On book tours, I used to fly into a city and then be immediately taken to a morning TV interview, or radio, and then I’d do another show or two, and then have lunch with a book journalist, and then do magazine stuff in the afternoons, and maybe more radio, and then I”d get a quick dinner, and a shower, and then I’d do the reading in the store. On this book tour, I barely had any local media to do. There is no book media anymore, certainly not on the local level, in most of the country.
I saw a lot of matinees on this book tour.
Lots of afternoon movies. And popcorn. Lonely for the book world that used to exist.
From transcript, Sherman Alexie on “War Dances,” Basketball, and Cinematic Book Tours: The Book Club : The New Yorker
More Alexie:
But the handful of books that I continually reread are: The Great Gatsby, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems, Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses, James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break, Philip Roth everything…
That list could go on and on…I’m a writer, yes, but I’m also a huge fan boy.