By Michaela Cavallaro
From our February 2025 issue
A long line of talented authors has fostered a vibrant literary scene in Maine, with lots of support from our state’s community of avid readers. So it should come as no surprise that Maine boasts the country’s second most bookstores per capita, more than doubling the national average. In the interest of exploring this thriving ecosystem of writing, selling, and reading books (and also just because we were curious), we asked some notable writers where they like to go to find their next good read.
Bridgton Books
Selected, without any coordination, by Lois Lowry and Stephen King
Photos by Dave Waddell
“Bridgton Books is really a very simple name for a simple place,” King says. “It doesn’t have a fancy bookstore name like Back of the Page or anything. It’s just a flat-out bookstore. It’s a wooden building, and the floor creaks, and there’s a big white cat, and the books are heaped everywhere. A lot of them have stickers on them that say ‘sale price’ — they’re remainders. Some of them are really old.” Justin and Pam Ward have run the shop since it opened, in 1993, and King is an admirer of the collection they’ve amassed. “They have a wonderful children’s section, a young-adult section, huge amounts of mysteries, and all the stuff that summer people want to read on rainy days. It’s got this upsy-downsy floor, and the shelves are crammed, and the aisles are narrow. If you want, you can buy some of the shit you can buy in bookstores now — jigsaw puzzles and maps and postcards. In the front of the store, crammed together, they have new fiction, and they have one of everything you’d want to read. Some of it’s alphabetized and some of it’s stacked up. It’s a great place.”
The shop isn’t too far from King’s place in Lovell, and it’s also right down the road from the 1768 farmhouse where Lowry spends summers. While it’s possible to enter through the front door, kitty-corner from Renys, locals like Lowry often come through the back, near the shelves of used books. “I like to linger there,” she says. One time, she picked up a cookbook that looked interesting, especially once she saw that its previous owner had jotted notes about the recipes and the dinner guests they’d served. “When I got home, I looked more carefully and I recognized some names,” Lowry says. “Then, I realized it was my cookbook, and I had donated it.” She adds that the owners really set the tone for the shop. “They’re a wonderful couple,” she says. “Justin is very quiet and introspective, and Pam is very outgoing, with a wonderfully loud voice, often talking about books.” Among staff picks, Lowry is partial to Justin’s. She also browses the table of remainders, where she’ll often grab two copies of the same book so she and her husband can have a little book club of their own. Over the years, Lowry has struck up enjoyable conversations with fellow browsers among the stacks. “Strangers greet each other at Bridgton Books,” she says, “because there you all are, and you care about the same things.”
After bouncing all around the country, Lois Lowry eventually settled in Maine and began a writing career that has, over the span of almost five decades, produced more than 40 books (some of her early work, in the ’70s, included contributions to this magazine). In the ’90s, she won not one but two Newbery medals. The first was for Number the Stars, about the escape of Jews from Denmark during the German occupation, and the second was for The Giver, a dystopian tale about a society that prizes uniformity and suppresses emotion. The latter has remained one of the most frequently challenged books in schools and libraries. Lowry, who has homes in Falmouth, Bridgton, and Florida, likes to sport an I’M WITH THE BANNED T-shirt, with The Giver depicted between novels by Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood.
On her nightstand: The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood
A former columnist for the University of Maine student newspaper and onetime Hampden Academy English teacher, Stephen King divides his time between Bangor, Lovell, and Florida. For about 20 years, he was an occasional member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band, made up of prominent writers, that put on shows to raise money for charities. King has written many dozens of best-selling novels and hundreds of short stories, and his work has frequently been adapted for television and film. (Maybe you’ve heard of, say, Carrie or It or The Shining?) His latest novel, Never Flinch, a thriller that revolves around revenge and vigilantism, is due out in May.
On his nightstand: The Perfect Nanny, by Leïla Slimani
Print: A Bookstore
Selected by Maya Williams
Photos by Tara Rice
In 2016, when Emily Russo and Josh Christie announced the launch of Print: A Bookstore, some bibliophiles wondered whether Portland could really support another indie bookstore. Nearly a decade later, the Congress Street shop is a thriving hub for book talks with authors from around the country, with recent notable guests including Zadie Smith, Tom Perrotta, and Louise Penny. It doesn’t hurt that Russo is the daughter of Pulitzer-winning novelist Richard Russo or that Christie’s late father, John, wrote numerous books about the Maine outdoors. But while industry connections may have helped early on, Print stands on its own reputation now. Williams discovered the shop soon after moving from North Carolina to Maine, in 2017, and has particularly come to appreciate its goofy TikTok presence — staffers stalking a catwalk while modeling Print’s latest merch or a new employee introduced in a black-and-white homage to the Addams Family — and its dedication to supporting local authors. “They’re very intentional about what they carry,” Williams says. “I love how queer friendly and community oriented they are.”
Maya Williams is fresh off a three-year term as poet laureate of Portland, an honor conferred by the city’s public library. Now, Williams, who uses ey, they, and she pronouns, is out with a third poetry collection, What’s So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway, a chapbook about community tragedy and finding joy amid sorrow, and is also working on a prose project about religion, grief, and pilgrimages to death sites.
On ey’s nightstand: Devil Is Fine, by John Vercher
Left Bank Books
Selected by Tess Gerritsen
Photos by Dave Waddell
Left Bank Books was originally located in Searsport but moved to Belfast’s old granite-faced Opera House in 2012. Julia Clapp and Tiffany Howard, a pair of Belfast natives and longtime Left Bank employees, took over in 2022. Gerritsen has been taking the short drive up Route 1 to visit the shop for years. “It’s really darling,” she says. “I love its coziness — it’s just big enough to hold books that will catch your interest.” She makes a point to hit the store when she’s shopping for gifts, whether for books or for novelties like Agatha Christie–themed jigsaw puzzles. She also stops in for readings and other promotional events, for her own books and others’. Last summer, she led a discussion with Tom Ricks, a Pulitzer-winning alumnus of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post who had just published a novel, Everyone Knows But You: A Tale of Murder on the Maine Coast. “Left Bank punches way above its weight,” Gerritsen says. “It really is able to draw impressive crowds into the store in support of authors.”
Terry “Tess” Gerritsen went to medical school and worked as a physician, and then she started writing. Now, she’s a practitioner of suspense, with more than 30 pulse-quickening novels to her name. The Camden resident is best known for her stories about Boston Police Department detective Jane Rizzoli and Massachusetts chief medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles (which inspired the popular Rizzoli & Isles television series). Her next book, The Summer Guests, due out in March, is the second in her Martini Club series, about retired CIA agents getting into hot water in a quiet Maine town.
On her nightstand: The Oligarch’s Daughter, by Joseph Finder
Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers
Selected by Governor Janet Mills
Photos by Dave Waddell
A proud Farmington native, Mills is a devotee of Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers, in the heart of town, not least because of the personal attention offered by owner Kenny Brechner. “I can email Kenny questions at any time of day or night,” Mills says. “I’ll say, ‘Do you have any books by Cormac McCarthy?’ And he’ll say, ‘Yes, I can get you this or that.’ Then, he’ll charge it to my account and drop it off at my doorstep.” And the governor insists such service is not reserved for boldfaced names. Brechner, who has owned the store since the late ’90s, has supported literacy outreach programs in local schools, hosted Harry Potter theme parties, and run a March Madness–style Tournament of Tomes, in which customers vote for their favorites among the shop’s top sellers of the previous year. “He’s read everything he sells,” Mills says, noting that Brechner knows his customers as well as he does his inventory. “I can ask, ‘What can I get my son-in-law who’s a music agent? What has my brother Paul not read yet?’ And he always has the answer.”
On long drives from Farmington up into Aroostook County, where Kay Mills was raised, the high-school English teacher would recite poems by the likes of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandberg. Those were formative experiences for her daughter Janet, who went on to become a poet, an attorney, and, eventually, Maine’s first female governor. Poetry, Janet Mills told the Associated Press a couple of years ago, is “a way of learning the world and opening our eyes and ears to what other people are experiencing.” Mills published some of her free verse back in the mid-’70s, when she was a law student, and she has continued writing even as her career has pulled her in different directions. When she released a few poems after her second inauguration, they garnered national attention in the press. She says she has drafted fragments of new work more recently, but her day job still keeps her plenty busy.
On her nightstand: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Back Cove Books
Selected by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
Photos by Tara Rice
Books are precious things, and Back Cove Books provides a handy metaphor to drive the point home: shelves of biographies and true crime inside a bank vault, complete with a massive steel door. Becca Morton, a former Print employee, opened Back Cove, in Portland’s historic Odd Fellows Hall (which once housed a bank), in 2022. She wanted to create a community gathering spot and literary destination for the off-peninsula Woodfords Corner neighborhood. “There’s something special about being able to go in somewhere you’ve gotten to know the people and they can recommend books to you,” Fay-LeBlanc says. Recently, he was particularly impressed by the launch party Back Cove hosted for Next Level, a picture book about neurodiversity by Maine author Samara Cole Doyon. “The book is about her relationship with her differently abled son,” Fay-LeBlanc says. “He was there, and Becca made the space more friendly to people like him. It was a lovely community moment.”
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, a nonprofit that offers writing workshops, promotes Maine authors, and gathers the state’s literary community for festivals, awards presentations, and other events. He’s also a poet, and his most recent collection, Deke Dangle Dive, is a moving, lyrical self-evaluation laced with, as the title suggests, reflections on hockey. After the deaths of his mother and brother during the pandemic years, he’s working on a collection of poems about personal loss and collective grief.
On his nightstand: The Most, by Jessica Anthony
The Briar Patch
Selected by Morgan Talty
Bottom left: Bookstore owner Gibran Graham. Photos by Dave Waddell
Growing up on the Penobscot Nation’s Indian Island, Talty didn’t spend much time in nearby Bangor. “But if my mom was downtown and had the money, she would go to Mexicali Blues and I’d go to the bookstore,” he says, referring to the Briar Patch, which for much of its more-than-30-year history focused exclusively on children’s books. “I just liked how it felt like you could hide with a book in any corner.” Gibran Graham bought the shop in 2017 and expanded its inventory to include the full gamut of books for adults, along with games, crafts, puzzles, and gifts. The Briar Patch recently survived a leak that swamped most of the kids’ section, as well as a major health crisis for Graham, who has had to work his way back from a debilitating stroke. Yet the bookseller made a point to introduce Talty, whose mother died in 2021, at the Bangor launch party for Fire Exit. “The highlight of that night for me is Gibran standing up from his wheelchair and taking his time to introduce me,” Talty says. “I can’t think of that without thinking about my mom. It’s lots of things, but the big one is truly the resilience they both had.”
Morgan Talty is the author of two critically acclaimed books, the 2022 story collection Night of the Living Rez and the 2024 novel Fire Exit. Both works took inspiration from the author’s experience as a member of the Penobscot Nation in Maine. “Though Talty’s subject matter is often dark . . . he has a light touch, and draws us in with a calm intimacy,” a New York Times review of Fire Exit noted. A resident of Levant, outside Bangor, Talty is presently working on both a memoir and another novel, and he’s teaching creative writing and literature at the University of Maine.
On his nightstand: Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts, by Nick Rees Gardner
Longfellow Books
Selected by Ryan T. Higgins
Photos by Tara Rice
Since opening almost 25 years ago, Longfellow Books has weathered the ascendance of Amazon, a catastrophic bout of water damage that ruined nearly half the inventory, and the arrival of more bookstores around Portland. Owned today by Ari Gersen, son of one of the store’s founders, Longfellow remains a pillar of the local lit scene. Given Higgins’s craft, it makes sense that he feels a special affection for Bring Your Child to a Bookstore Day, a national event that he thinks Longfellow does particularly well, with book giveaways and author meet-and-greets. Plus, Higgins is grateful for Longfellow’s support early in his career, when he was driving around New England sweet-talking indie shops into carrying his then-self-published books. Heck, he’s such a fan of the place that he even has nice things to say about the bathroom: “Because it’s semi-private, you have to go ask, and they’ll give you the code that’s been printed out that week, and you take it downstairs with you. It feels like you’re part of some secret club.”
Photos by Tara Rice
Author and illustrator of nearly two dozen children’s books, Ryan T. Higgins dreamed up Bruce, a grumpy bear who takes in a clutch of goslings, as well as, among other colorful characters, a young dinosaur named Penelope, who has an appetite for her human peers. Both of those protagonists have been featured in books — Mother Bruce and We Don’t Eat Our Classmates — that landed on the New York Times bestseller list and won the E. B. White Read Aloud Award. The Kittery resident is currently working on another Bruce book, Goodnight Bruce.
On his nightstand: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Stephen Brusatte
