CategoryBOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES

Childrens books have always been an important part of my life. They made a reader out of me, starting not with the Dick and Jane books, which even as a child I thought were silly, but with fairy tales, and picture books like Paddle to the Sea, and with a wonderful anthology of stories and poems called Beloved Tales that my parents gave me for Christmas. I still have that book, though the cover is...

November 17, 2023, 11:53am In further evidence of Mayor Eric Adams’s absolutely disastrous run as mayor of New York City, it was announced yesterday that the New York Public Library system will see widespread Sunday closures of many branches as a resulting of a 5 percent budget cut (amounting to almost $40 million). This is truly terrible and misguided. Full stop. Budget will also be cut for...

Montral is a city of parallel universes, often most at ease ignoring each other. Across linguistic, cultural, and generational orbits, its also a city thats shown tremendous appetite for German author Jenny Erpenbecks work, in great part due to De Stiil, an anglophone bookstore in the heart of francophone neighborhood Le Plateau. Owner Aude Le Dubs carefully curated shop features literary fiction...

It isnt often that libraries, those citadels of quiet refinement, play a role in capturing a serial killer. Yet that is what happens in the movie Se7en. William Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, is a veteran detective charged with training a newcomer, David Mills, played by Brad Pitt. Their first case: a pair of murders inspired by two of the Seven Deadly Sins, gluttony and greed. After the...

It was not as long of a walk as people presume from my days as a public defender to founding a community-based literary arts organization. After years of working in the chasm between judgment and the individual accused, I understood that the stone courtroom repelled the vulnerability of trust. I witnessed the system’s foundational skepticism, of the messy multitudes of our lived experiences...

In 1958, the young Indian poet Purushottama (P.) Lal was living in Calcutta, writing in English, and looking for a publisher. Unable to find one, he gathered a small group of college friends who were also convinced that English was a legitimate Indian language for creative writing, including Anita Desai, and started an independent press, known still as Writers Workshop. During what became their...

Now screening on the Criterion Channel—and perhaps at an arthouse cinema near you—is a new 4k restoration of Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s debut film, Party Girl (1995), starring indie queen Parker Posey. Party Girl has become a cult classic for its heroine’s wardrobe of 90s couture and its documentation of Manhattan nightlife during that liminal period between the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and...

August 4, 2023, 12:04pm Michael Chabonthe Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Unionspent his Covid quarantine taking a trip…through time! Well, not literally, but in an emotional and curatorial sense, the speculative fiction maestro can now be considered a time traveller. Yes, as reported by Boing Boing earlier...

This year, Im celebrating Pride through LGBTQ childrens books. Im building a new library for my two kids and wife Stefanie, who is trans and transitioned just two years ago. We began with Being You: A First Conversation About Gender (Penguin, 2021) and a pride alphabet book, Pride Puppy (Orca, 2021). These loving, age-appropriate celebrations of creative gender expression and different kinds of...

May 31, 2023, 8:19am You know when two people you like turn out to know each other, and you think, oh COOL but also WEIRD? That’s how I feel about a photo I saw of Channing Tatum dropping into Emma Straub’s Books Are Magic store in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, on Tuesday to promote his third children’s book, Sparkella and the Big Lie. I’m a tough study of children’s books, and especially of celebrity...