Flavorwire presents a list of its ten favorite bookstores in the United States and requests that you “buy something fer crissakes.”
Flavorwire’s Top 10 Bookstores in the United States
The E-Reader and Tablet Tidal Wave
Pew Internet finds that tablet and e-reader ownership nearly doubled over the holiday gift-giving period 29% of Americans now own at least one of these digital reading devices. Meanwhile, the content producers keep rushing in, with NBC Universal launching an e-book arm and Apple’s textbook scheme netting 350,000 downloads in three days.
NPR Commentator to Swim from Cuba to Key West
“More than 30 years after her last big swim, Diana Nyad is back in the water,” writes NPR’s Greg Allen. “Nyad, a former commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, became well-known in the 1970s for her swim around Manhattan Island and, a few years later, for swimming from the Bahamas to Florida. Now, at age 61, she’ll soon be attempting a 103-mile swim from Cuba to Key West.” Unfortunately she’s already missed Key West’s Hemingway Days.
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Famous in France
France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, has been awarded to the French-Moroccan journalist and novelist Leïla Slimani, The New York Times reports. Slimani’s book, Chanson Douce, is loosely based on a tragic case in New York City in which two children were murdered by their caretaker. Earlier this year we reviewed another book that was a finalist for the prize, The Heart.
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Reading Lists Amended
Remember when Esquire released their not-so-great list of eighty books every man should read? Well, they have amended their list to eighty books every person should read, asking advice from “eight female literary powerhouses” including Roxane Gay, Michiko Kakutani and Lauren Groff. Our own Janet Potter recommends twenty-eight books you should read if you want to.
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Jane Austen in New York
At the Morgan Library in NYC: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen‘s Life and Legacy.” Read the NY Times review of the show here. And, if your hankering for eighteenth and early nineteenth century English art isn’t sated by the Austen, the Morgan is also offering “William Blake‘s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun'”.
Prisons From Another World, Another Time
Eric Benson interviewed Bruce Jackson about “the strange and brutal world of Southern prison farms.” Jackson, who recently published a collection entitled Inside the Wire, snapped prison photographs in Texas and Arkansas from 1964 to 1979. The images depict both the mundane and the surreal, occasionally appearing as though they were “taken from a fever dream.”
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Pointing this out one more time: Why are we applauding a piece that starts out with a baseless assertion that “Bookstores are dying”?
Can we stop saying this? Please? As though it’s a fact, or really, at all relevant to what any of us are trying to do? Can we please remember that all my go-to indies — McNally, Word, Greenlight, Idlewild, Powerhouse, Desert Island — have OPENED, not closed, in the last 6 years, and no one seems to want to stop tossing around depressing, unfounded conventional wisdom?
Oh, just presenting someone’s utterly subjective top-ten list, not applauding it per se. It gave me a whole new list of stores of that I absolutely have to visit someday; I’ve only been to two out of the ten.
WORD, Greenlight and McNally Jackson are my go-to bookstores too! I know most of the booksellers in those three stores by name; they’re wonderful places, and it’s great that they’re there. At the same time, I feel like every second or third issue of Shelf Awareness brings news of yet another independent bookstore closing, so I can’t necessarily fault the writer of this piece for sounding the alarm.