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- Albertine
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972 Fifth Ave., at 79th St.; 212-650-0070
Tucked into a landmark Stanford White mansion, this bookshop is named after Proust’s Albertine in Remembrance of Things Past. The store specializes in books by French authors, also stocking French translations of English-language bestsellers, from Julia Child’s cookbooks to The Fault in Our Stars. The first floor skews highbrow with a large social-sciences section—Capital by Thomas Piketty, In Praise of Love by Alain Badiou—all arranged by author with side-by-side options for the text in either English or French. Upstairs are children’s, fashion, and food books below a ceiling painted with a starry zodiac wheel.
Best French Bookshop
From the 2015 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine