Why We Can’t Resist a Great Bookstore
The Book Review

Why We Can’t Resist a Great Bookstore

B2Upper-intermediateAugust 21, 202626 min
  • Interview
  • Arts & culture

What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down. For this week’s episode, our guest host, MJ Franklin, and the producer Sarah Diamond take a field trip to a local bookstore, McNally Jackson Seaport, at the southern tip of Manhattan. There, they talk with the owner, Sarah McNally, about what it’s actually like to run a bookstore. Then MJ sits down with Jennifer Harlan, an editor a...

Play episode

Opens the player: the full transcript, every word clickable, with translation and flashcards.

Try it: tap any word

Real sentences from the start of this episode. Every word is marked with its level.

Sentence 1 of 12 · 0:00

,

the books will speak to me.

Tap a word to see its meaning in your language.

Do you know these words?

8 harder words from this episode. Tap one to see what it means, then mark it.

Mark a few words and we'll tell you how this episode fits your level.

Is this episode right for you?

B2

B2 · Upper-intermediate

Comfortable if you already follow TV news

A1 31%A2 37%B1 18%B2 12%C1 2%
  • 86% of the words are B1 or easier.
  • 200 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
  • 118 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

Transcript

The opening of the episode. The whole transcript is in the player.

0:00

I walk into a bookstore and I get very woo-woo and I'm like, the books will speak to me. I just have to open myself up and whatever needs to emerge will emerge. So we're on a field trip.

0:11

We're on a field trip. This is the Book Review from The New York Times. I'm MJ Franklin in for Gilbert Cruz and recently I left my desk, left the building, and journeyed out to visit one of my favorite bookstores in New York,

0:24

Bignali Jackson Seaport, down at the southern tip of Manhattan. Whoa, it's so much bigger up here than I thought it was gonna be. This bookstore is low-key huge, which is also a really nice thing about McNally. When we walked in, it was just like a little entryway.

That was the opening. The rest of the episode (25 min) is in the player: every word clickable, with translation, saved words and flashcards.

Continue in the player

Automatically generated from the audio. May contain errors. Audio belongs to its publisher and is played from their feed. Rights holders can request removal — copyright & takedown policy