You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Book Stores.”
Several years ago, in the Spring of 2003, I endured one of those moderately shattering moments of identity crisis – a break-up – and resorted to drugs to ameliorate its effects. Included among the expected substances and liquids was the powerful drug of technology, specifically a new gadget, even more specifically a neat-o cool-o camera attachment that allowed you to [...]
The staff of Murder Ink are always answering questions. People want book recomendations. They want to know when their favorite author has another title coming out. Sometimes they bring in a stack of books and ask how much money they can get for them. But the most frequently asked question, always over the phone, goes something like this: "Yo. Can [...]
Among the stories I have either heard or read about the Villard Houses, my favorite is one about William Faulkner. Between 1949 and 1969 Bennet Cerf's Random House occupied the north wing of the stately brownstone that takes up the entire block between 50th and 51st on Madison Avenue. During those years Faulkner divided his time between Oxford, Mississippi and [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
Michael Chabon told us that The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (246-6080) was offended by this piece when it was first published in Civilization Magazine (Harper's reprinted it, too, and you can find it and a lot of other Chabon related stuff on his website, http://home.earthlink.net/~mchabon/). This seemed sufficiently peculiar that we called them up to ask why. But no [...]
In 1992, I attended a reading in celebration of the publication by Leon Forrest of his fifth novel, the 1,135-page "Divine Days," at the long since closed Brentano's on 53rd Street in Hyde Park, Chicago. I took along my former girlfriend, a quiet, awkward jazz DJ with whom I'd had trouble separating. The crowd that night was made up of [...]
I had just gotten my hair cut and in reapplying lipstick in the dressing room afterward found that the only color I happened to have in my purse was slightly too bright, and a little bit orange--not harmonious at all. So I put on lots, blotted it, and put on more, figuring that one might as well be brazen. Then [...]
