The best women-owned bookstores in NYC
Plus a quick life update
In today’s newsletter: a life update, the best women-owned bookstores in NYC, and what to do this week. If you’ve found your way here but are not yet subscribed, let me help you with that:
Hello my dear readers and subsribers!
Cue the gif of the sweet old lady from the film Titanic, staring wistfully off at the horzon. It has been 84 years since my last newsletter (or rather, several months). In the time since I’ve last regaled you with a newsletter touting the ways to spend 24 hours in Washington D.C., a lot has happened.
In August, I got engaged to my boyfriend of 8+ years, who proposed to me at the Iguazú waterfalls on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The proposal was spectacular, but what truly made it special was the location he chose. Iguazú is a place I had ran to nearly a decade prior, a week before my wedding day. Standing alone, in the shadows of those massive waterfalls, I had decided to not only call off my wedding, but to take back my life.
I’d go on to not only end my engagement, but to quit my job, and throw my entire self into pursuing my dreams of becoming a travel writer. I never thought I would return to Iguazú National Park, let alone get happily engaged in nearly the same place I had decided to call off a wedding.
In September, I began planning our New York wedding while simultaneously finishing the manuscript for my upcoming travel memoir, Call You When I Land. Writing this memoir has been the most [insert any emotion] experience of my life. I’ve felt it all: excited, inspired, intimidated, insecure, worried, confident, everything.
The book starts with me in the jungles of Argentina as a runaway bride and follows my journey as I flip my life upside down. It’s a romantic story, a career-driven story, a coming-of-age story, a women-empowering story, and—above all—a wanderlust-fueled book that will take you from the streets of Buenos Aires to the wilds of Borneo.
As the old saying goes, life is what happens when you’re busy not writing Substack newsletters. But, now that my manuscript is finished and my wedding is nearly planned out, I’m back and excited to pick up the torch and continue sending travel-inspired stories your way.
I love a good bookstore. I especially love a good bookstore-meets-coffeee shop. It’s the coziness that does it for me: the smell of freshly made coffee, the warmth of a worn-leather armchair, the appeal of colorful book spines calling out to you. It goes without saying, that New York has a vibrant literary scene and a wide-range of bookstores that run the gamut from quirky to unique to massive.
Whatever bookstore appeals to you, the following women-owned bookstores have brought something special to their neighborhoods. From the first Asian American woman-owned bookstore in Chinatown to the first (and only) bookstore in the Bronx—if you’re looking for a place to cozy up with a book (and maybe even a glass of wine), these are some of my favorites:
Daisy Jones, Aurora, true crime, and a travel memoir
In a shameless plug, please go pre-order my travel memoir or bookmark it on Goodreads. As any author out there knows, a pre-order goes a long way in helping set a book up for a strong release. For my true crime lovers, don’t miss The Deck Investigates podcast and its investigation of the Darlene Hulse murder in Indiana. Not only is the story good, but the work that Ashley Flowers and her team are doing to solve this cold case is spectacular. Finally, go watch all the episodes of Daisy Jones & the Six on Amazon Prime and then proceed to enter your 70s rock n’ roll era by listening to the Aurora soundtrack on repeat.
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