• Skip to main content
  • Current
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Reviews
  • 🔎

bookstores

A night with National Book Award finalist Eliza Griswold

John Fea   |  October 11, 2024

On Thursday night I got the chance to chat with writer Eliza Griswold about her new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church. A few days before this event, which was held […]

Why Viktor Orbán may want to visit Bestsellers Bookshop in Budapest

John Fea   |  August 9, 2023

A friend spotted Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in Budapest. As many of you know, prime minister Viktor Orbán is trying to build a Christian nationalist state in Hungary modeled closely on a kind of Trumpian populism. […]

Publishers Weekly honors The Midtown Scholar as its bookstore of the year

John Fea   |  May 24, 2023

Congratulations! Learn more here. Midtown Scholars Bookstores co-owners and founders Catherine Lawrence and Eric Papenfuse talk about the origins of the store. Here is our coverage of the finalists. In the video above, Lawrence and Papenfuse discuss their move to […]

Publishers Weekly announces finalists for “Bookstore of the Year”

John Fea   |  March 28, 2023

They are: Edmunds Bookshop in Edmunds, Washington Harvey’s Tales in Geneva, Illinois. Interabang Books in Dallas, Texas Main Street Books in Lafayette, Indiana And (drumroll please): MIDTOWN SCHOLAR BOOKSTORE in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania! We had our book launch for Believe Me: […]

Remembering the Strand Bookstore’s best customer

John Fea   |  February 8, 2023

His name was Tom Verlaine, the guitarist and lead singer of the 1970s band Television. Here is a taste of Colin Groundwater‘s piece at LitHub: If you swung by the carts that line the Strand’s exterior, where all the books […]

Byron Borger reviews In Praise of Good Bookstores

John Fea   |  August 4, 2022

If you read this blog, you know Byron Borger. He and his wife Beth run the Hearts & Minds bookstore in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, the best Christian bookstore in the country. Over at Christianity Today, Borger reviews Jeff Deutsch’s book In […]

The Midtown Scholar’s Grand-Reopening!

John Fea   |  May 29, 2021

I am very excited about this weekend’s re-opening of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg! Back in April 2020, I joined Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, for the bookstore’s first pandemic […]