It would be easy to mistake Finally, a Bookstore That Sells Mesh Underwear for a small book. It is not. It is a precise one.

The book and fashion worlds have been flirting. At Climax, they're making out — inside the East Village shop where rare books meet boutique fashion.

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

A Letter, Long Withheld

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

“By the final pages, the reader has not so much finished the book as agreed to remember it.”

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

A Letter, Long Withheld

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

It would be wrong to call Finally, a Bookstore That Sells Mesh Underwear flawless. It is something better than that: alive.