Love Letter to the Indie Bookstore: Radical Third Spaces

By Alyssa Lyons

I’ve always loved books. And I mean loved books. As a child, I’d often comb through the trash to recover discarded tomes. Where my neighbors saw old and water-stained trash, I saw glorious treasure. I'd sniff dog-eared yellowed pages as I skipped home with my latest additions. So it’s not surprising that as an adult, I would come to love bookstores.

Bookstores, especially independent ones, are what sociologist Ray Oldenburg  referred to as “third places.” Third places are virtual or physical spaces outside of home and work/school where people gather, organize, and find and build community. In independent bookstores, it’s not uncommon to find people sipping coffee, working, or quietly sharing space with others who have bookish affinities. Madeleine Roberts-Ganim identified third spaces as places that can “affirm our identities and build empathy for identities different from our own.”

Unlike larger corporate bookstores that are simply in the business of selling books, independent bookstores are owned and operated on a smaller scale often outside of franchising. Often, they’re owned and operated by marginalized folks at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. While they too are in the business of selling books, they often have a purpose independent of making money. They are radical third spaces needed now more than ever. While chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble close across the nation and third spaces have been dying since the COVID-19 pandemic, independent bookstores have witnessed a rebirth with over 200-300 new stores opening nationwide.

Not uncoincidentally, the rise in independent bookstores converged with white nationalist political censorship of books, education, and knowledge. In most authoritarian dystopian fiction, books are often the first things to go under totalitarian government regimes. All you have to do is read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to know that. Books, and the knowledges they offer, are portals to alternative consciousnesses. As both knowledge production and consumption are under political siege, independent bookstores are not only third spaces of belonging, connection, and community: they are also critical spaces of transgressive knowledge and political resistance.

In 2023, I wrote about how book bans "Maintain White nationalist, capitalist, and heteronormative patriarchal ideological control over students by alienating them from a multitude of stories, narratives, histories, and ideas that might shift, challenge, and/or disrupt oppressive beliefs and attitudes." These books speak into existence the lives of Black and Brown, queer, femme, and/or poor and working-class folks. They offer worlds through words.

As books have been targeted with right-wing fervor, independent bookstores (and their owners) have become necessary sites of political, ideological, and physical resistance to political suppression. For example, the independent bookstore in Florida, White Rose, opened its doors when concerned librarians witnessed books like Maia Kobabe’s Genderqueer: A Memoir being banned in schools and classrooms nationwide. The bookstore is an LGBTQ+, Latina, and women owned bookstore.

And in the East Village, Bluestockings, New York’s only “queer, trans, and sex-worker cooperatively-owned activist bookstore and café,” has for the past 21 years curated radical book collections while creating a community space that offers Narcan training, sanitary products, clothing, and snacks to unhoused folks and people who need community support.

These bookstores not only sell banned books; they build community around them. These bookstores exist in defiance of suppression of knowledge. The white nationalist state functions as what Michel Foucault might call a “truth regime.” This suppression, repression, and distortion of knowledge is an attempt to monopolize what we believe and think about the world. Or what we consider the truth.

We can see this in our politics in the U.S. as the Trump administration continues its efforts to block Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming and curriculum in schools across the nation: including colleges. Datasets, information, and statistics compiled by researchers are being scrubbed from official websites with over 8, 000 pages removed.. In March 2025, PEN America reported that over 350 words were scrubbed from government websites and documents under the Trump administration: including words like climate change, abortion, women, and elderly. As Foucault reminds us, knowledge is socially constructed.

Indie bookstores often challenge both the censorship and repression of institutionalized knowledge production and consumption. With far-right influence and control, there is a political attempt to influence what people know and what they believe by controlling discourse. The words we use shape meaning, identity, and society. Independent bookstores are not only third spaces. They are liminal spaces—a conduit from our oppressive and repressive past and present to a liberated future outside of coloniality, empire, genocide, and imperialism.

And while indie bookstores exist in a white capitalist nation-state, they also stand in contradiction, offering and creating knowledge and truths outside of the academe and the state. For instance, Bluestockings sells zines created by marginalized community members, prioritizes books from independent presses, and welcomes queer, unhoused, and economically dispossessed folks in its intentional space to facilitate workshops and events.

I grew up in The Bronx, New York. For most of my life, the only bookstore our borough had was the corporate conglomerate Barnes and Noble. It closed in 2016 and our county, one of the most densely populated in the United States, lost the only brick and mortar bookstore we had. Then came along The Lit Bar in 2019. It opened in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx as the only bookstore--independent or otherwise.

The Lit Bar is not only an important community space. With a thoughtful curation that centers authors of color and marginalized knowledges, bookstores like the Lit Bar are material and immaterial places of transgressive resistance in its forbidden knowledge, stories, histories, identities, and worlds. Especially in a borough where most folks are of the global majority and working class. What the white nationalist state hides and obscures, independent bookstores like the Lit Bar proudly display in their front windows enticing passersby to come in, sit down, and learn something new.

Comments

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For those who do not have the opportunity to travel many places, books are a world that takes them away. I hope that books about travel experiences will help you understand this world better.