Born on the south coast of England and now living in New York City, Jane Ormerod is the author of "Recreational Vehicles on Fire" (Three Rooms Press, 2009), "11 Films" (Modern Metrics, 2008,) and the spoken word CD "Nashville Invades Manhattan." She performs extensively throughout the United States…
Born on the south coast of England and now living in New York City, Jane Ormerod is the author of "Recreational Vehicles on Fire" (Three Rooms Press, 2009), "11 Films" (Modern Metrics, 2008,) and the spoken word CD "Nashville Invades Manhattan." She performs extensively throughout the United States and Europe, and is a founding editor at Uphook Press. "
Join us on Friday, February 22nd at 7pm for a reading and discussion of Mind Over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies with the author, Diana Senechal.
Too often our use of language has become lazy, frivolous, and even counterproductive. We rely on clich's and bromides to communicate in such a way that our intentions are lost or misinterpreted. In a culture of "takeaways" and buzzwords, it requires study and cunning to keep language alive. In Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies, Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targeting a variety of terms, the author contends that a "good fit" may not always be desirable; delivers a takedown of the adjective "toxic"; and argues that "social justice" must take its place among other justices. This book also includes a critique of our modern emphasis on quick answers and immediate utility. By scrutinizing words and phrases that serve contemporary fads and follies, this book stands up against the excesses of language and offers engaging alternatives. Drawing on literature, philosophy, social sciences, music, and technology, Senechal offers a rich framework to make fresh connections between topics. Combining sharp criticism, lyricism, and wit, Mind over Memes argues for judicious and imaginative speech.
Read our Q&A with the author here: https://www.bookculture.com/blog/2018/10/29/qa-author-diana-senechal
Diana Senechal is an educator and author whose writing has appeared in The New Republic, Education Week, American Educator, and The New York Times. Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize and the author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012), which was a Choice Outstanding Academic title. She now teaches at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary.. For more about her work, please visit her website.
Join us on Friday, February 22nd at 7pm for a reading and discussion of Mind Over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies with the author, Diana Senechal.
Too often our use of language has become lazy, frivolous, and even counterproductive. We rely on clich's and bromides to communicate in such a way that our intentions are lost or misinterpreted. In a culture of "takeaways" and buzzwords, it requires study and cunning to keep language alive. In Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies, Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targeting a variety of terms, the author contends that a "good fit" may not always be desirable; delivers a takedown of the adjective "toxic"; and argues that "social justice" must take its place among other justices. This book also includes a critique of our modern emphasis on quick answers and immediate utility. By scrutinizing words and phrases that serve contemporary fads and follies, this book stands up against the excesses of language and offers engaging alternatives. Drawing on literature, philosophy, social sciences, music, and technology, Senechal offers a rich framework to make fresh connections between topics. Combining sharp criticism, lyricism, and wit, Mind over Memes argues for judicious and imaginative speech.
Read our Q&A with the author here: https://www.bookculture.com/blog/2018/10/29/qa-author-diana-senechal
Diana Senechal is an educator and author whose writing has appeared in The New Republic, Education Week, American Educator, and The New York Times. Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize and the author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012), which was a Choice Outstanding Academic title. She now teaches at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary.. For more about her work, please visit her website.
Monday February 25 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM Mother Winter is the story of Sophia’s emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev grew up under the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad. An imbalance of …
Monday February 25 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Mother Winter is the story of Sophia’s emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev grew up under the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad. An imbalance of power and widespread anti-Semitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America and abandoning her estranged and alcoholic mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her.
Mother Winter depicts in urgent vignettes Sophia’s years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connection with the worlds she occupies. The result is a searing meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and the pursuit of wholeness after shattering loss. And ultimately, it is an aching observation of the human heart across time and culture.
Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, she was the nonfiction editor for The Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurels scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s fellowship awards. She has a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from The School of Visual Arts, where she worked with survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in Vela Magazine, Bellows American Review, Electric Lit, The Seattle Review of Books, Ravishly and The Literary Review, among others; all with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ragdale, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University, MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She grew up on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn.
Join us at Book Culture on 112th Street on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm as we welcome Elizabeth Emens to discuss her new book, Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Life More. Reading this book should be at the top of your To Do list. Life Admin will give you many hours of your life…
Join us at Book Culture on 112th Street on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm as we welcome Elizabeth Emens to discuss her new book, Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Life More.
Reading this book should be at the top of your To Do list. Life Admin will give you many hours of your life back.
Every day an unseen form of labor creeps into our lives—stealing precious moments of free time, placing a strain on our schedules and our relationships, and earning neither appreciation nor compensation in return. This labor is life admin: the kind of secretarial and managerial work necessary to run a life and a household.
Elizabeth Emens was a working mother with two young children, swamped like so many of us, when she realized that this invisible labor was consuming her. Desperate to survive and to help others along the way, she conducted interviews and focus groups to gather favorite tips and tricks, admin confessions, and the secrets of admin-happy households.
Life Admin tackles the problem of admin in all its forms, from everyday tasks like scheduling doctors appointments and paying bills, to life-cycle events like planning a wedding, a birth, a funeral. Emens explores how this labor is created, how it affects our lives, and how we might avoid, reduce, and redistribute admin whenever possible—as individuals and as a society.
Life Admin is the book that will teach us all how to do less of it, and to do it better.
Wednesday February 27 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, …
Wednesday February 27 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca.
Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.”
Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds.Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.
This event is free!
This highly anticipated yearly event is hosted by Three Rooms Press co-directors Kat Georges and Peter Carlaftes and features readings from various authors and prizes including a collection of poetry, cds, rare videos, and rare photos. Held since 2008, the event will feature performances of Bukowski poems and tales by a unique cast of talented fans including famed monologist Mike Daisey, NYTs bestselling author Reed Farrel Coleman, world-renowned poet George Wallace, playwright/novelist Richard Vetere (Champagne and Cocaine), playwright Michael Puzzo (Spirits of Exit Eleven), poet Puma Perl (Retrograde), and performance artist Diane O’Debra. Admission is $10. A limited open mic will be available for audience members wanted to share their personal favorite Bukowski poem (under 3 minutes).
Charles Bukowski was considered the champion of the outsiders, the lost, the lonely, and the outcasts of society. His work is still vividly relevant today. Overall, Bukowski wrote about the human condition, something that can be applied to any time period regardless of changes in technology, politics, or societal conflict.
Doors open at 6:30pm. (for best seating please arrive early). All attendees have a chance to win Bukowski books, CDs, DVDs, and other prizes!
Le Poisson Rouge is located at 158 Bleecker Street, just West of Thompson Street. For tickets or more information you can call (212) 505-FISH (3474) or visit (https://lpr.com).
For additional press details, including photos, interviews and press passes, please call Peter Carlaftes at 212-731-0574.
For more about our performers, visit our Facebook event page!
You go through life thinking there’s so much you need…. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend…
You go through life thinking there’s so much you need…. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.
An intimate whisper that packs an indelible punch, We Are Okay is Nina LaCour at her finest. This gorgeously crafted and achingly honest portrayal of grief will leave you urgent to reach across any distance to reconnect with the people you love.
Nina LaCour is the Michael L. Printz Award winning and bestselling author of We Are Okay, Hold Still, Everything Leads to You and The Disenchantments. She is also the co-author, with David Levithan, of You Know Me Well. A life-long lover of books and storytelling, she is on the faculty of Hamline University's MFAC program, runs The Slow Novel Lab, an online novel writing course, and hosts "Keeping a Notebook: a podcast on writing." She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and daughter. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @nina_lacour or at ninalacour.com
This event is free!