Our Book Shelf

Guillaume Wolf "Prof. G" | You Are A Circle

With a mix of inspiring quotes and art, You Are a Dream is a visual meditation for the creative mind that challenges you to go beyond your comfort zone by bringing full awareness to your creative work and your life.  Part of a four-volume series with themes around creativity, embracing your creative gift, and exploring, the book has a small quote on the left page to reflect upon, and an illustration on the right page.

Zadie Smith | Intimations

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time.

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next.

Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman | Big Friendship

Two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls.

Aminatou and Ann define Big Friendship as a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts. And they should know: the two have had moments of charmed bliss and deep frustration, of profound connection and gut-wrenching alienation. They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga. Through interviews with friends and experts, they have come to understand that their struggles are not unique. And that the most important part of a Big Friendship is making the decision to invest in one another again and again.

An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.

Toni Morrison | The Source Of Self-Regard

Here is Toni Morrison in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades. These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.

James Nestor | Breath: The New Science of A Lost Art

There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.

Nestor was also recently interviewed by Terry Gross for Fresh Air, You can listen here. 

Leo Lionni | Little Blue And Little Yellow

For kids and adults.

First published in 1959, Little Blue and Little Yellow are best friends, but one day they can’t find each other. When they finally do, they give each other such a big hug that they turn green! How they find their true colors again concludes a wonderfully satisfying story told with colorful pieces of torn paper and very few words.

Alissa Wagner & Sabrina DeSousa | Dimes Times:  Emotional Eating

A cookbook from one of our favorite downtown eateries.

Dimes, the all-day Chinatown restaurant known for serving vibrant, healthy plates to a devout following of patrons has grown to include a deli and market as well as design objects and apothecary products since its opening in 2013. Now, the all-encompassing brand expands with its debut cookbook.

The collection of recipes, derived from the Dimes menu, is organized by time of day and state of mind, from 8AM, Determined and 4PM, Curious through 11PM, Afterhours. The 8x8 book is inspired by Bruno Munari, medicine folklore and conversations overheard in the neighborhood and features interactive food faces and shapely rhymes that encourage readers to get creative with their meals.

Dimes Times: Emotional Eating features photography by Mary Manning alongside text by Alissa Wagner and Toniann Fernandez, and was designed by Erin Knutson and Sabrina De Sousa. Sandwiched between two clocks that recall the Dimes logo, Dimes Times: Emotional Eating is a compendium of tasty go-to's for the mind and body at any hour.