Brooklyn Bookstores: Part 2 (and NBA parties!)

As promised last week, I'm profiling the final three on my list of favorite bookshops in Brooklyn. But first, I thought I'd do a wrap up of a few National Book Award parties from last Wednesday. First, the Association of American Publishers Young Publishing Group sponsored an event at Random House to watch the award ceremony. The Huffington Post coverage of the event includes a shaky and loud video with interviews of Chip Kidd, Avi Steinberg, Teju Cole, Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz. The Random House cafeteria in the background is hardly recognizable - all of the lights are off, with blue and pink accent lighting and swanky turquoise pillows.

Then there was the after party at Cipriani Wall Street hosted by the DailyBeast, which was attended by a young crowd. On the dance floor, there was a fair amount of Peanuts style dancing going on, including some noteworthy celebratory moves from NBA Fiction winner Jaimy Gordon and her sister. Finally, the literary magazine Armchair/Shotgun, hosted the contrarian first annual NOT-the-National-Book-Awards at Blue & Gold Tavern, where they encouraged attendees to "Suggest a book that will never win an NBA, because it's terrible. Or because it's great, but available only in Tagalog. Or because it's How I Met Your Mother: Complete Cast Bios."

And now, the final three recommended Brooklyn bookstores.




Unnameable Books – Prospect Heights
600 Vanderbilt Ave

Unnameable Books is owned by Adam Tobin and is a great place to go for poetry readings and film viewings, which are held in the shop's backyard or in the basement. In a recent profile, Adam explains why he had to change the bookshop's name (it was originally Adam's Books) and what he sees as the role of his bookstore in the neighborhood. In June of 2008, Unnameable Books was featured on the cover drawn by Adrian Tomine for The New Yorker, who lived above the shop's previous location on Bergen Street. The cover shows a guilty looking woman receiving a package from Amazon.com as the shop owner unlocks the bookstore and makes eye contact with her. One of the funniest events I attended at Unnameable Books was a midnight book party to celebrate the simultaneous publication dates of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue and Nabokov's The Original of Laura (read The New Yorker's Book Bench coverage here).






Greenlight Books – Fort Greene
686 Fulton Street

Greenlight Books opened just over a year ago after Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo, the events coordinator at McNally Jackson in Nolita, won a $15,000 grant from the Brooklyn Public Library. Rebecca Fitting, a 34-year-old sales representative for Random House joined her as a business partner. Today, the bookshop is thriving, and hosts a great list of readings and literary events that are supported by the myriad writers who live in Fort Greene.




Book Court - Cobble Hill
163 Court Street
718-875-3677

Founded in 1981, BookCourt is owned and operated by Henry Zook and Mary Gannett (pictured below) and their son Zack. What I love about Book Court is that it is so community orientated and they always have a wall of staff picks that I peruse every time I stop by the store. For reviews and upcoming events, check out their website. They also have a funny Twitter feed that features posts like "Waitaminute, have we talked about the fact that resident dreamboat Paul Auster is going to be here tonight, w/his new book, Sunset Park?" or "The clarity with which I understand that I need pizza is astonishing" or "Best title I've unpacked today: Diary of a Baby Wombat."

Brooklyn Bookstores: Part 1

There’s no question that Brooklyn is a literary borough. From the annual Brooklyn Book festival to all of the literary cafes, landmarks, and residents (see The New York Observer article “The Brooklyn Literary 100”), Brooklyn is a bibliophile’s dream come true.

This month, I reviewed Brooklyn resident Paul Auster’s latest novel, Sunset Park, which takes place in the neighborhood the book is named for. At one point in the novel, a character considers one of the merits of his neighborhood to be the proximity and access to a bookstore. If I apply that test to my own living situation, then my apartment in North Park Slope is prime real estate. Here are my five favorite bookshops in Brooklyn.




This week I’ll write about two, and next Sunday I'll write profiles of the other three.

Community Bookstore – Park Slope
143 Seventh Ave
(718) 783-3075

This bookstore is just a few blocks away from me and has a great back garden and children’s section. A cat named Sir Marjorie Lambshanks III, Esq. and a bearded dragon live in the shop, and there are a couple of book clubs held at the store, including Books Without Borders for works in translation and The Modernist Bookclub. The bookstore went through some financial troubles in 2007, but owner Catherine Bohne rallied her neighbors in Park Slope and got through it. According to Brooklyn blogs, she has apparently moved to Albania, and is in the process of selling her bookstore to someone named Ezra Goldstein. Read more about this recent development here.


Freebird Books – Red Hook
123 Columbia Street
(718) 642-8484

This bookstore is special to me because I heard about it from George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company in Paris while I was staying in his bookshop and planning a move to Brooklyn. The original Freebird Books founders, Samantha Citrin and Rachel London had stopped by Shakspeare & Company the month before I arrived. Today, Peter Miller owns the bookstore and runs it in his spare time (his day job is Publicity Director at Bloomsbury). Freebird holds great readings, film screenings and BBQ’s in the summer. They also have a Post-Apocalyptic book club that meets in the shop, lots of used paperbacks, and a stellar New York City section.

Check back next week for more!

Announcing Paravion Press from Atlantis Books

I've mentioned my love for a very magical bookstore perched on the cliffs of a small island in the south of the Aegean Sea in a previous post, and I've been thinking about my friends at Atlantis Books of Santorini, Greece again lately, because the shop needs our help.

After 3,000 years times are tough in Greece. Atlantis Books is only seven years old but needs to find a new bag of tricks to stay in business. It's run by a group of designers, educators and book lovers who've long dreamed of doing more than just selling books, so now they're making them too. This new publishing venture and imprint of Atlantis Books is called Paravion Press and you can find their website here.

The books they are publishing are handmade editions of short works. They're beautiful editions and you'll help Atlantis Books continue to do their good work by owning one. Once you have read them you’ll want to share them with friends, so they're packaged in envelopes that are ready to mail onward.

Five titles are available now: short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov, Saki, and Sherwood Anderson, as well as an essay by Mark Twain. Additionally, you can pre-order the Paravion Compendium edition, a hard-bound collection of their first complete series of stories.

Here's how you can help Paravion Press:
* Order some books.
* Refer retailers who would enjoy stocking Paravion editions.
* Refer exceptional artists to illustrate forthcoming Paravion editions
* Submit ideas for perfect stories to print, either public domain or previously unpublished.

Again their website is http://paravionpress.org. You can contact them at hello@paravionpress.org.

I'm excited to see what the future holds for my friends at Atlantis Books, a bookstore that was recently on a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world. Every order and kind word will help Paravion Press and Atlantis Books stay afloat in the Mediterranean Sea.

Where the Cool Kids Shop

Last week I wrote about the sad state of Barnes & Noble but I’ve always been partial to the other chain.

The first Borders store opened in Ann Arbor in 1971. It’s an unobtrusive two-storey building with Borders Books & Music stamped on its brick façade. In college, I’d sit in the store, touch the book jackets, flip through the new releases and try to stick to the back of the store. I didn’t want to be seen there.



Borders wasn’t where the English majors were supposed to go. The independent bookstore—Shaman Drum―was where the real literary junkies hung out. The store held book readings; the staff was tattooed and punctured; they showcased high quality literary magazines in the store windows. It was a pretty cool place, I’d admit. And I spent some money there on overpriced textbooks. But the store didn’t give me that breezy, everyman feel of Borders.

To be clear, the Borders in Ann Arbor didn’t look like some corporate chain store―it wasn’t very big or surrounded by a concrete sea of parking lot. But when I wanted to take a break from dusty academic life, I went to Borders to look at what shiny things the rest of the country was buying and check out which books were marked down with a “20 percent off” sticker. I wanted to feel like a regular person out shopping, not an undergrad sleeping on the top bunk, trying to catch up on last week’s reading of Moll Flanders.

Shaman Drum just didn’t give me the comfort I wanted. Looks like I should have browsed at Borders but bought at the hip independent store. Shaman Drum went out of business last summer after almost thirty years and I hear a Five Guys Burgers and Fries is opening in its place.

I’ve moved beyond ramen noodles and library stacks, and that cool little independent store is looking pretty good about now.

Too Legit to Quit

General Stanley Allen McChrystal's Rolling Stone fiasco is sort of old news by now; after President Obama sent him packing, he quietly announced his retirement earlier this week. For most people, retirement offers a chance to pursue hobbies or travel, and they actively look forward to it. I have a suspicion, however, that the man who masterminded Operation Strike of the Sword (and eliminated Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) will not be fulfilled by gardening -- or even the possibility of owning a boat with a silly name and a cooler stocked full of Bud Light Lime.

So, the million-dollar is question for Gen. McChrystal is: what's next? I was betting on some morally dubious Blackwater consulting deal, but this Daily Beast article surprised me. According to one of McChrystal's close Army pals, who was interviewed for the piece, "the only thing I ever heard him say he wanted to do, after he completed his mission in Afghanistan… was eventually retire and open a bookstore." WHOA.

Well, whaddaya know, Stan -- Politics & Prose, one of America's most venerated independent bookstores, is for sale! Located in Washington, D.C. (incidentally not far from where my mother lives, so I have enjoyed many a browse through its aisles), Politics & Prose is a community icon. It's an absolute must-stop on an author tour, and D.C.'s relatively strong concentration of educated, high-performing residents -- at least the liberals -- view it as a bastion of cultural enlightenment. The prospect of its closure has peeps straight-up trippin'. Several prospective buyers have thrown their hats in the ring, but I worry that they are driven more by idealism than a realistic vision for keeping an independent bookshop thriving in the coming years. That challenge is one for a very special person. A person with vision, discipline, strategy... a person called STANLEY McCHRYSTAL.

Lest you dismiss ex-General Stanley McChrystal out of hand, he's more qualified than you might think to lead a literary counter-insurgency. He was the Managing Editor of The Pointer, West Point's literary magazine; he even wrote seven pieces of short fiction for it. And check out this quote from Dexter Filkins’s NYT McChrystal masterpiece, ‘ “If you were to go into his house, he has this unreal library,” Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief and longtime friend, told me this summer. “You can go over and touch a binding and ask him, ‘What’s that one about?’ And he’ll just start. His bad habit is wandering around old bookstores. He’s not one of these guys that just reads military books. He reads about weird things too. He’s reading a book about Shakespeare right now.” ’ I also expect he'll write a memoir, which is sure to be interesting reading, and the advance he would get should about cover the asking price of the store, which is purportedly in the region of $2 million.

However, I'm sure he'd want to shake things up a bit once he took command, starting with P & P's name: "politics" is a very sensitive word for him at the moment, although Coalition Forces & Prose unfortunately doesn't have quite the same ring to it... Maybe he'll open a rare book room to match that of Powell's in Portland, and channel his determination into amassing an unrivalled collection. My personal hope, though is that his habit of only eating one meal a day will lead him to get rid of that dark little cafe in the store's basement, perhaps turning it into a gym, or even a bar (with Bud Light Lime as the house special, natch).

Politics and Storytelling

The 2010 Shakespeare and Company literary festival begins tomorrow! I have now arrived in Paris (thank you to Joey for posting for me yesterday) and I will post a few updates from the festival. The theme this year is "Politics and Storytelling" and the organizers have planned an incredible lineup of authors, as you can see on the festival schedule of events. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the festival written by the festival co-directors, Jemma Birrell, David Delannet, and Sylvia Whitman:

"'A socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore' is how George Whitman describes the labyrinth of books that is Shakespeare & Company. . . . Bookshops, for George, are a political act. in their choice of titles and support of authors and small publishers, as well as the sense of community they offer, independent bookstores are, in their very existence, political. As our lives become more and more defined by the internet, virtual social networks and new ways of reading, bookshops offer something more tangible and contemplative.

It was this context that inspired the festival theme of Storytelling and Politics. Who are today's storytellers and what are the most influential narratives? Can a work of fiction reflect society without being political? Do writers have a particular responsibility? Should literature engage with the world, or offer respite from it?"

One of the authors who will be speaking at the festival is Fatima Bhutto, an Afghan born Pakistani poetess and writer. She is the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed by police in 1996 during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima's new book, Songs of Blood and Sword (forthcoming in the US from Nation Books in September), is a book about her father's death and a history of her extraordinary family that mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself. In the book, Fatima explains her quest to find the truth behind her father's murder, and links her aunt, Benazir with the deaths of Fatima's father and his brother. This has resulted in an angry reaction from critics and some of her family members in Pakistan.

The book came out in the UK to mostly praise from reviewers who are touched by her fascinating and lavish account of life inside one of South Asia's most famous, and cursed, political dynasties. Fatima has been on a book tour since its publication, giving talks to packed audiences. Today, I picked her up at the train station in Paris to accompany her to her hotel, and she is beautiful, lovely, and completely down to earth.

She will be speaking in conversation with Janine di Giovanni at 11:40 on Saturday in a marquee on the Square Rene Viviani, directly next to Shakespeare & Company.

Bookstores in Paradise

If you know me fairly well, you know that I have two favorite bookstores: Shakespeare and Company in Paris and Atlantis Books in Greece. To me, these bookstores are incredible, magical, and wonderful beyond my wildest imagination. Why? Well, the bookstores are located in Paris and on the island of Santorini, two very romantic places. But the real secret is that both bookstores are really cooperatives where writers, artists, and friends can stay and help run the bookshop.

I’ve lived in each one for a couple of weeks, waking up among the books, stocking the shelves, minding the till, washing dishes, sweeping floors, and making dinner for other bookstore residents. It’s thrilling to be surrounded by books and eccentric friends, with late-night literary conversations and daytime adventures and bookstore projects.

Here is a little profile and history of both bookstores, with links for more information.

Shakespeare & Company

The original Shakespeare and Company was run by Sylvia Beach out of her shop 12 rue de l'Odeon. She is famous for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses out of her shop, and expats like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were patrons. The next phase in Shakespeare and Company history started when George Whitman, a young American who had tried to walk across South America, came to Paris in the early 50s to study on the GI bill. He called his first bookstore Le Minstral, his nickname for his girlfriend at the time and also the name of the strong wind that blows from the north in France. He later changed the name to Shakespeare and Company, and let writers and 'lost souls' stay in the shop for free from the very first night. Two bookstore mottos that are painted in the bookstore are "Live for Humanity" and "Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise." Today, George is 96 and still lives in an apartment above the bookstore. His daughter Sylvia, who is 28 now, manages and owns the bookstore and organizes a festival every two years. The 2010 festival is taking place this week, from June 18-20, and I will be attending and writing updates from Paris from this blog.

Shakespeare and Company

Literary Festival

George Whitman's Wikipedia page

Documentary: Portrait of a Bookseller as an Old Man


Atlantis Books

Atlantis Books founders Craig and Oliver were studying at Oxford and visiting the village of Oia on the island of Santorini when they decided to start a bookshop. Their friends Tim and Quinn (who met at Shakespeare and Company), Chris, and Maria came along to help, building the bookshelves out of the wood they found around the island. Today, a revolving group of friends runs the bookshop at any moment. The talented bunch is always coming up with new plans—a radio show, a publishing venture, or construction projects in the bookstore. One of the best ideas that I was able to be a part of in 2008 was a Super 8 Film Festival, organized by our French friend Pauline. We projected black and white films onto the white walls of houses in Santorini, while Tim and a local musician accompanied with music.

Atlantis Books

Film Festival

Tim and Quinn's staircase project

Atlantis Books's Flickr page



*posted by Joey on Claire's behalf*

Book Spot: Bluestockings

You get pretty spoiled in New York when you realize how many great independent bookstores are all around you. Living near Columbia University, I've got at least three great places to choose from, and that's before I get to the nearest B&N. But if you manage to get outside your 10-block radius, you find there are even more bookstores you haven't yet explored. Last year, I took the fantastic walking tour offered by the Independent Booksellers of New York (IBNYC) in collaboration with The Millions, and discovered a slew of stores I'd never visited before. We started at St. Mark's Bookshop and made our way down through Manhattan and finally over the bridge to Brooklyn, ending with treats at Word in Greenpoint and celebrating the many books we'd purchased along the way. My favorite place from this entire tour, however, was found right in the middle of the journey: Bluestockings.
Bluestockings, located at 172 Allen Street on the Lower East Side, is an independent bookstore that specializes in books on activism, social studies, and current events. The store originally specialized in feminist literature, and their name referred to a term from mid-18th-century Europe; as groups of women turned from meeting to play cards to more intellectual pursuits, they invited men of similar interests to join them for parties, encouraging them to wear their "blue stockings", the least fancy clothes they owned. The idea was to have discourse without standing on ceremony, and though the term bluestocking was initially applied with derision to women who affected literary interests, it became a term of empowerment for later generations of educated women and activists. Today, the bookstore keeps the idea of the bluestockings in their mission statement: "Through words, art, food, activism, education, and community, we strive to create a space that welcomes and empowers all people." Through both the books they stock and the environment they have created, Bluestockings manages to do just that:
The place is crammed from top to bottom with beautiful books on every subject you could imagine: women's studies, queer theory, race and ethnicity, political movements, counter-culture movements, politics of war and peace, everything is available. Moreover, they feature books from hundreds of different publishers: as large publishers tend to focus on bigger topics, many academic and independent book publishers pick up the slack on the more focused yet equally important subject matter. And Bluestockings tends to divide even these publishers' subject areas into smaller, more nuanced methods of categorization.
Looking for Sci-Fi set in a dystopian universe? The staff can find it for you. (I got the sense that they had read much of the material stocked, always a great find in an indie bookstore). Queer studies broken down into specific issues? They've organized that, too! Young adult and children's literature that will help them become future activists? There's a shelf for that!

What's additionally great about Bluestockings is that they continue to support those publications that mainstream bookstores have long abandoned. As a former employee of The Kenyon Review, which I still consider one of the greatest literary magazines out there, it thrilled me to walk into an independent bookstore and find 2-3 copies in stock in the magazine section. Very few bookstores stock these kinds of publications anymore, but Bluestockings has dedicated a whole wall to them.
This makes my little ex-Reviewer heart skip a beat. Also available: political pamphlets, for whatever political affiliation you may have, both professionally-printed and homemade:
And postcards. And t-shirts.
What really makes this bookstore for me, however, is the way they encourage discourse and conversation about the books you're reading. The store hosts free (suggested admission) author appearances almost every night of the week, where writers and readers mingle and discuss the issues at hand over a slice of vegan banana bread and below dozens of gorgeous posters by local artists. Back before the Kindle and the iPad, bookstores used to be more than just shops, they were watering holes and places of great conversation, and Bluestockings is maintaining that tradition.
Most importantly, this bookstore remains a place where what you choose to read can surprise you: in the age of e-books and online purchases, it is becoming harder and harder to be genuinely electrified and changed by what you choose to read. (I tend to go to Amazon with a shopping list, rather than an eye to browsing). Whereas in a bookstore like this one, the long table of potential reads can engage your curiosity.
Walking in, I wasn't sure what I wanted to buy, but I found myself drawn to works of graphic novels, political propaganda, gender theory, and pop sociology, and would have walked out with all of them had my bag been big enough. When you agree to browse for reading material, you open yourself up to the possibility that what you read might change your mind. It's a risk, yes, but one very much worth taking, especially when you visit a store as good as this one.

Upon checking out with my selection (The Black Minutes by Martin Solares), and mentioning my interest in reading more literature-in-translation, the woman at the register said, "Oh, then you should check out Kenzaburo Oe's The Changeling, it's amazing", and pointed me to its location on the shelf. It was clear from the enthusiasm in her face that she knew what a difference a great book could make, and was going to do everything she could to share that enthusiasm.
I wish there were more stores like Bluestockings out there, and I hope next time you're in New York, you get a chance to visit. I guarantee it will be a highlight of your book-buying experience.