But curation is probably still the way for bookstores to go. It no longer makes business sense for a small shop to stock a bit of everything. Learn from Aquazzura and Jimmy Choo: go boutique. The big winner in the pandemic was the romance novel. Eighteen million print copies were sold in 2020; in 2023, more than thirty-nine million copies were sold. Romance is among Amazon’s most popular genres, and, according to the Times, the number of bookstores dedicated to it recently rose from two to more than twenty. The stores’ names are not coy: the Ripped Bodice, in Brooklyn and Culver City; Steamy Lit, in Deerfield Beach, Florida; Blush Bookstore, in Wichita. You can fondle the product all you want, and the staff will be eager to assist you.
To reiterate: The woman writer is always out of time. Her responsibilities may well exist outside waged labor—if she writes on spec, if her dog needs walking, if her kids are screaming for their tablets, all while her imagination takes her away from the present (meditation app be damned) into the plotting of the next idea. The people around her want her writing to be already done, but you know what they say about women’s work.
So, what are we talking about when we are referring to these intangible moments? We are talking about how we navigate the spaces in our lives, be it how we board the bus, the kind of music we listen to when cleaning the kitchen, or how we negotiate who’s turn it is to visit grandma in the nursing home. In other words, we’re talking about how we engage with our world, in particular with the people around us, in ways that are sometimes not even accessible to us.
Yr Dead lays bare the deep loneliness of living in the digital age; how others shape us; and how, out of the ashes of catastrophe (and despite the world’s ills), humanity shows through the cracks. There is hope.
Written partly during lockdown, a time that pushed many mothers trapped at home close to breaking point, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz’s tale “of mothers and monsters” is, on the face of it, about women who break the ultimate taboo and desert their children. Some are jaw-dropping stories in themselves: take the novelist Muriel Spark, who left her four-year-old in the care of nuns in Rhodesia during the second world war, after separating from his father, and moved back to Britain; or the YouTube influencer who very publicly adopted a Chinese child and then furtively “rehomed” him when it didn’t work out as planned. But it is the author’s interweaving of these stories with more everyday reflections on maternal guilt and judgment that turns this book into a fascinating portrait not just of those who leave, but those who stay.
Bishop’s purpose is an “attempt to tell it truly while never denying the power and authenticity of the myth” of the 11 days in August 1944 that were filled with drama, bloodshed and joy. In a story rife with ambiguity, the idea of Paris, the City of Light, gleamed “like a distant lighthouse through the gloom of war.” It was the place war photographer Robert Capa called, “the beautiful city where I first learned to eat, drink and love.”
Through the perspectives of artists and writers like Pablo Picasso, Irène Némirovsky, Jerry Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, as well as French Resistance fighters and military figures including Gen. Philippe Leclerc and Charles de Gaulle, Bishop’s engrossing narrative unfurls.