I first read about Shopsin's Greenwich Village restaurant in Calvin Trillan's classic New Yorker tribute to it, and its owner, the eccentric, garrulous, cranky Kenny Shopsin. The last time I was in New York, I managed to eat there, getting breakfast with Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the new location in Essex Market. — Read the rest
Kenny Shopsin was the proprietor of Shopsin's, an incredible, storied, secretive, boisterous, tiny restaurant and general store in Greenwich Village, whose cookbook/memoir is a masterclass in sloppy diner chef-craft in the mode of Daniel Pinkwater's Fat Guys From Outer Space. — Read the rest
To call Shopsin's "a Greenwich Village institution" was to understate something profound and important and weird and funny: Shopsin's (first a grocery store, later a restaurant) was a kind of secret reservoir of the odd and wonderful and informal world that New York City once represented, in the pre-Trumpian days of Sesame Street and Times Square sleaze: Tamara Shopsin grew up in Shopsin's, and Arbitrary Stupid Goal is her new, "no-muss memoir," is at once charming and sorrowing, a magnificent time-capsule containing the soul of a drowned city.
At my house, we've fallen in love with Recipe, a 2013 picture book about a little girl who tells her good-sport mom that it's time she learned to cook, and hands over a set of ingredients for Mom to buy, including a new puppy, a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt, a helmet, a water squirter, and 20 bags of marshmallows.
Children's author, essayist and hero of literature Daniel Pinkwater has revived his classic backlist as a line of DRM-free ebooks! Each one is only $3, and there are some astoundingly good titles in there.
Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars was my first Pinkwater, and it literally changed my life. — Read the rest
Mark and I have rounded up some of our favorite items from our 2009 Boing Boing reviews for the second-annual Boing Boing gift guide. We'll do one a day for the next six days, covering media (music/games/DVDs), gadgets and stuff, kids' books, novels, nonfiction, and comics/graphic novels/art books. — Read the rest
Here's part five of the Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide, a roundup of the bestselling items from this year's Boing Boing reviews. Today's installment is nonfiction books.
Don't miss the rest of the posts: kids' stuff, fiction, gadgets and comics. — Read the rest
shopsin's general store
baby leo
funkyzilla
sumolounge
demeter fragrance
mudpuppy magnet monsters
butter ny
green chair press
field notes: the kit
bird song organ
chicken bag
krappy
gun rack organizer
elsewares
global home
previously on web zen:
shopping zen 2007
Permalink for this edition. — Read the rest
Kottke's got a great, long post on Shopsin's, the "eccentric" NYC diner with a long menu that reads like the label on a bottle of Dr Bronner's soap. Kottke links to lots of great supplementary material but the gem is the PDF of the menu itself. — Read the rest
Shopsin's is a Greenwich Village restaurant with enough character for ten eateries. The owners have refused all publicity until now. Spurred by a new landlord with big ideas about the new lease, the owenr has allowed one of his regulars to pen a lyrical appreciation of the joint for the New Yorker. — Read the rest
