Blog

Why These Violent Delights Should be Staff Pick of the Year

Because I am Chloe Gong’s hero (please see photo below for evidence), I have taken it upon myself to spearhead the voting campaign for her fabulous debut and our 2022 kids’ pick finalist, These Violent Delights

 

(Legend has it that if you say “These Violent Delights” three times in PSB: Boston Edition, I will appear behind you in the YA section to tell you about this book.) 

 

New Hollywood: From Page to Screen: 2000-2021

At the end of March 2020 we found ourselves making a lot of guesses about how our world would look for, what we thought would be, the next six weeks or so. We guessed it would be important to provide *something* that might help break the isolation of lockdown, something that allowed us to continue connecting with our community even though no one could actually come to the store. We tried a couple of different things including the daily and then three times a week newsletter Shelf Stable.

A Food Nerd’s Dream: On Ferran Adria’s Latest Project

 

A few months ago, I was visiting a couple of friends of mine, outside in their backyard because, you know, COVID. One of them, a professional baker, said “I have to show you this book” and rushed inside, returning with a coffee-table-book-sized tome. From the fraction of the cover I could see while he carried the book over, I knew exactly what it was.

 

Power in Attending: An Interview with DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA author of A Ghost in the Throat

Cover of A Ghost in the ThroatA woman rushes to the side of her murdered husband and drinks his blood by the handful. Goddamn, what an image, right? The woman, Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill later composes "The Keen for Art O Laoghaire," a major work of Gaelic literature that is still taught in schools in Ireland today.

The Winter of Mixed Reads: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

 

When I first read Michelle Zauner’s New Yorker essay “Crying in H Mart,” about dealing with the loss of her mother, I couldn’t get the cover of her 2016 debut album, Psychopomp, out of my head. It’s a candid shot of two women, the outline of a roof behind them against the backdrop of a dream-bright blue sky. The woman on the left, Zauner’s mother, is young, dressed in stylish 80s office casual, and frozen in a gesture of reaching out at the camera. It’s hard to tell if she’s smiling, though the woman next to her is laughing. It’s a visualization of Japanese Breakfast’s esthetic: sonically reaching towards the past, but with lyrics full of yearning.  

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - blogs