“A group of people came together and said, ‘Hey, we have this shared pipe dream,’” explains Tom Campbell, one of the two co-owners of the Regulator Bookshop on Ninth Street in Durham, which this December celebrates its 30th year of business. I’m talking with Tom and his business partner, John Valentine, in the store’s messy […]
Gerry Canavan
Posted inArt
Connoisseurs of disaster
Since 1986, the New Stories from the South anthology from Algonquin Books has distilled the year’s best Southern fiction from the hundreds of stories published annually by Southern writers, in regional magazines, or about the South as a whole. This year, for the first time, series founder Shannon Ravenel did not make the editorial decisions, […]
Posted inGuides
Carrom
When I arrive at Broad Street Café on poker and carrom night, I find Billy Stevens doing the same thing he’s been doing for the last 20 years: teaching people how to play carrom. “There’s an invisible line running from the center of the pocket to the center of the disc and out the other […]
Posted inArt
Moon rising
The heroine of Rebecca Lee’s debut novel, The City Is a Rising Tide, is Justine Laxness, a young 30-something working for an alternative-medicine nonprofit in New York in the early ’90s. The nonprofit, whose funding has come mostly from an eccentric millionaire now under investigation by the IRS, wants to build a hospice in China–but […]
Posted inGuides
Taking comedy seriously
Zach Ward, founder of Carrboro’s DSI Comedy Theater, may be the hardest-working man in show business. Since he founded Chapel Hill High School Improv as a freshman in 1993, Ward has dedicated his life to comedy in North Carolina, building an active theatrical community that now includes 46 local players and many more alumni nationwide. […]