Karibu Books Shuts Its Doors

This Friday marks the beginning of Black History Month, but by mid-February 15-year-old Karibu Books—one of the leading African American bookstores in the country and one of the few remaining bookstores aimed at black readers—will shut its doors.
It’s unfortunately not an uncommon event in recent years; many specialty book retailers, including women’s and LGBT bookstores, [...]

Building my children’s book library

As you all must know by now, I’m pregnant. My little boy is due at the end of April, and I find myself feeling both excited and scared about the prospect of being a mom. I spend the wee hours of the night tossing and turning, trying to find a comfortable position, and obsessing about [...]

A cheer for Small Beer

Small Beer is a teeny tiny press out of Easthampton, MA, founded by Gavin Grant and author of the highly acclaimed story collection Magic for Beginners Kelly Link. They publish like 2 books a year. We love small indie presses, especially when they do wonderful, unconventional books.
Small Beer is the publisher of Elizabeth Hand’s novel [...]

Listening

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one [...]

Vote for Your Favorite Books

The end of the year approaches, and with it, the closing of Fringe’s 25 Books Poll.
In a nutshell, we were appalled that the New York Times top 25 list included only 2 women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list. We vowed to make our own list, where the [...]

The Witch of Portobello: A Review by Julia Henderson

Okay, I know. I wrote my review of The History of Love and gushed about it, and now you’re all going to think that I only write gushy reviews. But here’s the thing…this book *really* made me think about who I am and where I am going, and who I want to be as a [...]

Breaking the Sequence

Has this ever happened to you: You come across a passage or line in a book and think it brilliant, and are thrilled that you’re the first one to discover it, only to find that people have been talking and writing about that exact thing for years?
Much later than I should have, I read A [...]

Lonely?

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) [...]

The Amazon Kindle – Wave of the Future or Overpriced Tech-toy?

In this morning’s “Around the Water Cooler” segment of Good Morning America, I learned about the new Amazon Kindle. It’s concept isn’t new — it’s a wireless reading device that can hold up to 200 books, can display current newspapers and can even connect you to over 250 blogs. It’s a s thin as a [...]

Vote for the Best Novel of the Last 25 Years

Here at Fringe, we love novels, writers of color, and women writers (along with a whole lot of other things like feminism, culture, and judging from our blog tags, more feminism). That’s why the New York Times’ list of the Best 25 Novels of the Last 25 Years made us sad. (As the Guerilla [...]