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Smell This
Scents Inspired by a Stylist’s Family Memories
When the stylist Beverly Nguyen opened her Manhattan home and gift store, Beverly’s, in April 2021, she kept thinking of her grandmother who ran what Nguyen calls an “everything shop” in Vietnam. It carried snacks, drinks, beauty products and even refrigerators. “She transformed the space depending on what people needed,” says Nguyen, “and that’s exactly my ethos with Beverly’s,” which sells objects ranging from handcrafted ceramics to bamboo steamers. Now, a new line of three-in-one home, fabric and body sprays draws on Nguyen’s family history and her own early years in Orange County, Calif. One of the three scents, Dawn, which has hints of lemon, orange blossom and musk, is designed to capture the magic of 5 a.m. trips to the beach to watch the sunrise. Joy Ride, which has notes of sandalwood, white vetiver and leather, was inspired by excursions in the family’s Mercedes convertible. “My dad would be driving and my mom was in the front seat,” both dressed for work, says Nguyen. “Me and my sisters [were] in the back seat, messy and in T-shirts with the wind in our hair.” The final fragrance, Wedding, mixes frankincense and cedar and is intended to conjure, says Nguyen, “the ritual of going to church together.” Decorating the handmade Italian glass bottle is a wedding photo of her parents. For Nguyen, the collection is about “sharing more of my world with people,” she says. $65, available in-store at Beverly’s and online at atmosfragrance.com.
Go Here
The Resurgence of the Gay Bookstore
Gay bookstores — historically lifelines for the LGBTQ+ community before they were replaced by online booksellers — are back, with independent shops opening across the country. At Hive Mind Books, which opened in November in Bushwick, Brooklyn, customers quietly type on laptops at tables, surrounded by titles by and about LGBTQ+ people. A small cafe encourages lingering and community. In nearby Crown Heights, the Nonbinarian Bookstore, also established in November, sells donated titles exclusively by LGBTQ+ authors and also distributes free books. On the West Coast, the Seattle shop Charlie’s Queer Books, which opened in 2023, has romance shelves organized by queer identity flags, plus a range of queer fiction, nonfiction and kitschy souvenirs. Quotes from the author bell hooks and art with tag lines like “Be gay, read books” adorn the shop and a children’s corner features family-friendly LGBTQ+ picture books. Upstairs, a space with communal tables invites reading, writing and grass-roots organizing. In Florida, where there’s been a considerable uptick in book bans recently, Tallahassee’s Common Ground Books opened in August 2022, specializing in LGBTQ+ titles. Violet Valley, which opened in 2023, is a hub for queer and feminist titles in the town of Water Valley, Miss., while the author-owned Loudmouth Books in Indianapolis is centered around titles by queer, Black and Indigenous authors. In Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, Little District Books sells queer titles; the Little Fox Bookshop has been popping up around Portland, Maine; and soon, the Little Gay Bookstore plans to open in Columbus, Ohio.
Covet This
A Jeweler’s Take on the Stationery Box, Made in Japan
Kim Dunham has long been infatuated with ancient handcrafted pieces. The jeweler founded her business eight years ago with gold signet rings — a style that goes back to the Mesopotamia era — that she engraved with mottos, monograms or symbols specific to her clients. The rings can also function as wax seal stamps, so when Dunham considered creating a complementary art piece, she ultimately decided on an urushi stationery box, released this week. Called the Ritual of Writing, the kit is made in collaboration with a traditional box maker and urushi artist, both based in Yamanaka Onsen, a Japanese town known for its hot springs and lacquerware. “I always travel with my notecards and envelopes and will often leave a note behind at a place that I’ve stayed, or with people that I’ve met,” Dunham says of her own writing ritual. Each box, hand-carved and coated in multiple layers of urushi (a lacquer derived from the sap of the urushi tree), takes four months to complete and is tied with a hand-braided silk rope known as kumihimo. Inside is a silver and onyx matchbox case designed by Dunham, wax sealing sticks and custom letterpress notecards and envelopes. “I appreciate that [the artisans] honor their craft and they don’t rush things,” Dunham says of the box-making process. “It’s all about taking a pause.” $5,900, kimdunham.com.
Eat Here
France’s New Wave of Cosmopolitan Cooking
In France, an emerging generation of young chefs are melding traditional French cooking with the kitchens of their ancestral countries to create new and deeply personal dishes. At Aldehyde in the Marais in Paris, for example, the Franco-Tunisian chef Youssef Marzouk uses the rigorous French culinary techniques he learned while working at the city’s Hotel Le Cheval Blanc to refine the dishes he ate as a child. “If the emotional memories of food that inspire me are Tunisian, the quality of French ingredients transforms them into something else,” says Marzouk, who serves dishes like lamb with a spicy espuma of mechouia, a cooked Tunisian condiment of tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic. One of his desserts pays homage to his Tunisian grandfather, recalling the scents and flavors of the Cuban cigars and chocolate-covered After Eight mints the old man loved. “I have two cultures,” says Marzouk, “and in the kitchen they become one.”
At Matka (Mother, in Polish), a cozy bistro with a wood-burning stove in the Third Arrondissement, the chef Piotr Korzen, who is from Poland, says he applies his French training to lighten the traditional Polish dishes he cooks using his mother’s and grandmothers’ recipes. “I try to make these recipes subtle without losing their rusticity,” says Korzen of dishes such as duck tartare with green tea consommé and cabbage stuffed with slow-braised lamb and crispy rice. In the Eleventh Arrondissement, the Franco-Vietnamese chef Patricia Tram’s recently opened restaurant Tram 130 has become a hit for its modern dishes inspired by the food she grew up eating, but also by her travels and stints working as a self-taught chef in Brussels, Ibiza and New York. Signature plates include her char siu-style veal sweetbreads on brioche toast. The new wave of cosmopolitan French cooks isn’t just confined to Paris: In the Southern French city of Nîmes, the Franco-Vietnamese sisters Nha and Nhat Nguyen took over the restaurant their parents ran for 28 years this past summer, renamed it Hèita, and brought the Algerian-born chef Fayçal Benhabiles, Nhat’s boyfriend, into the kitchen to prepare an eclectic menu of the foods they like to eat themselves. This includes a succulent laap, a Laotian salad of crunchy rice, beef, crudités and fresh herbs; fried eggplant on a bed of smoked feta; and smash burgers. “We eat from everywhere,” says Nha. “It depends on our moods.”
Consider This
Marking the 80th Anniversary of the Moomins
When the Finnish artist and author Tove Jansson started working on a draft for her first book about the now internationally beloved Moomins, a family of hippo-shaped creatures, fascism was on the rise and the Winter War — a conflict between tiny Finland and the Soviet Union’s massive Red Army — had begun. She described that time as a moment when it felt like all color was being drained from the world. As a result, her first book, “The Moomins and the Great Flood” (1945), was full of dreamlike illustrations, rich with bright hues. Since then, Jansson’s Moomin stories have been published in over 50 languages and TV adaptations have aired in 120 countries. The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the first book, and Jansson’s work is set to be celebrated in Europe and beyond. In Finland they started early with the opening, on Oct. 25, of an exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum featuring her drawings, murals and paintings. Next year, fashion brands including Acne Studios, Dover Street Market and Comme Des Garçons are planning to release various Moomin-inspired products. The film adaptation of Jansson’s novel “The Summer Book” (1972), whose setting is inspired by the island of Klovharu, where the artist and her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, spent their summers for almost 30 years, is scheduled to premiere in the United States in 2025, starring Glenn Close. The artist’s niece, Sophia Jansson, highlights the persistent appeal of her aunt’s work: “Tove’s books touched on topics of darkness — war, natural disasters and displacement — that we can all relate to now,” she says, “but they were really about creating a better and more tolerant world. One where all are welcome.” moomin.com/en/moomin80.
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The post The Queer Book Shops Opening Across the Country appeared first on New York Times.
