Interview with Ben Rybeck of Brazos Bookstore
At the Winter Institute, in Memphis, TN, I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of really cool, really interesting indie booksellers. Last weekend, I caught up with one of them: Ben Rybeck, of Brazos Bookstore (and himself an author), and had a nice chat about zombies, TV adverts, and The Last Wave.
Here's a wee extract:
“The sea,” author Gillian Best tells me, “is just like zombies. It’s everywhere, and it’ll kill you if you don’t pay attention.”
But I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, let me back up here and confess something: I write this article for BrazosBookstore.com with absolutely zero pretense toward anything resembling journalistic objectivity. I met Best in January, at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute in Memphis, Tennessee—imagine summer camp, but for booksellers in the winter and with a lot more drinking—when I had dinner with her and her publisher, House of Anansi Press, a venerable Canadian publishing house with a connection to pretty much every major author from that country you can think of (including, yes, giants like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje).