Love My Indie with Author Elise Stephens

Love My Indie is a feature where fellow bloggers, readers, and authors tell me about their favorite independent bookstores. I love the feeling I get when I go into an independent bookstore - like it is filled with hidden treasures just waiting for me to find them.

Showing some Indie Love today is:

Elise Stephens, author of Moonlight and Oranges

My favorite indie bookstore around Seattle is the Elliot Bay Book Company: http://www.elliottbaybook.com/

They have a lovely space with worn wood floors and bright high ceilings. They handwrite staff-pick recommendations for dozens and dozens of books. It’s like a friend telling you what you might like to read, rather than the trickier task of navigating book-jacket copy to learn if you’ll like the rest of the words inside. 

Elliot Bay Book Company has been my repository for literary journals. They carry a huge supply and they have large tables where a patron can sit for hours, pouring over literature, surrounded by shelves with spaciously arranged books that aren’t squished tightly together. The second floor looks down almost loft-style on a little café serving coffee and fresh baked cookies to accompany the turn of a good page. At EBBC, reading is a low-key lifestyle, a pleasure to be savored, with books as friends who you, the reader, get the privilege of being introduced to.

It makes me wonder if bookstores like these were part of why I fell in love with books to begin with. True, the content of the book speaks louder than just about anything else, but when books are presented carefully, as “friends” in a place that invites the reader to relax and enjoy, it makes a difference on another emotional level. Bookstores like EBBC are in the habit of matchmaking, and I’m very grateful to them for their hard work and dedication to the culture of us bookworms.

 About Elise Stephens

Elise Stephens received the Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction from the University of Washington in 2007, where she also received her degree in Creative Writing. Moonlight and Oranges is her first novel and was a quarter-finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband where they both enjoy swing dancing, eating tiramisu, and savoring the flavor of local live theater. Visit her at www.elisestephens.com

I am currently giving away a copy of Elise's Moonlight and Oranges as part of the Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop. For a chance to win a copy, enter HERE.