Indie job perks

I work at an independent bookstore. Now that may SEEM like the hippest job ever (beat only by working at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn), but I'm going to bust that myth. Perhaps it's because I spend my days on the phone with teachers and publishers...but on a daily basis, my job is anything but hip. In fact, I'd come to the conclusion that the only hip thing about my job is the hepcatmosphere created by the employees, their conversations filled with obscure music and movie references, talk of late night comedy and local vegetable and dairy farms, and many, many book discussions.

Yet yesterday I became aware of a job perk even more heptastic than my new urban outfitters oxfords. I get free book advances! Books written by great authors that still have grammatical mistakes in them! How crazy is that? And amongst the many books I schlepped home, the absolute best was a book of short stories. Shorts stories are my favorite kinds of stories, by the way. But not just any short stories, unpublished short stories by the late Kurt Vonnegut. The best part? The foreward is written by none other than the indie-beloved Dave Eggers. Be jealous. Or, be lucky enough to be my friend and I'll let you borrow it before the book's tentative release date in late January.