Richard Move Channels Martha Graham
The New York City shopping scene is nothing if not cyclical; trends have a sneaky way of slinking back, even after being declared dead for decades. For example, the city is currently seeing a notable spike in independent bookstores catering to idiosyncratic tastes—but this is not a new phenomenon. New York has always been a place where eclectic literature has found eager customers. There was Murder Ink, on the Upper West Side, devoted to mysteries, and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, in Greenwich Village, which specialized in L.G.B.T.Q. material. There was Djuna Books, on Tenth Street, and Womanbooks, on West Ninety-second Street, both of which carried feminist texts, and the National Memorial African Bookstore, in Harlem, founded by the civil-rights activist Lewis H. Michaux, in 1932, which touted one of the most significant collections of Black literature in the country. These spots are all gone, but now, due in part to the rise of #BookTok, where genre fiction often goes viral, booksellers are once again getting more targeted in their approach. In Park Slope, there’s The Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore, founded by sisters Lea and Bea Koch. It opened in 2023 and has been packed ever since. In Bed-Stuy, Tiffany Dockery, a former Google employee, recently opened Gladys Books and Wine, which focusses on books by Black women. And, just in time for Halloween, The Twisted Spine, New York’s first bookstore dedicated purely to horror, has opened its doors in Williamsburg. The store’s owners, Lauren Komer and Jason Mellow, raised over forty thousand dollars in a crowdfunding campaign to open the space, which has a distinctly goth vibe, with black-painted walls, a glowing electric fireplace, and a coffee bar that serves lattes in skull-shaped mugs—plus books in dozens of creepy categories, from “Slashers” to “Haunted Houses.” Long live the oddball bookstore.
What to Watch
Richard Brody on the French New Wave.
Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” dramatizing the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” in 1959, is also a group portrait. The French New Wave was, above all, a gathering of passionate young filmmakers who self-consciously embraced movies as art and, in doing so, turned cinema into an art of youth. That’s why, in the nineteen-sixties, the New Wave became an inspiration to filmmakers worldwide and put movies at the center of cultural life. Here are some of the (streamable) masterworks that helped to do so.
“The 400 Blows”: François Truffaut’s first feature, from 1959, is a tender and furious—and largely autobiographical—story about a vulnerable, passionately artistic youth. The cruelties and pieties of school, the distracted inadequacy of parents, the alienating remoteness of official culture add up to a world in which, for young Truffaut, the movies were more than a substitute—they saved him.
“Chronicle of a Summer”: The New Wave often filmed fiction with documentary-like methods, but rarely made documentaries. The documentarian Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin turned in-the-street reporting both reflexive and creative with this 1960 investigation of whether Parisians consider themselves happy. The results expose the emotional price of French colonialism and of repressed memories of the Second World War.
“Chronicle of a Summer.”Photograph courtesy Criterion Collection
