Shopping in New York is cyclical; Trends have a sneaky ability to come back, even after they've been declared dead for decades. For example, the city is currently seeing a marked increase in the number of independent bookstores catering to idiosyncratic tastes, but this is not a new phenomenon. New York has always been a place where eclectic literature has found active buyers. There was Murder Ink on the Upper West Side, dedicated to mysteries, and Oscar Wilde's bookstore in Greenwich Village, which specialized in LGBT material. There was Djuna Books on Tenth Street and Womanbooks on West Ninety-second Street, both of which sold feminist texts, and the National African Memorial Bookstore in Harlem, founded by civil rights activist Lewis H. Michaud in 1932, which touted one of the most significant collections of black literature in the country. All those ads have disappeared, but now, thanks in part to the rise of #BookTok, where genre fiction often goes viral, booksellers are once again becoming more targeted in their approach. Park Slope has Torn bodice, a romance bookstore founded by sisters Leah and Bea Koch. It opened in 2023 and has been packed ever since. In Bed-Stuy, Tiffany Dockery, a former Google employee, recently opened Books and wine Gladys, which focuses on books by black women. And just in time for Halloween, Curved spine, New York's first bookstore dedicated exclusively to horror has opened its doors in Williamsburg. The store's owners, Lauren Comer and Jason Mellow, raised over forty thousand dollars in a crowdfunding campaign to open the space with a distinctly gothic vibe, with black-painted walls, a glowing electric fireplace, and a coffee bar serving lattes in skull-shaped mugs and books in dozens of creepy categories, from Slashers to Haunted Mansions. Long live the weird bookstore.
What to see
Richard Brody on the French New Wave.
Richard Linklater “New wave“, dramatizing the making of Jean-Luc Godard's film Breathless in 1959, is also a group portrait. The French New Wave was, above all, a collection of passionate young filmmakers who consciously embraced cinema as an art and thereby turned cinema into the art of the youth. This is why, in the sixties, the New Wave became a source of inspiration for filmmakers around the world and put cinema at the center cultural life. Here are some of the (streamable) masterpieces that helped make it happen.
“400 strokes“: François Truffaut's first feature film, released in 1959, is a tender and fierce (and largely autobiographical) story of a vulnerable, passionately creative young man. The cruelty and piety of the school, the distracted inadequacy of the parents, the alienating distance of official culture, constitute a world in which, for the young Truffaut, films were more than a substitute—they saved him.
“Chronicle of Summer“: The New Wave often filmed fiction using documentary film methods, but rarely made documentaries. Documentarian Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, in their 1960 study of whether Parisians considered themselves happy, presented street reporting that was both reflexive and creative. The results reveal the emotional cost of French colonialism and repressed memories of World War II.
“Chronicle of Summer”.Photo courtesy of Criterion Collection
