Quite a Hullabaloo: new bookstore coming to Crown Heights

A rendering of the bookstore's projected interior (via Kickstarter) — A rendering of the bookstore’s projected interior (via Kickstarter)

Bushwick might be wearing the city’s literary crown right now, but it looks like it a strong contender’s coming up in the ranks: a Crown Heights entrepreneur is planning to open a new bookstore complete with a reading garden and a FREE events series. With a potential David Foster Wallace weekly reading club! What a wonderful world.

The bookstore, dubbed Hullabaloo Books, is the brainchild of Michael de Zayas, who has founded a few other neighborhood staples in the past — the Crown Heights Village community playspace, Little Zelda cafe and Wedge Cheesemongers, to name a few. De Zayas and his crew have sussed out a space at Park Place off Franklin Avenue, and they’re planning to turn it into a “community garden space, writing center, literary venue for events and readings, and the best micro bookstore in the world,” all by August 30.

This is, of course, quite an undertaking, and while construction on the space is well underway, they’ve kicked off an $18,420 Kickstarter campaign to help fund the (free) event series they plan to host in the space once it’s open. Hullabaloo is promising nightly readings, writing workshops, book series and other events to help bolster Crown Heights’ literary community. They’ve got a potential schedule up on the Kickstarter site right now, and it looks pretty packed. And specific, too; sample events include a Marcel Proust weekly reading group and the aforementioned David Foster Wallace group, a horror/sci-fi reading series and an open improv, puppetry and comedy night. The Kickstarter though, is only to fund the event series, since according to the page, the bookstore will open regardless.

Prospective renderings of the site look pretty cool, promising a cheerful, bookshelf-filled interior and an ivy-and-tree decorated outdoor reading garden. And de Zayas, a writer as well as a business owner, has literary history in his blood – his grandfather was Andrew Svenson, one of the original writers behind the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, along with the Happy Hollisters and the Tollivers.