#27: Mil Mundos

Community centered spot with fantastic finds

The Shop: Mil Mundos

Bushwick, Brooklyn: 323 Linden St

Let’s say you need to buy a book, drink a coffee, organize a protest, and get a pair of pants tailored all in one stop: Mil Mundos Books and Cafe has you covered. This intimate and versatile local business is tucked away on a residential street in Bushwick (not factory loft, $13 bacon egg and cheese, highbrow graffiti mural Bushwick, but cozy, bodega coffee, medium-brow graffiti mural Bushwick). Mil Mundos is a space dedicated to its community, offering space for both community hangs and community organizing.  A bilingual bookstore, the staff, signage, and selection embraces Spanish alongside English. They also offer Spanish classes and private Spanish tutoring which I am fantasizing about pursuing after getting through the grad school grind! The selection here trends political, with all brands of wokeness represented from Pod Save’s Deray McKesson On the Other Side of Hope types to far leftier strains like Aph Ko’s Racism as Zoological Witchcraft. The store also contains a tailor shop and cafe, all gracefully packed into a small but mighty storefront.

What I got:

Twilight Zone: The Original Stories

My jaw dropped when I found this perfectly yellowed used paperback compilation of classic scifi stories that inspired episodes of one of TV’s most iconic shows. My love affair with the Twilight Zone runs deep from childhood binges on Syfy channel’s holiday marathons to producing a Zone parody sketch comedy show in 2019 with the supremely talented Megan Sass and Austin Sanders. So many of the show’s political takes feel fresher than ever in our age of surveillance and neo-fascism, which are sure to shine through in these original stories from Ray Bradburry, Richard Matheson and other sci fi pioneers. 

In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado’s fractured, meta memoir In the Dream House has been on my list to read since it made the rounds on every highbrow podcast when it debuted a few years ago. This book seems to take the same ethos as one of my all time faves Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler but applied to a personal narrative, telling the story through meta text exploring and exploiting the tropes of a vast variety of genres. This will no doubt be a challenging read, but also a fascinating one