A small, curated storefront offers books of various languages, inside Cleveland Heights' new Hexagon Books.
Owner Manuel Chinchilla runs the shop at 2184 Lee Road, plus the classroom tucked down the hallway, where he will teach Italian and Spanish language classes.
Chinchilla, formerly a Spanish language teacher at Hunting Valley’s University School and a professor at Sewanee: The University of the South, organized Hexagon’s books by continent, showcasing authors from around the world. One key detail that sets his space apart from other bookshops in Northeast Ohio is that it offers a selection of books written and presented in non-English languages, along with English translations of works.
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“To me, reading is not centered on any one tradition or any one country. When I wanted a bookstore, my idea was to have a bookstore that would include or display more prominently that diversity,” Chinchilla says.
The instructor and shop owner was born and raised in Honduras, where he lived until he was 19. He studied at Louisiana State University and got his PhD at The University of Michigan in Romance Languages. Since then, he’s been teaching language classes — and always had a dream of opening a bookstore.
And not just any bookstore.
He found inspiration for the shop’s name, “Hexagon Books,” in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel,” which showcases an infinite library with books in any possible language, arranged into hexagonal rooms. (A book by Borges is proudly displayed in the front window of the shop, next to a few other key selections.) “This bookstore is supposed to be one of those rooms,” Chinchilla says.
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Don’t expect floor-to-ceiling stacks of books at Hexagon; Chinchilla made the shop easy to navigate and thoughtfully curated, with unusual and experimental selections that readers wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. He aims to support the bookstore with Spanish and Italian language lessons, which will go hand-in-hand with his literary offerings.
“These two things match up well, they go together because eventually the people who are taking the lessons will have, maybe, a taste for the culture; maybe they become fluent conversational, and the same with their reading skills,” he says. “Maybe they start to appreciate reading something in the original Italian or the original Spanish.”
The shop soft-opened last week and Chinchilla has already kicked off some programming, like a Latin American horror fiction book club. He aims to host community gatherings for book readings and discussions as well — and hopes for his readers to inform Hexagon Books’ inventory. He particularly wants to have a strong kids’ reading section, which already hosts a few shelves of foreign language picture books.
“It would be cool if people, when they’re little, get accustomed to knowing that there are different languages that they can use to get to know the world — and that it’s fun, and it’s not difficult,” Chinchilla says. “I want them to be the readers that, 15 years from now, are not impressed with buying or reading a book in a foreign language; they will just do it.”
Chinchilla recommended a few of his favorite books, reflecting selections from the shop.
“Rashōmon” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Famed, historic Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s most famous short story made an impact on Chinchilla. This philosophical tale, which was made into a movie in 1950 by Akira Kurosawa, follows characters’ crimes and moral quandaries. “It’s almost like a work of architecture, and you forget about it while you’re reading because it’s so beautiful,” Chinchilla says.
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Ukrainian-born Brazilian author Clarice Lispector published this classic in 1964, crafting a novel that takes a squished cockroach and uses it to pose questions about society, life and death. “To me, she’s a giant, like Virginia Woolf; very intellectual, very smart,” Chinchilla says.
Forget My Name by Zerocalcare
Published in 2022, this graphic novel by Italian artist Zerocalcare is a coming-of-age tale that digs into family trauma and events through the artist’s unique style. “The art is great. The best thing is that it’s really funny,” Chinchilla says. “He does all this through humor.”
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
An English translation of French author David Diop’s 2018 masterpiece At Night All Blood is Black won the Booker Prize, after the work had already won numerous French book prizes. The author weaves West African culture and stories into a World War I Senegalese Tirailleurs infantry unit. “The narration is sort of like an oral story, so every chapter begins with a refrain that comes from the previous one, in this very hypnotic way of narrating,” Chinchilla says.
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