“But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously…”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Life in the bookstore...such as it is.
Rumors have it at night the store turns into a submarine. We have yet to establish documentary proof.
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Vague Updates from 57th Street Booksellers
Rumors have it at night the store turns into a submarine. We have yet to establish documentary proof.
• About
• Ask me anything
Vague Updates from 57th Street Booksellers
57th Street Books Summer Reads!
Part 1 of a series of awesomely delightful middle-grade reads for summer!
1. Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani
In this stunning epistolary novel, Meena, an Indian immigrant living in New York City’s Chinatown and River, a boy growing up in rural Kentucky, become first pen pals, and then best friends. Through imagery so warm and rich you can feel it Neela Vaswani and Silas House create a story of the unlikely resonant rhymes in human lives across seemingly divergent circumstances. The authors integrate the complex political issues of immigration and mountaintop removal that Meena and River face with so much dexterity and heart that the reader will feel called to activism herself! I fell completely in love with these voices, and know that they’ll stay with me for a while to come.
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
— Maurice Sendak (via bobulate)
(Source: polioshimmy, via openbookstore)
“It is too bad that sound waves decay. If they did not, we would still be able to hear melodies by Mesomedes, and Odo of Cluny playing his organistrum. We would hear extinct toxodons, and prehistoric horses wearing pottery bells, and dead bats chewing crackly flies. We could hear the goats of the past - the old English milch goats, the fatlings of Bashan, thirsty peacock goats, Finnish Landrace goats bleating for their kids, baby Göingegets grizzling for their mothers, and wild mountain ibexes protesting hoarsely at being made to live in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.”
— Things That Are: Essays by Amy Leach
Check out our map of the Dystopian Universe, a collection of the most memorable apocalyptic futures and digital wastelands ever put in print. Blow it up to full size and explore, you might never come back.
(via doubledaybooks)
“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.”
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods (via larmoyante)
Amen.
(Source: larmoyante, via pantheonbooks)
Image 1: Haskell Hall, 1895-96, Henry Ives Cobb, architect. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Image 2: Yerkes Observatory. Column detail, south entrance. Photo © Patricia Evans.
Image 3: Yerkes Observatory. South porch. Photo © Patricia Evans.
