Celebrate the Key West Literary Pantheon
Books & Books @ The Studios honors Key West’s extraordinary literary legacy with the Key West Literary Pantheon, a frieze wrapping around the store above its bookshelves. The frieze celebrates the names of forty-four distinguished and nationally recognized authors, all of whom have lived and/or worked in our island paradise.
This amazing group includes eleven Pulitzer Prize winners (some multiple times), six National Book Award winners, and three winners of the prestigious Bollingen Poetry Prize. These literary artists have drawn sustenance from the Key West muse which in some subtle way drew out creativity in a manner that an intellectual hot-bed like New York could not.
As James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight Cowboy put it “The town excited …. I spent all my time exploring, walking the streets. The place was mysterious, funky, indescribably exotic. It had much of the charm of a foreign country, but you had the post office and the A&P and the phone worked, so life was easy.” John Dewey, perhaps the leading philosopher of the last century, confirmed “the mañana mood develops very easily here,” but it made words flow. William Gaddis heard it was a lazy retreat popular with artists and writers. Looking for a quiet place to finish the novel he was working on, he found the perfect shady porch to set up his rickety Olympia typewriter, completing the novel J R, a winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Perhaps the best explanation comes from David Kaufelt, founder of the Key West Literary Seminar: “I have a theory why we all live here. It’s called the Peter Pan theory. Freud said that we are at our most creative when we are in our very early youth, before we’re five years old. That’s where we are here. We wear shorts, we ride bicycles, we have the water, a great symbol of the unconscious, and we’re free to be children here and let our spirits go. There’s nobody in suits and ties telling us what we have to do.”
Although our Pantheon is limited to deceased writers, there is no doubt that the Key West magic
continues to this day. Among our current residents are many of equal stature: Pulitzer Prize
winners including Annie Dillard and Alison Lurie, National Book Award nominee Phyllis Rose, many members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters — including Anne Beattie, Joy Williams and Edmund White, the inestimable Laurent de Brunhoff, and Library of Congress Living Legend Judy Blume.
Right now, gift cards really are the gift that keeps on giving.
Independent Bookstore Day has been rescheduled for Saturday, August 29, 2020, making this beautiful totebag a collector’s item for sure.
Lead by Assistant Manager Gianelle, last month’s virtual book club pick was 
We had a wonderful time with Mamta Chaudhry, author of HAUNTING PARIS, a timeless story of love and loss takes a mysterious turn when a bereaved pianist discovers a letter among her late lover’s possessions, launching her into a decades-old search for a child who vanished in the turbulence of wartime Paris.
We had a great time hosting Key West local Hays Blinckmann on Friday, Feb. 21 promoting her second novel WHERE I CAN BREATHE. WHERE I CAN BREATHE is a drama/comedy infused with bold characters, laugh out loud humor that will keep you engrossed in its compelling storylines.
Having to rush suddenly to a Connecticut hospital, Arthur, Abby, and Ansel Williams must come to grips with the impending death of their beloved mother, Agnes. She is dying from cirrhosis and for years has been drinking herself to death. None of the siblings are prepared for the journey of placing their mother in hospice care and spending her final weeks looking back at her lifetime of pain and destruction. Asher Williams, their father, business mogul, and Agnes’s ex-husband, also must come to terms with his family’s path and his role in shaping all of their lives. The story is rich with a family’s defining moments that changed them, pushed them apart, and brought them back together.
We recently had the pleasure of hearing Craig Pittman, author of 
It wasn’t so long ago when a lot of people thought the Florida panther was extinct. They were very nearly right. That the panther still exists at all is a miracle–the result of a desperate experiment that led to the most remarkable comeback in the history of the Endangered Species Act. And no one has told the whole story–until now. With novelistic detail and an eye for the absurd, Craig Pittman recounts the extraordinary story of the people who brought the panther back from the brink of extinction, the ones who nearly pushed the species over the edge, and the cats that were caught in the middle. This being Florida, there’s more than a little weirdness, too. An engrossing narrative of wry humor, sharp writing and exhaustive reportage, CAT TALE shows what it takes to bring one species back and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.
Come celebrate Black History Month at Books & Books this February. Our selection of books this year will cover fiction, nonfiction, science fiction/speculative fiction, YA, poetry and more.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake, Erik Larson delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz.
Alison Lurie’s view of the world has always been both critical and affectionate, and often also humorous. This candid, wide-ranging collection of essays, WORDS AND WORLDS: From Autobiography to Zippers begins with an account of Lurie’s childhood as an odd-looking, awkward little girl who liked making up stories to a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. Then it travels to the years when even her family and friends suggested that she should give up collecting rejection slips for her writing and just enjoy having somehow acquired a husband and children.