PORT ANGELES — Port Book and News is taking part in two shop-local initiatives this weekend: the well-known Small Business Saturday and the new Support Indies First, an event in which authors volunteer at their local bookstores.
Sherman Alexie, the Seattle-based National Book Award winner for his The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, put the call out to fellow authors: Pick an independent bookstore and spend some time there this Saturday.
Novelist Jonathan Evison stepped up. The author of 2011’s West of Here, a saga set on the Elwha River, as well as the Washington Book Award-winning novel All About Lulu and the 2012 best-seller The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, will show up at 9 a.m. Saturday and stay till around 11 a.m. at Port Book and News, 104 E. First St.
“He’ll help us hand-sell books,” said owner Alan Turner, adding, “his knowledge of literature is profound; his enthusiasm infectious.”
The novelist, who lives in Sequim part time and Bainbridge Island part time, will recommend his personal favorites: Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run, Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist, and the new edition of Frank Norris’ classic McTeague, for which Evison wrote a new introduction.
“This is a great way to fight for independents — one that will actually help them,” Alexie wrote in his open letter. “It’ll help you as well; the Indies I’ve talked to have told me that last year Small Business Saturday was one of their biggest days of the year . . . The most important thing is that we’ll all be helping Independent bookstores, and God knows they’ve helped us over the years.”
