Iconoclast Books

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Iconoclast books was founded in 1993, to very little fanfare. After many years of working in restaurants and bike shops, Gary Hunt, a practicing ski bum, set out to find his niche in life. He traveled. He worked in more restaurants and bike shops. He grew weary of that and more importantly, he felt vaguely unfulfilled. He had a friend, Royce Wilson, who managed a used bookstore in the University district of Seattle and they would often talk late into the evening over red wine or scotch while Royce outlined the basics of the used book business to Gary. This led to a period of a few months in which Gary went around to garage sales and thrift stores buying books and selling them, or attempting to sell them, to used bookstores throughout the city. This is what is known as book scouting, and Gary discovered that he had a certain knack for it. Of course, the bookstores never bought everything that he brought in to sell them, but they bought just enough to cover his expenses with a little left over to buy more books. This was like starting in the mail room, learning by hard experience which books you could buy for 50 cents and turn a profit on and which ones you couldn't.

In speaking about his craft and why he tells war stories, O’Brien says, “That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.” For more than thirty years he has, with novels like Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods, illustrated the experience of a soldier at war as well as a soldiers returning home. O’Brien has been awarded The National Book Award as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award.

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