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With me in the Glasgow studio was , formerly from Chicago. After spending the past thirteen years here, she's a born again Glaswegian, teaching creative writing. But all the action in her book, RAMSHACKLE, takes place in Chicago. Elizabeth's protagonist, Roe, lives in the suburbs and like Anais, she is fifteen years old (sans potty mouth!). Nevertheless, Roe is up against it and having a hard time. It's a compelling tale and well written. It seems the "teen heroine" is having her day - both of these books aren't exactly tailored for the younger reader as the subject matter is dark and difficult but an older teen could certainly try them on for size. The Book Café may have done it again.. stumbling on two emerging talents. Jenni Fagan and Elizabeth Reeder. Watch this space!

Anyone listening to a book programme will probably have given a passing thought to owning their own book shop. Sounds idyllic but what kind of skills are necessary to run one? These are also dire times for the industry and for many, books are now a luxury. Yet it's hard to pass by an inviting indie shop. So, what's it like having your very own gaff? Cue Barry Young of and Steve Rapaport of . They are clearly very happy to be doing what they do. Just think, they get to choose what they stock the shop with, arrange the shelves, lighting, front window. And then they sit around drinking tea and reading books until customers call by. When they do, they dispense wisdom and suggest titles they might like to try. Actually it's not wildly off the mark but there is a good deal more to it as I listened to Steve and Barry tell me about the long hours and generally small financial rewards. In short, it's a vocation. Astoundingly, neither Barry nor Steve emerged from the womb fully formed book shop owners so what was their back story and did former jobs give them additional skills?

Steve's CV was impressive - a computer science degree, (handy as he has created his own database software to keep track of stock), stage actor, a bit of a linguist oh and he's a trained salesman. Barry had led a colourful past life too but he's been in the book game for many years. His first shop was in Ireland. But then he fessed up to a period in his life when he was a night club bouncer. (I believe him.. there's a lot of Barry to get past if you want to have a go!) How this helped him in the book shop remains unclear as I'm not aware of much rowdy behavior in the indie book sector. Guys like Barry and Steve are solid gold. They know their niche market like the back of their hands, they put in the hours, they are passionate and extremely well read. And they love to chat to their customers. Most of all, they remain positive about the state of the book industry despite the inexorable rise of ebooks and online shopping. Give me a quirky little bookshop down a side street run by an ex actor or bouncer any day. Indie owners, we salute you!

Tuesday's Culture Café had the newspaper industry under the spotlight as the Leveson inquiry rumbled on and the parliamentary Culture and Media Select Committee delivered a damning verdict on Rupert Murdoch's stewardship of News Corp. In comedy,they say timing is everything. Same must apply to theatre. is staging a promenade production, ENQUIRER - a site specific piece of documentary theatre. My weekend homework involved attending the preview at The HUB, an office block set amidst the media compound on the banks of the Clyde. About seventy of us gathered there and I would guess that 99.9% were journalists. Pushing at an open door then? Well, sure, we were interested in the state of the industry but could it turn into a navel gazing exercise? For the next hour and a quarter we roamed the length and breadth of the top floor of the Hub, following the action. We saw cluttered desks, power dressed women editors, foppish editors as well as a grittier version (nicely played by Billy Riddoch), angry hacks, upset hacks.. it all looked so familiar. I've been in journalism for over 20 years and it definitely rang true. As I watched the vignettes being performed, (complete with profane language and scurrilous humour) it wasn't long until the discomfort set in. The morning conference scene was disturbingly accurate: there was the usual bear baiting stuff about missing stories, or worse, competitors nabbing exclusives. Mention was made of the obsessive monitoring of the Today programme's running order and the inevitable slagging off they got for going too big on something that the press hacks had played down. Bit by bit, we saw how the pressure was ratcheting up for journalists to "deliver the story" whatever it took. Every single word sounded authentic and that wasn't a coincidence. Verbatim recorded accounts of 40 journalists were used and there isn't a single word in the entire production that wasn't uttered by the interviewees. How then, do you turn all that transcribed material into a narrative? Obviously knocking together bits of conversations and making it into a narrative was going to be tricky. Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of NTS and co director told me how much of a role Andrew O'Hagan had played and that the team had resorted to physically cutting and pasting lines from the recordings and re-assembling them on a big blank page. Kind of like making your own newspaper, eh? I have to mention the cast at this point. Top notch. Maureen Beattie, John Bett, the aforementioned Billy Riddoch, Billy Boyd, Gabriel Quigley and James Anthony Pearson. Enquirer could so easily have become a rant about the decline of the newspaper industry but it was much subtler, a more human piece of work that asked questions of the journalists AND the newspaper buying public. Go and see it for yourselves- you don't have to be a journalist to see how the press industry just might be heading to hell in a handbag.