This Independent Bookshop Week (Saturday 18 June – Saturday 25 June 2022), the team at Norwich’s independent bookshop The Book Hive are fed up with the state of things. So they’ve joined forces with And Other Stories to declare the shop an independent nation state.
Inspired by the events in The Visitors by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (which is set on the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and whose protagonist suffers from hallucinations of a garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse), The Book Hive is declaring their three-storey building a ‘gnome man’s land’ – they are hitting reset, and building up an independent society from scratch.
And they need your help. Come to the shop during Independent Bookshop Week and suggest a law or policy for the soon-to-be independent utopia/dystopia. At the end of the week, a team of booksellers and publishers will pick their favourites. Chosen contributors to the gnome man’s land manifesto (which will be published on social media) will be rewarded with an & Other Stories goody bag full of independent publishing swag.
Visit The Book Hive throughout Independent Bookshop Week for books, merchandise, bookmarks and totebags, as well as a gnome-themed games and giveaways!
Independence forever!
About The Visitors
This June, And Other Stories publish The Visitors by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, the UK debut (her second novel) of one of America’s most gifted young writers. Darkly funny and uncannily percipient, Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s stunning UK debut charts the decay of a woman dealing with debt, lust, self-doubt, and the intrusion of a mythologic al creature into her apartment, as the last days of our digital age – and of the luxury to write fiction about our unhappiness – count down towards a strange climax.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of The Visitors and The Exhibition of Persephone Q. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York and Geneva.
About The Book Hive
Situated in the heart of Norwich, in the Lanes area of the city, The Book Hive celebrates the beauty of printed material – as well as the pleasures of whimsical, alternative curation. The shop is well-known for foregoing traditional sections, instead favouring mixes of the booksellers’ picks which allows for a unique browsing experience and the kind of serendipitous discovering that more traditional layouts – or algorithms – cannot replicate.
About Independent Bookshop Week
Independent Bookshop Week is a celebration of independent bookshops in the UK highlighting the vital role independent bookshops play in their communities. The campaign was launched in 2006 by the Booksellers Association and will celebrate its 16th birthday in June 2022.
Independent Bookshop Week 2022 will take place Saturday 18 June – Saturday 25 June.