At the top of Chicken Corner's wish list for quite some time has been a bookstore -- an independent shop that took chances and also stocked classics. For a brief while we had a lovely little boutique on gallery row (when it was gallery row, on EP Ave.). But that store was underfunded, carrying only a nicely selected, spare stock of mainly used paperbacks; it didn't make it. Then, for the last four or so years, it's been nothing except Amazon, which seems to live the air we breathe. But, strangely, enough, this fall Chicken Corner got her wish. A viable shop, Stories L.A., moved in next door to 826LA, its merchandize and sense of mission in stunning equilibrium. It has books to sell, buy or trade, new and used. And it has a cafe. It looks good. As my buddies from The Eastsider and Dwell reported, the shelves are transplants from Dutton's, which died so famously last year.

Stories also likes an author who makes some noise.

To wit: among the store's first readers will be Jason Flores-Williams, a New York writer who recently moved to Venice. He's the author of The Last Stand of Mr. America and two other novels. He has written for Hustler, The Nation and High Times, and there is such a variety of information about him online that I thought there were two writers of the same name, if not the same Mexican-Lebanese-American heritage. He's a lawyer and political activist, described in the following terms after an unauthorized performance in front of Carnegie Hall:

Jason Flores-Williams believes that creative resistance is the new relevant art. Subvert everything, nothing deserves to stand! We must produce culture that is beyond their cooption. We have to fight The Man on his own turf. JFW wrote the High Times' Call To Resistance, which was at the center of the 2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York City. His novel "The Last Stand of Mr. America," has been a controversial cult hit and got him banned from reading at Columbia University.

I haven't read Flores-Williams' fiction yet and don't know if I'll like it. Is it a bad thing to approach a work of fiction with caution? The first google offering on Flores-Williams is a ten-year-old interview that was offensive enough that I almost changed my mind about writing this post. (In a phone conversation, Flores-Williams said the interview has "haunted me from day one." He explained that he'd been trying to bait the interviewer who was "uptight," which I believed given how laughably over-the-top many of his statements were.) Other snippets I've read, some I've liked, some not. Regardless, it's a lively reading in store for Stories, and possibly a good one.

Also reading will be arts writer and editor Tulsa Kinney of Artillery magazine, which is based in Echo Park, and artist/arts writer Gordy Grundy.

7 pm, Tuesday, January 20, 2009; 1716 Sunset Blvd. (Echo Park) Los Angeles.