Not P: Outing favorite books: Now you can read what Tilda Swinton and peers read

[Allan Balliett]

http://onegrandbooks.com/shop/curators/tilda-swintons/

“I had, for years, thought that bookstores no longer needed to be
comprehensive, because we can find a book online and we do,” says Aaron
Hicklin, the editor-in-chief of Out magazine and co-editor of BlackBook
magazine. “The best part of bookstores are the tables in the front with the
staff recommendations. So I thought, what if an entire store was built
around that concept? And what if the recommenders were names the attendees
had heard of?”


Those questions served as the basis for Hicklin’s latest project, a
“bookstore concept” called One Grand. <http://onegrandbooks.com/> Hicklin
approached dozens of people he admires – friends, acquaintances, some total
cold-calls – and asked them a simple question: if you were stuck on a
desert island, which 10 books would you bring with you, and why? The
results, culled from the likes of Tilda Swinton, Tom Ford, Ryan McGinley
and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are simultaneously good ways to fill up your summer
reading hours — Hicklin has, true to his mission, opened a pop-up shop
selling the recommended books at Whisper Editions
<https://www.whispereditions.com/>on Fulton Street — but they also
represent a window into people’s tastes and worldviews. Books, Hicklin
says, “tend to be signposts through their lives, signposts of who they’re
becoming and their evolving philosophy and ideology on the world. I thought
that if these books were annotated, they become this kind of biography of
the person.”


In advance of a bookstore he is opening in Narrowsburg, , N.Y., this fall,
Hicklin has shared the lists exclusively with T. The first — from the
actress and Sleater-Kinney band member Carrie Brownstein — debuts for the
first time here.


*“The Devil Finds Work,” James Baldwin*


“Baldwin is one of my favorite writers and cultural critics. His work
always feels both relevant and revelatory. This book-long essay on film and
moviegoing is part memoir, part homage to cinema, and also an exploration
of the ways corrosive ideas seep into the collective imagination.”


*“Collected Poems,” Philip Larkin*


“‘On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes’
(‘For Sidney Bechet’). Such spare and soaring prose to examine stunted,
anxious lives.”


*“Birds of America,” Lorrie Moore*


“Moore is one of the best short story writers of all time. She is a
strange, wondrous and occasionally unmerciful storyteller while also being
incredibly profound.”


*“The Waves,” Virginia Woolf*


“An impressionistic, experimental novel that is filled with an immense and
delicate beauty. Told in soliloquies, the book explores a vast and tender
interior landscape.”


*“The Professor and the Madman,” Simon Winchester*


“One of my favorite history books. It’s a story about the creation of the
Oxford English Dictionary and of an epistolary and academic friendship
between two men, one of whom (unbeknownst to the other) was an inmate at an
insane asylum.”


*“Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion*


“A seminal book of essays. A meditation on the mythologies of the West and
on America itself. Trenchant, prescient, timeless.”


*“We the Animals,” Justin Torres*


“Ruminations on family, brotherhood, and the ways we are simultaneously —
sometimes devastatingly — both different and similar to our kin.”


*“Ballad of the Sad Café,” Carson McCullers*


“‘The most outlandish people can be a stimulus for love.’ A Southern Gothic
novella on the eccentricities and vicissitudes of the heart.”


*“Other Voices, Other Rooms,” Truman Capote*


“A dizzying, almost surreal bildungsroman about a search for a familial
love that is just shy of non-existent.”


*“The Argonauts,” Maggie Nelson*


“One of my favorite books of the last few years. It’s both a memoir and an
ontological exploration. In some ways, this book is a life-changer in that
it posits new spheres of both being and togetherness.”


*One Grand, a bookstore concept, is on view through the end of August at
Whisper Editions, 8 Fulton Street, New York, **onegrandbooks.com*
<http://onegrandbooks.com/>*.*
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