Bookstore
Story Stream
Bookselling Out October 17, 2024
My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said t...
The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret October 16, 2024
Tee Minot, the owner of Christopher’s Books in San Francisco, wrote me a letter not long ago about the joys of owning a bookstore. In the end, she said that if she could recommend one book to me, it would be “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams. I ...
A Book Critic Goes to Dublin October 03, 2024
This summer, my wife, Cree, and I went to Dublin to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. We chose it over more exotic destinations because it made sense to us: I’m a book critic and she’s a writer. How could we not go to Dublin, perhaps the most l...
Hannah Arendt, Poet October 01, 2024
For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgen...
Amazon Saved Bookstores September 17, 2024
Top Gun: Maverick was released on May 27, 2022. The view here is that the movie was boring, trite, and even quite “woke” despite a popular perception that it trampled on the overused notion. But that’s not the point of this opinion piece.Good or bad,...
Books Sold Here August 05, 2024
The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to...
Romance Bookstores Are Booming July 08, 2024
Last summer, when Mae Tingstrom had the idea to open a romance bookstore in Ventura, Calif., the first thing she did was search online to see whether there was already one in her region. She found The Ripped Bodice — a bookstore in Culver City that w...
A Romantic and Relaxed Conservatism July 02, 2024
Several weeks ago, intent on continuing my pattern of exploring retail locations rather than shopping online, determined to encounter people in the flesh rather than on Zoom, I wandered into a sex shop on Connecticut Avenue. This particular store is ...
Valley of the Books June 05, 2024
At the very tip of McCarren Park, in Greenpoint, on a block that has a Starbucks and an overpriced luxury-apartment eyesore, sits a nondescript, three-story building. It belongs to Bill Hall, the 60-year-old proprietor of High Valley Books, who runs ...
An Ode to the Bookstore, My First True Love February 13, 2024
While driving between two of my local bookstores to pre-sign copies of my forthcoming memoir (in L.A., "local" meaning an hour apart), I was struck by the fact that while I’ve had many loves in my life (film, little league baseball, my wife), my olde...
Saving a Kentucky Town February 08, 2024
In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel, 42, opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky. Everyone thought she was crazy.Downtown Hazard was a forbidding place to start any business, much less a bookstore. The coal mines that o...
I’m an Unwelcome Author January 15, 2024
I’ve always loved bookstores.In the rural California town where I moved after leaving the foster homes in Los Angeles, there was no real bookstore. No Barnes & Noble or Borders (those still existed in the early 2000s).Across the street from the boxin...
