“We were diverse before it became something people identified themselves as being,” said Ülrika Moats, general manager of Brazos Bookstore in Houston. That approach makes sense, as Houston is the most diverse city in America, according to a recent study conducted by personal finance website WalletHub.
“Some of our best-attended events over the past several years have been with authors Issa Rae, Jia Tolentino, Bryan Washington, and Ocean Vuong, which gives you a sense of the type of audience we have,” added Mark Haber, a PEN Hemingway Award–nominated novelist and the store’s operations manager.
Of course, over the past year, in-person events have been canceled and, like other bookstores around the country, Brazos has had to shift to virtual events. This has opened the store up to more authors from the U.S. and abroad. An event in July featured seven women translators, and an event later this month tied to the publication of Granta’s Best of the Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue will bring together the Mexican writers Andrea Chapela, Aura García-Junco, and Aniela Rodríguez, along with Nicaraguan writer José Adiak Montoya, for a virtual conversation. “The editor of the issue, Valerie Miles, who lives in Spain, saw on social media all the work we were doing with translated literature, particularly from Spanish, and reached out to us for an event,” Haber said.
Brazos was established in 1974 by Karl Killian primarily as an art and architecture bookstore. Through his efforts, it developed a reputation as a literary haven in Houston, and Killian went on to cofound Inprint, the literary nonprofit that fostered the launch of the creative writing program at the University of Houston.
In an obituary for Killian, who died last year at age 77, Haber told the Houston Chronicle that Killian’s life and work “are just built into the literary DNA of Houston.” A wall of photos of A-list writers who appeared at the store over the past four decades bear testament to this legacy.
Following a medical diagnosis in 2010 that indicated he would be unable to continue running the store, Killian sold Brazos to a group of local investors. Jane Moser, mother of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Ben Moser, was hired as manager; she was succeeded by veteran booksellers Jeremy Ellis and Benjamin Rybeck. Today, the ownership group continues to support the store and has grown to 35 people. Moats meets with them monthly.
“Fortunately, the news is good: we have been profitable and remain so,” she said, noting that several bookstores in the city closed in the past year, including two Half-Price Books outlets and the River Oaks Bookstore, one of the city’s few independents.
Despite its dearth of bookstores, Moats believes Houston—the fourth-most-populous city in the country—deserves a better reputation in bookish circles. “Though it is not known as one, it really is a literary town,” she said.
“We do extremely well with small press books from publishers like Coach House and New Directions,” said Haber, adding that Brazos was among the first stores in the U.S. to import books from overseas publishers like Charco Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions. Brazos’s buyer, Keaton Patterson, was a judge in the fiction category for the 2020 National Book Awards.
With just 2,800-sq.-ft of sales floor and an additional 700-sq.-ft for the back, Brazos has to select carefully the types of books it sells. It offers, for example, a very limited number of mysteries and thrillers; Murder by the Book, one of the country’s top mystery bookstores, is just down the street. Children’s books, graphic novels, and select sidelines have become bigger priorities in the past several years. Brazos also stocks a modest but growing selection of Spanish- and French-language books.
“A lot of new customers discovered us during the pandemic,” Moats noted. She attributed the increase to an influx of California transplants and oil and gas executives from abroad, and, in particular, local parents who bought children’s books when schools transitioned to virtual learning and stopped hosting Scholastic-sponsored book fairs last year.
“It’s great to know that even though we have been here for so long, doing so much good work, there are still people out there who have an opportunity to discover us,” Moats said.
