On Friday night, your correspondent went to the opening night of Detritus, a new bookstore at 71 Orange Street supported through the city of New Haven's Project Storefronts program and curated by Alexis Zanghi of The Dirty Pond. Detritus aims to be a bookstore that reflects both the local literary scene and the eclectic taste of its curator; it also aims to be a place where literary events of many, many kinds can occur, making the bookstore as much a performance space as a bookstore, a place where New Haven's writers and readers can go to not only read each other, but see each other, hear each other, meet each other. And if the energy of its first evening is any indication, it will succeed. For the opening was crowded, the wine flowing, people standing around the sidewalk outside laughing and smoking cigarettes, as if it were a club (hooray!). And inside, your correspondent, who is not a talkative man by nature, could not stop talking to people—writers, readers, critics. Zanghi declared that the opening would last from 6 pm to 8 pm and had to shoo people out the door. We should make sure she has to keep doing that, for Detritus appears both to be filling a niche that New Haven needs and offering a different, and highly intriguing, model of what a bookstore can be.