A worker-owned community event space
Located at 48 Commerce Street
Open 10am - 10pm (except Sun)
Book Reviews
Like you, we love books... and the next best thing to reading books is reading about books! Below you'll find an assortment of reviews for titles that we regularly stock. Also, be sure to check out our online catalog.
Fire on the Mountain
I thought of sf writer Terry Bisson's work as being delightfully absurdist, always moving but never solemn, but then I read Fire on the Mountain, his acclaimed 1988 short novel, reprinted in 2009 by PM Press in a handsome pocket edition with an introduction written by the revolutionary Mumia Abu Jamal from his cell on death row. Now I know that Bisson is perfectly capable of being as solemn...
Daemon
Have you ever been reading a book or watching a film and as the plot moves to involve some use of technology you begin to brace yourself, and the cringe as you are ripped out of the story by what is an obviously ignorant treatment of matters you know well? Do you find the idea of creating a "gui interface using visual basic" to see about tracking an ip address as more fit for a sitcom rather...
War Dances
Sherman Alexie's short story "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" (which appeared originally in the New Yorker in 2003, and was later published in the collection "Ten Little Indians" that same year) is a mighty high standard for any contemporary American writer to match. The fusion of emotion and image, sympathy and grace, the fluidity and power of its language, make it for me one of the finest short...
Makers
The major themes I’ve written about here lately – the decline of traditional mass-production industry, the crisis of value and shift of production outside the cash nexus, the rise of micromanufacturing, the digital/network culture – are all central to Makers. And given my research and writing interests, it’s a foregone conclusion that any work of cyberpunk or other near-future sci fi is going...
Magicians
Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. Quentin Coldwater is a nerdy, depressed, high-achieving Brooklyn kid who finds himself hijacked from his Princeton interview and whisked away to Brakebills Academy, a school of magic upstate on the Hudson. He passes the entrance exam and begins his education as a...