Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan on how you can help write the store’s brand new chapter
My father encouraged reading growing up with the saying “there is no frigate like a book.” It wasn’t until years later that I realized his sailing metaphor was borrowed from a line of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. After months in lockdown with our lives resembling the famously reclusive poet, many of us have reached for books to transport us.
“People turn to art in confusing times,” says Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Miami’s Books & Books. “Books are particularly cathartic. Reading about other people creates a shared experience; it’s how we work out our own anxiety. People are looking for joy right now and they’re also looking inward.”
As Miami’s economy moves forward with reopening, one of the casualties of the coronavirus is South Beach’s Books & Books location. A mainstay on Lincoln Road for over 30 years, it is now permanently closed. “We went from being on a really funky, wonderful street to a street that now is very inhospitable to most locally owned independent businesses,” Kaplan told Miami.com on the decision not to reopen, noting high rents on the pedestrian mall.
By navigating the crisis nimbly, Kaplan has managed to reopen all six of the remaining Books & Books locations throughout Miami, including the Coral Gables flagship, and stores at Bal Harbour Shops, the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami and Coconut Grove. The Key West Books & Books, in partnership with legendary young adult author Judy Blume, has also reopened.
TURNING THE PAGE
Kaplan founded Books & Books in 1982 and two years later co-founded November’s annual Miami Book Fair. Over the decades, he’s nurtured a community of book lovers and during the challenging months of quarantine, he says, “The community has shown up.” Longtime patron Maggie Silverstein launched the Friends of Books & Books campaign, encouraging donations and gift cards purchases to help keep the ship afloat.
With stores and cafes reopened, Books & Books will continue to host virtual author events online and readers can also tune into Kaplan’s weekly podcast The Literary Life featuring author interviews. Miamians have returned to browse bookshelves and enjoy socially distanced lunch in the sunny outdoor courtyard in Coral Gables. Book lovers can also continue to shop online at booksandbooks.com.
A NOVEL APPROACH
Whether it’s a beach read or an armchair adventure at home in the a/c, these are the summer reads the Books & Books team is most excited for.
A Burning (Knopf, June 2020) is a stupendous debut novel by Megha Majumdar that explores the culture of contemporary India through three distinctive characters. What I love most about reading is learning about other lives and other cultures. In these days, even the semblance of travel through fiction is liberating. In The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees and Cocaine in Miami 1980 (Simon & Schuster, July 2020), Nicholas Griffin does an amazing job interviewing reporters, politicians and regular people from 1980 when we had the McDuffie riots, the Mariel boat lift and the beginning of the cocaine cowboys. That year defined Miami at its darkest period, but it’s also what led to Miami’s resurgence. — Mitchell Kaplan, Founder & Owner
Andrew Krivak’s novel The Bear (Belleville Literary Press, February 2020) is set in a distant future with a father and daughter as earth’s last inhabitants. When the girl suddenly finds herself alone and far from home, the natural world intervenes to help her find her way. It’s an exquisite tale of all living things existing in beautiful balance and has one of the most perfect endings of any book I’ve read. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Knopf, July 2020) is a profound and magical historical novel about a family ravaged by grief over the loss of young Hamnet, a boy whose life has been all but forgotten and whose name inspired one of the most famous plays of all time. — Gaël LeLamer, Head Buyer
Beach Read (Berkley, May 2020) by Emily Henry is a smart, savvy rom-com that manages to simultaneously tackle misogyny in mainstream publishing and be frothy and sweet. Mexican Gothic (Del Rey, June 2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a darkly glittering horror novel set in the Mexican countryside during the 1950s, which features one of my favorite protagonists of the year. The novels couldn’t be more different, but they will be my go-to recommendations all summer long. They’re brilliant and entirely impossible to put down from the first chapter. — Cristina Russell, Children’s & YA Book Buyer
For fans of The Hours and Fates and Furies, The Book of V. (Henry Holt & Co., May 2020) by Anna Solomon is a bold, kaleidoscopic novel intertwining the lives of three women across three centuries as their stories of sex, power and desire finally converge in the present day. Emma Straub’s All Adults Here (Riverhead Books, May 2020) is a warm, funny and keenly perceptive novel about the lifecycle of one family as the kids become parents, the grandchildren become teenagers and a matriarch confronts the legacy of her mistakes. — Cristina Nosti, Events & Marketing Director