanted, but they're meltin'

BLUE PLATE SPECIAL: polenta puttanesca; kale braised with cumin & red wine vinegar. Everything is from scratch except the polenta, which is sliced from one of those precooked rolls.

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The very best book I read last year. All the things here are true, and should be attended to.

‘This is especially true of one late-in-the-novel experience of Justin being lost in Seoul’s Gimpo Intl. Airport. This episode is among the most striking in the book, and also one of the most fantastical, as space, time, and logic seems to collapse around Priest’s protagonist.’ Val’s super review 👇

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AIRSIDE BY CHRISTOPHER PRIEST: Val Nolan on the genre-defying literary maestro’s final novel // IZ Digitalinterzone.digital ‘There are no aliens or portals here; there is, perhaps, a time/space slippage, but the reality of that is up to each reader to decide. A speculative audience will hum along to the book’s eerie tune.’...

Of the stuff displayed in the front room, disparagingly: -Oh, these are the books you get paid if you sell. -Well technically we get paid for *all* the books sold here...

This book is (literally) full of (baby) spiders

Relatable

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Today's OED Word of the day is âme damnée: "A person slavishly devoted to another, and willing to carry out onerous (and sometimes disreputable) services on his or her behalf; a puppet; a tool." Happy Independence Day. May we live to see another.

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Today, outside the Betsy Ross house:

The US, tomorrow

Both PFBs open regular hours today, "Canada" Day: Main 10am-7pm; Drive 11am-7pm. A picture of the Drive's new awning, & some thoughts re: the best response to "Canada" Day over on IG: www.instagram.com/p/C843qNSv0yp/

Day's first sale: Christmas presents, from a Christmas list. Pretty sure this sets an all-time record; earliest I ever previously recall Xmas gift orders is late August, right alongside graduate reading lists.

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I never knew it had a name, but once you see the low effort recombination gesture "style transfer" you see it everywhere: from "Uber but for dogs", to AI Art slop, to real contemporary art galleries full of 'painting of a bird, but embroidered' and Thing for Doing X Doing Y. Just dull, dull stuff 😞

*I wonder why "style transfer" went out of vogue; that's "A Rube Goldberg machine in the style of Ernst Haeckel's 'Art Forms in Nature,' and Bing Copilot is really kinda immaculate about doing that

A propos of that debate

Natural consequence of the woke ideology

Genuinely a new one; visitor from east coast USA: -I asked ChatGPT where in Vancouver I should come for a good selection of graphic novels. It sent me here. [Bought a stack!] [Deeply conflicted about the resources burned to generate this otherwise positive sales experience]

Unearthed another 10 boxes of mostly SF/fantasy mass market paperbacks from the 70s to early 2000s. Some out already, others hitting Main Street's shelves over the long weekend.

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I feel strongly about but also a little vulnerable about this topic, because I came up in the 2000s writing movie reviews, and film bros were unbearably attached to authoritative voice—which I think can be a block when it comes to writing/watching/experiencing more varied art. So:

The Joy of Reading Books You Don't Entirely Understand - Reactorreactormag.com It really should be acceptable and normal to say “I don’t entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.”

Recommended reading. "We live in an era in which corporate and pseudo-corporate narratives of all kinds seem unconquerable—but if you poke at them, they roll up into a ball like potato bugs and demand the violent protection of the state--" lithub.com/generation-f...

Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)lithub.com Last fall, around the time Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me was published, I went to the Brooklyn stop of Liz Phair’s 30th anniversary tour for her debut album Exile in Guyville. Exile is on…

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Here's a story I wrote a long time ago. smallbeerpress.com/free-stuff-t...

The Force Acting on the Displaced Body | Small Beer Presssmallbeerpress.com The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branche...

Circle of life: portajohns returning to spawn in the shallow reaches of Jonathan Rogers Park.

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“AI” is the culmination of the tech industry. Every time you use it, you destroy the environment, erode labor protections, endanger workers overseas, enrich the ruling class, and make something unforgivably worthless, all at the same time – and it's all hidden from you in a frictionless distraction.