Thomas Wolfe’s Sugar-Mama

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A tour through the iconic Thomas Wolfe Memorial house in downtown Asheville and the accompanying Visitor’s Center will give you an in-depth look at Wolfe’s ‘Altamont,’ the fictional name he gave to his thinly veiled description of his hometown in his paramount work Look Homeward, Angel. During your visit you will learn how tourism in Asheville in the first part of the 20th-century led Wolfe’s mother Julia to buy the ‘Old Kentucky Home,’ in order to capitalize on the boom, and how the house and his family shaped Wolfe’s prolific writing, which by the end of his career amounted to a million pages, although the majority were edited out of final works.

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Amy Manikowski

Amy C. Manikowski is a writer, bookseller, trail-diverger, history buff, and pitbull lover. She graduated from Chatham University with an MFA a while ago, and after wandering aimlessly settled in Asheville NC.

Gathering Wilde-Flowers

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Lady Windemere's Fan by Oscar Wilde, Tauchnitz edition.
listed by Pickford’s Books.

March. Saint Patrick’s Day. Irish authors.

Is it possible to think of Irish authors without pausing for just a moment on one Mr. Oscar Wilde, the brilliant mind behind Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Lady Windermere’s Fan?

My introduction to Wilde didn’t come via high school English class, or even through one of his works. I fell into an immediate heart-eyed crush with Wilde through a movie that had very little to do with him personally– Velvet Goldmine. It’s a ridiculous, pretentious, early-00s indie-film about a 70s glam-rocker whose goal was to essentially be the Oscar Wilde of the Brit-pop scene. That is, a decadent, outrageous, flagrantly bisexual artist bent on challenging social taboos while creating something brilliant whose depth and true merit probably wouldn’t be appreciated until much later. It’s basically the cinematic equivalent to the entire Aesthetic movement, of which Wilde was the crown prince. (more…)

Pru Holcombe

Pru is a North Carolina native, transplanted to the bustling base of South Carolina’s tiny share of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she tag-teams with her husband to herd two brilliant boys and two cats.

When she’s not busy blogging with Biblio or toiling over original works, you can most likely find her speeding around in the mountains, blasting egregiously loud music and singing off-key.

Despite being fresh in the bookselling scene, she’s been a insatiable reader since forever, and will point you to her love for Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen, while tucking Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams behind her back and shushing them. Honestly, she’ll read anything you put in front of her. Help support her writing career via Patreon

http://patreon.com/pruholcombe

A True Passion for Books

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Elizabeth Kostova spoke at a reception Thursday evening, October 7th on Carolina Day’s Key School campus in Asheville, North Carolina. Throughout her talk, she shared her childhood experiences which were centered on reading.  Her growing up years were not only focused on silent reading, but reading aloud to one another.  Kostova’s family read the classics including Jane Austen, Henry James and Charles Dickens.  In fact, as Kostova picked up Conan Doyle to read aloud to one of her children, she realized that it was these … Continued