Brokelyn

Not you too Ikea. Not you too.

With all the recent hubbub about the fate of indie bookstores (especially the sniping over a petition to save the city’s St. Marks Books), you’d think we’re nearing a critical choke point in the industry’s future. Discount furniture embassy Ikea is already betting against the printed book. The Economist reports Ikea is releasing a new, deeper version of its popular $50 “Billy” bookcase designed more as decoration to hold “ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffe-table-tome” — but not, notably, ye olde ink-and-paper bundles of words. Have you ever tried putting books on a too-big shelf? It messes up your whole literary feng shui! I can’t put Tom Wolfe behind Thomas Wolfe; they’d never get along! Also, some of us think pretty shelves packed with intriguing spines promising endless adventures is great decoration on its own, right? What say you?

We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you want to continue feeding the last mega book retailer beast or keep supporting your local, but today only, you can get 50 percent off 200 hardcover fiction best-sellers at Barnes & Noble online. That means steep discounts on Game of Thrones, Lev Grossman, Tom Perrotta, those True Blood novels, James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Michael Savage and tons of other stuff your dad would probably like. You can get the same deal on kids/teen fiction today too (Hunger Games!).

Snow is free, and kind of romantic. Photo by David Minder.

Let’s face it: dating is expensive and there’s no guarantee of ROI. So why spend a bundle to make a good impression when you can be a cheap date who doesn’t seem cheap? Any dolt can come up with dinner and a movie (bye bye, $100), but being cash-challenged requires you to be a bit more resourceful and creative with your game. Here are a few things to do and places to go to help you kick off the year with a bit more swagger, if not a bigger wallet: Read the rest of this entry »

Pair free drinks or some food with a concert, screening, book-reading, really any good-lookin’ free event, and we’ll likely tell you to check it out. But when the whole thing’s about drinks in the food? Well, two words: Rum. Cupcakes. Tonight, Jun. 22, at WORD bookstore, food writer and recipe tester Lucy Baker will read from her new book (a must-read, we say), The Boozy Baker: 75 Recipes for Spirited Sweets. The eponymous Baker will share tips, tricks and, yes, tastes, from her collection of classic desserts made all the better “with a healthy dose of alcohol.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Community Bookstore. Photo by Annie Wang.

Back in the day, you knew your neighborhood used bookstore. Some of us knew all three of them. Now, these dusty, quirky, often-malodorous treasure troves of recycled literature are a rare, but hearty, Brooklyn breed. But if you know where to look, you can still find a home—and even make a little cash—for your boxes of yellowed, dog-eared pages. Or you can pick up a few of someone else’s. Here’s our guide to Brooklyn’s used bookstores—from dust to dollar-value. Read the rest of this entry »

From National Novel Writing Month to NYC’s First Independent Bookstore Week, November is building an identity as a month in celebration of the written word. And now, WORD bookstore in Greenpoint is inviting scribes young and old to express their love of our fair city in sentence form.  Simply write between 500 to 1,000 words on your favorite part of the city (the rules are open to all boroughs, but yours better be about Brooklyn). The contest is aptly named “Neighborhood by Neighborhood,” a spinoff of State by State: a 50-essay, 50-state collection from some of our country’s most esteemed writers. Read the rest of this entry »