When celebrity comedian John Mulaney was in Eugene earlier this year, he stopped into J. Michaels Books downtown and walked out with a stack of eight books, including a modern Hollywood-set noir, a biography of a forgotten French-Belarusian painter and the increasingly surreal tale of a whaling ship.
Since Mulaney’s stop at the store, timed around a May performance at the Cuthbert Amphitheater, he has made no secret of the success of his visit.
“Go there in person and buy anything they tell you to,” he wrote in the caption of a June 30 Instagram post, in which he raved about the book “Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants” by Mathias Énard…