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USA Today
2 days ago
- Business
- USA Today
Tomorrow Bookstore in Indianapolis is home to translated books and author pop-ups
Tomorrow Bookstore in Indianapolis is home to translated books and author pop-ups Independent bookstores are the heartbeats of their communities. They provide culture and community, generate local jobs and sales tax revenue, promote literacy and education, champion and center diverse and new authors, connect readers to books in a personal and authentic way, and actively support the right to read and access to books in their communities. Each week we profile an independent bookstore, sharing what makes each one special and getting their expert and unique book recommendations. This week we have co-founder Jake Budler of Tomorrow Bookstore in Indianapolis, Indiana. What's your store's story? Tomorrow Bookstore is an independent, general interest bookstore on Indianapolis's premier retail corridor. Founded by Julia Breakey and Jake Budler, Tomorrow is a majority woman-owned bookstore focused on human-centric global stories. The store opened in April 2023 to fill a gap – there were no independent bookstores in downtown Indianapolis. What makes your independent bookstore unique? By far and away, our community's feedback is about the quality of selection. Despite being a small store (about 700 square feet of selling space), Julia focuses on a diverse, global selection of high-quality and lesser-known titles. In just one year, we have sold titles from authors from over 75 countries. What's your favorite section in your store? Our favorite permanent section is our table dedicated to works in translation. In keeping with our goal of high-quality and lesser-known stories, we focus on curating a table of translated works from around the globe. It is one of our only permanent displays. What book do you love to recommend to customers and why? "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a gorgeous tale with everything: time-travel, a cafe in Tokyo, lyrical and magical prose and beautiful lessons. What book do you think deserves more attention and why? "Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways" by Brittany Means is one of our team's favorite reads of 2023 and one of the best, most human and powerful memoirs that we read. Means grew up here in Indiana, and we love supporting talented local writers. Why is shopping at local, independent bookstores important? Bookstores are not simply retail stores. They are inherently community-based organizations that provide new experiences, information and spaces. They ultimately reflect society and humanity at large. What are some of your store's events, programs, or partnerships coming up that you would like to share? Tomorrow Bookstore hosts a variety of literary, art and community events, including four book clubs, a weekly local author pop-up and more. They focus on partnering with other independent businesses and non-profits across Indianapolis. In June, we are hosting events like an independent publisher pop-up with Two Dollar Radio from Ohio and a live painting and piano concert event with Pocket Vinyl.
New York Times
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Historical Fiction Imbued With a Rich Sense of Place
What We Tried to Bury Grows Here 'In war, the full breadth of emotions persist, hiding among the horror — even joy.' For Mariana, whose fiery political writing is an inspiration to her fellow Basques, that joy comes from a brief encounter with a young soldier named Isidro, who has left his remote village to fight on the government side in the Spanish Civil War. In a conventional novel, they'd be the tragic lovers battling fascist oppression. But in Zabalbeascoa's daring first novel their stories serve a different purpose, attracting a host of other stories on both sides — as well as the sidelines — of the conflict. In WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE (Two Dollar Radio, 277 pp., $27), almost two dozen narrators vie to convey the danger and uncertainty of life in a country where 'tomorrow you never knew who would throw you against the wall for the actions of today.' We hear from priests and soldiers, mothers and children, prisoners and refugees. Amid the inevitable violence and horror, there are the equally inevitable heroes and villains, but for everyone the world has acquired 'an evil stink.' Mariana knows her compatriots have no choice but to fight on, yet she also knows that 'the war will make us unrecognizable to our former selves.' To Save the Man Radical transformation is central to the plot of TO SAVE THE MAN (Melville House, 322 pp., $29.99), which takes its title from a favorite saying of Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: 'To save the man, we must kill the Indian.' Although the novel takes place in just a few months during the autumn and early winter of 1890, it covers a wide range of physical and emotional terrain. As a new class of students is ushered into Pratt's military-style campus in central Pennsylvania, the western reservations are being swept by a movement called the 'ghost dance,' which promises triumph over the white man's weapons and a return to the old ways of the frontier. Moving between the increasingly rebellious plains and this school dedicated to erasing its pupils' tribal loyalties, Sayles builds narrative tension as news of a possible uprising spreads through dormitories filled with vulnerable young men and women. It offers a different sort of challenge to the institution's only Indian instructor, a talented musician who's been presented to Carlisle's benefactors as a 'paragon of her endangered race.' Caught between two worlds, Miss Redbud often feels more like a traitor. The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter Sixty-one-year-old Judith Shakespeare insists that she favors neither side in the 17th-century battle between Britain's Puritan Roundheads and the Cavalier forces of Charles I. Nevertheless, the playwright's midwife daughter must flee her native Stratford when the fractious political atmosphere yields a charge of witchcraft against her. It's not necessary to read 'My Father Had a Daughter,' Tiffany's novel about the youthful Judith, to enjoy THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER (Harper, 256 pp., $30), whose title is borrowed from a line Shakespeare gave to Ophelia that goes on to explain: 'We know what we are, but know not what we may be.' What Judith may be, when she reaches the questionable safety of London, is a co-conspirator with an old flame, a wolfish actor who's been reduced to clandestine performances in pubs now that the Parliamentarians have closed the city's theaters. The (wildly dangerous) performance of a lifetime awaits him in the besieged Royalist stronghold of Oxford, and he insists that only Judith can help him get there. Unfortunately, she's saddled with two cumbersome companions: a Bible-spouting Protestant zealot and an unpredictable little girl who may be as mad as Ophelia. Babylonia The literature that inspired BABYLONIA (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pp., $27.99) stretches as far back as the Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, who wrote of a powerful woman they called Semiramis, ruler of a vast Middle Eastern empire in the ninth century B.C. Myths have surrounded her ever since, and she's been portrayed as a ruthless schemer, reveling in the violence and cruelty that were the hallmarks of the Assyrian monarchs who came before and after her. Casati doesn't shy away from the stark brutality that permeated the culture Semiramis was born into. At the same time, she invents a subtly persuasive portrait of an impoverished orphan whose cleverness and striking looks propel her from a wretched provincial settlement to the inner sanctum of the royal citadel via marriage to a taciturn warrior, the emperor's closest companion since childhood. The court and its intrigues are chillingly drawn, dominated by the emperor's mother ('every thought of hers, a dagger in the dark') and a eunuch spymaster ('the only weapons I trade in are secrets'). What enables Semiramis to prevail is her memory of what it was like to have nothing, to be nothing. On the rise, she is constantly alert to the bonds forming 'an endless rope, tied from person to person, that can be snapped in a moment.'
