The Little Bookshop

Most bookshop-cafés pick a corner for a reading chair. The Little Bookshop built a pull-out stage into the one farthest from its bar instead, and that's the tell for what kind of room this is — a 750-square-foot space at 239 Bushwick Ave. that seats about 40, opened May 2025 by mother-daughter duo Mary and Ashley Jones, with Ashley's husband Hans.

The shelves run general-interest — literary fiction, fantasy, romance, narrative nonfiction, cookbooks — plus a poetry section they call the Edgar Allan Poetry Corner and a large Pride selection, which tells you the curation has a sense of humor about itself. Food is small on purpose: full coffee service, homemade soups, sandwiches — enough to justify staying, not enough to compete with the books for attention.

Family-run, and it shows

It's Black-owned, woman-owned, Latinx-owned and family-run, and the space reads that way — reading nooks built for one person and a friend rather than a crowd, the same instinct behind the East Village's own bookshop-bar hybrid a few subway stops over, though this one skews café-and-community-stage over nighttime bar. Recent reviews (140 and counting, 4.8 average) keep landing on the same two things: the soup, and the stage actually getting used for readings and small shows rather than sitting empty as a design flourish.