We have wine and beer and music on the weekends. How many book events do you do on a regular basis . On a yearly basis, about 600 a year. Often kid events, adult events, other kinds of things but we are very active. When did you open . About 35 years ago. Why . Well, you know, the story is basically i was an english major in college. I didnt want to give up the dream of being part of the literary culture and one quick way to do that was to get into the book business. I loved bookstores when i was a kid. I saw myself at the bookstore more than the library in college. I went to law school. Why coral gables . I am originally from miami beach so when i moved back from where i was going to school, coral gables was a community i didnt know very well but i explored it. It was right before an independent book shop at the time ripe for an surrounded by miami . What you think of miami is really about 26 different little cities. Miami beach, miami, miami south. So coral gables is just one of those little cities. It is one of the most historic as well. It was built in the mediterranean style in the teens and 20s. It is a gorgeous little city that has become a cultural gem within the miami community. Who is your audience . Just about everybody. Because of the uniqueness of the store we get people coming from all over. The local audience is an audience that is just a couple blocks away there is a residential area. We are in a Business District and wonderful arts cinema nearby. Now, you are involved with the miami book fest. What is your involvement . I was wond one of the founde founders. I was a young kid and i had no idea what the future would bring. And we were brought together and they said would you like to put on a book fair and we said great, we did, and miami at the time was suffering. It was in the early 80s, Time Magazine had a story that said miami, paradise lost with a big question mark and i think what eduardo wanted to do was bring light to miami. He had been to the barcelona book fair. I had been to the new york one and others. The whole Community Came together. It was a very Diverse Community at the time, it still is, and we decided to cater to the diversity of miami. What is it like today in it is a vibrant city with so many communities different than each other but tied together by its diversity. What is is now happening, which i am loving, is the Cultural Community is becoming much more sophisticated. We have incredible writers who live here. The movie moonlight was a miami original more or less. There is a lot happening here that wasnt happening when i was a kid going up in miami beach. What about the festival . How big has it grown . The festival has grown remarkably. We started out with two days. Now it is a week. We have probably close to 600 authors that come over the week period of the book fair. It really has become something miami is very proud of. It is the big tent under which all of miami fits. So it is something i take aerate lot of pride in. Why has miami developed such a writers village . We can probably spend three or four programs on just that. But i think part of the attraction on miami is how strange it is. As you know, miami started probably if you ask people about miami they would have told you about the mystery writers that came from here. People like charles williford. That all happened because miami was so strange. All of the strange murders that took place here, you know, the cocaine cowboys. You couldnt make up something that you didnt hear in the news two days or two months later. Since that early, early thrust of miami, you then began to find miamis community becoming more rich allowing poets to live here. We have cable mcgraph who won the kingsly and mcarthur genius prize. You have wonderful fiction writers living here. An incredibly diverse latinAmerican Community. People writing in spanish and portuguise. And we will talk to other actors from here. All of those wrieters are so spor important. Welcome to miami. This is booktv and for the next two hours we will have a discussion about brooks, writing, what you are reading and other guests are reading. Mitchell kaplan is the owner of books and books bookstore. They have this location, one in the miami airport and where us . Lincoln road in south beach. We are also in the performing arts center. The adrian Artist Center for performing arts. They have a store there as well. We opened up a new store that is going to pop up called books and boo books and bikes. It a bookstore and bike shop. Where is that location . That is in lynwood which is your version of brooklyn. Well, we are going to be having that discussion. It is an interactive discussion. As always on cspan live programs your chance to participate. We will put the phone numbers up a little bit later after we meet our other guests. Lets go inside and we will join our other guests as well. We mean let tom go in first because he has the camera. So, Mitchell Kaplan, can an independent bookstore thrive and survive . I think definitely. Independent bookstores are coming into their own once again. I think last year there was Something Like 6070 new bookshops that have opened. There is something to be said for real stations as opposed to what people do and find on the internet. There is certainly internet shopping that goes on. But there is also something about a sense of community that is created with a real space like a bookshop. Is this a Community Space . Go ahead and sit down. Oh, it most definitely is. I think we are really about spaces. When you see folks who have joined us are they familiar faces to you . Yes, they have. They run the program at Florida International university and ana menendez who is an author and former journalists. Ana menendez you wrote a book called in cuba, i was a german shepherd. How did you come up with that . It was a punch line for a joke i heard as a reporter. I used to cover Little Havana my first time at the herald and a joke tony lopez, a wonderful scupalture told me and i was doing a profile and couldnt put it into the profile but it stayed with me. When i left journalism and began to write fiction, i said im going to write a whole story revolving around this joke. Host Les Standiford, what is a master of fine arts and how do you get into the program . A master of fine arts is one of those degrees that i would hesitate to tell parents to send their daughters and sons to come to because the parents probably want them to learn how to sell bonds, do things they can assure themselves will make their children a lot of money. You dont become a writer to become rich and famous. What we do is offer the opportunity for those people who cant do anything else to take that talent thank you to take that talent and to bring it to the max, shape it into a way that will find that audience that the person is looking for. And it is like all the arts, many, many are called and very few are chosen. But the reason we are there, i think, is to give those applicants and students who are admitted professional tools so when they go out into the cold, cruel world they know what is required. That is not a guarantee of success as we know. The arts are terribly competitive. But ours is a practical minded program. Not theoretical. You want to reach your audience, lets talk about what your audience is, how you can take that talent there is and and hone it to the professional level. I liken it to a bunch of young men who have shown up, who have been drafted by the nfl, and they show up at summer Training Camp and the coach says you are tremendously talented and lets talk about what it takes to operate at the professional level. Host day one, all the fresh faces looking at you, what do you tell them . What do they learn day one . That you have a lot of talent or you wouldnt be here. Lets talk about how to shape that talent in a way that makes a connection. You know, everybody who comes in is very good at expression but i say babies are too but nobody wants to hear what you have to say. What we have going to talk about is making that connection with the audience. Ana menendez, when you sit down to write a book, what is the most difficult part for you . Well, let me just say before that is that you would not know but Les Standiford was my professor at fiu many, many years ago. He is not to blame for anything. But it was the only class i took and it was as an undergraduate and it encompassed everything. I have a book here i still use and i think he still uses. What is the hardest thing . These days it is sitting down to write. I have a small child and time has just gotten away from me unfortunately. Okay. We are showing this book. What is it about this book that works for you . Well, i have i brought three books and they are all three that have been very important to me throughout my life. The first one was carl sanbergs wind song and then early moon. Which my uncle, who is a poet, gave me as a child. I think i was six or seven when he gave me the first one. This one is dedicated in 1979 so i was nine. It was just a beautiful i still remember the fog comes in and it was a beautiful book. I think what it did for me was demystified poetry. So many of us are afraid of poetry. And it just made it, you know, part of my language. Then there was this book that les introduced to me almost 30 years ago, i suppose, it is now. I amdating all of us. And then another book was one i picked up here at books books when i was a columnist at miami herald and was having a rough ride i used to hang out here a lot especially among the poetry books and i picked up and you will see it is annotated heavily the odes of horror which are translations by contemporary poets edited and they are fantastic. H horace is a comfort. Why do you worry the infinite question with your finite mind . Things that were very comforting to me. The obvious question i have for you knowing your love of poetry but you are not poet. I know how hard it is. How do you incorporate the poetry into your writing . How does it influence your writing . I am not sure it has although some people say my writing is lyrical. But, i think, it is just the love of the word and the sentence and a sense of the rhythm. But also what poetry strives for is a capturing of the essence in a very few words. I think that is such a wonderful calling were the writer. Host Les Standiford, you have written both nonfiction and fiction books. You are not a poet either. Why do you teach poetry and bring it into a writing class . The fact is when i was in graduate my school myself we were forced even if we thought of ourselves as fiction writers to take a class in poetry. And i remember talking to take the class with henry taylor who went on to win n award and i thought this is it. After this class i am out of here. My idea of poetry was by the shores of goomy. I had no idea what modern poetry was. But i went in and discovered a whole new world and for the first 34 years after graduating the only thing i could publish were poems. I was, for many years, a practicing poet and enjoyed it. I came to understand that i think poets are after the same essential moment that fiction writers are at the end of a story or at the end of a novel. All we writers want to have the reader put down the piece, regardless of how long it is, and say yes, that is exactly right. That is what where was looking for. We want that moment. What i envy poets is like poplar songwriters they can get that in a page. Such a short period of time. I am working for 2300 pages, 23 years on something, to get that hopefully at the end of the book. But we are all in it together. The other thing i learned is the words are so important to me, the language of every sentence, even if it is nonfiction or fiction is just as important to me as was a line of poetry. Host recent nonfiction, last train to paradise. Who was Henry Flagler . What is his role in florida . I was going to call the book the man who invented florida that is he is. Before Henry Flagler there wasnt much to florida. The largest city was jacksonville with 4,000 people. A couple thousand in people in tampa. If you drew a line from jacksonville southwest to tampa in the middle of the state that was as far as you could go. There was no palm beach. There was no bocaraton, there was no miami. 20,000 people and an important naval station was the most important place in the state but you could only get there by boat for a long time even after flagler came in the early 1880 said it remained that way. He did an amazing thing after extending his railroad down the eastern seaboard of florida creating palm beach, creating miami. A little outpost called fort dallas. Someone came to him with the notion of extending that railroad to key west and at the time he was 72 years old, had all the money he needed and he said im going to do it. I think he was motivated by the fact people said it was impossible. He proved the impossible could be done. In doing so, he stitched together that Little Island and really clesed the american frontier in 1912. He is responsible for that traffic jam on 95. No matter how many lanes there will never be enough because people are fascinated with going to end of the american road. Mitchell kaplan, what is on your bedside . What are you reading today . Well, interesting. I have been reading a book that many people know. Two books. One is called being mortal it a book if you havent read you want to read. It is kind of amazing. I am dealing with sickness in my own family and this has been very, very helpful in terms of understanding how one deals with an elderly parent and the kinds of things to look out for and the kind of conversations to have and that sort of thing. So, being mortal has been good. And will shallbe is remarkable in the selections and essays about books. He wrote a book called books for living and it is a series of books that have inspired him over the years. I have been reading this to get a little substance to face the challenging times of the last couple weeks actually. Ana menendez, same question. Well, i just finished second in time. I rarely recommend books just because i feel it is so personal and i dont want to impose my taste on people but it is a really beautiful book. I love everything about it. It is a chorus of voices about the end of the soviet union. She talks to ordinary people about their struggle with the end of the soviet union. And i love it so much because, well, the voices she collects are astonishing. The fact they are ordinary people is something i think we aspire to as fiction writers. This is a book of nonfiction but what we aspire to. Illuminate ordinary people and this is a collection of a hundred of these voices. I am reading right now, only on number nine, 20 lessons by the 20t century by timothy synder. It just came out. You were talking about the things you can get at bookstores that you cant on the internet. And number nine where i ended today is be kind to our language. Think of your own way of speaking and on and on make an effort to separate yourself from the internet, read books. I thought i will end it there and bring this. The then i just finished reading, kind of obscure for americans, a czech writer. It is about what books give you. It is a quirky book. It isnt anything i think would be published here today because there is no plot. It is a very short book about a man who collects waste paper and when he sees the books he wants he takes them home. There is no real plot pulling you through. It is just this love of books. It is a beautiful little book and i just finished reading that. Harbal is the authors last name and the book is too loud of solitude. What is on your reading list . First, i want to third the idea of browsing in a bookstore delight. There is no such thing while the internet is wonderful and gets books out there and allows people to reach things they might not otherwise there is no such thing as a pile of books on a table on the internet. You come into the nonfiction section of books books and maybe you are looking for something and cant find it but while looking you see a dozen other books that sound interesting. You see the covers, look in them, and maybe you can learn to do this on the internet but i never have. The second thing i want to say is about being asked what you are reading. I am reading my students ma manuscripts. Thousands of them. Some of them, thank god, because i have graduate students, are good. Sort of following up on what ana said i have come to the point where i cant bring myself in public to say you should read this one because what if my other friend is listening and they are thinking well, why didnt you boost my book . [laughter] i want to talk about the wonderful writer who many of you know james w hall and i would not dream of missing a james w hall writer and i hope some of you feel the same way. But a couple books i have been reading and i have nothing to do with these. Do not know these people. One, a novel that is going to come out here in a couple weeks called unreliable by a guy named lee nervy. This book is a real tour of force about a fellow who on the first page says you cant trust a thing i say but i may have just killed my exwife and i am not so sure perhaps my lover, too. That is how the novel begins. It was a dare i couldnt pass up. He carries along and you do finally find out who done it by the end. But i think my that time you are laughing so hard you dont really care. I really enjoyed that book. Then a piece of nonfiction i think is remarkable and i cant imagine anyone reading this and not being swept away. It is called rise by carry brookens. It is a story of a woman who she was abused, her children abused, she walks out and gets it in her mind the way she will save this family, put it back together is to build a house from raw land and she manages to do it and the record of it is absolutely astonishing. I cant recommend it highly enough. Before we go any further, i want to get our Television Audience involved. We will put the phone numbers on the screen. If you dial the number in, please let us know what you are reading or what kind of books you read. We have three people, very involved in the world of literature and books and here is your chance to ask them some questions as well. 2027488200 fore the eastern time zones. 2027488201 for our mountain and pacific people. You can contact our facebook or finally send an email to us. Booktv at. Cspan. Org. Also we have an audience here at books and books one of the 600 events that are happening this year at books and books, and were going to be passing around a mic in just a few minutes so if you have any questions for our panel as welg please ask them.