previous events

• 

  These Dreams of You

  by Steve Erickson

  $16.00 List Price

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

  Tuesday, March 27

  7:00pm

  Steve Erickson — These Dreams of You

  One November night in a canyon outside L.A., Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate-radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country's first black president. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession …

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  One November night in a canyon outside L.A., Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate-radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country's first black president. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife and their son set out to solve the enigma of a little girl whose body is a radio, broadcasting a future rhythm & blues that circles the sphere of time. Scattered across two continents, the family meets a mysterious stranger with a secret who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past, from '60s London to '70s Berlin, from the ground zero of civilization to a New World mid-air in its leap of imagination.
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Steve Erickson is the author of nine novels and two books about American politics and popular culture that have been published in ten languages. His work has appeared in publications such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine. He currently is the film critic for Los Angeles Magazine and the editor of the literary journal Black Clock, which is published by the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature.

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  Monday, March 26

  7:00pm

  Joshua Knelman — Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art

  Hot Art traces Joshua Knelman’s five-year immersion in the shadowy world of art theft, where he uncovers a devious game that takes him from Egypt to Los Angeles, New York to London, and back again, through a web of deceit, violence, and corruption. With a cool, knowing eye, Knelman delves into the…

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  Hot Art traces Joshua Knelman’s five-year immersion in the shadowy world of art theft, where he uncovers a devious game that takes him from Egypt to Los Angeles, New York to London, and back again, through a web of deceit, violence, and corruption. With a cool, knowing eye, Knelman delves into the lives of professionals such as Paul, a brilliant working-class kid who charmed his way into a thriving career organizing art thefts, and LAPD detective Donald Hrycyk, one of the few special investigators worldwide who struggle to keep pace with the evolving industry of stolen art. As he becomes more and more immersed in this world, Knelman learns that art theft has evolved into one of the largest black markets in the world, which even Interpol and the FBI admit they cannot contain. Sweeping and fast-paced, Hot Art takes readers into a criminal underworld like no other.
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Joshua Knelman is an award-winning journalist and editor. He was a founding editorial member of The Walrus magazine, and his writing has appeared in Toronto Life, Saturday Night, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail. Knelman’s feature article “Artful Crimes,” published in The Walrus, won a gold National Magazine Award. Knelman is also the coeditor of Four Letter Word: New Love Letters, which has sold in ten countries.

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  Thursday, March 22

  7:00pm

  Joshua Foer — Moonwalking With Einstein

  MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes.” Foer (the youngest of the three Foer brothers) draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's …

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  MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes.” Foer (the youngest of the three Foer brothers) draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author's own mind, Foer explores the fascinating ways in which our brains are wired to remember, or forget, the vast array of information and experiences that make up life. An instant bestseller that is poised to become a classic, MOONWALKING is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Joshua Foer was born in Washington, DC in 1982 and lives in New Haven, CT with his wife Dinah. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, Esquire, Slate, Outside, the New York Times, and other publications. He is the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura, an online guide to the world’s wonders and curiosities. He is also the co-founder of the design competition, Sukkah City. Moonwalking with Einstein is his first book.

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  Thursday, March 15

  7:00am

  Megan Mayhew Bergman — Birds of a Lesser Paradise

  Exploring the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world, Megan Mayhew Bergman’s powerful and heartwarming collection captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collide with good sense, or when our…

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  Exploring the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world, Megan Mayhew Bergman’s powerful and heartwarming collection captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collide with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place can’t be denied.
  
  In “Housewifely Arts,” a single mother and her son drive hours to track down an African gray parrot that can mimic her deceased mother’s voice. A population-control activist faces the ultimate conflict between her loyalty to the environment and her maternal desire in “Yesterday’s Whales.” And in the title story, a lonely naturalist allows an attractive stranger to lead her and her aging father on a hunt for an elusive woodpecker.
  
  As intelligent as they are moving, the stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are alive with emotion, wit, and insight into the impressive power that nature has over all of us. This extraordinary collection introduces a young writer of remarkable talent.
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Megan Mayhew Bergman grew up in North Carolina and attended Wake Forest University. She has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, and Narrative. She lives in Shaftsbury, Vermont, with her veterinarian husband, two daughters, and several animals.

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  Wednesday, March 14

  3:45pm

  Kristen Johnston — Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster

  Kristen Johnston reading from
  
  Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster

• 

  Friday, March 9

  7:00pm

  Patrick Dewitt

  Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die, and hired guns Eli and Charlie Sisters will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's goldmining claim …

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  Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die, and hired guns Eli and Charlie Sisters will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's goldmining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living—and whom he does it for.

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  Wednesday, March 7

  7:00pm

  Nathan Englander — What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

  These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction. …

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  These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the 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. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.
  
  
  Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Nathan Englander is a Jewish-American author born in Long Island, NY in 1970. He wrote the short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1999. The volume won widespread critical acclaim, earning Englander the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kauffman Prize, and established him as an important writer of fiction.

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  Thursday, March 1

  7:00pm

  Ellen Ullman In Conversation with Maud Newton

  The award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter. San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets.…

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  The award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter. San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient’s recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward. The patient’s questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— “I have no idea what it means to say ‘I’m a Jew’”—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he’s gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program. With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer.
  
  Performer Bio(s):
  
  
  
  Ellen Ullman is the author of a novel, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her experience as a rare female programmer in the early years of the personal computer era. Picador will reissue both books in March 2012, with new introductions by Mary Gaitskill and Jaron Lanier, respectively. Ullman lives in San Francisco.
  
  
  
  Maud Newton is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Narrative, the New York Times Book Review, the Paris Review Daily, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, the Awl, the Boston Globe, Barnes & Noble Review, and many other publications. She started blogging in May 2002.

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  Wednesday, February 29

  7:00pm

  Michelle Haimoff - These Days Are Ours

  Six months after September 11th, New Yorkers are instructed to get on with their lives despite the terror advisories, streets filled with 9/11 merchandise, and mail that may contain Anthrax. But for Hailey, still jobless after college and living in her family's Fifth Avenue penthouse, getting on …

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  Six months after September 11th, New Yorkers are instructed to get on with their lives despite the terror advisories, streets filled with 9/11 merchandise, and mail that may contain Anthrax.
  
  But for Hailey, still jobless after college and living in her family's Fifth Avenue penthouse, getting on with life means getting closer to Michael Brenner, the Princeton graduate and future human rights lawyer who seems to have it all. The city feels as if it's on the brink of apocalypse, and seeking out any sort of future seems pointless. So Hailey and her friends - Katie, already working at Morgan Stanley; Randy, a trust-fund kid who wears sweaters with holes in them; and Jess, confident of her future success regardless of her present inertia - stay out all night, dream up get rich quick schemes and aspire to greatness while questioning how much that greatness really matters.
  
  But when Hailey meets Adrian, a transplanted Pennsylvanian and recent Brown graduate who doesn't belong to Hailey's privileged mileu, she begins to realize that her view of the world might not be the only one there is, and soon she is questioning everything she thought she knew.
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Michelle Haimoff is a writer and blogger whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, PsychologyToday.com and The Huffington Post. She is a founding member of NOW's Young Feminist Task Force and blogs about feminist issues at genfem.com

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• 

  The Guardians:

  An Elegy

  by Sarah Manguso

  $20.00 List Price

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

  Tuesday, February 28

  7:00pm

  SARAH MANGUSO – THE GUARDIANS

  The Guardians, Sarah Manguso The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, “An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street.” Sarah Manguso writes:…

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  The Guardians, Sarah Manguso
  
  The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, “An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street.” Sarah Manguso writes: “The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.”
  
  The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso’s friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso’s fellowship year in Rome, Harris’s death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso’s marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris’s presence in and absence from Manguso’s life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.

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  Monday, February 27

  7:00pm

  Lizzie Hutton—She'd Waited Millenia

  On the Docket: Reading Audience Q&A Book Signing Author Bio: Raised in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Lizzie Hutton is a poet now also pursuing her PhD at the University of Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review and Interim, among other journals; she is a …

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  On the Docket:
  
  Reading
  
  Audience Q&A
  
  Book Signing
  
  Author Bio:
  
  Raised in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Lizzie Hutton is a poet now also pursuing her PhD at the University of Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review and Interim, among other journals; she is a Pushcart nominee as well as the recipient of the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, a Hopwood Award, and a Meader Family Award. She’d Waited Millennia is her first book.

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  Tuesday, February 21

  7:00pm

  ADAM WILSON – FLATSCREEN

  Flatscreen, by Adam Wilson Flatscreen tells the story of Eli Schwartz as he endures the loss of his home, the indifference of his parents, the success of his older brother, and the cruel and frequent dismissal of the opposite sex. He is a loser par excellence—pasty, soft, and high—who struggles…

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  Flatscreen, by Adam Wilson
  
  Flatscreen tells the story of Eli Schwartz as he endures the loss of his home, the indifference of his parents, the success of his older brother, and the cruel and frequent dismissal of the opposite sex. He is a loser par excellence—pasty, soft, and high—who struggles to become a new person in a world where nothing is new.
  
  Into this scene of apathy rolls Seymour J. Kahn. Former star of the small screen and current paraplegic sex addict, Kahn has purchased Eli’s old family home. The two begin a dangerous friendship, one that distracts from their circumstances but speeds their descent into utter debasement and, inevitably, YouTube stardom.
  
  By story’s end, through unlikely acts of courage and kindness, roles will be reversed, reputations resurrected, and charges (hopefully) dropped. Adam Wilson writes mischief that moves the heart, and Flatscreen marks the wondrous debut of a truth-telling comic voice.

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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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  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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  Tuesday, January 31

  7:00am

  MARK STRAND – ALMOST INVISIBLE

  From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within…

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  From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.

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  Tuesday, January 24

  7:00pm

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 24TH @ 7PM: RJ ELLROY & DAVE ZELTSERMAN

  A Quiet Vendetta: A Thriller By R.J. Ellory: By award-winning thriller heavyweight R.J. Ellory, this ambitious crime novel takes his skill for suspense to a spellbinding level. When Catherine Ducane disappears in New Orleans, the cops react fast—she is the governor's daughter, after all. But the…

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  A Quiet Vendetta: A Thriller By R.J. Ellory:
  
  By award-winning thriller heavyweight R.J. Ellory, this ambitious crime novel takes his skill for suspense to a spellbinding level. When Catherine Ducane disappears in New Orleans, the cops react fast—she is the governor's daughter, after all. But the case quickly grows strange.
  
  Her bodyguard turns up horribly mutilated, and when the kidnapper calls, he doesn't want money: he wants time alone with a minor government functionary. By the time the pieces fall into place, it's already too late . . .
  
  A Quiet Vendetta is both the epic story of one mobster's life— ranging from Cuba to Chicago— and equally a powerful thriller of rage, love, and loss. With tension to match the best of Cussler, Patterson, and his own best-selling work, A Quiet Vendetta confirms R.J. Ellory's place at the forefront of the genre.
  
  Killer's Essence, A: A Novel By Dave Zeltserman:
  
  Stan Green is a New York City Homicide Detective who has seen better days. As his family life threatens to disintegrate and his work partner disappears, he is assigned to the most shocking case of his career-a strange and remarkably violent murder. Stan must look into the crime alone. He finds just one witness, a neurologically disabled recluse who sees through the souls of others as demonic hallucinations. As more murders occur, and he drifts further from his family and friends, Stan's suspicion and rage escalate. Soon he realizes that the deaths fall into the pattern of a serial killer—and starts to believe that his witness is not at all insane, but terrifyingly perceptive . . .

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