Places around Tampa Bay that matter to readers and writers: bookstores, public libraries, museums and good rooms to work in. Written from Clearwater with the details a local writer actually needs before driving across the county.
CountercultureJack Kerouac typed On the Road on a 120-foot roll in three weeks and then revised it for six years. He spent his last years in a cinderblock house in St. Petersburg's Disston Heights, and the house where he died…
Book ReviewsBook two of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy takes fifteen-year-old Anna through Ellis Island and onto a train to Chicago, where she learns how people fear and prey on immigrants. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsDeanna Bennett's memoir of the first year after her husband Tom died, holiday by holiday, from the depths of sorrow to the start of a new life. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsThe final book of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy follows Anna through war, the great influenza epidemic and the temperance fight, as a Lithuanian girl builds an American life between 1914 and 1919. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsThe memoir Helen Dragunas began and her daughter Deanna Bennett finished: growing up the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants through the 1920s and the Depression, and what happened to the real Anna. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsBook one of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy follows a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl and her stern mother across Europe by rail and across the Atlantic in steerage in 1914. A tribute and a review.
GhostwritingMost ghostwriting now runs over video, and many ghostwriters don't travel. Here's why, whether it hurts your book, and how to get in-person time if it matters to you.
BookstoresLibrary Friends groups take donations and sell them to fund programming, and several have permanent drop points including a drive-up slot at Palm Harbor. Used bookshops buy selectively. Nobody wants encyclopedias, textbooks past their edition, or anything damp.
LibrariesTown 'N Country Regional Public Library is the closest Hillsborough library to Pinellas, about fourteen miles from Clearwater. Two floors with an elevator, a used bookstore on the ground floor where some books are free, private study rooms, and a…
Children's BooksThe Jimmie B. Keel Regional Library in Tampa holds the highest rating of any library or bookstore in this series. Open until nine at night Monday through Thursday, the latest closing of anything on either list, with a large enclosed…
HistoryThe Henry B. Plant Museum occupies the south wing of the 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel, a 511-room Moorish Revival resort whose thirteen silver minarets still define the Tampa skyline. The furniture is the actual furniture. In 1898 the hotel became…
BookstoresFeed Your Imagination is a small vintage-leaning comic shop on Central Avenue in west St. Petersburg. Classic and modern comics, graphic novels, and figures at low prices, run by an owner who sends customers to other shops when he cannot…
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