The New Yorker

At the Strand by Jenny Kroik
“I like to loiter around the city looking for interesting things,” the artist Jenny Kroik says. Her painting for this week’s cover depicts another loiterer at the Strand Bookstore, a beloved institution in lower Manhattan. “I have tried to do a painting a day since I moved here from Oregon, a year and a half ago. Bookstores are really good places for inspiration–you see people interacting with the books they have an affinity for, you see how people consume the culture. Sometimes someone will be dressed in a similar way to things he or she is looking at. I love these sort of poetic fun moments.”
The New Yorker

Anita Brookner: Look at Me new cover

Penguin's new cover for Anita Brookner's 'Look at Me'

I Murdered My Library

What happens when you begin to build a library in childhood and then find you have too many books? From a small collection held together by a pair of plaster of Paris horse-head bookends to books piled on stairs, and in front of each other on shelves, books cease to furnish a room and begin to overwhelm it. At the end of 2013, novelist Linda Grant moved from a rambling maisonette over four floors to a two bedroom flat with a tiny corridor-shaped study. The trauma of getting rid of thousands of books raises the question of what purpose personal libraries serve in contemporary life and the seductive lure of the Kindle. Both a memoir of a lifetime of reading and an insight into how interior décor has banished the bookcase, her account of the emotional struggle of her relationship with books asks questions about the way we live today.
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