BookCourt

While John Grisham's Playing for Pizza and Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon top the New York Times' best sellers list, we're poking our heads into BookCourt in Cobble Hill to see what Brooklynites are tucking into their totes.

Out in the Manhattan suburb (sorry, it's true!), where baby strollers, daddy-actor types and yoga-obsessed writers run rampant, it's not surprising that Tom Perrotta's new book The Abstinence Teacher tops the hardcover fiction list. After all, the guy wrote Little Children, the most angsty-cool anti-parenting guide ever written. In his new book, Mr. Perrotta abandons the kiddie playground for school to examine how a single sex education teacher will battle a herd of evangelical Christians trying to get her to ditch the old banana/condom demo and take on an abstinence curriculum. In The Abstinence Teacher, Mr. Perrotta continues "writing books for people who don't much like books—satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes," according to Benjamin Alsup at Esquire. Fun! But you could also follow Mr. Alsup's advice and just wait for the movie.  read more »

We missed this article on Friday about one of our favorite bookstores, Cobble Hill's BookCourt.

In the late 1990's, whining about the fate of independent bookstores was a favorite pastime in a certain New York demographic. But the counterexamples are starting to crop up: For every Madison Avenue Bookshop there is a Corner Bookstore; Shakespeare and Company never really went out of business; and now comes word that BookCourt is expanding for a third time in response to demand in its nook in Cobble Hill.  read more »