This Land

When I was 14, I began a passionate love affair with William Faulkner.

As you might expect in such an unusual pairing (he being dead and Southern, me being lip-glossed and wanting my MTV), we had a few problems to overcome, chief among them the fact that I couldn’t understand…

I spend my days surrounded by books. A glorious, beautiful, maddening riot of books–hundreds of thousands of them at the downtown library alone, in all shapes, sizes, and subjects, spilling from carts and shelves, stacked on desks and waiting in bins. While some books are crackling new, most have been…