Whenever I host visitors in Edmonton, I love showcasing the city’s bookstores and coffee shops. After all, nothing stimulates conversation quite like a steady drip of caffeine and a stack of new books you swear you’ll finish someday. We also happen to live in a literary city — not just because many great writers call Edmonton home, but because we’ve added even more indie bookstores to the map in recent years.
So, come along, dear reader, on my highly prestigious and much-anticipated (according to my friends, who were cornered into hearing about it)…
The first stop is Transcend Coffee and Roastery in Ritchie. Since I can’t drink milk — a fault I blame on my Métis grandmother — I settle in for a drip coffee and reflect on how a city like Edmonton comes alive when a deep freeze ends, and people, like our coyote cousins, emerge from our burrows to roam around our beautiful city. The coffee hits hard. Venezuelan, I believe. I tend to prefer darker roasts, but Transcend has perfected the roast of the medium bean, and it’s exactly what I need to kick-start a caffeine-fuelled bookstore frenzy.
I take my coffee and walk across the street to Magpie Books, where one of the co-owners Julie King-Yerex is kicking around. We chat about Good Girl by Aria Aber, a new arrival that Julie highly recommends.
Magpie has a distinct point of view, and it shows. In a publishing world that often prioritizes a narrow range of voices, Magpie goes the other way — championing authors from Black, Indigenous, trans and other marginalized communities. You won’t find many of Heather’s Picks here. Instead, you find names like jaye simpson, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Emily Austin and plenty more that might never land front and centre in a big box store — but should.
The curation feels intentional, political and deeply literary. Browse the staff picks or talk to any of the well-read team members, and they direct you to a book that challenges how you see the world — which is exactly what good literature should do.
Magpie also serves as a true community hub. On any given night, you might walk into a naloxone training, a political poetry event or a reading by a celebrated queer author. It’s the kind of bookstore that reminds you what bookstores are supposed to be.
I say goodbye to Julie, finish my coffee, buy Good Girl and cross the river to McCauley.
Paper Birch Books is just south of Giovanni Caboto Park on 95th Street, one of my favourite neighbourhoods in the city. There aren’t many spots where I can get my groceries (Italian Centre), a bonsai tree that will certainly die (Zocalo) and used copies of Footnotes on Gaza by Joe Sacco and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky. I also get an excellent Americano from the little coffee bar that owners Céline Chuang and Benjamin Hertwig recently installed in the store, using beans by Roasti Coffee Co. from Sherwood Park. (They also serve select pastries from La French Taste a few blocks north on 95th Street.)
The problem with a store like Paper Birch, which looks more like a cozy living room than a store, is that you want to buy everything on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. It’s packed with books, but somehow within the stacks there’s a system of organization. Céline and Benjamin do an incredible job of curating their stock of, well, everything. I could spend hours touching every spine of every book in there, but I limit my visit to the length of my Americano. Paper Birch is the place you go to find the poetry that you read to your first true love or the short story collection that inspired your ill-advised year of trying to be a novelist in your early twenties? The staff are more than happy to direct you to the right book for your mood, which at the time for me is learning more about Middle Eastern history, as well the decade-long war in Ukraine.
Three coffees deep at this point (I had one at home before going on tour), I decide to make my way to the old faithful Audreys Books on Jasper Ave. But first, I pop into Commodore Restaurant to smash back a BLT, fries and diner coffee. If you haven’t been to the Commodore before, well, that’s on you at this point. I remember my grandfather — who never read a book in his life, but sure appreciated a good meal — absolutely demolishing a plate of their liver and onions (still on the menu), and finally, after all these years, I appreciate the aesthetic beauty of that weird memory. With that, I pay the ridiculously low bill (in cash) and walk next door.
I like Audreys. It’s been a part of my life since I refused to buy textbooks from the U of A and instead spent that budget on Thomas King books. When I walk in, one of the staff says, “Hey! You wrote Prairie Edge,” and that makes me feel great because I’ve been publicly recognized as a writer now a total of once. I chat with the staff about some of the more recognizable authors that call Edmonton home — Jordan Abel, Jessica Johns, Emily Riddle, Nisha Patel, Richard Van Camp, the above-mentioned Benjamin Hertwig… just a few of the names that you’ll find on the shelves of its local authors section.
Audreys also has an incredible selection of children’s and young adult books downstairs. My brother is having a kid, so I buy This Land is a Lullaby by Tonya Simpson with illustrations by Delreé Dumont and a Cree translation by Dorothy Thunder. It is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful books ever written. I’m probably going to keep it for myself, but I’ll get another copy for my brother’s kid.
I roll back to the south side of the river and park at the Colombian on 99th Street in the old Todd Cleaners building. Like all the best bookshops, their baristas are more than happy to guide you through your caffeine journey (imagine if they actually called it that?). For me, that is another Americano. I really like the beans at the Colombian, which they roast themselves, and they’ve done a great job with the ambiance, creating a place that makes you want to sit back with some old friends and reminisce about the Empress Ale House. Between the Colombian, Made by Marcus, Frank’s Pub and the new Porch Light Books, I love what’s happening in that little corner of Strathcona right now. (Now bring back the Empress, and we’ll call it good.)
Porch Light’s owner, Michael Hingston, is, among many things, also the publisher of the popular Short Story Advent Calendar series and Edify’s culture editor. He sells both used and new books from this airy space, where you can easily lose track of time chatting with Michael about your literary aspirations while eyeing new copies of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar or used copies of Whitemud Walking by Matthew Weigel. Since I am experiencing caffeine shakes, I limit myself to purchasing just one copy of A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen instead of the thirty books that catch my eye.
I have my pile of books, and the shops have been good to me. It’s affirming to go out and talk books and drink coffee and realize that we’re all just trying to make sense of the day-to-day. And if there are coffee and books around, well, those things help with that. I take my book stack to Frank’s to get a decompression pint and post up to read and think about how I feel so fortunate to live in this city.
