Short Story Collections I Want to Read

Fiction is my jam, but sometimes life gets too busy to immerse myself into a beastly novel. Enter: the short story. I don’t read many stories beside the occasional literary magazine, certainly not a collection of stories by a singular author, but I’d like to remedy that, starting with these. Each collection listed here is […]

The Friend // Sigrid Nunez

“Something bad happens to the dog: a lesson learned early, from childhood books. The animals in those stories often die, often in bad ways. Old Yeller. The red pony. And even when they don’t die, even when they’re not just alive but happy at the end, they suffer, often badly, often they are put through […]

Crazy Rich Asians // Kevin Kwan

Crazy Rich Asians is certainly not a book I would typically read (in fact, I never would have picked it up had I not loved the movie so darn much) but it was so much fun! Kwan demonstrates a heavy focus on dialogue, so I absolutely flew through it. Like a guilty-pleasure romcom, the plot […]

Gingerbread // Helen Oyeyemi

The hype is REAL for Gingerbread. I will admit I was initially drawn to it because of its gorgeous cover, which I’d seen lurking around my Instagram feed for several weeks. Like most Riverhead publications, I was lured in with gorgeous design work, and then pleasantly surprised by the literature inside. Wonderfully told and vividly […]

McNally Jackson, New York, NY

SoHo’s McNally Jackson is one of the most aesthetic and best-curated indie bookstores I’ve ever visited. Sure, the employees are the most hipster (read: the rudest) you’ll find, but that comes with the territory of being an independent bookstore in one of New York City’s trendiest areas. I visited McNally Jackson on a Wednesday afternoon […]

Three Lives & Company, New York, NY

Try to find an image for “cozy bookstore” and it’s likely that Three Lives & Co. is the top result. “Cozy” may be a nice term for small, which Three Lives certainly is, but it’s also quiet and wonderfully curated, which, together, create a perfect browsing atmosphere. It may not be the best place to […]

Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY

Cobble Hill’s Books Are Magic is officially my new favorite New York bookstore. Owned by Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers, Books Are Magic is everything I look for in a bookstore: it’s quaint and charming, with plenty of space to browse without being too overwhelming, and the employees are friendly but […]