People Like Us, Call & Response, and the Power and Potential of Local Indies

WIR: People Like Us by Jason Mott 

In this post, I'm going to direct you to my separately published review of Jason Mott's People Like Us in The Christian Century. This was my second review for that publication. Being somewhat new to the magazine review game, I rushed out and bought a copy as soon as I received and accepted the invitation from TCC's Books Editor, Elizabeth Palmer. It occurred to me only after I got back that I was likely to get a review copy.

People Like Us was one of my top 20% of 2025 reads, for all the reasons you can read about in the linked review, and probably a few more besides. I'm hoping to get to Mott's prior Hell of a Book sometime soon, or at least before the end of the year. It won the National Book Award in 2021.

AWIGI: Call & Response Books

Interior shot of Call and Response Books
source: Call and Response Facebook page,
photographer uncredited

I'm fortunate to have 6 local, independent bookstores within about a 30 minute walk from my home, and Call & Response is the closest, by about 0.l mile. Also, as a general rule, if I'm going to seek out a book by an African-American author, I'd like to do my best to support Black-owned stores dedicated to getting such stories out to readers. Buying a book from a store I want to support is fair consolation for my "oops!" moment of not realizing I would get a review copy from the magazine.

Call & Response opened in May 2024, just a week after that year's Chicagoland Independent Bookstore Day Book Crawl. I visited there first during its opening weekend, if not Opening Day, picking up a copy of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions by DePaul University Professor Francesca T. Royster.

Amidst all my bookstore wanderings, I'm reasonably certain I've been back to C&R about a dozen times, and have regularly enjoyed good chats with owner Courtney Bledsoe, and Tamara, an alum of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores who works as a bookseller with Courtney. I've been to several "start-up" stores in recent years, and see Call & Response as doing great work in getting off the ground--not just in terms of content curation in the process of building sales and inventory, but in the number and variety of community engagement events C&R runs. These events include Book Clubs (of course), Open Mic Nights, Trivia Nights and Friend Speed-Dating. Also, they've been "punching above their weight" in terms of supporting area book signings, including one with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The store's presence and activities are particularly meaningful because Courtney grew up in the neighborhood. Although I'm inclined to wax idealistic or romantic about the power of local indies, I think there's something to celebrate here in booksellers who start a business to build the kind of community they want to continue living in. 

C&R is part of a growing group of Black woman-owned bookstores in Chicago. Semicolon Books has received a lot of press, especially since 2020, but others in the area include Da Book Joint, Burst Into Books*, as well as Build Coffee & Books (which is, at least as of my last visit, much heavier on the café operation than the bookselling). I also had a chance to visit Last Chapter Bookstore in Chicago's Roscoe Village neighborhood during last year's Chicago Indie Book Crawl. It's a bit out of my wheelhouse as a Romance-focused store. For those of you outside Chicago who consider Evanston "Chicago," I'll happily add L'oreal Thompson Payton's Zora's Place in Evanston to this list.

(*Full disclosure: I serve on the Planning Committee for Burst Into Books's annual Words of Wonder Litfest on the South Side of Chicago)

Call & Response's "About" statement from their web site says a lot about this important niche in bookselling:

Call & Response is a Black woman-owned bookstore focused on fostering a love of reading, community, human connections, and the sharing of ideas across cultures and backgrounds. With the knowledge that the publishing industry has historically overlooked and sidelined writers of color, we place the voices of Black and other authors of color at the center of our work. We hope to provide a space for the many people who, for so long, have not seen ourselves represented in literature, empowering all to share their stories with the world.

In a future post, I'm looking forward to digging into Char Adams's Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore (AWIGI: Source Booksellers, Detroit), and am also looking forward to celebrating Source and the legendary Ms. Janet Webster Jones.  Adams's book provides a helpful directory to Black-owned bookstores in its appendices, unfortunately missing both Burst Into Books and Call & Response. (No criticism there; the landscape shifts constantly.)

As with many indies, Call & Response is preaching the message about the power of local independent bookstores, especially against the [amazingly large online retailer], on its socials. More importantly, perhaps, Courtney Bledsoe has been on-point and positive about the community impact of stores like hers in the face of recent and planned corporate incursions by Barnes & Noble.

Local Indies and the Corporate Behemoth

Former building for Marshal Field & Company department
store in Oak Park, Illinois, likely pre-2011, when the building
served as a location for Borders (source: Wikipedia,
credited to "Zol87)

My neighborhood, like several across Chicagoland (including Oak Park, depicted above), is about to get a new Barnes & Noble. I want to strike the right balance as I discuss this development and the impact of other major chain stores, in part because I am committed to strategies that increase book access, especially in Chicago. The B&N coming to my neighborhood will be easily accessible to several bus routes and one commuter train line serving the broader South Side. If B&N can add to book access without destabilizing the existing ecosystem, that's a positive. I suspect, however, that that's not an effort B&N itself will make, and whether it happens will depend on the community's ongoing engagement with the "home-grown" independent booksellers. It remains to be seen how much the Hyde Park Barnes & Noble will adapt its offerings to serve the reading interests of that broader South Side.

It's not too difficult to see that Barnes & Noble's development plans in Chicago focus on areas that already have relatively high saturation of local, independent booksellers. The most prominent of these, so far, has been the Wicker Park location on Milwaukee Avenue. The arrival of Barnes & Noble precipitated the demise of nearby Volumes Bookcafe, according to Volumes's co-owner Rebecca George. George has noted that her sales immediately dropped by about 20-30% after B&N's arrival in the neighborhood.

Recently, WBEZ (Chicago's Public Media station) convened George, C&R's Bledsoe, and B&N's CEO James Daunt for a conversation on one of its morning talk shows, "In the Loop." It's a 23 minute conversation, and well worth the listen for the issues it raises. Kudos to substitute host Clare Lane and the participants for an illuminating discussion--definitely more light than heat--that gets to some of the core issues around the local bookstore landscape and the potentially destabilizing effects of big chains.

Listen to the "In the Loop" conversation here.

I had a few reflections after listening to the segment. First, Volumes has a case, and Daunt's suggestion that B&N is a different kind of business than Volumes doesn't ring true. Second, Courtney Bledsoe does a terrific job of staying positive and focused on the distinctive offerings a store like hers can offer. She projects a seriousness about the added precariousness introduced by a new neighborhood B&N near her, and remains focused on the distinctive values and opportunities her store has in a way that does ring true.

Despite Daunt's general civility, there are a number of unfortunate aspects to the case that he presents. To my ear, one can hear the moral turmoil involved in having been on both sides of this particular kind of "Empire vs. the Scrappy rebels" confrontation. His Daunt Books had to square off against large chains in the U.K. before he was hired to run Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately, his description of this experience insinuates that the indies getting their business displaced just need to become better at their jobs.

In some sense, it's the quintessential capitalist conundrum. Even as businesses vie to offer services of benefit to the community, they compete not merely to compete, but they compete to win--where "winning" amounts to "vanquishing." At least the big ones do this. I don't think any of the region's local, independent booksellers see their goal as to put any of their peers out of business.

Daunt also seems to argue that Barnes & Noble is just a different kind of bookstore, and isn't going into any neighborhood that already has something like it (implicitly, "something like it" being a large, chain bookstore). This strikes me as a deliberate obfuscation of the oxygen-sucking power that large retailers, with greater capacity to discount books, play within the bookselling ecosystem.

It is not the case that B&N is filling in geographic gaps in bookstore access or accessibility. When I did the 2024 Chicagoland Indie Book Crawl, I wanted to do it as much as possible on foot and by transit within the time available. To that end, I picked the Milwaukee Avenue corridor as the best way. It had the highest concentration of local independents participating in the Crawl (as well as a major used shop in Chicago that doesn't participate). I walked from Skunk Cabbage down to Open Books in the West Loop, 8 stores in all.

That said, Chicago is a city with 2.7 million people, not counting the suburbs, and there should be more than enough business to go around. Even in a city as bookstore-rich as Chicago, there is likely more business to go around. B&N, though, is not exactly "hitting 'em where they ain't." In addition to the bookshop dense Milwaukee Avenue corridor, B&N is planning stores in Hyde Park and Downtown, as well as a near west suburb of Oak Park. Each of these locations has at least 4 local, independent bookstores within a 30 minute walk or a 5-10 minute drive. Again, I'm not buying the idea that they are avoiding direct "competition" with the local indies.

I called it an "Empire vs. Rebels' affair above rather than "David vs. Goliath," in that Malcolm Gladwell has argued that the latter scenario is really one that favors David. I keep this in mind in this instance partly because in at least two instances, B&N is taking over former Borders locations, and in a 3rd is moving into a space about 2.5 blocks away from an old Borders location. Oak Park is giving B&N tax breaks to recoup the space it's moving into, which was a Marshall Field's department store before it was a Borders. It seems to me that history might provide some lesson there. I only hope it is not after B&N drives other stores out of business.

The remaining matter for me with regard to Daunt's comments in the WBEZ discussion, is that he's clearly going to avoid conceding any points that will run contrary to B&N's ownership. B&N is currently owned by Elliot Advisors, a UK private equity firm. I've talked to one B&N alum who is aware that one clear possibility for the chain going forward is an Initial Public Offering to make the store a publicly-traded company. 

In the publicly-traded situation, the priority of "maximizing shareholder value" will enter into the mix of other values present in the bookstore ecosystem, and not necessarily for the better. This is especially the case if it reduces the diversity of voices available and the economies of scale a large chain can afford wind up sucking the oxygen out of the local indie book market. Profit, growth, community benefit, increasing diversity of voices and representation are all values that can co-exist in theory, at least, but how they get optimized in a pinch winds up making a big difference. It will likely diminish the range of "people like us" who get their stories out there.

I see the dilemma on the consumer side as well. In my own personal spending reckoning as a customer, as much as I support local independent bookstores, I tend to mentally kick myself if I forget to use my 15% discount card (from the Book Crawl) when making a purchase. My "bargain brain" and my "healthy community" brain don't completely jibe, even when I'm aware that my purchase dollars at a local bookstore provide me with a wider range of community-building benefits than buying it from a big corporation would. I can't, however, ever bring myself to participate in the behavior Rebecca George describes at Volumes, where customers would set down stacks of books they picked up off of her shelves and just go up the street to buy them, at a discount, from B&N--essentially "showrooming," with or without a camera.

As Danny Caine discusses in How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling (AWIGI: a kind gift from dear friends, doubtless purchased at 57th St. Books), some dimension of the B&N threat would be diminished if stores were more or completely limited in their ability to discount books. See the discussion of the French bookstore ecosystem in Chapter 4. I'd be interested in advocating for this, but am more hopeful than optimistic, at least in the near term, regarding success in such a campaign. (It galls me that the [Amazingly large online retailer] is the first hit for Caine's book on a Google search.)

Ultimately, I think we're better off finding a pathway for the Call & Responses of the world, the efforts of folks like Courtney Bledsoe to contribute to healthy and inclusive democratic cultures in the neighborhoods and towns where they grew up. It feels like the way to be properly (locally) patriotic, in the Wendell Berry sense, which very much involves blooming where one is planted, and acknowledging that the "Empire" stores are the ones that will be much more likely to optimize profit over community benefit (or diversity of voices, etc) every time.

I didn't intend to go on so long about this matter in this post, as indeed the discussion of this issue is going to be a recurring theme here. I hope we'll make some productive advance in driving the conversation and further socializing the community-building value of indie bookstores and local economies.

2025 WIRAWIGI wrap-up

At one level, it's obviously premature to do a wrap-up post as the fourth post of the blog, but 2025 was a big year both for my reading and for my exploration of local, indie bookstore scenes, mostly around the U.S. The individual titles and stores will continue to unfold over the course of upcoming posts, but I wanted to account for a few things in summary at the turn of the year from 2025 to 2026.

I'm a little later than I wanted to be in posting this--partly because of the length, partly because the beginning of 2026 in the U.S. has been exhausting.

Poetry favorites from 2025 (see list below)

WIR: 175 books

I didn't set out with a numerical goal for the year, but had different goals in mind. More on that in a second. I managed to finish a book at an average pace of about once every 52 hours. A few factors contributed to this rate of completion--including that my work (paid and unpaid) involves ongoing research, and that I read at least 3 books simultaneously. I usually have one fiction book, one poetry collection, and one or two non-fiction books going at the same time. This year, I finished 79 novels (or short story collections), 39 poetry collections, 43 non-fiction titles, and 14 books that blurred the boundaries across those categories. 

My main reading goal for the year was to organize most if not all of my reading around "immersion" months--specifically, Black History Month, Women's History Month, National Poetry Month, Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and Native American Heritage Month. In July, I read all Icelandic fiction, mostly by Icelandic authors. In December, I focused all my recreational reading on books recommended to me by friends and booksellers. During National Poetry Month, I focused on epic poetry to the exclusion of prose fiction. January, August, and parts of September and October were free-form. I read all the poetry aloud, with the exception of three of the epics, which I read on planes and trains. 

The point of the monthly focus for me was to read with awareness that my various layers of privilege mean that I'm usually an "expected reader." We operate in a world that doesn't always acknowledge explicitly the way it's set up to view white, male, cisgender, heterosexual as "norms." I'm not going to call the exchange even, to be sure, but the goal was to create month-long micro-immersions in the perspectives of those enduring macro-immersions in a world not always or even often optimized to validate, honor, or respect their experiences.

 

For me, this is partly a continuing effort to improve my understanding of two insights: "there is no them; there's only us," and "what you can separate, you can violate." The former expression is commonly linked with Fr. Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries; the latter was used by my college Religious Studies professor, the late Ira G. Zepp, Jr. 

I'll write elsewhere about the "windows/mirrors" dimension of engaging in stories--that literature gives us perspective on others' experiences and reflections back on our own. The metaphor works to do some important work in ensuring all folks have access to both (something the publishing industry on its own doesn't always do well), but the metaphor also breaks down when pushed. Windows become mirrors and vice-versa.

A couple of my recent reads have developed this point for me in helpful ways. First, Elaine Castillo's How to Read Now: Essays (AWIGI: 27th Letter Books, h/t to Drew for the recommendation), wherein she writes:

"[N]one of this work is meant to be done alone. Reparatively critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color. But the logic of empathy would have us believe so; it would have us believe that other people tell stories, which are there to make us feel things, the line between the two neatly delineated. The logic of empathy says 'I feel your pain'--but the logic of inheritance knows this transaction has always been corrupt at its core. The story I'm telling is not just something for you to feel sympathy for, rage against, be educated by: it's a story about you, too. This work has left a will, and we are all of us named in it: the inheritances therein belong to every reader, every writer, every citizen. So, too, the world we get to make from it." (p. 74, emphasis in original)

I didn't have Castillo's insights when I started my 2025 reading journey, and I'm not sure that my particular intent meets her criteria of doing something more than reading for empathy. I will qualify my assessment, though, by observing that my exercise was not oriented primarily toward empathizing with the stories told, but rather to come up with a way to destabilize white supremacy in my reading environment as much as possible for an extended period. Castillo's point, to my mind, reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates's rebuttal of the late Saul Bellow's racist dismissal of people and cultures of the global south, in which Coates affirms that Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. 

To be clear, I don't suppose any of this is close to sufficient work in the face of the enormity of the imbalance, but it is an attempt to push the balance at least a little, in this one area. As Josh Cook writes in The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century (AWIGI: Biblioasis):

"...this specific issue--the mistaken belief in the universality of white dude experience--is a direct source of the unbearable whiteness of publishing and one of the buttresses of white supremacy in our society. Or, to put this another way, white dudes need to read books that make them feel excluded so they can feel the fact of other valid human perspectives." (p. 206)

I also didn't have Cook's book in hand when I started this. I have a sense that human progress depends on constantly refining the insight that we, whoever "we" are, are not the center of the universe. I think Castillo and Cook's insights play well together in this space. 

I'll pop some additional data on highs and lows of the WIR side of the occasion at the end of this post, but move now to the...

Exterior of West Side Book Shop, Ann Arbor, Michigan

AWIGI: 184 independent bookshops

Starting from a few of my local neighborhood shops in Chicago in January 2025 to ending with a half-dozen or so out in the western suburbs of Chicago at the end of the year, I managed to visit a different bookshop about once every 48 hours, on average, over the year. This doesn't count return visits to a few favorites here and there. It also brings my two-year total to 264 (de-duped). 

I did some significant road-tripping over the course of the year, and added indie bookshops as side trips along the way. As a result, 2025 involved 26 states, the District, and lower Ontario. I participated in the official indie bookstore crawls in the Twin Cities and Chicago, and an "anytime" crawl in the downtown mall area of Charlottesville, Virginia (6 stores, on Insta). Everything else was DIY. I found one handy way of doing this was to past a Google Map driving route into an AI engine, and ask it to identify bookstores within 5 or 10 miles of my route.

It feels like I have too many highlights to name over the course of the year, from sharing the "crawl" experience with family and friends in various locales, to several kinds of "bookendipity." 

At Just Book-ish in South Boston, I asked about finding a poetry volume by the current or immediate past Poet Laureate of Boston . The bookseller found both for me, and handed me one by the latter, saying, "by the way, that's me." You can guess which one I bought. 

I told the booksellers at Gibson's in Concord, New Hampshire what I was up to, and they sent me to the Old Number Six Book Depot (Insta) in Henniker, New Hampshire (which was a wonderland), and to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, New Hampshire. At Toadstool, I mentioned what I was doing while chatting with Nadia, a bookseller there, who had recently returned from her own DIY bookshop crawl in Montreal.

The most common question I get when I tell people about this ongoing, and indeed endless, quest is impossible to answer: "What is your favorite?".  As my friend, Pat, pointed out, this is like asking somebody to name their favorite song from their favorite band. No one bookstore can capture everything you might be looking for in that moment, and the best bookstores offer distinctive surprises that only their booksellers and their community culture can offer.

One bookseller/barrista at Inkwell Booksellers Company in Minneapolis asked me if I ever encountered a bookstore I just hated. The quick answer was, "No," at least at that point. To be sure, "hate" is a strong word, so I wouldn't be inclined to go there. I mentioned to her that I often encountered bookstores that didn't feel especially curated toward my interests (e.g. Romantasy or Gothic-themed stores aren't really my wheelhouse), but that this didn't prompt dislike. It just made it less likely that I'd return. I learned what I needed to for the moment.

Regarding "at least at that point": It's my impression, or at least my hope, that one enters a bookstore in something of the same spirit that one enters a book--with curiosity and humility. It always feels to me like an expanding outward--mentally and spiritually. A month or two after that conversation in Minneapolis, I went to a used bookstore in a small city within an otherwise mostly rural section of an East Coast state, and was welcomed by a chalkboard at the door that offered a derisive and misspelled definition of the word "woke." Inside, the bookstore was chockfull of mass-market paperback thrillers, detective novels, etc. It didn't feel ripe for serendipity, even in a specially-designated section of "Women Writers." Sliding somewhere between sorting and segregation...

I won't give that place any more words here, but suffice it to say one of the joys of visiting all these bookstores is finding a spirit of discovery and community, a recognition that we all have more to learn and lots of different things to learn about.

I will say, though, that comparing bookstore communities across municipalities and regions, I can propose groups that can fit what you're most interested in discovering.

Looking for the deepest stacks in town? Off the top of my head: Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, Strand in NYC (Manhattan), Politics and Prose (flagship in NW) in DC, Parnassus Books in Nashville,  The Bookworm in Omaha, probably Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago (it used to be the Seminary Co-op, but I don't think it currently is). I haven't done much comparison in Columbus, Ohio, but it's difficult for me to imagine any other store there has deeper stacks than the 32 or so rooms of The Book Loft of German Village. If I'm wrong about that, please point me in the direction of the one that surpasses it. Powell's City of Books is obvious for Portland (although I visited there shortly before I started my formal count). 

On the other hand, if you're looking for expert curation and making the most magic with the least space, perhaps Wild Rumpus Books in Minneapolis (mostly for kids books), Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul (also kids), Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, Lost City Books in DC, The Book Shop in Nashville, The Next Chapter in Omaha. There are too many to name, and lifting up some of these here is not meant to say that others fall short. Indeed, trying to account for the distinctive communities and bookseller curation in these stores is part of why I wanted to start this blog--so there will be more to come. As you can imagine, it's particularly difficult for me to play favorites in general, and especially in Chicago, where I live.

I've only minimally accounted for used bookstores, which can have their own distinctive characters. Some deep, magical, and well-organized; others "optimized for serendipity."

We'll also have an opportunity to dig into the stores offering special points of focus for their curation--Black owned, women owned, LGBTQ+ owned, Asian-American owned. To use Josh Cook's typology in The Art of Libromancy, bookstores generally fall into one of three categories: radical, conservative, and progressive.

Here's how Cook defines them:
    - Radical: "overtly and explicitly support specifically articulated ideologies and itendities with their programs and stock."

    - Conservative: "[understand] bookselling to be amoral, displacing all of the moral aspects of books onto the writers for what is written, publishers for what is published, and readers for what is purchased."

    - Progressive: "[acknowledge] the inherent political nature of bookselling, that booksellers' decisions influence and are influenced by systems of power that surround them, that bookselling exists in a political and historical context, and that booksellers' systems, techniques, policies, procedures, traditions, and 'common sense' grew within and reflect that context." (pp. 61-62)

I'll dig into some of these in other posts. This one is already too long. I'll finish with an appendix listing my favorite reads by category for 2025.

Appendix

Some of these books are recent, many are not. They are listed in no particular order. I hope to explore some of them more deeply in other posts, and will add the "AWIGI" at that point.

Fiction

-Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor

-A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley

-The She-Devil in the Mirror, Horacio Castellanos Moya

-My Friends, Hisham Matar

-The Round House, Louise Erdrich

-The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley

-The Good Lord Bird, James McBride

-How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu

-América del Norte, Nicolás Medina Mora

-Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

-Animal Life, Auður Ave Ólafsdóttir

-Your Absence is Darkness, Jón Kalman Stefánsson

-People Like Us, Jason Mott

Non-fiction

-The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century, Josh Cook

-The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, Kerri K. Greenidge

-An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America, Matthew Stewart

-The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy, Matthew Stewart

-The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, Wendell Berry

-These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore

-Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard

-The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer

Poetry

-The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka

-Dirt Songs, Kari Gunter-Seymour

-Dead Dad Jokes, Ollie Schminkey

-Information Desk, Robin Schiff

-Kin, Margaret Britton Vaughn

-Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz

Memoirs, Missives, Mixed Genre, and Miscellany

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg

Walk through Walls, Marina Abramović

My Life in Seventeen Books, Jon M. Sweeney

(Most of) my favorite fiction reads in 2025