Latest news with #Books&Company
Hamilton Spectator
19 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Your guide to must-visit main streets in Prince Edward County for a perfect day out
If you're like me and love small towns with a vibrant main street, cute shops and unique restaurants, a trip to Prince Edward County will not disappoint. Of course, PEC has a lot to offer from stellar wineries to beautiful beaches — and a wide array of accommodations. But a day of shopping, lunching and strolling the main street is another great way to relax while supporting local business. My girlfriends and I recently made the most of Picton, Bloomfield and Wellington being within close proximity of one another. Here's how you can do it too, in just one day. Main Street in Picton has a wonderful selection of shops featuring everything from books, to kitchen and housewares, to unique thrift items. There is both pay and display street parking available on the street and in a municipal lot, but there is also limited free parking available in municipal lots at 55 King St . and on Mary Street . Books & Company is a must-visit. Not only is there a wide variety of books, gifts, puzzles, toys and more, but the resident cat, Pushkin, adds to the experience at the large but cosy bookshop. It's a treat going into Books and Company in Picton, especially if the resident cat, Pushkin, is nearby. You can also stop by the attached Lily's Café. Here, you can order coffee, sweets and delicious sandwiches. I also bought a beautiful bouquet of dried flowers here. A stroll along Main Street will take you into a variety of different shops, selling goods ranging from affordable to, well, something you might want to save up for. My friends really enjoyed Cylinder Shop , which features the owner's beautiful handmade pottery that's also functional. Local stores lining Picton's main drag offer unique shopping experiences. Cylinder Shop, for example, features locally handmade and functional pottery. Fibre lovers can enjoy Rosehaven Yarn Shop , and there are some beautiful clothing stores, jewelry stores, gift shops and more. It's definitely the largest out of the three main streets we visited. Wellington is located along the north shore of Lake Ontario and boasts many popular wineries. It also has an adorable little street for those of us who love to shop. There is free parking in designated areas along Main Street for up to two hours. By the time you get to Wellington, you may be hungry for some lunch. You're in luck on this small but vibrant Main Street. We tried La Condesa , which serves up authentic small-plated Mexican cuisine and it was delicious. Mexican restaurant La Condesa offers delicious small plates in Wellington, part of Prince Edward County. We had tried to get in the night before, but there was an hour wait. For lunch on a Sunday, we walked right in. I loved the decor, and the Mexican Coca-Cola was a special treat. If you've ever tried it, you know it's better than the same soft drink that is made in North America. Mexican restaurant La Condesa offers delicious small plates in Wellington, part of Prince Edward County. Wellington has some cute shops. One of them, Oak Clothing Co. , also has a coffee shop inside. Wellington in Prince Edward County offers some cute shops and delicious restaurants. Another dining option is Midtown Brewing Co . Plus, you can order a nice cold beer. We went here when we couldn't get into La Condesa the night before. Wellington in Prince Edward County offers some cute shops and delicious restaurants, including Midtown Brewing. The food, especially the fries with roasted garlic and Parmesan, was delicious. We did have to wait for a table on the Saturday night we went without reservations, but only for a few minutes. Wellington in Prince Edward County offers some cute shops and delicious restaurants. This was taken at Midtown Brewing. While we waited, we wandered over to the Drake Devonshire , which is right on the waterfront. This cool place offers food, drink, arts, culture, a gift shop and a place to stay. The beach is just steps from Main Street as well if you'd like to take a dip or take in some fresh air. The drive in to Bloomfield is beautiful with unique homes and gorgeous gardens. Main Street is a great place to do some shopping. There is plenty of free parking on the street and in lots, for a maximum of two hours. One of the first places you will see on the drive in is Slickers County Ice Cream. It's delicious and made with Ontario cream. Note, there is another location in Picton. Slickers County Ice Cream can be found in Picton and Bloomfield. Once you're finished your ice cream, Main Street is filled with cute, unique shops. I've found some great silver jewelry from Casa Lucia and there are plenty of great gift shops and more. My friends found some special items at Kokito . We had to check out the historic Bull Homestead, which has become Handworks & Outside Inn , featuring unique outbuildings where you can buy work by local artists and artisans. The hanging chairs make for a fun photo opportunity. Bloomfield is filled with art and creativity and this is just one of many places to explore if you love art. The Bull Homestead in Bloomfield makes for an interesting photo backdrop while touring around Prince Edward County. The public washrooms are just off the main street. I always like to know where the public washrooms are when I check out a new place. In Bloomfield, they are just off the main drag. Spa lovers, you can finish your day at Wander . It's a new lakeside resort that offers a spa, food and accommodations. If you want to find a place to eat dinner, you can find delicious food in any three of these towns. All of these places offer much more than just the main street. Make sure to check out their tourism websites if you'd like to see more. Learn what Picton has to offer here . Click here for more on Wellington. Visit this website for more on Bloomfield.
New York Times
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Wordplay, Weirdness and a Guest Appearance by Clint Eastwood
Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture that you want to describe as 'downtown,' regardless of where she actually lives. Manhattan, according to her book bio, but with a bassist, not a banker — as so many downtowners are today. Nothing staying the same is a big Tillman theme, minus any nostalgic gauze. 'I don't make good use of time,' one of her meta-narrators says in 'Thrilled to Death,' a thorough if not complete selection of her short stories. 'I waste a lot of it, and it wastes me.' Tillman's style is spare and spiky. She is a jill-of-all-genres, having written novels and criticism and oral histories of Andy Warhol and Books & Company, the dearly departed Upper East Side bookstore next to, and bullied out by, the old Whitney Museum. Her last book, 'Mothercare,' was a long autobiographical essay, an unsentimental education in managing the decline of a problematic parent. 'Thrilled to Death' is dedicated to Tillman's late father. Its contents, which date from the 1980s to the present, were selected and arrayed by the author in what she calls 'associative' order. The lack of dates keeps the reader on high alert, not so much on her toes as afloat out of time, as if in a dream. And Tillman's characters teem with dreams. 'Dreams, the mind's gifts, can be sweeter than anything reality offers, and they satisfy me more than sex,' thinks the protagonist of 'The Undiagnosed,' who shows up at a masquerade party wearing her neurotic, dead dad's suit. Another guest is dressed as a rose, 'his penis … a thorn in his side.' Clint Eastwood is at the party, too. 'It's not a good time to be a man,' he tells our heroine. Their small talk is perfectly natural, philosophical and hilarious. Keeping tally of the celebrities that pop up is one way to orient yourself in Tillman's wide-ranging, bumpy landscape of mostly ordinary lives. In 'Dead Talk,' Marilyn Monroe contemplates her nether regions with a hand mirror and imagines a lakeside visit with the son she never had, before drifting off to her final oblivion. In 'Angela and Sal,' the brooding bisexual actor Sal Mineo picks up the check for the narrator at the Hard Rock Cafe in London and waits for her in his limo, two years before he is knifed to death. She's seen him once before, on Fifth Avenue, while buying her father a humidor. 'Ironic coincidence is common as mud in actual life but appears less often in fiction because it might seem contrived,' Tillman notes. She pokes the fourth wall so often it's like a PVC shower curtain. Wordplay abounds. A character in the title story, set at a carnival, is named Paige Turner. Form-wise, there is nothing predictable or comforting about this work. 'Future Prosthetic@?' is a Jabberwockyish riff so committed to its whacked-out machine language — 'narnt into funking a doodle,' etc. — and redolent of recent discontents around artificial intelligence that I had to look up when it was written (2015, for an anthology of flash science fiction). 'Myself as a Menu' is divided into courses, rendered in old-fashioned typewriter font, preoccupied with various visits to the 'nuthouse' and signed Lynne Tillman. Another story reveals 'Lynne Tillman' to be the pen name of a 'real' person, Patricia Mergatroyde. Somehow, whoever-she-is has zipped these 40-odd textured pieces, plus an introduction by Christine Smallwood and afterword by Lucy Sante, into fewer than 300 pages, like fur coats in a packing cube. Tillman is attuned to humanity's animalness, and animals themselves. In a relationship triangulated with her analyst (remember those?), Helen of 'The Substitute' meets a man with the canine name Rex, and they sniff each other like 'intrigued dogs.' 'That's How Wrong My Love Is' is devoted to mourning doves, its narrator mulling the ethics of why she feeds and cares for them and not the bigger, uglier pigeons. 'Boots and Remorse' is a little horror movie about a pair of adopted cats that should probably come with a parental advisory sticker. Tillman writes for grown-ups, but the kind who are constantly tending to their inner children. (Helen 'was astonished at how adolescence malingered in every cell of her mature body.') In an era of truncated attention spans, her short stories, some verging on micro, seem newly with-it. Her one-liners can do more than certain entire volumes. 'She used to be an editor for a Condé Nast publication before she started hitting the bottle.' 'The unclear family.' (Variation of nuclear.) 'I don't like endings.' Who does?
