It was also very gratifying for us to learn that a short story she wrote while doing our course, The Place of the Doves, was short-listed in the African Writing 2011 Flash Fiction competition.

http://judycroome.blogspot.com/

We firmly believe that independent bookshops have an important place and a strong role to play in our society (and, as writers, in our hearts). Here is the first in a series of posts on our best-known and most loved independent shops. Please let us know if you have a favourite bookshop you would like us to feature.

Q and A with Verushka Louw of Book Lounge

Where are you situated?
The Book Lounge is situated in the East City Precinct of Cape Town, a grand way of saying we are to the east side of the city’s heart, with a beautiful view of Table Mountain.

What kind of readers do you attract, and cater for?
I think the great thing is we attract readers, people who really need to constantly be reading something exciting. People who carry a book in their bag and have 5 next to their bed. The staff are all great readers and lover of books, so we believe we cater for people like ourselves. We have a great backlist and do not just stock what is new, but also what is important to read, be it coming-of-age novels or essays about food and we support quality local publications.

Why are independent books stores important?
When you are an independent book store you know the importance of good service to your readers. You talk to your customers and ask them what they are reading, you stay alert of what is happening in the book world. In that sense you become a bit like the oracle. If you put in the effort, people will trust your opinions and ask you for advice. Don’t we all want the best advice, be it buying a car or flowers?

How is your bookshop different from all others?
I suppose every parent believes their child is the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the same goes for the Book Lounge. Most of the staff have been here since the shop opened in December 2007 and have put a lot of passion and hard work in making it a one of a kind shop. We are a destination store, we believe that coming to a book store should still be an experience to remember. It is always great when we hear people say they live elsewhere but always come and visit when they are in Cape Town.

Do you have a “favourite” kind of reader?
Does it make me a capitalist to say one that often buys books? Readers who come and tell us about how they enjoyed a book and even recommend books to us, those are great readers.

Tell us some of your favourite books of all time.
Not sure if this is for me personally? I am a lover of quirky fiction and as the Children’s Book Manager, I obviously read lots of childrens’ books. I also love short stories.
Favourite books:
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Matilda – Roald Dahl
The Red Tree – Shaun Tan
An Invisible Sign of my Own – Aimee Bender
Lullabies for Little Criminals – Heather O’Neill
No One Belongs Here More than You – Miranda July
Kitchen Casualties – Willemien de Villiers

What are you recommending at the moment?
The new Nicholas Dickner, Canandian author, Apocalypse for Beginners, quirky and lovely , then a Faber title, Is Just a Movie by a 70-year old man Earl Lovelace, which is blowing everyone away and for local flavour, the new Brent Meersman, Reports Before Daybreak, fast-paced.

Please give the address of your website and details of any newsletters (including how to sign up).
Our website is www.booklounge.co.za and it has all our newsletters on, you could also e-mail us at booklounge@gmail.com if you have any other queries or which to be added to the mailing list.

“Critics cite many reasons in their dismissal of the genre, reasons that ostensibly aren’t rooted in literary snobbery. ‘The problem’ with chick-lit, I’m told, is that it doesn’t deal with the real issues that women face. Well actually, some of it does. From sibling rivalry to infidelity, addictions to poor body image, a woman can take her pick within the genre if she wants to. And the rest of it? It’s meant for pure indulgent enjoyment, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

“But why insist that chick-lit reflect the issues facing its readership when no other genre is measured by the same yardstick? It isn’t expected of science fiction, crime, mystery, historical fiction, or even most literary fiction. Women didn’t flock to buy We Need to Talk About Kevin thinking, ‘Gosh, my son is in prison too for picking off his classmates with a crossbow. That’s the book for me.’

“And there’s no need to fret over the malleable minds of chick-lit fans. Our poor little female brains aren’t going to turn to mush because we read light and breezy books. And it’s not as if women who read chick-lit read it exclusively. Most of us enjoy chocolate cake, but we don’t eat it every night for dinner.”

As you’ve probably gathered from past posts, I don’t find our strict, and often snobbish, distinctions between genres helpful at all. The genre doesn’t dictate how well a book is written – nor how much it says about society.

Chick lit and romance can and do deal with the issues of our times: attitudes of men to women and vice versa, dating rituals, the difficulty of finding love in modern society…

One of my favourite authors, Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer for his wonderful book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, recently wrote a book of essays on reading.

Chabon would like to see the distinction between “serious” and “popular” disappear. He argues that “serious” fiction has as many conventions and restrictions as any other. Far from being a higher form, it is just another genre, no different from any other.

Personally I like all kinds of fiction – and I have a great love of good crime novels. Besides having all kinds of worthy reasons for reading, I also find that it makes me happy. What can be wrong with that?

Jo-Anne Richards is a writer and lecturer in the Wits journalism department. Her novels include The Innocence of Roast Chicken, Touching the Lighthouse and Sad at the Edges. A new novel – My Brother’s Book– was released last year.

At a moment when the hardback novel seems endangered, McEwan’s work is almost scandalously popular. Although his novels headily explore ideas, and his gift for visual detail approaches that of John Updike (Briony’s cousin, fondling a suitcase: “The polished metal was cool, and her touch left little patches of shrinking condensation”), his international success has a lot to do with an old-fashioned talent for creating suspense. His plots defy what he calls the “dead hand of modernism.” (Even “Saturday,” which takes place in a single day, has enough incident to rival “24”: a plummeting plane, a car crash, a break-in, a tumble downstairs, lifesaving surgery.) McEwan said that one of his goals was to “incite a naked hunger in readers.” He discussed his technique reluctantly,
as if he were a chemist guarding a newly filed patent. “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information,” he said.

McEwan is a connoisseur of dread, performing the literary equivalent of turning on the tub faucet and leaving the room; the flood is foreseeable, but it still shocks when the water rushes over the edge.

That’s how it is with the hounds that descend upon a woman in the 1992 novel “Black Dogs”; the orgiastic murder in the 1981 novel “The Comfort of Strangers”; the botched sexual initiation in “On Chesil Beach.” At moments of peak intensity, McEwan slows time down— a form of torture that readers enjoy despite themselves. In “The Child in Time,” from 1987, a man’s little girl is kidnapped at the supermarket, and his rising panic is charted with the merciless precision of a cardiogram. In “The Innocent,” a 1990 tale of espionage in postwar Berlin, McEwan spends eight pages conjuring a corpse’s dismemberment. And “Saturday” keeps the reader jangled for nearly forty pages, wondering along with Perowne if an airplane descending on London has become a terrorist missile. Martin Amis says, “Ian’s terribly good at stressed states. There’s a bit of Conrad that reminds me of Ian. It’s ‘Typhoon,’ when the captain is heading into this terrible storm and Conrad is in the position of first mate. Going into the captain’s cabin, he notices that the ship is yawing so that the captain’s shoes are rolling this way and that across the floor, like two puppies playing with each other. You think: Wow, to keep your eyes open when most people would be closing theirs.
Ian has that. He’s unflinching.”

Jo-Anne Richards is the author of four novels. Her latest is My Brother’s Book, published by Picador. Order it from Kalahari

She lectures in journalism and writing skills at Wits University, besides running workshops in literary skills, narrative journalism and Romance writing. She supervises Masters students in the Creative Writing Masters programme at Wits.

She is co-founder of allaboutlove.net, a website dedicated to good reading and writing. The site publishes novels and short stories, and runs interactive online writing courses in romance writing. It includes a basic lesbian romance writing course – thought to be unique.

Colm Toibin says he doesn’t like it very much. AL Kennedy and Amit Chaudhuri both admitted to decidedly mixed feelings on the subject, in a piece in The Guardian UK.

According to Kennedy: “The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not.
“I wouldn’t be the first writer to point out that doing something so deeply personal does become less jolly when you have to keep on at it, day after cash-generating day. To use a not ridiculous analogy: Sex = nice thing. Sex For Cash = probably less fun, perhaps morally uncomfy and psychologically unwise.

“Sitting alone in a room for hours while essentially talking in your head about people you made up earlier and then writing it down for no one you know does have many aspects which are not inherently fulfilling. Then again, making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it and hours of absence from self – that’s fantastic. And then it’s over, which is even better. I’m with RLStevenson – having written – that’s the good bit.”

Chaudhuri says: “…Then there’s the group of people who don’t enjoy being novelists, to which I probably belong; whose lives are at once shaped and defined by, and to some extent entrapped in, the act of writing fiction. I still find it difficult to believe that I’m something called a ‘novelist’; but this hasn’t stopped me from dreaming, frequently, of alternative professions: second-hand bookshop owner; corporate worker; cinematographer.”

On the other hand, Will Self wrote, in the same piece: “I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte.

“Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics.

“I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seductive of all: the buying of stationery.”

I have a writer friend who declares writing to be an affliction. He has to do it, but he suffers it like a misfortune. I don’t agree with him. (Well sometimes I do, but that’s only on my worst days.)

I am utterly schizophrenic about the process. Sometimes I hate it. I wallow in self-pity: Does anyone really care? Why should I struggle so and wrestle all these demons? Is there any point? On the other hand, when it flies … wow! It’s better than sex, that feeling of being on another plane, immortal, all-powerful. And I agree with Will Self: I adore stationery. I feel a thrill when I enter a stationery shop. I try out the pens, look for the most sensual notebooks … (Sad really, but there it is.)

Generally speaking, I feel calmer when I’m writing. When I don’t have a novel in process, I’m inclined to be gritty and irritable.

How do you feel about writing? Why do you write or long to write? We’d love to hear your opinions.

Jo-Anne Richards is the author of four novels. Her latest is My Brother’s Book, published by Picador. Order it from Kalahari.net

She lectures in journalism and writing skills at Wits University, besides running workshops in literary skills, narrative journalism and Romance writing. She supervises Masters students in the Creative Writing Masters programme at Wits.

She is co-founder of allaboutlove.net, a website dedicated to good reading and writing. The site publishes novels and short stories, and runs interactive online writing courses in romance writing. It includes a basic lesbian romance writing course – thought to be unique.