#24: Spoonbill & Sugartown

The Shop: Spoonbill & Sugartown

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: 218 Bedford Ave

Deep in the hive of Brooklyn’s buzziest neighborhood, Spoonbill & Sugartown seems to hearken back to a chiller, funkier Williamsburg. The selection of this store is sublime. As a forever music nerd, I was captivated by the music section towards the entrance, drawn in by books on Brian Eno and Genesis P-Orridge and subsequently chastened by their price tags. I repeated this experience with each section of the store: racks of ferocious feminist zines, arresting art books, sensational stationary and a phenomenal fiction system. I have been to many bookstores but this is perhaps the only one where I thought “damn, I would buy literally all of these books.” Hell, if I had enough money, I would buy this whole store and turn it into my apartment-- who needs a kitchen when you have books? Unfortunately, Bedford ave rent ain’t cheap and neither are the books at this spot, prompting me to be judicious in my selection.

What I got:

Satantango

I’ve written in this blog before about my favorite Hungarian postmodernist weirdo Laszlo Kraznazhorkai and have been itching to give a read to his debut novel from 1985. Like all of his writing, this book promises to be an esoteric bummer with very few line breaks (I am excited by this). I am also intrigued that this book was adapted into a seven hour (!!?) film that a bunch of important people said nice things about in this trailer.

Intimations

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth robbed me of so many hours of sleep. I simply couldn’t put it down! Since reading that gem, I’ve been a bit daunted to read her subsequent works. Smith writes big ol’ novels that are very dang good and my circadian rhythms can only take so much. I was happy to stumble on Intimations, a slim but formidable collection of her essays published during the earlyish days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concurrent uprising after the murder of George Floyd.