Feb/March 2012

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February 5th in New York
Carter Sickels & Stephen Stark
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February 6th in New York
DAN CHAON – STAY AWAKE
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February 7th in New York
Clay Shirky and Eric Klinenberg in conversation
Téa Obreht reads from THE TIGER'S WIFE
Poetry Reading with Martha Rhodes, James Tolan, Stephanie Brown, and Marcia Pelletiere
FREE Mischief & Mayhem Reading Series w/ Kaylie Jones , Thaddeus Rutkowski and host Katie Halper
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February 8th in New York
Susan Howe & Roberto Tejada
Adam Gopnik's Winter
Josh Bazell, Wild Thing, with Malcolm Jones
Selected Shorts: Roz Chast Presents What I Hate from A To Z
9
February 9th in New York
Pico Iyer and Rebecca Solnit
Nathan Englander—What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories with novelist Colum McCann
Granta Release Party
Bernice L. McFadden: Gathering of Waters
Bernice L. McFadden: Gathering of Waters
NYU Steinhardt/Blue Note Jazz Series: Al Kooper in Conversation with Dave Schroeder
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February 10th in New York
ROBERT KANIGEL – ON AN IRISH ISLAND
Author's Talk with Louis Hyman
11
February 11th in New York
Reading: Kevin Rashid Johnson’s “Defying the Tomb” Featuring John “Mac” Gaskins
Reinventing the Past
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February 12th in New York
Writing on the Margins: Literature between Cultures
Frühschoppen Literary Brunch
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February 13th in New York
Susan Cain—Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking with George Prochnik, author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
Reading: Jose Maria Sison’s “Selected Writings” With BAYAN-USA
The EVEN CLEVELAND BOOK CLUB discusses Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
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February 14th in New York
The Moth StorySLAM. Theme: Love Hurts
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February 15th in New York
Brandon Downing & Aaron Kunin
FENCE Winter Issue reading
86th and Lex Reading Group
A conversation on Black Cool with Rebecca Walker, Margo Jefferson, and Miles Marshall Lewis
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February 16th in New York
Wayne Koestenbaum THE ANATOMY OF HARPO MARX
Stewart O'Nan in conversation with Edward Champion
BOOKFORUM presents: WASTED YOUTH
Milton Glaser
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February 17th in New York
Charlotte Silver—Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood
Edmund White JACK HOLMES AND HIS FRIEND
Global Economy: Crisis Without End
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February 20th in New York
The St. Mark's Bookshop Reading Series: Megan Boyle, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Spencer Madsen, Marie Calloway, Tao Lin
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February 21st in New York
Edmund White - JACK HOLMES AND HIS FRIEND
ADAM WILSON – FLATSCREEN
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February 22nd in New York
On Biography: Stacy Schiff in conversation with Rachel Syme
Selected Shorts: An Evening With One Story Magazine
Deborah Eisenberg & Wallace Shawn read from An Ermine in Czernopol (NYC)
Women Without Men
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February 23rd in New York
Patrick McGrath, Leigh Stein & Sarah Schulman Celebrate 12th Street Online Magazine
Toby Lester in conversation with Robert Krulwich of RadioLab
24
February 24th in New York
Friday Night Book Group
25
February 25th in New York
Tom McCarthy's MEN IN SPACE
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February 26th in New York
An Evening with Melville House Authors: Lars Iyer et.al
Jean Strouse and Colm Toíbín on Alice James
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February 27th in New York
“Our America”: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Ilan Stavans
Eleanor Henderson in conversation with Taylor Antrim
Lizzie Hutton—She'd Waited Millenia
American Creative Writers on Class
Freedom to Occupy? Reclaiming Space and Reinventing Protest
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February 28th in New York
Ask Me About...Madame Bovary
Richard Mason, History of a Pleasure SeekerRichard Mason, History of a Pleasure Seeker
SARAH MANGUSO – THE GUARDIANS
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February 29th in New York
Behind the Curtain: A Magazine Roundtable
The Role of the Critic
Panel discussion Daniel Banks, reg e. gaines, Eboni Hogan, and others to be announced, on the book: Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater
Michelle Haimoff - These Days Are Ours
Turnstyle Reading Series: Ben Lerner and Michelle Valladares
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March 1st in New York
Ellen Ullman In Conversation with Maud Newton
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March 4th in New York
DISCUSSION
5
March 5th in New York
Coffee-Colored People (By the Score)
Coffee-Colored People (By The Score) with Allan deSouza
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March 6th in New York
Kathryn Harrison, Enchantments
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March 7th in New York
Nathan Englander — What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories
National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists’ Reading Wednesday, March 7th 6 pm
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March 9th in New York
Patrick Dewitt
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March 10th in New York
The Dickens Fellowship

New York

change city

Feb 5, 2012
7:00pm-9:00pm
Carter Sickels & Stephen Stark
Carter Sickels reads from his novel: The Evening Hour - “[The Evening Hour] is grounded in rich storytelling.” – Publishers Weekly “First-time novelist Sickels paints Cole’s experience with an unflinching hand.” – Library Journal “Intensely lyrical… Sickels has great insight …

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Carter Sickels reads from his novel: The Evening Hour

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“[The Evening Hour] is grounded in rich storytelling.” – Publishers Weekly

“First-time novelist Sickels paints Cole’s experience with an unflinching hand.” – Library Journal

“Intensely lyrical… Sickels has great insight into the emotional life of West Virginians, and he refreshingly presents them as fully realized characters rather than as clichés or stereotypes.” – Kirkus

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Stephen Stark reads from his novel: The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door

Brilliant, Sexy, Edgy Page-Turner With a Twist

It’s been nearly 20 years since Stephen Stark earned critical acclaim from Bret Lott, Andrea Barrett, and Larry Brown for his New York Times Book Review Notable Book Second Son. Now he’s back with a literary thrill ride, The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door, from Shelf Media Group.

The genre-bending The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door is a wholly original and unputdownable book that’s like no novel you’ve read.

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Suzanne Dottino/fiction curator, suzanne@kgbbar.com

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KGB Bar
more at kgb bar
85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
212-505-3360
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Monday, February 6
7:00pm
DAN CHAON – STAY AWAKE
Stay Awake, by Dan Chaon Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist…

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Stay Awake, by Dan Chaon

Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.

A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house.

Dan Chaon’s stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm—in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

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BookCourt
more at bookcourt
163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-875-3677
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Tuesday, February 7
6:00pm
FREE Mischief & Mayhem Reading Series w/ Kaylie Jones , Thaddeus Rutkowski and host Katie Halper
This is a general admission event in The Gallery at LPR. Mischief and Mayhem is a publishing collective, not a publishing company. Our goals are to nurture and promote distinctive authorial voices, especially those that fall outside of commercially acceptable notions of literature, and to do everything…

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This is a general admission event in The Gallery at LPR.

Mischief and Mayhem is a publishing collective, not a publishing company. Our goals are to nurture and promote distinctive authorial voices, especially those that fall outside of commercially acceptable notions of literature, and to do everything we can to bring those writers to the largest possible audience.

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Le Poisson Rouge
more at le poisson rouge
158 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012
212-505-3474
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Tuesday, February 7
6:30pm
Poetry Reading with Martha Rhodes, James Tolan, Stephanie Brown, and Marcia Pelletiere
Martha Rhodes is a poet, editor, teacher, and the author of four collections of poetry:At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance, Mother Quiet, and The Beds. James Tolan is author of the chapbooks Red Walls and Whiskey and the Rake of Mourning. >> Learn More Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections…

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Martha Rhodes is a poet, editor, teacher, and the author of four collections of poetry:At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance, Mother Quiet, and The Beds.

James Tolan is author of the chapbooks Red Walls and Whiskey and the Rake of Mourning. >> Learn More

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket.

Marcia Pelletiere is a poet, musician, and multimedia artist. Miracle with Roasted Hens is her first poetry collection.

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NYU Book Center
more at nyu book center
18 Washington Place, Nyu, New York, NY 10003
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Tuesday, February 7
7:00pm
Clay Shirky and Eric Klinenberg in conversation
We're more wired together digitally today than at any time in our history, in a great throbbing social-media hive. At the same time, a far greater percentage of us are living alone than at any time in our history. What's the connection between these two phenomena? Where do the trend lines take us …

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We're more wired together digitally today than at any time in our history, in a great throbbing social-media hive. At the same time, a far greater percentage of us are living alone than at any time in our history. What's the connection between these two phenomena? Where do the trend lines take us from here? The Penguin Press presents celebrated public intellectual Eric Klinenberg, author of the forthcoming Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Along, and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, coming together to discuss what it all means and where we're all heading.

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192 Books
more at 192 books
192 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
212-255-4022
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Tuesday, February 7
7:00pm
Téa Obreht reads from THE TIGER'S WIFE
St. Mark's Bookshop & The Huffington Post present: In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the …

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St. Mark's Bookshop & The Huffington Post present:

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation's list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in New York.

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St. Mark's Bookshop
more at st. mark's bookshop
31 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10003
212-260-7853
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Wednesday, February 8
7:00pm
Adam Gopnik's Winter
The author delivers highlights from his renowned 2011 CBC Massey Lectures. A stunning, beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik’s trademark gentle wit, the five Winter lectures offer an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination. Gopnik will …

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The author delivers highlights from his renowned 2011 CBC Massey Lectures.

A stunning, beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik’s trademark gentle wit, the five Winter lectures offer an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination.

Gopnik will deliver highlights from the lectures (available in book form as Winter) and engage in a Q & A with the audience. The program will be followed by a book signing with the author.

Tickets: $15

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92Y Tribeca
more at 92y tribeca
200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013
212-601-1000
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Wednesday, February 8
7:00pm
Josh Bazell, Wild Thing, with Malcolm Jones
Former mob hit man Dr. Brnwa is on the case, and on the run, in this electrifying sequel to Josh Bazell’s bestselling novel, Beat the Reaper. It's difficult to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed—so difficult, that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter …

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Former mob hit man Dr. Brnwa is on the case, and on the run, in this electrifying sequel to Josh Bazell’s bestselling novel, Beat the Reaper. It's difficult to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed—so difficult, that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a job accompanying a sexy but self-destructive paleontologist on the world's worst field assignment, Brown has no choice but to say yes. Facing new and old monsters alike, Dr. Brnwa's story continues in this darkly funny and lightning-paced follow up to Bazell's thrilling debut.

Josh Bazell holds a B.A. in writing from Brown University and an M.D. from Columbia. He lives in New York City.

Malcolm Jones writes about books, music, and photography for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is the author of a memoir, Little Boy Blues, and collaborated with the songwriter and composer Van Dyke Parks and the illustrator Barry Moser on Jump!, a retelling of Brer Rabbit stories.

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Strand Book Store
more at strand book store
828 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-4805
212-473-1452
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Wednesday, February 8
7:00pm
Selected Shorts: Roz Chast Presents What I Hate from A To Z
Welcome to the world of the wacky and endearing New Yorker cartoonist and stories about her most favorite least favorite things. Chast shows appealingly gloomy cartoons from her new book, What I Hate from A to Z, and introduces stories read by Jerry Stiller (Seinfeld), Anne Meara (Sex and the City),…

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Welcome to the world of the wacky and endearing New Yorker cartoonist and stories about her most favorite least favorite things. Chast shows appealingly gloomy cartoons from her new book, What I Hate from A to Z, and introduces stories read by Jerry Stiller (Seinfeld), Anne Meara (Sex and the City), and Stephen Lang (Avatar) that feature her favorite combo — humor and dread — by gothic humorist Shirley Jackson, dark comic genius Bruce Jay Friedman.

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Symphony Space
more at symphony space
2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York, NY 10025
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Wednesday, February 8
8:00pm
Susan Howe & Roberto Tejada
Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and literary criticism, Susan Howe’s recently published a collection of poems, Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions, 2007). That This, a collection of work published by New Directions (that includes “Frolic Architecture”) in 2010 recently won …

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Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and literary criticism, Susan Howe’s recently published a collection of poems, Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions, 2007). That This, a collection of work published by New Directions (that includes “Frolic Architecture”) in 2010 recently won the Bollingen Prize. Roberto Tejada is the author of Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Full Foreground (University of Arizona, 2012).

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The Poetry Project
more at the poetry project
131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY 10003
212-674-0910
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Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards
by Al Kooper
$19.99 List Price
For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble
Thursday, February 9
4:00pm
NYU Steinhardt/Blue Note Jazz Series: Al Kooper in Conversation with Dave Schroeder
Songwriter, producer, musician and founding member of Blood, Sweat and Tears, Al Kooper joins our series host Dave Schroeder for an in-depth interview. Afterward Mr. Kooper will sign his CDs and book.
Barnes & Noble
more at barnes & noble
150 East 86th Street, New York, NY 10028-2105
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Thursday, February 9
7:00pm
Granta Release Party
Be it a wrong turn, a bad relationship, a debilitating illness or a war, every action creates a reaction, every move is followed by another move. How do we get out of what we've gotten ourselves into? Granta 118 zooms in close on the phenomenon of the exit strategy. With readings by featured writers…

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Be it a wrong turn, a bad relationship, a debilitating illness or a war, every action creates a reaction, every move is followed by another move. How do we get out of what we've gotten ourselves into? Granta 118 zooms in close on the phenomenon of the exit strategy.

With readings by featured writers Judy Chicurel, Vanessa Manko, and Susan Minot as well as a conversation with Granta assistant editor Patrick Ryan, 192 Books hosts the launch of Granta 118: Exit Strategies.

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192 Books
more at 192 books
192 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
212-255-4022
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Thursday, February 9
7:00pm
Bernice L. McFadden: Gathering of Waters
“In her new novel, Gathering of Waters, Bernice McFadden brings her own special vision to the unfortunate story of Emmett Till and his murder in Money, Mississippi. This moving and magical novel, which traces the generations leading up to and away from that horrible night in 1955, drew me in …

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“In her new novel, Gathering of Waters, Bernice McFadden brings her own special vision to the unfortunate story of Emmett Till and his murder in Money, Mississippi. This moving and magical novel, which traces the generations leading up to and away from that horrible night in 1955, drew me in immediately and swept me along through its richly imagined world. I couldn’t stop reading, caught up as I was in that enticing place between truth and fantasy, the here-and-now and the what-was, the living and the dead, the ugliness and the beauty, the hatred and the love. What a rich chorus of voices Bernice McFadden has fashioned from this place called Money.”

—Lee Martin, author of Break the Skin and The Bright Forever

Told from the point of view of the town of Money, Mississippi, Bernice L. McFadden's new novel Gathering of Waters retells the tragic story of Emmett Till. At this event, the author will read and talk about her new novel.

Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels including the classic Sugar and Glorious, which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, selected as the debut title for the One Book, One Harlem program, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is a two-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of two fiction honor awards from the BCALA. Her sophomore novel, The Warmest December, was praised by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison as “searing and expertly imagined.” McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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The Center for Fiction
more at the center for fiction
17 East 47th Street, New York, NY, New York, NY 10017
212-755-6710
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Thursday, February 9
7:00pm
Bernice L. McFadden: Gathering of Waters
“In her new novel, Gathering of Waters, Bernice McFadden brings her own special vision to the unfortunate story of Emmett Till and his murder in Money, Mississippi. This moving and magical novel, which traces the generations leading up to and away from that horrible night in 1955, drew me in …

MORE ABOUT THIS EVENT
“In her new novel, Gathering of Waters, Bernice McFadden brings her own special vision to the unfortunate story of Emmett Till and his murder in Money, Mississippi. This moving and magical novel, which traces the generations leading up to and away from that horrible night in 1955, drew me in immediately and swept me along through its richly imagined world. I couldn’t stop reading, caught up as I was in that enticing place between truth and fantasy, the here-and-now and the what-was, the living and the dead, the ugliness and the beauty, the hatred and the love. What a rich chorus of voices Bernice McFadden has fashioned from this place called Money.”

—Lee Martin, author of Break the Skin and The Bright Forever

Told from the point of view of the town of Money, Mississippi, Benice L. McFadden's new novel Gathering of Waters retells the tragic story of Emmett Till. At this event, the author will read and talk about her new novel.

Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels including the classic Sugar and Glorious, which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, selected as the debut title for the One Book, One Harlem program, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is a two-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of two fiction honor awards from the BCALA. Her sophomore novel, The Warmest December, was praised by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison as “searing and expertly imagined.” McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction
more at this location
17 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017
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Thursday, February 9
7:30pm
Nathan Englander—What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories with novelist Colum McCann
Critically-acclaimed Brooklyn based author Nathan Englander will discuss his story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank with friend and fellow novelist Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin. These eight new stories display a gifted …

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Critically-acclaimed Brooklyn based author Nathan Englander will discuss his story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank with friend and fellow novelist Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin. These eight new stories display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, written with a command of language and imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction. The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.

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Greenlight Bookstore
more at greenlight bookstore
686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
718-246-0200
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Thursday, February 9
8:00pm
Pico Iyer and Rebecca Solnit
Pico Iyer’s new book—on hauntedness, fathers and Graham Greene—is The Man Within My Head. He is “a writer like no other,” wrote Jan Morris. “His particular gifts of thoughtfulness, perception and descriptive power, allied by now with profound experience, reach new levels of grace.” …

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Pico Iyer’s new book—on hauntedness, fathers and Graham Greene—is The Man Within My Head.

He is “a writer like no other,” wrote Jan Morris. “His particular gifts of thoughtfulness, perception and descriptive power, allied by now with profound experience, reach new levels of grace.”

Rebecca Solnit’s books include River of Shadows, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Her “extraordinary mind seizes hold of an unexpected topic and renders it with such confidence, subtlety and grace that one finds it hard to remember what things looked like before,” wrote The New York Times.

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92nd Street Y
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1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128
212-415-5500
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Friday, February 10
6:30pm
Author's Talk with Louis Hyman
In BORROW: The American Way of Debt—How Personal Credit Created the American Middle Class and Almost Bankrupted the Nation, economist Louis Hyman delivers an accessible and informed history on the rise of personal borrowing in the United States, demonstrating that today’s problems are not as new…

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In BORROW: The American Way of Debt—How Personal Credit Created the American Middle Class and Almost Bankrupted the Nation, economist Louis Hyman delivers an accessible and informed history on the rise of personal borrowing in the United States, demonstrating that today’s problems are not as new as we think. Hyman describes the evolution of personal loans, finding that our borrowing patterns are similar to our grandparents, but higher basic expenses, stagnating wages and increased economic competition from abroad have made it harder to repay our debts.

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Rose Auditorium @ Cooper Union
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41 Cooper Square (3rd Avenue. at 7th Street.), New York, NY 10003
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Friday, February 10
7:00pm
ROBERT KANIGEL – ON AN IRISH ISLAND
On an Irish Island, by Robert Kanigel On an Irish Island is a love letter to a vanished way of life, in which Robert Kanigel, the highly praised author of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, tells the story of the Great Blasket, a wildly beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland, …

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On an Irish Island, by Robert Kanigel

On an Irish Island is a love letter to a vanished way of life, in which Robert Kanigel, the highly praised author of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, tells the story of the Great Blasket, a wildly beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland, renowned during the early twentieth century for the rich communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke. With the Irish language vanishing all through the rest of Ireland, the Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars and writers drawn there during the Gaelic renaissance—and the scene for a memorable clash of cultures between modern life and an older, sometimes sweeter world slipping away.

Kanigel introduces us to the playwright John Millington Synge, some of whose characters in The Playboy of the Western World, were inspired by his time on the island; Carl Marstrander, a Norwegian linguist who gave his place on Norway’s Olympic team for a summer on the Blasket; Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a Celtic studies scholar fresh from the Sorbonne; and central to the story, George Thomson, a British classicist whose involvement with the island and its people we follow from his first visit as a twenty-year-old to the end of his life.

On the island, they met a colorful coterie of men and women with whom they formed lifelong and life-changing friendships. There’s Tomás O’Crohan, a stoic fisherman, one of the few islanders who could read and write Irish, who tutored many of the incomers in the language’s formidable intricacies and became the Blasket’s first published writer; Maurice O’Sullivan, a good-natured prankster and teller of stories, whose memoir, Twenty Years A-Growing, became an Irish classic; and Peig Sayers, whose endless repertoire of earthy tales left listeners spellbound.

As we get to know these men and women, we become immersed in the vivid culture of the islanders, their hard lives of fishing and farming matched by their love of singing, dancing, and talk. Yet, sadly, we watch them leave the island, the village becoming uninhabited by 1953. The story of the Great Blasket is one of struggle—between the call of modernity and the tug of Ireland’s ancient ways, between the promise of emigration and the peculiar warmth of island life amid its physical isolation. But ultimately it is a tribute to the strength and beauty of a people who, tucked away from the rest of civilization, kept alive a nation’s past, and to the newcomers and islanders alike who brought the island’s remarkable story to the larger world.

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BookCourt
more at bookcourt
163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-875-3677
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Saturday, February 11
6:00pm
Reinventing the Past
Chris Adrian, Catalin Dorian Florescu, Inka Parei and Linda Stift in conversation with Daniel Kehlmann Literature is often a delving into the past, made all but involuntary because the past has returned to haunt the present. Whether the history in question is familial, political or ancient, traces…

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Chris Adrian, Catalin Dorian Florescu, Inka Parei and Linda Stift in conversation with Daniel Kehlmann

Literature is often a delving into the past, made all but involuntary because the past has returned to haunt the present. Whether the history in question is familial, political or ancient, traces of old trauma can cast the present in a new light. This panel explores the different ways in which the past can be put to work in the name of storytelling.

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powerHouse Arena
more at powerhouse arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-666-3049
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Saturday, February 11
7:00pm
Reading: Kevin Rashid Johnson’s “Defying the Tomb” Featuring John “Mac” Gaskins
Soledad Brother-esque, “Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson” is a collection of letters between revolutionary New Afrikan prisoner Johnson and a fellow prisoner, Outlaw, as well as essays written by Johnson discussing Marxism and Maoism, the Five-Percenters,…

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Soledad Brother-esque, “Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson” is a collection of letters between revolutionary New Afrikan prisoner Johnson and a fellow prisoner, Outlaw, as well as essays written by Johnson discussing Marxism and Maoism, the Five-Percenters, Dialectical Materialism, Dead Prez, Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism, Class Struggle, and more. Johnson’s book will be read by John “Mac” Gaskins was in a neighboring cell with Johnson, and was recently released from the tombs of Wallins Ridge State Prison in southwest Virginia. Original artwork produced by Johnson will be displayed.

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Bluestockings Books
more at bluestockings books
172 Allen Street, New York, NY 10002
212-777-6028
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New York

Feb 5, 2012

7:00pm-9:00pm

Monday, February 6

7:00pm

Tuesday, February 7

6:00pm

FREE Mischief & Mayhem Reading Series w/ Kaylie Jones , Thaddeus Rutkowski and host Katie Halper

Tuesday, February 7

6:30pm

Poetry Reading with Martha Rhodes, James Tolan, Stephanie Brown, and Marcia Pelletiere

Tuesday, February 7

7:00pm

Tuesday, February 7

7:00pm

Wednesday, February 8

7:00pm

Wednesday, February 8

7:00pm

Josh Bazell, Wild Thing, with Malcolm Jones

Wednesday, February 8

7:00pm

Wednesday, February 8

8:00pm

Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

$19.99 List Price

For more info visit:Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble

Thursday, February 9

4:00pm

Thursday, February 9

7:00pm

Thursday, February 9

7:00pm

Bernice L. McFadden: Gathering of Waters

For more info visit:
Amazon • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble