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Instead of celebrating National Read-A-Book Day on Friday by putting books by local writers in the window of Barnes and Noble bookstore in Center City, manager Lynn Rosen thought: Why not put the writers themselves in the window?
“It was a tough sell to my staff,” Rosen admitted. “They thought I was crazy. We’ll leave that question unanswered as to whether I am or not.”
On the other hand, it sounded like a great idea to the writers. All of the two dozen authors Rosen reached out to agreed to come down to the store, sit in the leather chair in the window display outfitted with a side table and lamp, and silently read a favorite book.
“They are performance art,” Rosen explained. “It is a live display.”
The rosters of writers included recognizable and bestselling local authors, including Lorene Carey, Jason Rekuluk, M.L. Rio, and Jamie Brenner. They each read for 15 minutes and then swapped out for the next writer’s time slot. This went on for almost seven hours.
“It involved no talking, which is a big bonus for me,” said Brenner, who had done speaking events at the store in the past.
She sat in the window and put her nose into Grady Hendrix’s 2020 horror novel, “The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.”
“Every writer is a reader first,” she said. “This is showing everyone what our first love is, which is sitting with a book.”
M.L. Rio, whose first novel “If We Were Villains” became a bestseller and is now being pitched for television, recently relocated to Philadelphia from Washington D.C. A former Shakespearean actor, she felt comfortable in the fishbowl of Barnes and Noble’s storefront window.
She wore dramatically heavy eyeliner and sat down with a classic: Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in a Castle” (1962), which she re-reads periodically.
“It’s one of my favorite horror novels. I think it’s a horror novel. People might fight me on that,” she said. “It always feels right for the fall and spooky season.”
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