Small Bookstores Are Booming: Critical Linking, December 2, 2018

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  • December 2, 2018

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A growing number of shoppers will be supporting their independent neighborhood bookstores on Small Business Saturday. After nearly being wiped out a decade ago, small bookstores are booming.

Dane Neller, the owner of Shakespeare & Co. in New York City, just opened his third indie bookstore, and he’s proving the naysayers wrong.

“Bookstores are back and they’re back in a big way,” he said. “I’m not giving to to hyperbole — it was record-breaking for us.”

Good news for bookstores. Good news for readers, too. 

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We love fantasizing about what our favorite fictional characters’ tiny homes would look like. There’s something deeply satisfying about reducing someone’s life story to a concisely organized little box, especially if those characters connect with us on a deeply nostalgic level. Today we’re looking at the characters in a little-known story called “Harry Potter.” To set the scene: The tiny home trend is sweeping the wizarding world and our beloved Harry, Ron, Hermione, Draco, Luna, and Neville have decided to embrace their independence and trade their dorm rooms for their very own tiny homes.

This is just fun.

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On the upside, this was the best year for Jewishly inflected older-kid books since I started doing this column. If I were to hazard a guess about why, I’d say that older-kid Jewish books seem to be engaging ever more authentically with the real world and all its nuances, and the increased interest in diverse books has meant that more novels with explicitly Jewish content are coming out from mainstream publishers.

Add some great Jewish children’s books to your TBR. 

Source : Small Bookstores Are Booming: Critical Linking, December 2, 2018