Episode 10: "Briana Parker on the worlds that opened through James Joyce’s ULYSSES"

Briana Parker, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books, joins Naomi for a discussion that begins in her thoroughly annotated copy of Ulysses from a high school English class (shouts out to Richard Roundy, Briana’s English teacher and now regular at Lofty Pigeon!) and meanders through the many worlds Briana has occupied and built in New York City — from growing up in Sheepshead Bay, to the Union Square Barnes & Noble, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the cozy kids’ corner at her own Lofty Pigeon Books.

Briana Parker is a third-generation Brooklynite. She spent ten years as an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before opening Lofty Pigeon Books in Kensington, Brooklyn with her partner Davi in 2023. 

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Lofty Pigeon, Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

What is Reading Around the Margins?

In each episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi Washer talks with writers, readers, translators, publishers, and booksellers about how they interact with their books as objects; how their own marginalia consciously or unconsciously informs the books they come to write; and how the experience of reading brings a book into existence.