Our city's independent bookstore needs your help!
My local anticapitalist, antifascist, LGBTQIA+ friendly, anarchist, super ultra crunchy, cooperatively owned, and self described "radical bookstore" is falling on tough times.
Hurricane Helene was a doozy y'all, a ton of small businesses like this are closing with no plans on reopening. The FEMA payments meant to help Asheville and WNC are being bogged down in a bunch of red tape, so many of us haven't seen a dime of them yet, even though some of it is earmarked to help small business. And, although tourism is coming back (and we're very very open for business!) the shock to the system was just too big for a lot of folks.
I've seen long-standing cornerstorne-of-the-neighborhood places just like this wink out of existence without any warning, only to be replaced by exploitative, soul-sucking corporate owned chains run by people who don't even live or pay their taxes in our community. I don't want to keep seeing this happen to the town I grew up in.
These are good people who provide an essential service to our city: being some of the loudest, most outspoken defenders of our human rights, and providing civic minded reading material you won't find anywhere else.
They sell books other people don't want you to read, and that generally means those are books you're obligated to read.
Also, they once hosted the backroom of their bookstore out as a viewing space for a no-budget student film I helped make like a decade ago and they were real cool about it so-long-as everyone we invited to the screening bought a coffee or a book. Do you think Barnes & Nobel would do that? Would Amazon?
Check 'em out! Buy a banned book! Become a sustaining member of one of the best independent bookstores around!
https://firestorm.coop/#Asheville #WNC #HeleneRecovery #Helene #SmallBusiness #LocalBusiness #ShopLocal #Bookstodon
