As I’ve told many of you who have stopped by in the last few days, the Philly Bookstore Crawl on Saturday was beyond our wildest expectations. I thought we would have maybe a bit busier of a day than normal, but we were packed from when we opened to when we closed! We ran out of the special totes and stickers I ordered within the first two hours and we opened an hour earlier than usual! Thankfully everyone was very nice about that.

In the afternoon, the South Philly Library was outside with their Book Bike and they gave away lots of books and signed up lots of people for library cards. If you didn’t know this already, you should sign up for a Philadelphia library card (you can do it online)! In addition to the ability to borrow physical books, you get access to the Libby app, which gives you access to lots of ebooks and audiobooks for free :)

We ended up selling over 800 books, about a fifth of our entire inventory! Our sci-fi/fantasy section in particular got almost entirely cleared out (if you have some sci-fi or fantasy to sell us, please send us an email!). We have been busy buying lots of books to refill our shelves and they’re slowly but surely getting back to reasonably full. My idea of full is books packed in so tightly that some books have to hang out on top of the other books.

Thank you everyone who came! Thank you everyone who came in the days after and listened to me apologize to them for having no books and assured me that we indeed have books! As Alex G once said, everyday is a blessing. We are so lucky we get to run a store that is patronized by the kindest people in the greatest city on Earth.

New Arrivals

Many many new used arrivals including many unpictured additions to our Spiritual World section - Mircea Eliade, Elaine Pagels, and lots of books on zen. Also yes that is a vintage mass market paperback of Lonesome Dove.

We also have two more remainders orders arriving this week! Lots of good stuff in those, including Gene Wolfe, Muriel Spark, Jennifer Dawson, David Szalay, Elaine Kraf (!!), Alison Bechdel, Ia Genberg, Cory Doctorow, and Keanu Reeves (yes).

Reading Updates

Ariel: This past week, I finished The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson, Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, and An Honest Woman by Charlotte Shane.

The Ha-Ha is a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman in a psychiatric institution that is best known today as the last novel Sylvia Plath reportedly read. I really, really loved it (and lucky for you we have five copies coming in our remainders order). It’s a really inventive novel that uses pretty off the wall first-person narration to show the changing perspectives of the main character on her own mental illness and treatment. The afterword, which focuses on the political and social context in which the novel was written, is also absolutely worth reading— Dawson, in addition to formerly being institutionalized herself, was also a social worker who thought deeply about equity in mental health care.

I don’t have much to say about Murder Bimbo or An Honest Woman! Both were fine. Murder Bimbo is billed as a thriller about a lesbian sex worker who assassinates a right wing politician. It is very Contemporary and tries to do a lot of Gone Girl-esque twists with mixed success. Overall it was fun!

An Honest Woman is a memoir of a woman’s time as an escort. It did not blow me away from a writing perspective, but that’s okay! It was interesting to read at the same time as Murder Bimbo— lots of similar themes (I did an unintentional sex work theme last week, apparently).

I am continuing to read Warlock by Oakley Hall and loving it! It’s a very different book than Lonesome Dove despite the frequent comparisons—both are just literary Westerns. I also started Concerning the Future of Souls, a short story collection by Joy Williams. It is my first of hers and I am really enjoying her voice!

Simon: Finished up Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein yesterday. This is a famously obtuse collection of prose poetry and, well, I found it very obtuse! I think what I found most striking by the end is that despite how much it reads like a jumble of words, the words pretty consistently stick to a feeling or theme throughout each section of the collection (Objects, Food, Rooms). I can’t say I’ve extracted a whole lot of meaning from any given poem here, but it was an interesting read and it’s kind of mind-blowing that it was first published more than 110 years ago.

I’m nearing the end of our short story book club pick, The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff (still five copies available at the store!). Won’t add a whole lot of extra commentary over last week here, but I’m looking forward to reading the titular story and “Bullet in the Brain” at the end — a couple of people mentioned how much they loved each of these while I was in the shop for the book crawl.

My new audiobook is Crashed by Adam Tooze, a sprawling look at the 2008 financial crisis and its interconnectedness with many crises across the globe afterwards. I’ve been meaning to read this for a while and it doesn’t disappoint — Tooze, as I knew from his newsletter, does a great job of clearly explaining the complexity of the financial world without leaning too heavily into its own self-referential jargon. I also have The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford on deck for when I finish The Night in Question.

Tomorrow, we’ll be open until 8 PM for the Passyunk Passeggiata. Grab a drink or a meal on the Ave and then come by the shop and say hi, bring me a snack, and buy a book. This is the second to last opportunity for you to do so before the last Passeggiata of the year next week!

This Saturday is the Philly Bookstore Crawl! As previously discussed, we will be opening at 10 AM, have free cute tote bags with purchases over $35, free cute stickers with every purchase, and the South Philly Library will be out front from 3 - 4 PM with their Book Bike.

We also have some fun new developments!

We will have a limited number of signed copies of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s incredible Fat Swim (I just finished reading it, more thoughts in the reading updates portion of today’s program) for sale because Emma rocks.

We will also have a whole bunch of free middle grade and picture books to give away (no purchase required, just grab ‘em) courtesy of Open Book Literary’s Leslie Zampetti. The books are very cute— bring your little/middle guy and pick one up!

New Arrivals

We are working hard to make sure we have a great selection of books for Bookstore Crawl! We have lots of new used books (pictured below) and we have another order of remainders (new books that were returned to the publisher, sold at used book prices) hopefully coming (cross your fingers for us) before Saturday. More used books to come too!

I am especially excited to finally have a used copy of Princess of 72nd Street, one of my favorite books. Other used book highlights include books by Kathy Acker, MFK Fisher, Patrick Radden Keefe, Eileen Myles, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lily King, Raymond Williams, Will Self, John McPhee, and tons of stuff from NYRB and Verso. Quite a line up!

Highlights from the remainders order that will hopefully get here is a bunch of copies of Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha (I am reading this now and loving it), a bunch of copies of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (I read this just last week and loved it), Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and lots more. I really hope it comes in time for Saturday but if not, no problem I guess :)

Oh! Also in order to make my shipping minimum for an order of new books for our book clubs, I got two copies each of Lonesome Dove (my favorite book of all time) and East of Eden (a book I get asked if we have every day and the answer is usually no because it is a hot commodity right now). I got the Penguin Orange Collection edition of East of Eden as opposed to the one with the Netflix adaptation sticker because I care about you guys and want you to have pretty books. Stocking new books is not going to be a regular thing for us outside of our book clubs, so come get these while you can!

Reading Updates

Ariel: I have randomly been reading up a storm despite it all, so I have a lot to update you on!

This past week, I finished The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Cadillac Jack by Larry McMurtry, and Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg. I talked about Cadillac Jack and The Copenhagen Trilogy last week, so in the interest of this not be super long I will just direct you to that.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which follows the survivors of a family poisoning as they live in isolation, is just as good as everyone has always told me. I put off reading it for a long time because I was scared it would be scary (I am a wimp) but I am here to tell you it is more creepy than scary and if I can do it, you can too. Really effective use of first person narration from a point of view that would otherwise be hard to empathize with.

Fat Swim, a collection of lightly interconnected stories mostly set in Philly, deals with queerness, fatness, love, and what it means to be a person with a body. The collection starts with an epigraph from Grace Paley and Eisenberg’s voice throughout the collection really reminds me of Paley’s— there’s a similar irreverence/healthy dose of the absurd, but also so much empathy there. My favorites were the titular story, Lanternfly, and Swiffer Girl, but the whole collection is really strong. We are so lucky to have Emma in Philly!

I just started Oakley Hall’s Warlock, a Western that many people compare to Lonesome Dove and one of Thomas Pynchon’s favorite books. I am enjoying it thus far, but am trying to keep the Lonesome Dove comparisons out of my head so I don’t have sky-high expectations.

I am also midway through Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha, a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman in a psychiatric institution that is best known today as the novel Sylvia Plath was reportedly reading when she died. Thus far I’m really enjoying the prose style and I am not finding it as upsetting as the description I just gave sounds.

Simon: First up, Jurassic Park. Even though I read this for a book club, I did not attend that book club because I lost my keys at work and getting back home from the Main Line took forever. This is an entertaining book and not much more; Michael Crichton is a supremely unstylish writer who came up with an interesting situation and uninteresting characters. Even though it’s been ages since I last saw it, I feel confident saying the movie is leagues ahead of the book.

Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh was my audiobook for the past week. This was my first time reading Hanh or any Buddhist spiritual work. While mindfulness has reconfigured into its own product over time, I found that Hanh’s presentation of meditation and mindfulness in the context of social responsibility was very compelling! His discussion of interbeing was the most interesting part of the book to me on a conceptual level, echoing a lot of work I’d read in college on actor-network theory and process ontology.

I’m now dividing my time between The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff, our short story club pick, and the poetry collection Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. These make for a fun contrast – Wolff’s writing is very straightforward, transmitting a lot of information clearly in a short span, while Tender Buttons is very obtuse. I’m excited to discuss The Night in Question. So far, I have really admired Wolff’s ability to quickly develop rich and distinct characters and their relationships with one another. “The Life of the Body,” “Two Boys and a Girl,” and “Sanity” have been standouts. We have a few copies of this in the shop if you’re interested in joining the club!

Bye!! See you soon!

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As a reminder, we’ll be opening an hour early that day (10 AM), the South Philly Library’s book bike will be outside for part of the day with books to check out and to keep, and we’ll have free special totes with purchases over $35 and free special stickers with all purchases. You should come!

New Arrivals

I actually remembered to take pictures of two stacks this time! But we do have like 8 boxes of stuff to inventory still and all of the remainders that I mentioned last week are finally coming tomorrow, so we have lots and lots of new stuff that isn’t pictured.

Reading Updates

Ariel: I am now 2/3 of the way through Cadillac Jack by Larry McMurtry, his thinly veiled autofiction about the life of an antiques scout with many entanglements with women, and it’s growing on me. It’s definitely more meandering and absurdist than the other books of his I’ve read, but it’s a very silly light read, which is a nice change of pace for me.

I am also almost finished with Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy, which I decided to pick up after talking about it with so many of you when we had a few copies of her novel The Faces in a few weeks ago. It’s just as good you all told me it would be! It’s a three-part memoir of her life in childhood, young adulthood, and her struggles with addiction as an adult. It is a very heavy book emotionally, but absolutely beautifully written.

Simon: I’m about halfway through Jurassic Park now and the dino action is very exciting. The characters are ridiculous and the dialogue is silly. But there’s intrigue and raptors, so who cares!

I am onto the final third of Jill Lepore’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and it feels like it has gotten too expansive for its own good. Lepore spends the second half of the book constructing an argument that puts AI mania in the context of a larger history of human conquest over the natural world. This takes some surprise turns — such as a brief history of Arbor Day — which leave it less focused and more confusing than I’d hope for. Lepore also glosses over much of the history of human slavery, which given that discussion of AI often focuses on inhuman/subhuman workers, feels strange.

I’ve started a couple of books in the past week as well. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a prose poetry collection, has been fascinating. It is written largely in very abstract sensory language. I have found it most rewarding to read aloud, though doing that in public a couple of times probably left others around me wondering what on earth I was saying. The other book is Tobias Wolff’s The Night in Question, our next short story collection book club pick. Not far in enough to make any conclusions yet, but I enjoyed the first story, about a reporter who is confronted by the (living) person he just published an obituary for.

Bye!<33

We have another fun and busy one lined up! Tomorrow we’ll be open until 8 PM for the Passyunk Passeggiata with our Short Story Book Club meeting at the shop afterwards to discuss Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man.

On Saturday from 12-4 PM, Simon will be vending on our behalf at Cartesian Brewing as part of the Reunion Book Fair of small presses and used books. We’ll be bringing lots of poetry and art books!

New Arrivals

Because summer is the slowest season for sourcing used books (not many library fundraisers, estate sales, etc.), we’ve placed two more orders of remainders (books returned to publishers that are usually in unread condition except for a little sharpie mark). Highlights:

• Keanu Reeves & China Mieville’s sci-fi book that they wrote together

• The Night Always Comes & The Horse by Willy Vlautin

• The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

• The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

• Monogamy by Susan Miller

• Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno

• Death Valley by Melissa Broder

• Shmutz by Felicia Berliner

• Tilt by Emma Pattee

• Kudos by Rachel Cusk

• Writers and Lovers by Lily King

• Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

• Lots of new contemporary political philosophy stuff from Verso and others

• New graphic novels, including a graphic biography of Paul Robeson

• Lots of new poetry (I know many of you are doing the Sealey Challenge!) including Louise Glück, Elizabeth Alexander, Kate Baer, Monica Youn, Claudia Rankine, Roya Marsh, Henri Cole, Solmaz Sharif, Clint Smith, Alice Notley, Patricia Lockwood, and more!

We also have a big book sale we’re attending on Saturday and a bunch of other used book buys in the pipeline, so we should hopefully be restocked on classics and other good stuff this weekend as well!

Reading Updates

Ariel: This week, I finished Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

While I enjoyed the Lilith’s Brood series, which follows the human survivors of an Earth-destroying nuclear war after they are saved by a seemingly benevolent alien species, I found it ultimately a bit unsatisfying. While the three books, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, each focus on a different character in distinct circumstances, their personalities all were very similar and none of them felt distinct. None of the characters were very fleshed out despite the cool world-building she was doing, which made it difficult for me to really care what happened to them.

Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her most famous novel which I am for some reason just getting to now, focuses on an eccentric teacher in 1930s Edinburgh who manipulates and overshares with her students. Like the other Spark I’ve read, it is very funny, dark, and kinda mean. I really enjoyed it! I love a short and weird book I can read in one sitting on a day off.

I am now a little over 100 pages into Larry McMurtry’s Cadillac Jack, a strange mid-career book about about a rodeo bulldogger turned antique scout based on his own adventures as a book scout. McMurtry himself said that he phoned this one in, and it definitely reads that way thus far. I think he might have written it just to come up with funny names (examples: Northrup Lump, Brisling Bowker, Blink Schedel, Moorcock Malone, Cunard Cotswinkle, Sir Cripps Crisp, Penserilla “Pencil” Penrose, I could go on). This is my tenth McMurtry book and my least favorite thus far, but to me even a bad McMurty book is at least fun.

Also still making my way at a leisurely pace through the new Eve Babitz letter collection, Too LA. I like it! I do not agree with Lili Anolik (the editor of these letters and also the author of two books on Babitz) that this is her masterpiece, though— Slow Days, Fast Company still holds that title for me.

Simon: Ahead of our short story collection book club tomorrow, I’ve finished The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley. It is largely a collection of stories on love and relationships that deals with some taboo and unsavory subjects without being judgmental or moralistic. Paley has an incredibly distinct voice and great sense of humor that shines through each and every story here. This is also my one hangup with the collection – because her voice is so distinct, every character sounds a bit like her narration. Excited to dig into this more with the book club.

I started Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for Smoke Stacks Book Club in the past week as well. While I don’t think anyone has ever accused Crichton of being a stylish writer, this is the antithesis to the experience of reading Paley. It reads like it was written with the intent to become a film – characters are consistently introduced with the syntax “[Full name] was [verb],” followed by a short block of character history to establish their attitude and motivations. I’m still enjoying it. It’s a fun story about dinosaurs and why they’re cool!

My audiobook drought is over! I’m listening to Jill Lepore’s upcoming book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (thanks to libro.fm for the Advance Listening Copy). Lepore argues that technological advancement – especially regarding data collection and usage – through the long 19th century and beyond has gone hand-in-hand with the erosion of democracy, reaching as far back as the invention of statistics as a science and Marx’s commentary on labor productivity. It’s not much fun, but Lepore makes a clear case for how AI- and generally data-driven technocracy/autocracy is an ideological project rather than some inevitable outcome of societal development.

P.S.: If you have a copy of Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem and want to sell it to us, we will pay extra for it. I would like to read it. Thank you!

XOXO See ya

On Satuday from 11-5, Simon will be vending on our behalf at the Lightbox Physical Media Fair at the Village of Industry & Art in Center City. He’ll be bringing lots of books on film, art books, and vintage mass market paperbacks that we haven’t put out in the store yet. You should go and also check out the many other physical media vendors! If you see The Sopranos (any season except for season 2 which I already have) or season 2 of The OC on DVD, please purchase it for me. I would also like Moonstruck on Blu-ray. I will pay you back!

Next week we’ll be at a fair too! Reunion is hosting a book fair at Cartesian Brewing (1326 E Passyunk Ave), one of our favorite places to pop up. It will be running from noon to 4 PM. We’ll have a smaller selection at this one, consisting of poetry and books on writing. There will be many small presses slinging their publications here along with !!more used books!!

Also! If you are an audiobook person, we now have a Libro.fm page! If you buy audiobooks through that platform, we get a portion of the proceeds (similar to our Bookshop.org page, which you can use to order new books). Here’s the link to that! Thanks for considering it :)

New Arrivals

A new shipment of remaindered or returned books (overstock/unsold copies from publishers or returned by bookstores) arrives today! These are books that are usually in brand new, unread condition except for a little sharpie mark that we price as we usually price used books (give or take half of the cover price). Remainders allow us to get much more recent releases than we often can find secondhand and enable us to source multiple copies of great books at once!

Highlights (in list form as I haven’t received the packages yet):

• 10 (!!) copies of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (a recent Simon favorite)

• 10 (!!) copies of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (one of my absolute favorite books)

• Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries

• Karl Ove Knausgaard’s In the Land of the Cyclops

• Soul of a Whore and Purvis, two plays by Denis Johnson

• A stage version of The Odyssey adapted by Derek Walcott

• Mike Africa Jr.’s On a Move: Philadelphia’s Notorious Bombing and a Native Son’s Lifelong Battle for Justice

• Change by Edouard Louis

• Stories and essays by Cixin Liu

• A lot more, including contemporary litfic and fantasy/sci-fi!!!

And here’s what the new arrival shelves look like at the moment— lots of new history and nonfiction.

My desk (and the four crates beside it) is also a mess of new stuff that I am inventorying, including lots of beautiful vintage paperbacks and a lot of biographies of writers (Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, etc).

Reading Updates

Ariel: Last week, I finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for the book club that meets tomorrow (loooved it but thoughts are saved for book club) and the first book in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series, Dawn.

I have mixed feelings about Dawn, in which a human woman awakens on the spaceship of a seemingly benevolent alien species that intervened to rehabilitate Earth after nuclear war kills almost all of humanity. In this one, Butler is very heavy on using dialogue between the clueless human characters and the all-knowing aliens to orient the reader to the world and the story. That can be fine, but it got to a point where I felt that every aspect of the world was being explained to me in a way that took me out of the novel rather than trusting me as a reader to figure it out.

I still enjoyed it and am now almost done with the second one, Adulthood Rites. This one has the same problem as the first for me, but I will still probably finish the series.

Today I’m going to start McMurtry’s Cadillac Jack, which was inspired by his own experiences as a book scout. Yay!

Simon: I’m now reading our book for the short story book club, Grace Paley’s Little Disturbances of Man. This is a lot of fun so far! Paley has used the stories I’ve read so far to tackle sex and relationships without being moralistic, overly romantic, nor dour. Her prose is lively and efficient, building up complete characters in the span of just a few lines without necessarily leaning on what’s left explicitly unsaid about them. Can’t wait to talk about it next week!

No audiobook right now for me — the rapid approach of football season has me catching up on backlogged episodes of Phantom Island, the only sports podcast I like! Sorry to all the others! And sorry (not really) for a podcast shout out in the reading section.

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We were in the Inquirer on Monday! Here’s a gift link to read it.

We have a very busy rest of the summer and I have lots to tell you about!

Passyunk Passeggiata

Every Thursday from this week until the end of August, we’ll be participating in the Passyunk Passeggiata, where participating businesses run specials and maybe stay open a little later every Thursday from 5 onward.

We will be open every Thursday from 12-8 PM (one hour later than usual!) with a cart (or table if our library cart doesn’t get here in time this week) of books under $5 outside. Realistically because it is just me, the cart/table will probably be set up all day and not just from 5-8 because I do not know how I would set that up by myself while we’re open. So there will be bargains all day!

Go to happy hour or dinner with your sweetie or your sweetie self and go book shopping before or after! I feel strongly that this would be the perfect date and it will also be cost-effective because many other businesses are running specials under $10. Also, if you wanted to impress your date with your thoughtfulness and strong community ties, you could bring me a snack.

August Events

Simon will be vending on our behalf at Lightbox’s Physical Media Fair on August 1st from 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM at the Village of Industry & Art on Broad Street. He’ll have lots of cool vintage paperbacks, art books, books on movies, etc. This is also great timing for me personally because I just thrifted a Blu-ray player (which had a Blu-ray of 50 Shades of Grey inside, excitingly) and would like to get more DVDs of prestige television. If you have King of the Hill on DVD, I would like to purchase that from you. I also just thrifted the first season of The OC.

On August 8th, Simon will again be vending on our behalf at Reunion Poetry’s Book Fair at Cartesian Brewing! I do not have more details to share yet but we are happy to participate :)

On August 22nd, it will be the Philly Bookstore Crawl! To celebrate, we’ll be giving away free limited edition totes with purchases over $40 while supplies last, free limited edition stickers with all purchases all day, and we’ll have a special guest in the afternoon (will share details when I have them!)

The tote in question:

New Arrivals

Well gang, I forgot to take pictures of the new arrivals this week. But rest assured, there are a lot and they are good. Here was my desk on Sunday:

We have a lot of new Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut (we keep getting cleared out), James Baldwin fiction and nonfiction, Mary Oliver, graphic novels, and more, and our Big Thinkers section is super full. Come on by and see for yourself!

ALSO: We should have some very interesting items joining our collectibles roster soon. Keep an eye out for more on this!

Reading Updates

Ariel: I finished Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty yesterday and promptly submitted five digitization requests to the University of Houston special collections (you are only allowed five) for copies of the many book reviews McMurtry wrote.

If you are new to knowing about me, McMurtry is my favorite author and also one of my role models as a bookseller and book scout. It is pretty rare that learning about a white guy author’s personal life makes me like them more, but that is actually what happened. McMurtry was a complicated and certainly not perfect person, but he seems to have also been really kind. I really enjoyed the biography as a reading experience, too!

I am about halfway finished with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and trying to take it slowly. Whenever I read her, I really benefit from rereading sentences and paragraphs a couple of times rather than just letting it wash over me. When I’m done with that, I think I’ll read McMurtry’s Cadillac Jack :)

Simon: I finished The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf, one of Ariel’s favorite books and now one of my favorites as well. It’s a compact and incredibly rich character study of Princess Esmeralda/Ellen, a woman who experiences manic episodes she calls “radiances” set in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1970s. Kraf’s writing is stunning, effortlessly bringing both her protagonist and NYC to life through the perspective of Esmeralda’s frantic retelling of her most recent radiance at her typewriter. Our copy of this will not make it into the shop, sorry! Too special!

I’m now starting our book for the Short Story Collection Book Club, The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley. This is again one of Ariel’s favorite books. She tends to be good at picking favorites. I’m excited to get into it. Our inaugural meeting is Thursday, August 6th at 7:30 PM if you’d like to join; we still have a few copies of this at the shop.

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The store has been really busy (thank you!) and I have lots of matchmaking to do (thank you!) so this will be a bit of a shorter newsletter than usual!

We have a ton of events coming up in August which I will tell you about another time, but the one happening the soonest is the Lightbox Physical Media Fair on August 1st at the Village of Industry & Art! Go say hi to Simon & purchase a book from us in a new location.

New Arrivals

Soooo many new arrivals, but here are just some I picked up yesterday and also a look at some of our new arrivals shelves. We have a ton of boxes of books I haven’t even inventoried yet!

Some of the currently uninventoried boxes are books on consignment for our nonprofit partner BookSmiles. In the near future, we will be putting those out with little smiley face stickers on the spines to mark them as such. As a heads up, because proceeds go to BookSmiles, store credit and sales won’t apply to those books.

Reading Updates

Ariel: Well guys, it turns out that working full-time at my full-sized bookstore and also working part-time at my former full-time job have given me less time to read than before. Oh well!

This past week, I finished Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany, two essays about the transformation of Times Square from a place full of porn theaters and adult entertainment to a sanitized tourist haven. The first essay largely focuses on Delany’s own experiences as a regular at porn theaters for three decades, while the second is an argument about why those types of institutions mattered as points of contact between people of different class and racial backgrounds.

I have complicated feelings about this one that are more from an argument perspective than from a writing perspective, so it doesn’t feel like this is the place to go into it (largely some gripes about some issues he hand waved away). Overall, I got insight into a side of New York I didn’t know much about and I am glad that I read it. It will be back in the shop tomorrow if you’d like to grab it!

I am still listening to the biography Larry McMurtry: A Life on audio, which is fueling my long-held desire to (self) publish a little collection of Larry McMurtry’s book reviews (did you know that he was a prolific critic for the New York Review of Books, The Houston Post, and many others from very early in his career to very late? He was and he was great!).

I have started Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for one of our book clubs and am LOVING it thus far. It’s been a while since I’ve read Woolf and I just love her voice!! I have sticky noted a truly ridiculous amount of lines to write down in my little journal.

I also started Too L.A., a collection of Eve Babitz’s unsent letters edited by Lilli Anolik and published by NYRB last month. I obviously love Eve (Slow Days, Fast Company is one of my absolute favorite books), but I find Anolik sooo annoying and find her annotations really intrusive. I will push through because Eve is so charming and witty and fun to read. It’s a perfect book to have in my bag for little snippets of reading time.

Simon: I have finished The Fifth Head of Cerberus! To summarize, this is a collection of three novellas by sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe (who Ursula Le Guin called “our Melville”) about the colonization of twin life-supporting planets and the indigenous population of one of them. The greater narrative is built through these three low-to-the-ground explorations of the setting. Once I got into the rhythm of the final novella, this was hard to put down. Wolfe does such an excellent job tiptoeing around the existence of the indigenous population and building a very rich mystery through the eyes of three distinct and deeply unreliable narrators. If you’re a fan of Le Guin (of course), Borges, or Jeff VanderMeer, I think this might be up your alley.

I also finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and cannot recommend it. For someone who is so eager to express his intellect and “logic,” Taleb builds the entire book around hypotheticals, strawmen, short “thought experiments,” and denigration of positions other than his as plain old dumb. He might well be a really clever guy when it comes to options trading, but he’s exhausting to read.

So far, I’m really enjoying The Princess of 72nd St by Elaine Kraf. Kraf’s prose is brilliantly creative and I love how freely she can put that skill to use with this narrator. I aim to finish by Tuesday for the next meeting of Smoke Stacks Book Club.

Bye! See you at the shop this week!

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Book Matchmaking

Back when we were a pop-up, I did what I called book matchmaking, where people would fill out a questionnaire about what they like to read and I would give them a pile of books I thought they’d like. It was very fun and I miss it, so I’m doing it again!

It’s $35 for three hand-picked used books in good condition, a note explaining my picks, a bookmark, and a sticker. You can fill out the questionnaire for yourself or a loved one, they make great gifts! If you or your loved one are just getting back into reading, I’ve also had people tell me their favorite movies.

Fill out the questionnaire here!

New Arrivals

I inventoried over eight boxes of books in the past few days and our new arrivals shelves (in the center aisle, under the graphic novels) are very full! I didn’t take pictures of everything, but here are some good stacks.

Make sure to check the new arrivals shelves next time you’re in! There’s always a lot of good stuff in there.

Not a new arrival, but just a heads up— we have a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in the shop that has been there for a week! Usually it goes in hours, but I think because it’s in the bottom shelf people haven’t seen it. Come through tomorrow and grab it!

Reading Updates

Ariel: I just finished my third Elizabeth Taylor (not that one) book, Angel, and it may be my favorite yet, which is high praise (if you have ever read this newsletter before or talked to me, you probably know how much I love the other two I’ve read!). Angel follows the life of Angelica Deverell, a writer who achieves popular success for her very dramatic and salacious romance novels as a teenager. It is a very funny and also sad book and shows Taylor’s observational powers and delightful sense of humor. The foreword in my edition is by Hilary Mantel! If you’re a fan of Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark, I highly recommend it.

I started Samuel R Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, two essays critiquing the gentrification of New York City, particularly the transformation of Times Square from a place full of hustlers and porn theaters to the sanitized tourist trap we know it as today. I’m only around 50 pages in, but I’m finding it really interesting as someone who grew up in New York (sorry) hearing my parents and grandparents talk about how much Times Square changed in their lifetimes.

I also just started the audiobook of Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Larry McMurtry and am probably going to start Larry’s Cadillac Jack soon as a special treat. I have been making myself read other things that are not McMurtry in order to be a better bookseller for you all, but I just found a copy of this book (which matches my copy of his Moving On, an underrated 800+ page banger) after hunting for it for a while. It is a hot Larry summer and I can no longer fight it!

Simon: Bad update from me this week! My bad everyone. I just let my brain kind of smooth over playing video games when I wasn’t working over the past week instead of reading.

I still haven’t finished The Fifth Head of Cerberus despite thinking it would be a quick read. I should not have been so surprised by how much more difficult Wolfe’s writing got after the first novella in this collection; he is, after all, known for this. The second novella, told like a folktale, introduces an entirely new slate of terms and concepts with minimal explanation. The third, structured as a military officer reading documents (journal entries, interview and interrogation logs) pertaining to a new prisoner, is less difficult but still rather non-linear. Do I like it all the same — yes. I’d pitch it as a brutal and very rich exploration of colonial dynamics both from the perspectives of colonizers and indigenous people in a sci-fi setting.

Fooled by Randomness by Nicholas Nassim Taleb might be starting to grow on me as a primer on the unreliability of statistics and probability. He’s absurdly arrogant, though, which is not exactly growing on me. For someone who preaches the value of not holding onto any particular idea or opinion too tightly, he sure does an awful lot of holding onto ideas and opinions dogmatically. If he deems something or someone stupid, they may never recover. Shout out to all the continental philosophers that he’s dismissed out of hand because he doesn’t care to try seriously engaging with them.

I will be starting The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf and The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley, both Ariel favorites, for book club purposes within the next week. Please hold me to that however possible.

Bye! See ya at the store this week :)

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the new store the last few days! We were consistently busy, even on Monday, and met lots of new people who had no idea that we were right next door for the past four months. It has been so novel and wonderful to be in a space that is all our own and has visibility from the street (if you are a person who just learned about us, that makes sense! Here’s an article about our former space!). Feeling very lucky to have you all in our community! Thank you!!

We’ll be open as usual this week despite the holiday and the heat, so come on by!

New Book Club

We’ve gotten a lot of interest in book clubs and realized that while we have a book club focused on style/voice that a friend of the shop runs and one focused on short story collections, we don’t have a more general book club for the store.

To rectify that, I’m starting a book club that I’m calling Ariel’s Pick (I am Ariel, co-owner of Little Yenta with my husband Simon, hi!). Each month, I will pick a book that I love and think would make for a good discussion. My picks will always be fiction, but will vary in genre and time period.

My first pick is Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, one of my favorite books. The book follows Ruth, her daughter, who is addicted to drugs, and her granddaughter, whom she is raising in her daughter’s absence. The novel is moving, but avoids the saccharine or moralistic and Boyt’s prose is beautifully understated and unlabored.

Our first meeting will be Monday, August 10th at 7:30 PM in the shop. Sign up here!

New Arrivals

Lots of new stuff in this week! Unpictured are a few books on gnosticism, alien encounters, and a nice big stack of graphic novels.

What We’re Reading

Ariel: This week, I finished Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, which I really liked. It centers on Mildred, a church-going, unmarried woman in her 30s in 1950s England, as she becomes caught up in the lives of her neighbors and her vicar. It is a very funny and surprising book about repressed desire with a kind of sarcastic sensibility that reminds me a lot of Elizabeth Taylor (the author, not actress). I kidnapped it from the shop but it’s back on the shelves now— go pick it up!

Speaking of Elizabeth Taylor, I have just started her book Angel, a satirical novel about a working-class teenage writer whose overwrought books bring her commercial success. I’m just a few pages in, but can already tell I will probably like this one just as much as the other two I’ve read by her (a lot).

Simon: Finishing store buildout really did allow me more time to read! I finished the first novella of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and am starting on the second now. Wolfe’s approach to worldbuilding in this collection involves very little exposition. Every detail gradually comes together into a setting that feels familiar but off in most ways. I don’t want to give away too much, but by the end of the first part, I could see how Wolfe might be a big influence on the world of contemporary “weird fiction.” It’s a disturbing read.

On the audiobook front, I’ve started Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb while I’m still figuring out how to get an audiobook of Adam Tooze’s Crashed. Taleb, a former hedge fund manager, is sort of the token iconoclastic essayist in the business world; this is my first time engaging with his work. I appreciate his willingness to dunk on self-styled genius MBA recipients who are really the beneficiaries of luck, but man, I’m just not sure how well this book holds up so far. Lots of conjecture, lots of distrust for modern journalism, not much evidence for his thoughts! Some of the conjecture on our inability to know every possible risk or outcome is at least interesting.

Thanks for reading! Stay cool :)

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In case you missed it, we’ll be open this upcoming Saturday in our new location at 1912 E Passyunk (which is literally right next door to our old one) from 11 AM to 6 PM. My mom has sent me four babkas from Zabar’s for us to share with customers for the occasion (if you have never had a babka or never had a Zabar’s babka, this is going to change your life).

We don’t have the capacity to plan an opening party right now, but we are thinking of doing bookstore karaoke to celebrate some time in July!

Store Updates

We have our window painted! Thanks to Jeremy of Welcome Home Sign Co., who did an amazing job!

Now to build out updates!

The front room of the store, which has our general fiction and genre fiction, is almost done! The shelves you see on the walls are full of just general fiction, with the exception of two columns at the end which are full of science fiction. Today we’ll be building an aisle in the middle that will hold mysteries, thrillers, and romance. Maybe poetry and theater too? But we’ll see what fits! Also going to install some light fixtures today.

Now the second room in which things are much more chaotic. The big desk is temporary— we’re getting a counter built by Manayunk Timber, but I’m not sure it will be ready before we open. So picture a nice counter where the ugly desk is right now. In front of the desk, there will be a case full of our collectible/rare books. For now, that’ll be the same barrister bookcase that was in the old place if you remember.

The opposite wall from the counter will have more shelves, which will have biographies/memoirs, essays/letters, science/nature, and perhaps poetry & theater depending on what we fit or don’t fit in the aisle up front.

More chaos in the third room! Here we’ll have the big thinkers section (philosophy/sociology/political science/anthropology/etc.), history, art & architecture, cookbooks, a children’s zone, and some type of reading nook.

There is a weird closet with no door that used to be a shower that we are thinking will be the nook. But maybe that would be unpleasant? We also thought about making it the children’s zone, but I guess parents probably would not want to stick their child in a closet with an exposed pipe that they have no visibility into as they browse the rest of the store. But maybe they would love that? I don’t know, I don’t have kids. Maybe the brick wall area will be the nook and the children’s area and the closet will just be a closet? Stay tuned!

The back room (the room with dark walls you can see bits of in these photos) will be our storage and inventorying room, so that is not for me or you to worry about at this time!

Book Clubs

Our next book for Style & Craft book club will be Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway! Our next meeting will be Thursday, July 30th at 7:30 PM at the shop. Sign up using this Google Form! If you’re in S&C already and are like, “Wait, I didn’t get an email about this” it is because I haven’t sent it. I will hopefully send one in the next few days with more logistics around book ordering etc (I also have like six used copies right now!). Sorry about me!

Our new book club focusing on short story collections does not yet have a date but we think it will be the first week of August. The book will be Grace Paley’s (in my opinion perfect) collection The Little Disturbances of Man. Sign up here— open to everyone regardless of if you are an experienced short story enjoyer or new to reading them!

Reading Updates

Ariel: I have not been reading as much as I’d like due to all of the above, but I finished Sonya Walger’s Lion, which is autofiction about the author’s relationship with her absentee dad. It was okay! I thought it was a bit overwritten and sacrificed some of the potential emotional power of the book at the altar of Style.

I also finished Lost City of Z by David Grann on audiobook while painting the store. It’s about the explorer Percy Fawcett’s search for an ancient city in the Amazon and his eventual disappearance while looking for it. I learned a lot about the Amazon and its civilizations and I think Grann did a good job addressing the white supremacist and colonial agendas of European explorers on the continent. It was also a pretty gripping story! I would recommend it. We have a couple of used copies in the shop.

I am also still reading Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. I’m loving it thus far! Reminds me both of Elizabeth Taylor and also Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day— repressed desires are a big theme.

I also finally got off the library waitlist for the audiobook of Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund yesterday. I am about two hours in and thus far it is more her own reflections/personal story than a history of the Jewish Labor Bund, but maybe that will change! I went to her talk at the Philly Ethics Society last month and enjoyed it, but also got the impression that a lot of the book is her personal reflections (which is fine, but I am hoping I get more history in there!).

Simon: I finished the novella A Shining by Jon Fosse. This is a single unbroken internal monologue of someone who chooses to drive aimlessly, turning left, then right, then left, until they end up with their car stuck on an anonymous forest road as a snowstorm begins. It’s a simple, fast-paced narrative and I found it a good introduction to Fosse’s style — I didn’t feel ready to take on the behemoth Septology, but now I’m much more interested.

I’m making my way through Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but this has been slow-going with our work schedule. This is a collection of three novellas and I’m still on the first. Wolfe so far has done a spectacular job of building a sense of mystery and foreboding around a world which feels both highly scientifically advanced and frozen in the early modern era (think golden age of marine commerce/piracy). Very excited to see where this goes when I have a little more time on my hands!

By the way, Bookshop.org is having a free shipping sale until June 26th! If you purchase a book on Bookshop and select us as your bookstore, we get a portion of each sale :)

Thanks!! See ya Saturday!

We had such a wonderful last weekend in the tiny store and celebrating Pride on Passyunk on Sunday. We met lots of new people who didn’t know we existed who I immediately confused with our moving news. We also saw lots of our beloved regulars! Thank you for making our time in the tiny store special!

New Hours

As a reminder, we’re closed until Saturday 6/27, when we’ll open in our new space (1912 E Passyunk, literally right next door to our former tiny store)! Here are our hours from then on:

Sun: 11-6 PM

Mon: 12-7 PM

Tues: Closed

Weds: Closed

Thurs: 12-7 PM

Fri: 12-7 PM

Sat: 11-6 PM

Hopefully this gives you many opportunities to come browse!

Store Progress

Here are some dark pictures of the store as it currently stands! We went with a sage-y green for the walls. I think it looks quite nice! We have one more room to paint and are also building shelves and organizing books so they will be ready to shelve. We’ll also be buying even more books this weekend!

Tomorrow, sign painters (Welcome Home Sign Co.) are coming to paint our name on the window. I am very excited. They do such beautiful work!

New Book Club

In addition to our current book club, which is run by friend of the shop Jon and focuses on writing style, Simon & I will be running a short story collection book club!

We’ll think about questions like, “Why are these stories in a collection together?”, “How does length work for or against a story?”, and more! We’ll be approaching these questions as readers-first (neither of us are creative writers), but all perspectives, writerly or not, are welcome!

Our first collection will be Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man, which is perhaps my all-time favorite collection. The stories are often very funny and absurdist and deal frankly with sex, class, and gender. She’s one of George Saunders’ big influences and you can certainly see her DNA in his short stories.

We’re aiming for the first week of August for our first meeting. Sign up for the book club here!

Reading Updates

Ariel: Last week I finished Leviathan by Paul Auster for our Style & Craft book club. The book is about a guy who blows himself up, as told by his friend who is basically Paul Auster. As we discussed in book club, I think the choice of narrator and the framing device of the book held it back considerably. I also thought the pacing was very odd and the women were written cartoonishly (they are all hot and all want to sleep with Paul Auster or with his friend or with both).

That was the only book I read this past week! I have been a busy guy. I am currently reading Lion by Sonya Walger, which is autofiction about Walger’s relationship with her absentee father. I had no idea that Walger is a famous actress, I just saw that it was a NYRB book, had a Susie Boyt blurb (author of one of my favorite books), and a customer who has very good taste in books brought it in. I am about halfway through and enjoying it!

I’m also reading Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which has been excellent (ha) thus far. A very funny book.

Simon: I finished Waiting for Godot! Yippee! No more waiting! This was my first time reading a play in a long time and I’m glad I picked it. It’s funny, it’s quirky, it’s a lot less self-serious than the stereotypical black-turtlenecked existentialism. My understanding is that Beckett’s writing is usually much heavier than this, but I’ll answer that question for myself when I have more time. Maybe Watt will come next.

Short read summer continued with The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, after an 8-week wait on the Free Library’s hold list. Billed as “a modern amorality play,” this is a short novella about a 17-year-old girl whose sheltered upper-crust upbringing sets her on a strange collision course with the modern publishing industry’s insatiable appetite for a trauma narrative. Ariel and Style & Craft co-host Jon are both big proponents of DeWitt’s legendary debut novel The Last Samurai, so I figured I’d read this as an introduction to her work before taking that on. Do recommend! It’s a fun, fast-paced, and very concise read, packing more into its 60-odd pages than most can do with 4x that.

Continuing with the short reads theme, I have started A Shining by Jon Fosse and The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. With very limited time to do anything but prep the new store, knocking out 10 pages in either of these feels pretty gratifying. Impressions to come next week.

This Thursday-Sunday are your last days to shop at the tiny store (1910 E Passyunk) before we close for a week to move everything over to a normal store right next door (1912 E Passyunk). Our first day open at 1912 will be Saturday, June 27th!

In the meantime we have been doing tons of work to get the new space ready, including buildings lots of shelves and buying lots and lots of books. This week if you ask me to find something, I may not do a very good job at it because there are lots of books everywhere and precisely where is not known to me. Anyway, we are so excited to have so much space for books and people!

Pride on Passyunk is Sunday!

So I forgot to take pictures of new arrivals (also there are soooo many books in the tiny store right now, just come by and see what we got!), so instead of my usual New Arrivals section, let’s talk about Pride on Passyunk, which is this Sunday from 1-5 from Dickinson to Broad. More details on the event here, but there will be sidewalk vendors, performances, and events and it is free to attend!

We’ll have a table outside full of lots of used books by/about queer authors. Do I have pictures of those? No, because I also forgot to do that. But I know you’ll be happy! There’s a lil something for everyone— contemporary literary fiction, biographies, romance, art books, and more classic stuff (Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein).

Please do not try and sell us books on Sunday! Every other day is fair game (although as always, if you have ten or more books you’d like to sell, please email first!).

Reading Updates

Ariel: I FINALLY FINISHED WAR & PEACE! It took me three months and I finished 19 other books (I counted) since I started it, but I did it. I loved the parts of this book that were a novel, I did not love the parts of this book that were Tolstoy philosophizing about the nature of history/leadership/the spirit of the troops, which is at least a good third of the book. I don’t think you all are necessarily dying for my extensive take on one of the most written about books of all time, so I will leave it at that!

I also finished Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, which was my first of her novels. She is a very stylish writer. I liked it but it left me a little cold! All of the characters in this book felt very detached to me, which I know is her reputation as a novelist, but I felt like they were detached because that’s how Didion writes rather than because that’s how the characters would behave, if that makes sense.

I am currently reading Leviathan by Paul Auster for our next book club meeting, and that is actually the only book I’m reading right now! #discipline

Simon: Still reading Waiting for Godot when I have time and enjoying it thoroughly! I’d love to get the chance to see this performed live sometime in the near future. There are so many outlandish stage directions here and a lot of the fun would be seeing how they’re interpreted.

I’m just about finished with We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland - 20 minutes left! - and I’d happily recommend it. It swept away many of the myths about Ireland that I’d come to accept (e.g. Irish nationalism = historically socialist) and has left me with a much better understanding of why it is the way it is. One caveat — this is part-memoir, hence "Personal History,” so this might not land for you if you don’t care for his perspective or political/religious views. Given that it ends with some words on the Irish real estate boom and bust contributing to the 2008 global financial crisis, I’m thinking about picking up Adam Tooze’s Crashed for my next audiobook. It sounds like the perfect June-July beach read.

New Arrivals

Lots of new stuff! A lot of good philosophy and contemporary fiction picks plus some classics. And we’re getting new stuff in all the time! Probably more new arrivals than ever! We don’t even have everything officially in our inventory yet!

Reading Updates

Ariel: I have not been reading as much this week since it’s been super busy, but I am finally almost done with War & Peace! Hopefully the next time you hear from me I will have finished it!

I was reading Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz but stopped halfway through. It feels like Anolik just wanted to write another book about Eve Babitz after discovering her letters (which I get!) and threw Joan Didion in there to market it. I was not enjoying Anolik’s writing and also did not like her using Didion’s fiction as if it was completely autobiographical. A lot of her conclusions/analysis felt a bit lazy and I think I am just much more interested in the source material than I am in reading Anolik’s take on it (good news for me, there is a collection of Babitz's letters coming out this month).

Didion & Babitz did inspire me to finally pick up Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer. I’ve read about a third of it and am enjoying it thus far. It’s my first time reading any of her fiction.

Simon: I finished Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard and it’s back in the Little Free Library at 1310 Morris as of last night. If someone reading already grabbed it, happy for you, I loved this book. It’s rather mean-spirited throughout, but the moments where the narrator’s admiration for someone or something break through his negativity feel all the more profound for it. It culminates in one of my very favorite endings to a story.

I’m between novels now and flipping through stories from Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories, Harlan Ellison’s Shatterday (Out of print, available in-store) and Brian Evenson’s The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. This pattern will probably continue until we get settled in our new space. If you enjoy science/speculative fiction, read Ellison’s story “Jeffty is Five”! I first read it in the middle of an unplanned all-night layover in an airport lobby and adored it, but it’s just as good in a lucid state.

Bye!! <3 <3

We’ll have more details to share soon about timeline/opening plans, but for now I wanted to thank you all for making this possible. The support you all have shown for a 150 square foot bookstore in the back of a children’s dress shop has been completely beyond our expectations. Thank you for giving the store a chance, letting us talk your ears off, and trusting us to recommend you books. We are the luckiest guys in the world to have you in our community :’)

Expansion also means that I (Ariel) am going to be working at the bookstore full-time— I put my notice in at my day job (aah!!!). We’re figuring out hours, but rest assured the store will be open regularly and frequently!

We’ll still be open regular hours at the weird small store you know and hopefully love for now. Onto normal newsletter business, I guess!

New Arrivals

We are buying books like crazy to have as many books as possible for the new zone! If you were thinking of selling us books, now is a great time. Information on what we take/don’t take and what we pay is on our website. We even can come to you for large collections!

While we’re building up stock for the new store, we’re also bringing new books into the current store all the time! The below will be in store this week :)

Reading Updates

Ariel: This past week, I finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, William T. Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria, and Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man.

In The Word for World, Le Guin herself admits in my edition’s introduction that she “succumbs to the lure of the pulpit.” Humans from earth conquer a resource-rich planet and enslave its inhabitants, and its until then peaceful inhabitants revolt. The book raises interesting questions on how violence changes people, but the villain felt a bit cartoonish. Even weaker Le Guin is still great, though.

Whores for Gloria follows an alcoholic veteran in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District as he spends his SSI check on sex workers, using their experiences to construct an idealized woman (who may or may not be real) named Gloria. I LOVED this book— my first Vollmann outside of his essays. The writing is lyrical, saturated, and often punctuation-less, but the reader doesn’t have to work to decode the text. Stylistically, it reminded me of Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, one of my favorites. Very excited to read more, probably going to read The Rainbow Stories soon.

I just finished Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man, her 1959 debut short story collection that largely focuses on Jewish New Yorkers. Wow! I really loved it! I love her voice and she’s also so funny. Little snippet for you from her story “A Subject of Childhood”:

“Truthfully, Mondays through Fridays—because of success at work—my ego is hot; I am a star; whoever can be warmed by me, I may oblige. The flat scale stones of abuse that fly into that speedy atmosphere are utterly consumed. Untouched, I glow my little thermodynamic way.”

I can definitely see why George Saunders cites her as an influence, I see a lot of her DNA in his work. The last story in the collection, “The Floating Truth”, is very absurdist in a way that really reminds me of Saunders. We have her collected stories in the store now and you should grab it :)

Also I am finally almost 1,000 pages into War & Peace! Only 200ish pages to go. No more tomes for me this year (watch as I break that rule within a month)!

Simon: I am about halfway through Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters - it’s incredible and I’m taking forever to read it because we’ve been spending 25 hours a day buying and inventorying books, which we can now reveal to you. The unnamed narrator’s feelings of spite, frustration, and affection feel so vivid as he sits near-silently in his wing chair and observes other dinner guests. This will make its way back into the Little Free Library where I got it (1310 Morris St.) sooner or later… keep an eye out!

I still have many good things to say about We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. If you read and enjoyed Say Nothing, give it a shot. If you didn’t enjoy Say Nothing but thought Ireland was an interesting subject, give it a shot.

Partially inspired by the above book, I’ve been reading Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot while I’m in the shop. I’ve laughed out loud five times in the first ten pages. The stage directions are solid gold. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead clearly owes a huge debt to this script.

Bye!! Love ya!

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New Arrivals

On Monday, we got almost 200 books from a very cool private collection— very philosophy-heavy with lots of Frankfurt School and philosophy of art/aesthetics stuff. Some great novels in there, too! Here’s a small sampling. These will probably not all be in the shop immediately because we don’t have space and also because it takes time to clean and price books. Let us know if you are interested in something in particular and we will happily bring it in for you!

What We’re Reading

Ariel: This week, I finished Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry, The Stand by Stephen King, and Sula by Toni Morrison.

Books: A Memoir is McMurtry’s reflections on a life of antiquarian bookselling and collecting and is pretty much the perfect book for me and like 100 other people who are passionate Larry McMurtry fans that are also used booksellers who hate selling books online. I can’t say I recommend it if you are not in that category— from a writing perspective, the guy really phoned it in. There are a few chapters that are one page long and that page just basically calls another antiquarian bookseller (by name) a hack and a bitch. There are some really fun anecdotes here and some wisdom on bookselling that I found really useful as a baby bookseller.

In my humble opinion, King’s The Stand is probably twice as long as it should be. The guy is clearly a talented writer (this is my first Stephen King so it was my introduction to his style), but the book feels bloated and the pacing suffers as a result. There were elements of the book I found very effective and moving, but there was a lot else I didn’t like. I didn’t find any of his female characters compelling or dimensional, the one Black character was a mystical guide for the rest of the entirely white group, and the portrayal of disability left a lot to be desired. I am sorry, fans of The Stand! I am interested in perhaps reading The Shining as my next foray into his stuff.

It was my first read of Sula and first Morrison for many years and holy shit. I started it last night around 6 PM and didn’t do anything else until I finished it at midnight. HER SENTENCES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL!!! The rhythm!!!! I was enthralled from the first sentence (“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.”). After finishing it in print last night, I have also been listening to the audiobook because I wanted to spend more time with it. Morrison reads it herself and her slow, deliberate delivery makes it sound like poetry.

Currently still reading War & Peace and am committing to buckling down and hopefully finishing it in the next two weeks. Although I also just started William Vollman’s Whores for Gloria and Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest…

Simon: I finished both Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali over the past week. Giovanni’s Room is so intense that I can’t imagine it going further than 150 pages, but I think I enjoyed Baldwin’s Another Country more, which allows its characters and story almost 3x the page count to develop. Madonna in a Fur Coat I did not care for. Maybe an issue with the translation — always hard to say — I didn’t feel the prose successfully reflected the emotional intensity at the heart of the story. I could also be starting from an unfair position after reading Giovanni’s Room. You be the judge!

We Don’t Know Ourselves so far could be one of my favorite works of nonfiction. Author Fintan O’Toole so deftly weaves his personal experiences with the broader currents and themes of life in Ireland from the late 50s onward. While the Troubles are certainly the most widely known piece of Irish history from this era, books like Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing can make it feel like nothing else was happening in Ireland at the time. The country’s story goes well beyond anticolonial violent conflict. I say this as someone who enjoyed Say Nothing.

I have only just started reading Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, a short novel of the inner monologue of a middle-aged Viennese artist at a party he’d rather not be at. It’s slow-moving and repetitive to a hypnotic degree, laden with comma-spliced sentences which come and go as the narrator moves from one tangled thought to another. It’s nice to be back reading something with a heavy focus on style.

Goodbye and stay cool!!

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On that note, we will be hosting the next meeting of our Style & Craft Book Club (our book club, run by friend Jon Sorce, that focuses on the style and voice of a book) at Cartesian Brewing on Monday, June 15th at 7:30 PM! Our next book is Leviathan by Paul Auster, which sounds kinda nuts (first line: Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.). Fill out this Google Form to join us (if you received an email from me on Tuesday, you are already on the list!).

New Arrivals

This week, I’d like to highlight some brand new micro-sections (stacks on the table in the center of the store) and some beautiful new arts books!

We now have a film micro-section, which lives above the theater section on the table, and what we are calling the “esoteric stack” which lives above the graphic novels section. We also have some nice new photo books and a very pretty book on Frank Stella. Come check it all out!

Reading Updates:

Ariel: This week, I finished Carson McCullers’ Clock Without Hands for book club and Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood for my fun lil walking around book. My review of both is “I really enjoyed this but I liked the other book I’ve read by her more.”

Clock Without Hands, which follows a cast of characters on the eve of court-ordered integration in small town Georgia, has McCullers’ signature sparse style and some surprisingly funny moments. I thought it was a great, empathetic book, but it’s really hard to top The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Eve’s Hollywood, autofiction about partying in Southern California, is a very fun book that I enjoyed quite a bit, but felt significantly less together than Slow Days, Fast Company. I think the stories were at their best when she was describing her childhood and high school years. It’s worth reading for the many pages long dedication alone and the scrapbook in the middle alone.

I am back on the War & Peace horse, which has been great, and am almost 60% of the way through the audiobook for The Stand by Stephen King (27 hours listened, 20 to go!!). I am just now getting to the meat of The Stand’s story which is kind of frustrating, but also not surprising given what I know about King books. I’m not sure why I chose a 48 hour long audiobook for my very first try at Stephen King, but I am committed to finishing it.

I’m also about halfway through Larry McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir.

Partially inspired by the book club, I have also been keeping a commonplace notebook of passages/sentences in books that stick out to me for whatever reason (this Substack post basically describes what I do). I’ve been putting a little post-it note tab on sentences I want to remember and when I’m done with a book, I go through and choose which ones I’d like to copy into my notebook. As a result, I read more carefully in the moment and also have some built-in reflection time when I finish a book. Over time, I may also notice some patterns in what I put in my notebook. I’ll let you know :)

Simon: Still reading Giovanni’s Room. This book requires a lot of focus and I have not had a whole lot of time to read lately, unfortunately. Baldwin’s writing is eloquent, moving, and highly dramatic as always. I can feel the desperation in every sentence. I plan to finish this today or tomorrow… after all, I need to have both started and finished Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali before the Smoke Stacks Book Club meeting next Tuesday (we still have a few copies in the shop if you’re planning on joining). Oops!

Part of the reason I’ve been slow to finish Giovanni’s Room is that I was busy with the hottest book in Philadelphia, Emma Copley Eisenberg’s short story collection Fat Swim. This is my first time reading her work and I’m glad I tuned in. I feel like I’ve met every character in it at some point and walked the same routes to the grocery store as them. Choice cuts are “The Dan Graves Situation,” “Lanternfly,” and “Swiffer Girl” (partially an elegy to a lost New York City that I’ve heard much about from Ariel).

On short stories, quick plug for the Library of America’s Story of the Week site, which has archived hundreds of stories, essays, and letters from hundreds of American authors over the past decade plus. From my digging so far, I’ll recommend Djuna Barnes’ atmospheric satire “Come into the Roof Garden, Maud.” You’re probably not wondering “are you thinking about starting a short story collection book club?” but the answer is “yes, I am.”

Audiobook-wise, I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick — enjoyed, not blown away — and am now back on nonfiction with We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole. So far, it’s a very nuanced portrait of Ireland’s awkward lurch into modernity, showing a country, its people, and its culture consistently at odds with themselves and their ideologies. It’s also doubling as a history of Irish literature and play writing after Joyce and is pushing my TBR list to the brink.

Hours

Normal hours tomorrow and Friday (4:30-7 PM), but on Saturday we will be opening an hour later so (12-6 PM) to set up for the book fair. Simon will be shop sitting and I will be at the fair with help from our amazing friends! Sunday we’ll be back to normal, 11-6 PM.

New Arrivals

On Sunday, Simon spent eight hours sorting through the estate of a former editor at Princeton University Press and he got so many gems! Most of these will be at the book fair first so get to the gig!

He also got a ton of really interesting books on film that we’ll bring to the book fair. I’ll also be bringing more vintage sci-fi mags for $6 each, classics, recent literary fiction, and more! Wow!

We’ll trickle more finds from this estate out into the store over time, inventory for everything has been a long process. Be on the lookout for some special things to come!

Reading updates:

Ariel: I have been really chaotic with my reading this week and I have ended up reading four books at once (my max is usually two!).

I am almost done with Eve’s Hollywood and I love Eve Babitz so much. “I don’t believe in facing pain unless it’s the kind you like.” “And her lipstick is a philosophically incomprehensible shade of chalky orange” “Maybe she ate colors when she entered a place and took them all in her.” Sooooo good!!

Currently scrambling to finish Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers for the previously mentioned book club tomorrow (I have . It is so good, McCullers is amazing (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorites of all time, I always make sure we have at least one copy in the shop!). I will save my thoughts on this one for book club >:)

I am halfway through Stephen King’s The Stand on audiobook and I think I like it? I do think that the original that was 300 pages shorter was probably better, though. The man should have listened to his editor, I’m sorry!

I have made zero progress in War & Peace and ask that you respect my privacy in regards to that at this time! Thanks!!

Simon: I finished reading Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which I enjoyed! If you’re a fan of yearning or wondering “what if I made a different decision 15 years ago,” this ought to resonate with you. I also finished the audiobook for Planet of Slums by Mike Davis, which I can’t say I enjoyed due to its subject matter, but it’s very insightful. This is probably better as a paper book — the audiobook narrator is not good at pronouncing names and the figures/visuals are absent.

I’m now just a chapter into Giovanni’s Room, which feels I’ve read an entire book already. Every sentence conveys so much and feels so consequential to the narrative. It’s a heavy read, I’ll need to take my time with it to get the most out of it. On audio, I’m through most of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which I’ve always meant to read since I first saw Blade Runner. I hadn’t realized how far off it would be from the film and its quirks and differences have made for an engaging book in itself. A Scanner Darkly, so far, has been the better of the two PKD novels I’ve read.

You’ll probably see me reading something out of the poetry section while at the shop. I’m not an expert, but we have plenty in our section that I’m trying to learn from. Some recent picks have been The Wild Iris and the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas.

Hours

This week, we’ll be closing an hour early on Thursday to attend the launch party of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s new book Fat Swim! Apologies for the inconvenience, but also we are excited to support Emma :) As a result, our hours this week will be Thursday 4:30-6 PM, Friday 4:30-7 PM, and Saturday & Sunday 11-6. There’s also a good chance I come in a bit early on Thursday to try and make it up to you.

New Arrivals

There are many new arrivals as always, but here are some highlights for you! Elizabeth Bowen is often compared to my beloved Elizabeth Taylor (author not actress), so I would really like to read her soon. I also would really like to read the Patrick Melrose novels! Come buy these before I take them home.

Reading Updates

Ariel: Because of Book Flavors Weekend and some other exciting things we can’t tell you about yet, this has not been a banner reading week for me, especially on the War & Peace front (still sitting around 700 pages with many to go…).

I did read two short guys, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie).

I enjoyed The Enchanted April, it reminded me a bit in tone of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour (fun game: how many times can I mention Elizabeth Taylor in one newsletter/can I go one newsletter without writing about Elizabeth Taylor), but I think the end felt a little flat for me. Without spoiling too much, I think it would have been a better book without the men.

I really loved Simple Passion, in which the narrator documents her all-consuming obsession with her married lover over two years. I am a huge fan of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and this shares a lot of that DNA. Really visceral descriptions of desire and longing! Highly recommend.

After many conversations with customers about how I have never read any Stephen King because I am a huge wimp, I have decided to read The Stand on audiobook after googling “best not scary stephen king books reddit” and going with the one that had no wait on Libby. I went in pretty much completely blind and am four hours in (9% of the book :P) and am kind of grossed out about the descriptions of plague victims, but nothing too scary has happened yet. I am enjoying it, although thus far it has mostly been descriptions of how people have caught the plague.

Also just started reading Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz! I am barely past the eight-page dedication (dedications include the color green, STRAWBERRIES and ASPARAGUS in all caps like that, mirrors, and “the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not”), but it is already very delightful.

Simon: I’ve also been very busy for the same reason as Ariel mentioned, so not a great reading week for me. I have about 50 pages left of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (two weeks to read a novella? come on mr. bookseller) and I’ve enjoyed it as an introduction to McEwan. He really does justice to the mixed excitement, fear, and confusion of falling in love with someone in this story. I would recommend it. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, a longtime blind spot for me, will follow this one.

My audiobook for the week has been starkly different — I’ve picked up Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. It’s a critical look at urban poverty in the wake of globalization and economic development pushing much of the world out of agrarian societies. Davis, one of the preeminent Marxists in urban history and sociology, was not a big fan of what this forcible transition has led to. It’s more of a broad survey of the conditions of global poverty than an in-depth analysis like his City of Quartz, one of my favorite Big Thinkers. While we don’t have any of his work on the shelves right now, I’d always recommend reading his essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” as a place to start!

Thanks again and see ya!

Book Flavors Weekend, our celebration of Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday & the Flavors on the Avenue festival on East Passyunk on Sunday, is almost upon us! As a reminder, this weekend we will be having a 15% sale on everything excluding merch (now including our rare/collectible books!) and a bargain table of $5 or less books.

We’ll also have ~85ish vintage sci-fi magazines from the 50s, 60s, and 70s for sale for $6 each. I posted some highlights on Instagram. They are incredibly cool-looking and full of stories & novellas from great authors!

If you can’t make it to the shop (or want to buy a book we don’t have), Bookshop.org will have free shipping this weekend! We receive a portion of sales when you choose us as your bookstore. As a quick aside, thank you so much to those of you who have been ordering through our Bookshop page. It really helps us as we save up for a bigger space. We also get to see your orders and they make us smile— you order such great stuff :)

Bargain Books!

Instead of new arrivals this week (I posted loads of them on our Instagram if you are hankering for those), I want to highlight some books that’ll be on our bargain table this weekend!

There are boxes and bags more of these. As you can see, there will be lots of classics, cool coffee table books, etc. All books that we think people will actually want to read, not random stuff we’re trying to get rid of. We’ll be replenishing the table throughout the weekend, so feel free to check back more than once to see what we’ve got. Everything $5 or less :)

Reading Updates

Ariel: Still reading War & Peace (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky) 🙃 I am 700 pages in which is not that much more than last week or the week before… I promise I do love it, it is just a hard book to pick up just for a short snippet and also to carry around because of its size. I do a lot of reading by picking up a book in moments where I am tempted to pick up my phone (often between tasks or waiting for something), so it’s making reading a long book take even longer!

While W&P looked on forlornly, I read Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company, a very lightly fictionalized collection of vignettes of Babitz’s life in 60s and 70s Los Angeles, in 24 hours. My first Babitz and I reallyyyy loved it. I can see why she’s polarizing, but her complete lack of shame around pleasure, desire, and her body is so refreshing to read. Can’t resist putting a short snippet here that I felt very inspired by:

I’m almost done with The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim; a very sweet, light book that I’m enjoying a lot (reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor <3). Probably starting Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion next!

Simon: The headline here is that I finished Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. It’s downright incredible, a new all-time favorite. I wanted to start it over immediately upon finishing. Some of Morrison’s sentences and paragraphs throughout the book develop this incredible driving rhythm that I’ve never experienced in a novel before. Where do I go next with Morrison? Sula? The Bluest Eye? Beloved for the third time??

I have since moved on to Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for this month’s Smoke Stacks Book Club meeting — wasn’t my thing, ended up putting it down around 100 pages — and am now reading Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a novella centered on a couple’s wedding night and their mismatched needs. Don’t have a whole lot to say on that front right now, but I think McEwan’s third-person omniscient narration has made for a very rich beginning to the story.

One other DNF/on-hold note with a different tone. I started Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as an audiobook and I think I chose the wrong format. It’s a fascinating read on nature and life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The problem is that it’s so intricate, if my attention drifts and I miss a single sentence or phrase, I can easily end up lost for a bit. I’d like to return to this on paper after I finish On Chesil Beach. Recommendations for a new commuting/driving audiobook are welcome.

P.S. all four of the books I’ve mentioned are on our shelves! Song of Solomon has a staff pick dot and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is part of an omnibus called Three by Annie Dillard.

That’s all for now!

I would also like to remind you that Independent Bookstore Day/Flavors on the Avenue weekend (AKA Book Flavors weekend) is April 25th & 26th and that we will be having a 15% off sale on books and a bargain table outside with books $5 & under. Yay!

I am also excited to share that we will be a part of Cartesian Brewing’s book fair on Saturday, May 9th from 12-4 PM. We did a pop up at Cartesian in December and the response was what made us feel like we could maybe be a (weird and tiny) store, so to be part of the fair there alongside so many wonderful bookstores is really really awesome :’)

New Arrivals

We have been buying lots and lots of books recently, so there are tons of new arrivals (like, hundreds! I am still inventorying a lot of it). Here are some highlights!

We also have restocked more vintage sci-fi mass market paperbacks!

Reading Updates

Ariel: I am still reading War & Peace (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky) and basically neglected it entirely this week! I still love it and will get back to it.

I finished and loved Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which not only discusses her experience being confused for Naomi Wolf, a third wave feminist icon turned conspiracy theorist/right wing sympathizer, but uses the doppelganger as a way to think about online culture, the far right, and the social and political impacts of COVID-19. It’s often hard for books about Our Current Moment to feel relevant even a year after they were written, but I found that Klein’s 2023 genre-defying book was not only relevant, but incredibly helpful in fighting my feelings of powerlessness and overwhelm. Her insights on collective care and being “soft on people, hard on systems,” will stick with me. Despite the subject matter, it also felt like a pretty breezy read because she’s such a great writer. Really can’t recommend this book enough!

I also read Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, which details the events surrounding the mysterious death and secret life of a 19-year-old in London. I am a PRK stan and was extremely excited when my library hold came in (see below), but was a little underwhelmed compared to Empire of Pain or Say Nothing.

Like his other books, it’s very well-written and gripping— I read it in two days— but I think because of the difference in scale/subject matter, it felt more like a straight-forward true crime book. Which is not necessarily a failing! Just different. I am excited to read his new New Yorker piece.

My current walking around book (this is what I am calling books that are not War & Peace because I cannot really walk around with that) is Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company. I’m enjoying it thus far!

Simon: With about 100 pages left in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I’m wishing it would go on for longer. There’s a passage around page 180 where Morrison lets us into protagonist Milkman’s thoughts about what motivate him and it truly blew me away. I finished the paragraph at breakfast one day and involuntarily said “oh, damn” as I closed the book. This will be on our shelves with a staff pick sticker sometime soon. We also recently came into a big pile of Morrison novels that I’ll be reading through over the next couple of months.

Louise Glück’s poetry collection Ararat is officially at “heartbreaking” status. Here’s a link to one of my favorites, “New World,” posted by the aptly named Blogspot account poemsthathurt. I think that says it all. We have a couple of Glück collections on our shelves: Poems 1962-2012, a career-spanning omnibus, and The Wild Iris, her most iconic single collection.

I’m finally at the Epilogue of Cadillac Desert — heartbreaking in its own way — and its final conclusion about what might undo the US from its cavalier attitude towards natural resource control is both compelling and strange to imagine. In short, what if we just had more mud and salt than we knew what to do with?

I’m also aiming to read all of Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner by next Tuesday for Smoke Stacks Book Club, which will be meeting Tuesday 4/21, 8 PM, at the Lucky 13 Pub to discuss it (we still have three of this book in store, by the way). Hopefully reality aligns with this goal…

See ya :)