19 minute read
THE NEXT CHAPTER
The Next Chapter for Zibby Owens
Transforming the publishing world on women’s terms | By Hilary Danailova
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Her podcast and brand may be tagged “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read,” but Zibby Owens’s days are nevertheless filled with books. She reads while waiting for her children to return home from school and on weekend mornings, while the kids watch cartoons. She peruses books while leaning on the island in the blue-and-white kitchen of her airy Park Avenue triplex apartment in New York City, marking pages of interest as the domestic chaos of busy children swirls around her.
“I can read through noise. I can read, like, backwards on a plane. I can read anywhere,” Owens says with a laugh.
That’s a good thing for the legions of busy moms—along with dads, grandparents and plenty of others—looking for the curated book recommendations that have made a hit of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, her seven-days-a-week podcast.
Episodes of the nearly five-yearold podcast, for which Owens has interviewed more than 1,200 authors—from relative unknowns to recognizable names like actress and children’s book author Natalie Portman and fiction writers Jennifer Weiner and Caroline Leavitt—have been downloaded nearly 10 million times.
The award-winning podcast established the 46-year-old as a leading voice in the literary world. Indeed, she has been dubbed “NYC’s most powerful book-influencer” by New York magazine for her facility in bringing books and authors to new and larger audiences.
The podcast also forms the heart of the Zibby Media network, the burgeoning multimedia company Owens has built around a lifelong love of literature, packaged with a distinct and savvy focus on the bookish needs of busy women.
Since 2018, that empire has grown to include Zibby Mag, an online literary destination showcasing essays by favored writers—many of whom Owens champions during her appearances on Good Morning America, where she is a regular contributor. More recently, the Yale undergraduate and Harvard Business School graduate has launched her own publishing house, Zibby Books, with monthly titles that are set to launch in February.
Slated for later in 2023 is her first brick-and-mortar independent bookshop, Zibby’s Bookstore, located in Santa Monica, Calif.
In addition to her media business, Owens has edited two best-selling essay anthologies, Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology and Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids. She also wrote the best-selling Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature as well as a children’s book, Princess Charming, about a princess trying to find her perfect talent.
Currently, Owens is at work on her first novel, about a Los Angeles author with writer’s block, and a sequel to Princess Charming.
Who else but a mom would be able to juggle all that? Indeed, it’s all the more remarkable considering that the energetic entrepreneur launched her literary empire less than a decade ago. At the time, knee-deep in childrearing, Owens was a sporadically published freelance writer of parenting essays. (Her children, from her first marriage to investment banker Andrew Right, are 15-year-old twins, a girl and a boy; a 9-year-old daughter; and an 8-yearold son.)
“My husband said, ‘You should really turn those essays into a book,’ ” Owens recalls, referring to her second husband, multimedia producer Kyle Owens. “I responded: ‘Moms don’t have time to read books,’ ” assuming her natural audience would be too consumed with mothering to read the essays.
From that flippant rejoinder came not only the podcast but also the titles for the two anthologies that followed. Published during the pandemic, both feature essays from authors who appeared on her podcast as well as by Owens herself. The pieces are organized into sections around the five things that the book maven frequently jokes that moms don’t have time to do: eat, breathe, work out, read and have sex. What busy parent—current or former— can’t relate?
That relatability is a key ingredient in Owens’s success. She even looks like your friend from, say, the library moms’ group, with preppy outfits paired with her signature wide smile and straight dirty-blond hair parted to the side.
She has an approachability, a down-to-earth friendliness that’s impossible to fake, despite growing up in one of America’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish families. Her father is Stephen Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private investment firms.
“Zibby recognizes that she has power and connections, and she uses them for good,” says Leavitt, whose most recent novel, With or Without You, was featured by Owens on Good Morning America. The novelist was also interviewed on Owens’s podcast. “She makes other writers feel that she’s right down with all of us in the trenches.”
On her Instagram feed, she’s humble and effusive in her praise of friends and colleagues and frank about her struggles with everything from her weight to scheduling mammograms. (Though unlike most of us, she gets encouragement in the comments from supporters like Paulina Porizkova. Owens interviewed the onetime supermodel in December about Porizkova’s new book, No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, an essay collection about her fashion career and complicated marriage to now-deceased Cars frontman Ric Ocasek.)
But Owens’s unprepossessing style belies an ambition to transform the publishing world on women’s terms. The initial author cohort at Zibby Books happens to be all female, and Owens fosters what she hopes is a warm, nurturing culture that accommodates families and children.
“Zibby has cultivated a real community of primarily women within the company who are dedicated to discovering fun and collaborative ways to put good stories into the hands of readers,” says Sherri Puzey, Zibby Mag’s contributing editor and marketing manager for Zibby Books. “Zibby’s given all of us on her team a seat at the table, figuratively and literally—our current office is her dining room table!—welcoming ideas and offering opportunities to grow within and alongside the company.” Continued on page 20
PEOPLE OF THE BOOKSTORE: DISTINCTIVE PLACES TO FIND YOUR READS
What makes a bookstore Jewish? Is it the
pickles sold at Sweet Pickle Bookshop, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, or the bat mitzvah photos that decorate the store’s walls? Is it the ease of stumbling upon a compelling read like The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman’s history of rivaling Persian Jewish families in China, which is a hit in the Judaica section of The Bookshop & Get Lit Wine Bar in Lenox, Mass.?
There are probably as many answers as there are Jewish-owned bookstores—themselves an unquantifiable subset of the approximately 2,500 independent bookstores in America. While many of these shops aren’t explicitly Jewish, their proprietors often connect their Jewish values with the bookseller’s mission of creating community around literature and ideas.
With readings and other events, that communal role has become more important as bookstores settle into the digital era’s economically tenuous retail calculus. Roughly two-thirds of independent bookstores closed between 1990 and 2010, according to the American Booksellers Association, coinciding with the rise of the internet. Now their numbers are increasing, reversing that trend.
Today’s independents are less interested in competing with online booksellers than in creating personal connections through social media and in-person gatherings. They’re also more likely to reflect the idiosyncrasies of owners and clientele. Sweet Pickle customers, for instance, delight in spotting the store’s branded merchandise on the streets of New York City: “Sarah Jessica Pickle!” wrote one fan on the store’s Instagram site, accompanying a shot of actress Sarah Jessica Parker strolling with a Sweet Pickle tote.
Some bookstores sell online, others don’t. “Amazon is useful if you’re looking for a specific title,” explains Israel Mizrahi, who owns Mizrahi Bookstore in Brooklyn. “Bookstores are the reverse: You want a person to recommend you something. It’s about relationships.”
Here, we provide a look at some of America’s most distinctive Jewish-owned bookstores:
SWEET PICKLE BOOKS MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
Sweet Pickle Books, the two-year-old used bookshop on the Lower East Side’s Orchard Street that sells both books and pickles, has struck a chord among teenagers and young adults, who post TikTok and Instagram tributes to the quirky emporium, as well as the neighborhood’s Jewish old guard, who come in to barter books and tchotchkes for jars of pickles.
Some of those tchotchkes are for sale. Others that have become favorites of Altshuler are not, such as the disco ball hanging from the ceiling and a vintage VHS copy of Crossing Delancey.
“I love the symbiotic relationship between people who buy and sell used books—how they reflect the interests of a community,” says Altshuler, who features a large selection of Jewish-themed books.
What shoppers discover in Sweet Pickle is an eclectic selection of classics and popular fiction and nonfiction, lots of it kitschy and decidedly vintage—Seinfood: A Food Book About Nothing
by TV Dinner Publications, or Myron Kosloff’s 1964 Dial “P” for Pleasure. And then there are the pickles. Altshuler knew she wanted to sell something alongside books, and pickles seemed like an obvious homage to the storied Jewish neighborhood. Jars of her proprietary blends decorate the store’s bookshelves, alongside T-shirts with cheeky slogans like “Eat More Pickles.”
Sweet Pickle’s success vindicates Altshuler’s millennial-girl “chutzpah”—her word—in a business historically dominated by men.
The Lower East Side bookstore’s quirky vibe appeals to both teens and the Jewish old guard. Pickles, kitsch and books at Sweet Pickle
Ellen Trachtenberg of Narberth Bookshop
NARBERTH BOOKSHOP NARBERTH, PENNSYLVANIA
Her vision was validated in the weeks after the election, when Philadelphia-area liberals, disheartened by the results, poured into her general-interest bookstore to commiserate and recommend progressive titles to each other.
The small bookstore, less than 1,000 square feet, has been a hub of local intellectual life ever since. Murals cover the walls with outdoor images or slogans like “A community of readers, writers, and lifelong learners.” Trachtenberg’s
Sisters Leah (left) and Bea Koch co-own The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, a bright, inviting store stacked with every type of romance book possible.
selection of books invites conversations over fiction best-sellers like Dani Shapiro’s Signal Fires as well as nonfiction books that explore heavier content.
“This is a place where we can talk about racism, about antisemitism,” Trachtenberg says.
Narberth is also deeply intertwined with the area’s sizable Jewish community—partnering with a book club at the Adath Israel congregation in Merion Station and participating in a cookbook event with the James Beard Award-winning, Israeli-born chef Alon Shaya.
Trachtenberg credits her Jewish values with sparking her vocation as well as “the Jewish emphasis on social responsibility and thinking critically about issues.”
THE RIPPED BODICE LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
“Books belong in a Jewish home,” affirms Leah Koch, who with her sister, Bea, owns the Los Angeles romance-focused bookstore The Ripped Bodice. Indeed, a section of the bright and enticing store looks like a living room, complete with shabby chic sofas and love seat.
For the Koches, bookselling fulfills a larger mission to promote diversity. While the sixyear-old store’s white shelves are stacked with every type of romance book possible, from Regency (Julia Quinn’s “Bridgerton” series is a favorite) to erotica, the sisters deliberately showcase Jewish, LGBTQ and non-white storylines and authors, all of which are underrepresented in the romance genre.
Toward December, rather than putting up tinsel, the owners mounted a riotous blue-andwhite Hanukkah display in the shop windows. Angelenos cruising by the pink Culver City storefront couldn’t miss the oversized dreidels, menorahs and posters of Jewish-themed books like Jean Meltzer’s The Matzah Ball.
MIZRAHI BOOKSTORE BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
With a simple paper sign taped inside the glass door, you’d struggle to notice the Mizrahi Bookstore on its nondescript block in the Marine Park area of Brooklyn. Most people shop by appointment—a necessity, considering the difficulty in squeezing into the threefloor labyrinth of books and papers; around a half-million used, rare and antiquarian titles are crammed into every available square inch. Turn one corner and there are stacks of Hebrew seforim, another and you’ll find novels in Yiddish, a third and you may encounter a pile of sheet music—cantorial compositions next to a musical piece commemorating the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan.
“You definitely can’t do a hora in here,” quips owner Israel Mizrahi, who transacts much of his business online (400 customers, from Syrian rabbis to secular Yiddishists, check his eBay site daily, he says).
Growing up in an observant Sephardi family in Brooklyn, Mizrahi would skip school to go to the local library. He started collecting Jewish books until he had amassed enough to open a store—so that’s what he did.
“Books either sell in 24 hours or can take 15 years,” he says. “It’s like a lottery. You never know what a customer’s going to come in for. There’s that thrill of selling just one more book.” $100,000 from both locals and visitors to the Berkshires to keep Matt Tannenbaum’s shop in business. (Hardly surprising, considering the consistently positive reviews the store gets: “Amazing little bookstore. Impeccably curated. Snagged a couple of authors that are harder to find in NYC,” wrote one Google reviewer.) The outpouring, which inspired Tannenbaum’s documentary film, Hello, Bookstore, affirmed his conviction that independent bookstores are community fixtures.
From the substantial Judaica section, he’ll recommend books like the dishy The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, or one of his favorites, a volume on 20th-century Jewish radicals in London’s East End.
Tannenbaum, a self-described schmoozer, set aside a corner of the store several years ago to create a wine bar to help lubricate discussions around books. “I love to have a glass of wine, make a few dollars and tell a story,” he says.
“I’ll say, ‘Have you read this book?’ Ten times out of nine, they’ll buy the book.” —Hilary Danailova
When The Bookstore & Get Lit Wine Bar faced insolvency during the pandemic, a GoFundMe campaign raised over
In addition to its communal ethos, Zibby Books is upending bookselling norms. The publishing house plans to issue one title a month and lavish equal resources on all its authors—unlike most publishers, who reserve the lion’s share of promotion for literary stars and best sellers.
At a November media launch for Owens’s newest projects, the female energy was palpable and joyous as sunlight streamed through the windows of her apartment.
Seated in front of the large fireplace in her family room, the hostess beamed as “her” authors took turns Zooming in to present their books. Among them was Alisha Fernandez Miranda, who joined from her home in Scotland. Her memoir, My What If Year: Four Internships, Three Countries, Two Kids and One Life-Changing Misadventure—a book that the author has jokingly called a “coming-of-middleage story”—is the publishing house’s inaugural release.
As Miranda and her fellow authors presented their titles, a small, in-person mix of book industry people and press chatted and lunched on sandwiches, fried chicken and that New York Jewish classic, black-andwhite cookies.
“We’re just moving and shaking over here,” Owens enthused, smiling warmly to her audience.
Then she surprised everyone by announcing the planned 2023 opening of Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, sharing architectural images and sketches of the indie bookstore. It will be “curating in a whole new way,” she said—categorizing books by topic rather than genre, creating author-recommended sections and, naturally, showcasing Zibby Books titles.
A bookstore may feel old school in an Amazon-dominated world, but Owens is a book influencer for a generation that moves seamlessly between the printed page and e-readers, podcasts, blogs and social media.
—ZIBBY OWENS
“People love to connect over books,” Owens muses of the myriad ways readers interact with each other through literature.
Readerly kinship, after all, is at the heart of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. Over and over, authors interviewed for this article said that talking to Owens feels like chatting with a good friend.
In an interview with Tony Awardwinning Broadway star Idina Menzel and her sister, teacher Cara Mentzel, the three Jewish women bonded over shared camp experiences and sibling dynamics while discussing Loud Mouse, a children’s book the sisters co-wrote about a mouse whose singing causes her to change size. When Menzel told Owens she wanted to foster conversations about talent, navigating fame and wanting “to be seen and heard” from a young age, Owens played a short clip of a song her 9-year-old had created for the book. “She’s got such a vibe already!” Menzel observed.
In another recent episode, Owens showcased an unusual Holocaust story when she interviewed author Michael Frank about his book One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World. Frank described his weekly meetings with Levi, who grew up in the little-known prewar Jewish community on the island of Rhodes before being deported to Auschwitz.
Listening to the breezy ease of these interviews and others, it’s hard to believe that Owens had never actually listened to a podcast before launching her own in 2018. “Originally, it was going to be me reading book excerpts for busy people. But I found out that was illegal,” Owens recounts. She decided to interview authors instead, “and I loved it.”
Owens is a stalwart fan of Jewish writers. She mentions Dani Shapiro, a longtime friend, and romance novelist Jean Meltzer as favorites, and she has been a judge for the National Jewish Book Awards. But she’s littlec-catholic when selecting authors and genres for her podcast, which features novels, memoirs, picture books, self-help titles and even cookbooks. “I like to mix it up with people of different cultures, races, religions, sexualities. I want to talk to everyone,” Owens says.
Listeners are equally enthusiastic.
“I felt like my new friend Zibby was introducing me to all these authors, and they became my cheerleaders,” says Sagit Schwartz, a
Los Angeles therapist who became hooked on the podcast while working on her first novel, Bean. Due out in 2024 from Alcove Press, Bean is a thriller whose protagonist is a Jewish woman suffering from an eating disorder. “I really credit them with helping me get to the finish line of my book.”
Discovering the role she’d unwittingly played in helping Schwartz to finish Bean, Owens then featured an essay by the author on her Zibby Mag website.
Books have been a consuming passion for Owens since a childhood that, for all its privilege, had its share of darkness. As Owens explains in her memoir Bookends—which focuses on her early years, the death of a friend on 9/11 and falling in love with her second husband—classics like Charlotte’s Web and Little Women served as emotional refuge from the trauma of her parents’ divorce when she was 9.
Later, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom (she has interviewed both authors for her podcast) sustained the then-20-something Owens through the loss of her college roommate and best friend, Stacey Sanders, in the World Trade Center attack, the tragedy that ultimately motivated Owens to pen Bookends, published last summer.
Soon to join the ranks of the novelists she promotes—her first novel, which does not yet have a title, is due out next year—Owens has redoubled her focus on championing authors. Pamela Redmond, who has three novels forthcoming from Zibby Books, praises the way Owens treats her authors as collaborators rather than commodities.
“I worked at Condé Nast for many years, and there are a lot of advantages to that,” reflects Redmond, a former columnist at Glamour Magazine who has published more than 20 novels, memoirs and nonfiction works with large publishing houses and has experienced the greater resources these companies can put behind a book. “But inevitably, the book is a product.”
In contrast, Zibby Books “is a totally different experience,” says Redmond. “Zibby’s big vision is that there should be more community— between authors, publishers, readers. It’s an entrepreneurial spirit based on relationships.”
It’s likely that Owens can realize this vision because Zibby Media is a privately held company and not answerable to shareholders. But Leavitt, the Jewish novelist whose works Owens has supported, sees Jewish values at play, too.
“In Jewish culture, you’re supposed to take care of others in the community. And that’s what she does,” Leavitt says about the way that Owens fosters writers and readers.
Owens’s strong Jewish connections date to her childhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her family belonged to Temple Emanu-El, the landmark Reform synagogue, and her recollections of the Jewish holidays and Hebrew school amid a 1980s upbringing are broadly relatable. “My mother was on the lookout for High Holiday outfits for me for, like, the entire year,” Owens says with a laugh.
Her first husband, Right, is Jewish; her second, Kyle Owens, is ItalianAmerican and chose to convert to Judaism from Catholicism before the two wed in 2017.
Inevitably, as technology has changed the book industry and paved the way for the Zibby Media literary empire, it has also changed books themselves. Authors are trying new formats, like shortform pieces and Audible Originals— audio-first works written directly for that market.
And then there is social media, which she praises for making literature more accessible.
“You can go on Instagram, DM [direct message] the authors and get feedback right away,” says Owens, who fastidiously responds to online queries.
The downside, she acknowledges, is that the sound-bite world of social media has shortened attention spans.
“When I try to read literary fiction with very long chapters, I get discouraged before I even start,” she confesses. While writing Bookends, “I made sure to keep every chapter short. I’d have a really punchy first and last sentence to keep people’s interest.”
As her audience and media company continue to expand, it’s clear that Owens is keeping readers’ interest. And every day, the community she has created around good books eagerly awaits her next chapter.
A drawing of the interior of Zibby’s Bookstore
Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.
