Tucked along Haywood Road in West Asheville, Firestorm Books is a small shop with a big personality. Run by the workers who staff it, this store fills its shelves with the kinds of books that get pulled from other places, including banned titles, radical writing, and voices you rarely see up front. Whether you come for a cup of coffee, a stack of zines, or a book event, you leave feeling like you found something the rest of the crowd missed. Here is a closer look at what makes this little Piedmont-meets-mountains bookstore worth your afternoon.
A West Asheville Shop Owned by the People Who Run It
Firestorm Books sits at 1022 Haywood Rd in West Asheville, and calling it just a bookstore sells it short. It is a worker-owned cooperative, meaning the folks ringing up your purchase and recommending your next read also help make the decisions about how the place is run.
That co-op model shapes everything from the titles on the shelves to the coffee and tea served near the front. There is no distant owner cashing in on the profits, which fits the store’s whole spirit of doing things differently…