If there is a heaven, I wouldn’t mind it having the textures and musty perfume of a used bookstore. Here in Bakersfield, a town not usually known for its literary pleasures, we have the ruggedly sublime Bookhounds. Today’s treasures, each of which I bought for $1.99:
Miller Williams’s The Ways We Touch,
William Matthews’s Flood,
Larry Levis’s The Selected Levis,
Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth,
and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.