canada

…you should go. It’s a nice little store with a very friendly staff. Conveniently located, too: three blocks from my hotel, ten blocks from the Amtrak station, and an easy hike to downtown. I had a great time, both at the reading and after.

This was my first visit to Vancouver in almost twenty years. I recalled it being a lot like Seattle, and it is, but what I wasn’t prepared for is how much it also reminded me of New York City. Not Manhattan—it’s too short for that—but the outer boroughs, Queens especially. Something about the architecture of the high rises made me feel like they’d been transplanted from the Rego Park or Elmhurst of my youth, and there’s also an elevated train, which every time I passed under it had me thinking about Flushing and the IRT number 7. Even the slummy parts of Vancouver felt more like East Coast urban decay than West Coast.

A little over a week ago I got an email from Christopher Brayshaw, the owner of Pulpfiction Books in Vancouver, BC, asking if there was any way he could tempt me into adding his store to the Bad Monkeys book tour. I and my corporate masters at HarperCollins are only too happy to please, so it’s been arranged, and I’m tentatively scheduled to appear on August 16th at 7 P.M.