Interview with a Bookstore: DIESEL

The Staff Shelf: DIESEL Bookstore
What are booksellers reading?

When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the staff at DIESEL Bookstore what they recommend.

In Which the Addition of a Full Bar is Considered

Alison Reid and I opened DIESEL, A Bookstore on June 1st 1989 in Emeryville, California, a corrupt, fading Chandleresque industrial town which was filling up with artists’ lofts, and would eventually transform into a biotech and digital startup industrial park with several shopping malls. Before the transformation was complete we moved our store back to our original stomping grounds in North Oakland. We had both worked in bookstores before and didn’t feel there was a bookstore in the East Bay that we wanted to work in, so we decided to open our own. A combination of a respectful workplace and a dynamic interaction with readers, along with an eclectic and lively selection of books on all subjects was what were shooting for. The kind of neighborhood bookstore every neighborhood should have. Our first thought was to be a 24-hour bookstore/bar/cafe, but we scaled that back a bit. We’ve been there for the last 20 years (adding three stores—Malibu, LA, and Marin). We wanted to create a fun, engaging, rich, aesthetic, urban bookstore that radiated out into the communities it serves. We also wanted a respectful, decent workplace for booksellers to have satisfying careers in.

 –John Evans

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SLIDESHOW: DIESEL Staff Recommendations

CHRIS RECOMMENDS: This is a strange beast of a memoir, mixed with observations and family legend, that is is more than the sum of its parts. Centered around the myth of another bestial mix, the minotaur, it seems appropriate that Gospodinov’s ruminations should digress and wander, pursuing the twists and turns of memory, all while seeking the center of the labyrinth.

CHRIS RECOMMENDS: In a hundred pages, Lindqvist moves elegantly from meditations on the power of art to the problems of social inequality. Through gorgeous language and striking imagery, this part-moral coming-of-age story, he explores the purpose of art in a world of suffering.

BRAD RECOMMENDS: For three wintry weeks in 1974, German filmmaker Werner Herzog walked some five hundred miles, from Munich to Paris. His friend and mentor, Lotte Eisner, was gravely ill in France, and Herzog believed his journey might save her. Few filmmakers so completely embody their own cinematic intensity as Herzog, and the impressionistic journal of his walk is a much-beloved document of those who have set out on foot in search of something only they could articulate (or possibly even understand).

COLIN RECOMMENDS: It is as if the very stones of Rome took voice and began to sing

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