• 

  Dec 5, 2018

  6:30pm-7:30pm

  How Will the Census Matter to You?

  Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA on NPR, leads a discussion on what is at stake for the 2020 Census. Not only will it determine national, state, and local representation—as well as spending for education, health, and infrastructure—but lack of funding and a newly planned question about citizenship…

  Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA on NPR, leads a discussion on what is at stake for the 2020 Census. Not only will it determine national, state, and local representation—as well as spending for education, health, and infrastructure—but lack of funding and a newly planned question about citizenship may threaten its accuracy. Featuring: Steven Choi of the New York Immigration Coalition and New York Counts 2020; Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; John Mollenkopf, GC distinguished professor of political science and sociology; and Esmeralda Simmons of the Center for Law and Social Justice.
  
  
  Presented with the CUNY Mapping Project at the Center for Urban Research.
  
  Free; reservations required.

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  The Graduate Center Public Programs (CUNY)

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  365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
  212-817-7182

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  Wednesday, December 5

  7:00pm

  The Life and Work of John Berger: Joshua Sperling with Susie Linfield and Siddhartha Deb (PRINCE STREET

  John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist,…

  John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. “Far from dragging politics into art,” he wrote in 1953, “art has dragged me into politics.” He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017. Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.
  
  Joshua Sperling was born in New York City and grew up in California. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Guernica, Film Quarterly, Jump Cut and Bullett Magazine, among other publications. He received a PhD in Comparative Literature, Film and Media from Yale University and currently teaches at Oberlin College.
  
  Susie Linfield is director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University. Her book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Guernica, Boston Review, and many other outlets.
  
  Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, a narrative nonfiction book that was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK, winner of the PEN Open award in the United States, and published without its first chapter in India because of a court order. A columnist for the “Bookends” section of The New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor the The New Republic, Deb’s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Nation, Dissent, n+1, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Baffler.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Wednesday, December 5

  7:00pm

  Literary Partners Program: The Rational Creature, Vol. 4 Launch Party and Reading

  oin The Rational Creature to celebrate the launch of our fourth volume, The Generations Issue, exploring the evolution of feminism and the femme experience through art and writing. There will be food, readings from contributors, and copies of Volume 4 available. ABOUT THE RATIONAL CREATURE: Started…

  oin The Rational Creature to celebrate the launch of our fourth volume, The Generations Issue, exploring the evolution of feminism and the femme experience through art and writing. There will be food, readings from contributors, and copies of Volume 4 available.
  
  
  
  ABOUT THE RATIONAL CREATURE: Started in 2016 at NYU, The Rational Creature is a feminist arts journal working to find and create work that explores the fight for feminist issues, promotes intersectionality, and strives toward gender, racial, and sexual equality for all. We publish print editions bi-annually. We also run an online blog. From essays to photo series, documentaries to artwork, we are open to all forms and individuals whose artistic goals mirror our own. Find out more at www.therationalcreature.com
  
  
  
  This event is made possible through Poets House’s Literary Partners program. Poets House is an ADA accessible facility.
  
  Admission Free and open to the public
  
  Sponsored By The Rational Creature

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  Poets House

  • more at poets house

  10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282
  212-431-7920

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  Wednesday, December 5

  7:00pm

  THE WRITERS STUDIO READING SERIES PRESENTS: A CELEBRATION OF TURTLE POINT PRESS

  The Writers Studio Reading Series Presents A Celebration of Turtle Point Press with readings by Turtle Point Press Writers: Katharine Coles Edward J. Delaney Joseph Keckler Grace Schulman David Trinidad and a Celebration of the Publication of Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage by Grace …

  The Writers Studio Reading Series Presents A Celebration of Turtle Point Press with readings by Turtle Point Press Writers:
  
  Katharine Coles
  
  Edward J. Delaney
  
  Joseph Keckler
  
  Grace Schulman
  
  David Trinidad
  
  and a Celebration of the Publication of Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage by Grace Schulman.
  
  Join us in the Rare Book Room as these writers share their work.
  
  More about Strange Paradise: Grace Schulman is an award-winning poet and the author of seven collections of poems. She has had long posts as Poetry Editor of the Nation magazine, Director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Baruch College, where she still teaches. But her love for her scientist husband and her care for him through his long illness proved to be among her greatest inspirations. It called forth her deepest grief at his loss.
  
  Katharine Coles is the author of the hybrid biography/memoir Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-Flung Path. She has also published two novels and six collections of poems, the fifth of which, The Earth Is Not Flat, was written under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The recipient of grants from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she has served as Poet Laureate of Utah, and was inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah, and is currently working with Poet’s House to develop a program that will bring poetry into libraries and natural history museums.
  
  Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning author, journalist, and filmmaker. His books include the novels Follow the Sun, Broken Irish, and Warp & Weft, and the short story collection The Drowning and Other Stories. His short fiction has also been published in the Atlantic and Best American Short Stories, and featured on PRI’s Selected Shorts program. Among other honors, he has received the PEN/New England Award, O. Henry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is also the co-author of Born to Play, by Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia. As a journalist, Delaney has written for publications including the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune, received the National Education Reporting Award, and has served as an editor at the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. As a filmmaker, he has directed and produced documentary films including The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus and Library of the Early Mind. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Delaney has also spent time in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado, and now lives in Rhode Island, where he teaches at Roger Williams University and edits the literary journal Mount Hope.
  
  Joseph Keckler is a singer, musician, writer, and artist. He performs widely and has appeared at venues such as Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, SXSW, Miami Art Basel and Centre Pompidou. He is the author of several plays and many songs, and has written about contemporary art for VICE and other publications. His work has been featured on WNYC and BBC America, and he has received a number of awards, including a Creative Capital grant and a fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts. Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World is his first book.
  
  Grace Schulman is an acclaimed poet, most recently recipient of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, the highest award of the Poetry Society of America. Among her other honors are the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, New York University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and four Pushcart Prizes. Schulman’s memoir is Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage. She is the author of seven collections of poems, including Without a Claim, her most recent, and Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, a Library Journal Best Books of the Year. Her prose essays are collected in First Loves and Other Adventures, and she is editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore. Schulman is former director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, and former poetry editor of the Nation. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.
  
  David Trinidad is known for the masterful use of popular culture in his poems. The poet James Schuyler wrote, “Trinidad turns the paste jewels of pop art into the real thing.” His work is also associated with the innovative formalism of the New York School. Originally from Los Angeles, Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College. Swinging on a Star is his fifth poetry collection with Turtle Point Press, and he has also published two collaborative works with the press.
  
  Founded in 1987 by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Philip Schultz, The Writers Studio is an independent creative writing program, offering six and eight-week workshops specializing in topics from the necessity of political fiction to writers beginning in their fifties. The classes, which meet in New York City, San Francisco, Tucson, the Hudson Valley and online, utilize an original teaching method which combines technique-based instruction with personal weekly feedback. Since its inception in 1990, The Writers Studio Reading Series has featured numerous writers and poets, including Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Andre Dubus III, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Julia Glass, Edward Hirsch, A.M. Homes, Etgar Keret, Marie Ponsot, Robert Pinsky, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, and Yehuda Amichai. www.writerstudio.com
  
  Turtle Point Press, an independent publisher distinguished by books of superior literary content and elegant design, has been delighting readers with new fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, memoirs, works in translation, and rediscovered classics since 1990. Our books have been recognized by the National Book Awards, the National Book Critic's Circle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/New England Awards, the French-American Foundation Translation Awards, The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, and elsewhere. Our newest titles introduce arresting work by more women writers and West Coast writers, and fiction and nonfiction that spans the globe.

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  Strand Book Store

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  828 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-4805
  212-473-1452

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  Wednesday, December 5

  7:30pm

  THALIA BOOK CLUB: JOAN DIDION'S SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM, 50TH ANNIVERSARY

  Actors and admirers, including essayist Sloane Crosley (Look Alive Out There), come together for an evening of readings and discussion to celebrate the master of the personal essay, whose distinctive prose has influenced the work of hundreds of writers and journalists. Didion’s first nonfiction work…

  Actors and admirers, including essayist Sloane Crosley (Look Alive Out There), come together for an evening of readings and discussion to celebrate the master of the personal essay, whose distinctive prose has influenced the work of hundreds of writers and journalists. Didion’s first nonfiction work remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America in the sixties.
  
  Joan Didion is not scheduled to appear at this event. This event will not include a book signing.
  
  At the Thalia Book Club, readers and writers meet for intimate conversations about compelling new books and favorite classics in fiction, essay, biography and more.
  
  Actors subject to change.
  
  Group discounts are available for groups of fifteen people or more - please contact the Box Office.

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  Symphony Space

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  2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York, NY 10025
  

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  Wednesday, December 5

  7:30pm

  Tom Barbash: The Dakota Winters w/ Isaac Fitzgerald

  It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from…

  It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy’s stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.
  
  But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father’s professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.
  
  Tom Barbash is the author of the award-winning novel The Last Good Chance, which was awarded the California Book Award, and the short story collection Stay Up with Me, which was a national bestseller and was nominated for the Folio Prize. His nonfiction book, On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal, was a New York Times bestseller. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts.
  
  Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. Formerly of The Rumpus and McSweeney’s and most recently the founding editor of BuzzFeed Books, Isaac is now the co-host of BuzzFeed News’ Twitter Morning Show, #AMtoDM. He also appears frequently on The Today Show to talk books, and is co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes), winner of an IACP award, and the author of a YA novel and picture book forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
  
  This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

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  Books Are Magic

  • more at books are magic

  255 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
  718-246-2665

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upcoming events

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  Friday, February 15

  7:00pm

  PHILOSOPHY AND FRIENDSHIP

  We always talk about love as the type of personal relationship we should primarily seek and thrive for. But Isn’t friendship much more crucial in our lives? Numerous philosophers have reflected upon the importance of friendship in the construction of our emotional balance but also in the definition…

  We always talk about love as the type of personal relationship we should primarily seek and thrive for. But Isn’t friendship much more crucial in our lives?
  
  Numerous philosophers have reflected upon the importance of friendship in the construction of our emotional balance but also in the definition of our identity and of our moral character. While the sentiment is lovely, seeing a friend as our alter ego can be problematic. We will try to discuss the features of this demanding conception of friendship, and compare views about what it could truly mean to be a good friend. What characteristics could friendship share with romantic or filial love? What features are exclusively defining friendship? What type of reciprocity is expected in a true friendship?
  
  Teacher: Jeanne Proust has studied Philosophy and Visual Arts in Bordeaux, Berlin, and Paris. Her research focuses on Théodule Ribot’s Diseases of the Will, both in philosophical and psychological perspectives. While teaching at different universities here in New York, Jeanne is advocating for a widening of philosophical education beyond the frontiers of academia.
  
  Complimentary beer by our presenting partner Sixpoint Brewery.
  
  Sixpoint’s motto is “Beer is Culture,” to highlight the human trajectory—the earliest human civilizations were founded upon the cultivation of cereal grains for making beer. Sixpoint aims to perpetually inspire the art, creativity, and collaboration generated through beer by acknowledging the history of the craft, while forging ahead to inspire culture in a modern setting.

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  Strand Book Store

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  828 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-4805
  212-473-1452

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  Friday, February 15

  7:30pm

  Corey Ann Haydu: Eventown w/ Alex Arnold

  Corey Ann Haydu: Eventown w/ Alex Arnold Friday February 15 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM The world tilted for Elodee this year, and now it’s impossible for her to be the same as she was before. Not when her feelings have such a strong grip on her heart. Not when she and her twin sister, Naomi, seem to be drifting…

  Corey Ann Haydu: Eventown w/ Alex Arnold
  
  Friday February 15 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
  
  The world tilted for Elodee this year, and now it’s impossible for her to be the same as she was before. Not when her feelings have such a strong grip on her heart. Not when she and her twin sister, Naomi, seem to be drifting apart. So when Elodee’s mom gets a new job in Eventown, moving seems like it might just fix everything.
  
  Indeed, life in Eventown is comforting and exciting all at once. Their kitchen comes with a box of recipes for Elodee to try. Everyone takes the scenic way to school or work—past rows of rosebushes and unexpected waterfalls. On blueberry-picking field trips, every berry is perfectly ripe.
  
  Sure, there are a few odd rules, and the houses all look exactly alike, but it’s easy enough to explain—until Elodee realizes that there are only three ice cream flavors in Eventown. Ever. And they play only one song in music class.
  
  Everything may be “even” in Eventown, but is there a price to pay for perfection—and pretending?
  
  Corey Ann Haydu is the author of Rules for Stealing Stars, The Someday Suitcase, and four acclaimed books for teens. She grew up in the Boston area, earned her MFA at the New School, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family. Find out more at www.coreyannhaydu.com.
  
  Alex Arnold is an editor at Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. She edits middle grade and YA fiction, and works with critically acclaimed and bestselling authors such as Corey Ann Haydu, Brittany Cavallaro, and Kali Wallace. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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  Books Are Magic

  • more at books are magic

  255 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
  718-246-2665

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  Saturday, February 16

  2:00pm

  Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer: To Night Owl From Dogfish

  Avery Bloom, who's bookish, intense, and afraid of many things, particularly deep water, lives in New York City. Bett Devlin, who's fearless, outgoing, and loves all animals as well as the ocean, lives in California. What they have in common is that they are both twelve years old, and are both being…

  Avery Bloom, who's bookish, intense, and afraid of many things, particularly deep water, lives in New York City. Bett Devlin, who's fearless, outgoing, and loves all animals as well as the ocean, lives in California. What they have in common is that they are both twelve years old, and are both being raised by single, gay dads.
  
  When their dads fall in love, Bett and Avery are sent, against their will, to the same sleepaway camp. Their dads hope that they will find common ground and become friends-and possibly, one day, even sisters.
  
  But things soon go off the rails for the girls (and for their dads too), and they find themselves on a summer adventure that neither of them could have predicted. Now that they can't imagine life without each other, will the two girls (who sometimes call themselves Night Owl and Dogfish) figure out a way to be a family?
  
  Holly Goldberg Sloan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and spent her childhood living in Holland, Istanbul, Turkey, Washington DC, Berkeley, California and Eugene, Oregon. After graduating from Wellesley College and spending some time as an advertising copywriter, she began writing and directing family feature films, including Angels in the Outfield and Made in America. Counting by 7s, her first middle-grade novel, was a New York Times Bestseller. The mother of two sons, Holly lives with her husband in Santa Monica, California.
  
  Meg Wolitzer was born in Brooklyn, New York, studied Creative Writing at Smith College, and graduated from Brown University (where she wrote her first published novel, Sleepwalking, while still an undergraduate). She is the New York Times-bestselling author of numerous novels for adults, including The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Wife, and The Female Persuasion; the young adult novel Belzhar; and the middle-grade novel The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman.

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  Books Are Magic

  • more at books are magic

  255 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
  718-246-2665

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  Feb 17, 2019

  6:00pm-7:30pm

  Book Release Party: Drew Pisarra's "Infinity Standing Up"

  Capturing Fire Press releases "Infinity Standing Up," a new collection of sonnets by Drew Pisarra. This event features a reading by the author himself as well as by poet-scholar Mare Davis. Admission is $10 and includes a complimentary copy of the book. Advance Praise: "A stunning collection of …

  Capturing Fire Press releases "Infinity Standing Up," a new collection of sonnets by Drew Pisarra. This event features a reading by the author himself as well as by poet-scholar Mare Davis. Admission is $10 and includes a complimentary copy of the book.
  
  Advance Praise:
  
  "A stunning collection of unique and eclectic observations of modern love which I’m sure Shakespeare himself would be pleased to see is ‘holding a mirror up to life.’ If Wes Anderson and Miranda July had a Queer love-child, they’d write like this." - Anna Girvan, Creative Fellow with the Royal Shakespeare Company
  
  "Rhyming and skipping his way through jaggedly sexualized and playful, formal sonnets with serendipity and style (“Devour me! Think me not some crazy nut.”), Drew Pisarra has written a rousing and unusual collection of poems that respond with see-saw emotion to a lover who comes and goes, with difficulty and love. Puns abound; titles tease. These sonnets will knock you out, and you’ll return to them again." - Diane Mehta, "How to Write Poetry" (2005)
  
  "These poems navigate the rapids of desire in a form that was made for twists and turns of feeling, from the derangement of lust to rueful self-reflection. Drew Pisarra honors the Shakespearean sonnet's tradition of wit and economy, while simultaneously delivering the pleasurable shock of 21st-century idiom." - Joan Larkin, "Cold River" (Lambda Literary Award)

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  Bowery Poetry Club

  • more at bowery poetry club

  308 Bowery, New York, NY 10012-2802
  212-614-0505

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• 

  Feb 18, 2019

  7:00pm-9:00pm

  Amit Chaudhuri on FRIEND OF MY YOUTH with Bruce Robbins

  Join us at Book Culture on Monday, February 18th at 7pm to celebrate the release of Friend of My Youth with the author Amit Chaudhuri. He will be joined by Bruce Robbins. In Friend of My Youth, novelist Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008…

  Join us at Book Culture on Monday, February 18th at 7pm to celebrate the release of Friend of My Youth with the author Amit Chaudhuri. He will be joined by Bruce Robbins.
  
  In Friend of My Youth, novelist Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on his mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit’s last remaining connection to the city he once called home.
  
  Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, “Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.”
  
  Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author and editor of several books, including The Beneficiary, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, and Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Robbins has written for The Nation, n+1, and other publications.
  
  This event is free to attend with no reservation required. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis. For more information, see: https://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-amit-chaudhuri-friend-my-youth

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  Book Culture

  • more at book culture

  536 W 112th Street, New York, NY 10025
  212-865-1588

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  Monday, February 18

  7:00pm

  112th: Amit Chaudhuri on Friend of My Youth

  Join us at Book Culture on Monday, February 18th at 7pm to celebrate the release of Friend of My Youth with the author Amit Chaudhuri. He will be joined by Bruce Robbins. Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading.…

  Join us at Book Culture on Monday, February 18th at 7pm to celebrate the release of Friend of My Youth with the author Amit Chaudhuri. He will be joined by Bruce Robbins.
  
  Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. Ramu, the friend of his youth, with whom he likes to get together when he comes back, is not there: after years of disabling drug addiction, Ramu has signed up for an intensive rehab program. But Amit Chaudhuri has errands to run in Bombay for his mother and wife, which take him back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the site, not that long before, of a brutal terrorist attack.
  
  Amit Chaudhuri writes novels the way an extraordinary instrumentalist makes music, stating and restating his themes, trying them out in different keys and to various effect, developing and dropping them, only to pick them up again and turn them completely around. He engages both our minds and our hearts. He makes us marvel. Friend of My Youth, his deceptively casual and continually observant and inventive new novel, makes us see and feel the great city of Bombay while bringing us into the quizzical, tender, rueful, and reflective sensibility of its central character, Amit Chaudhuri, not to be confused, we are told, with the novelist who wrote this book.
  
  Friend of My Youth reflects on the nature of identity, the passage of time, the experience of friendship, the indignities of youth and middle age, the lives of parents and children, and, for all the humor that seasons its pages, terror, the terror that can strike from nowhere, the terror that is a fact of daily life.
  
  Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom, where he is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. Friend of My Youth is his seventh novel. Among Chaudhuri’s other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; a work of nonfiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City; and two volumes of poetry, including Sweet Shop. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and the awards he has received for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award.
  
  Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author and editor of several books, including The Beneficiary, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, and Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Robbins has written for The Nation, n+1, and other publications.

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  Book Culture

  • more at book culture

  536 W 112th Street, New York, NY 10025
  212-865-1588

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  Monday, February 18

  7:00pm

  The Collected Schizophrenias: Esmé Weijun Wang (PRINCE STREET)

  The Collected Schizophrenias: Esmé Weijun Wang (PRINCE STREET) An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying …

  The Collected Schizophrenias: Esmé Weijun Wang (PRINCE STREET)
  
  An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophreniasdispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.
  
  Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of The Border of Paradise. She received the Whiting Award in 2018 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Monday, February 18

  7:00pm

  The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul: Sandor Jászberényi (WILLIAMSBURG)

  The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul is the latest story collection by one of Hungary’s top writers. Here are fourteen stories set mostly in contemporary Cairo and Iraq that reveal the dark realities in the life of one war correspondent. Told from the perspective of Cairo-based European war correspondent…

  The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul is the latest story collection by one of Hungary’s top writers. Here are fourteen stories set mostly in contemporary Cairo and Iraq that reveal the dark realities in the life of one war correspondent. Told from the perspective of Cairo-based European war correspondent Daniel Marosh, The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul—set in contemporary Cairo and Iraq, as well as Israel, London, and Hungary—is about a journalist examining today’s most pressing Middle East conflicts and the lives of others even while haunted by his own demons. Daniel Marosh battles insomnia and hallucinations while fleeing a lying world and war zones through a dizzying blend of Xanax, opium, alcohol, and prostitutes.
  
  Sándor Jászberényi (Shahn-dor Yahs-ber-ay-ñee) is the author of The Devil Is a Black Dog: Stories from the Middle East and Beyond (New Europe Books, 2014). In 2017 he received Hungary’s Libri Literary Prize. As a correspondent for Hungarian news sites, he has covered the conflict with Islamic State, unrest in Ukraine, the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, and the Gaza War. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, AGNI, and the Brooklyn Rail. He divides his time between Budapest and Cairo.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Monday, February 18

  7:00pm

  Guy Hocquenghem's The Amphitheater of the Dead: Max Fox and Wayne Koestenbaum (PRINCE STREET)

  The Amphitheater of the Dead is a lightly science-fictionalized memoir by the French thinker Guy Hocquenghem, written in the last months of his life with the intention of prolonging it. “Writing saves,” he writes. “Each time that I started work on a book, I knew I would get to the end. That’s the …

  The Amphitheater of the Dead is a lightly science-fictionalized memoir by the French thinker Guy Hocquenghem, written in the last months of his life with the intention of prolonging it. “Writing saves,” he writes. “Each time that I started work on a book, I knew I would get to the end. That’s the challenge that I launch with this one, one more time.” From May to the end of June 1988, Hocquenghem worked on this last book, writing in pen from his bed until complications from AIDS developed into paralysis and “his hand no longer responded to commands from his brain,” as his comrade Roland Surzur writes in the preface. He did not get to the end.
  
  Set in 2018, the novel dramatizes the task of living with death, imagining a future of chronic deferral remarkable for depictions of AIDS at the time. The mild futurism (in thirty years, not much has visibly changed beyond bioluminescent houseplants) primarily functions as a way for Hocquenghem to reflect on his midcentury life, though reading it in the actual 2018 brings out surprising juxtapositions and resonances with the present. Hocquenghem’s personal trajectory was singular at the time: he forged a new way of relating to homosexuality in France through his thought, writing and political activity, but in retrospect he feels shockingly familiar. We can see now how the course of his life formed the template for many contemporary queer lives.
  
  Guy Hocquenghem was born in 1946 and arrived at the Sorbonne in time to occupy it in 1968, militating over the years with a series of communist and other left formations including the Front homosexuelle d’action révolutionnaire. His first book Le Désir homosexuel appeared in 1972, and he produced journalism, films, magazines, and novels until he was physically unable, up until his death in August of 1988. He is considered one of the forebears of queer theory.
  
  Max Fox is a writer and translator, an editor of the New Inquiry, and a founding editor of Pinko Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia.
  
  Wayne Koestenbaum has published nineteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). His newest book of poetry, Camp Marmalade, was published in 2018. He has exhibited his paintings in solo shows at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (L.A.), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017; he has given musical performances at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, and the Renaissance Society. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

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  McNally Jackson Books

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  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Shortest Way Home:

  One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

  by Pete Buttigieg

  Liveright

  $27.95 List Price

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

  Monday, February 18

  7:30pm

  South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in conversation with Frank Bruni

  A mayor’s inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal. Once described by The Washington Post as “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of,” Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, …

  A mayor’s inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal.
  
  Once described by The Washington Post as “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of,” Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation’s most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a “dying city,” because the industrial Midwest beckoned as a challenge to the McKinsey-trained Harvard graduate. Whether meeting with city residents on middle-school basketball courts, reclaiming abandoned houses, confronting gun violence, or attracting high-tech industry, Buttigieg has transformed South Bend into a shining model of urban reinvention.
  
  While Washington reels with scandal, "Shortest Way Home" interweaves two once-unthinkable success stories: that of an Afghanistan veteran who came out and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and that of a Rust Belt city so thoroughly transformed that it shatters the way we view America’s so-called flyover country.
  
  Pete Buttigieg, born in Indiana in 1982, is currently serving his second term as mayor of South Bend. A dynamic national lecturer and TEDx speaker, as well as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy veteran, Buttigieg was educated at Harvard and Oxford. He and his husband, Chasten Glezman, live in South Bend, Indiana.
  
  Frank Bruni has been an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since June 2011. His previous jobs at The New York Times include writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine (2009-2011), chief restaurant critic (2004-2009) and Rome bureau chief (2002-2004). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, he is the author of three bestselling books: "Ambling into History," "Born Round," and "Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be." He lives in Manhattan.

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  Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, Dweck Center

  • more at this location

  10 Grand Army Plaza, New York, NY 11238
  718-230-2100

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  Feb 19, 2019

  6:00pm-7:30pm

  Bryant Park Winter Poetry with Get Fresh Books LLC

  Hear established and emerging poets read their poetry as Bryant Park Poetry goes indoors for the winter. This month's program is presented in partnership with Get Fresh Books LLC. Featuring the poets: Victor Alcindor, Marina Carreira, Darla Himeles, and Lynne McEniry. Kinokuniya Bookstore provides…

  Hear established and emerging poets read their poetry as Bryant Park Poetry goes indoors for the winter. This month's program is presented in partnership with Get Fresh Books LLC.
  
  Featuring the poets: Victor Alcindor, Marina Carreira, Darla Himeles, and Lynne McEniry.
  
  Kinokuniya Bookstore provides a warm environment where you’ll meet other poetry aficionados. Located at 1073 Avenue of the Americas, between West 40th and West 41st Streets. The bookstore sits opposite Bryant Park. Books are available for purchase and for signing by the poets.
  
  Winter Poetry readings are held on the third Tuesday of each month, January - April, 6pm-7:30pm.
  
  Readings are free and open to the public.
  
  *Please note: programs are subject to change

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  Kinokuniya

  • more at kinokuniya

  1073 Ave of the Americas, New York, NY 10018
  

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  What's Never Said

  by Susan Shapiro

  Heliotrope Books LLC

  $16.00 List Price

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

  Feb 19, 2019

  6:00pm-7:30pm

  Secrets of Publishing Panel

  Join Professor Susan Shapiro, NYU alumna & author of “The Byline Bible” for her free, exciting SECRETS OF WRITING SUCCESS panel where literary luminaries will answer all of your questions about breaking into publishing and getting a book deal. The panel will include, agent Serene Hakim, editors Eli…

  Join Professor Susan Shapiro, NYU alumna & author of “The Byline Bible” for her free, exciting SECRETS OF WRITING SUCCESS panel where literary luminaries will answer all of your questions about breaking into publishing and getting a book deal. The panel will include, agent Serene Hakim, editors Eli Reyes (Newsday), Melissa Dahl (NY Mag), Deb Garrison (Knopf), authors Dream Jordan, Seth Kugel, Kate Walter & Byline Biblers Sybil Sage, Ron Bel Bruno, Liz Montgomery and Victor Varnado.

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  NYU Bookstore

  • more at nyu bookstore

  726 Broadway, New York, NY 10003
  

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  Tuesday, February 19

  7:00pm

  Liquid Rules: Mark Miodownik (WILLIAMSBURG)

  We all know that without water we couldn’t survive, and that sometimes a cup of coffee or a glass of wine feels just as vital. But do we really understand how much we rely on liquids, or the destructive power they hold? Set over the course of a flight from London to San Francisco, Liquid Rules offers…

  We all know that without water we couldn’t survive, and that sometimes a cup of coffee or a glass of wine feels just as vital. But do we really understand how much we rely on liquids, or the destructive power they hold?
  
  Set over the course of a flight from London to San Francisco, Liquid Rules offers readers a fascinating tour of these formless substances, told through the language of molecules, droplets, heartbeats, and ocean waves. Throughout the trip, we encounter fluids within the plane—from a seemingly ordinary cup of tea to a liquid crystal display screen—and without, in the volcanoes of Iceland, the frozen expanse of Greenland, and the marvelous California coastline. We come to see liquids as substances of wonder and fascination, and to understand their potential for death and destruction. Just as in Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik’s unique brand of scientific storytelling brings liquids and their mysterious properties to life in a captivating new way.
  
  Mark Miodownik is a professor of materials and society at University College London, and director of the Institute of Making. His first book, Stuff Matters, was a New York Times bestseller and won the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award and the Royal Society Winton Prize.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Tuesday, February 19

  7:00pm

  Launching Lizzy Mason's The Art of Losing (PRINCE ST)

  On one terrible night, 17-year-old Harley Langston’s life changes forever. At a party she discovers her boyfriend, Mike, hooking up with her younger sister, Audrey. Furious, she abandons them both. When Mike drunkenly attempts to drive Audrey home, he crashes and Audrey ends up in a coma. Now Harley…

  On one terrible night, 17-year-old Harley Langston’s life changes forever. At a party she discovers her boyfriend, Mike, hooking up with her younger sister, Audrey. Furious, she abandons them both. When Mike drunkenly attempts to drive Audrey home, he crashes and Audrey ends up in a coma. Now Harley is left with guilt, grief, pain and the undeniable truth that her now ex-boyfriend has a drinking problem. So it’s a surprise that she finds herself reconnecting with Raf, a neighbor and childhood friend who’s recently out of rehab and still wrestling with his own demons. At first Harley doesn’t want to get too close to him. But as her sister slowly recovers, Harley begins to see a path forward with Raf’s help that she never would have believed possible—one guided by honesty, forgiveness, and redemption.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Tuesday, February 19

  7:00pm

  LEILA SLIMANI: ADÈLE

  Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored—and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes…

  Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored—and consumed by an insatiable need for sex.
  
  Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. Suspenseful, erotic, and electrically charged, Adèle is a captivating exploration of addiction, sexuality, and one woman's quest to feel alive.
  
  Join us as author Leila Slimani discusses her new novel with Lauren Christensen, staff editor at the New York Times.

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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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  Tuesday, February 19

  7:30pm

  LITPROV: LYNDSAY FAYE & CHRIS GETHARD

  DATE | Feb 19 2019 TIME | 7:30pm PRICES | $16 THEATER | Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre Expected Run Time is 90 minutes Led by Rakesh Satyal (No One Can Pronounce My Name), comedian and writer Chris Gethard (Lose Well) and mystery maven Lyndsay Faye (The Paragon Hotel) read from their latest works. …

  DATE | Feb 19 2019
  
  TIME | 7:30pm
  
  PRICES | $16
  
  THEATER | Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre
  
  Expected Run Time is 90 minutes
  
  Led by Rakesh Satyal (No One Can Pronounce My Name), comedian and writer Chris Gethard (Lose Well) and mystery maven Lyndsay Faye (The Paragon Hotel) read from their latest works. First you'll hear the author's story as written, then a comedian has five minutes to take the book's themes and run with them. The catch? Our two brave comics haven't quite done their reading.
  
  Have you ever pretended to read the new book everyone’s talking about? Not quite caught up with the New York Times Book Review? Seems like you’re drowning in “Best Of” lists? We all know the feeling, but our exciting new series LitProv takes the pressure off of you and puts it on stage! LitProv brings together new voices in literature, and some of our household-name favorites, to read from their latest works. Then we let loose a couple of comedians to riff off the reading without having read the book. Hosted by Rakesh Satyal (No One Can Pronounce My Name), this lovefest of literature and comedy is sure to bring on the laughs and add to your growing TBR pile.
  
  Each event in the series includes a conversation with the authors, a Q&A with the audience, and a book signing on stage following the show. Plus 20% off all drinks at Bar Thalia with every ticket purchase!

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  Symphony Space

  • more at symphony space

  2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York, NY 10025
  

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  Tuesday, February 19

  7:30pm

  Esmé Weijun Wang: The Collected Schizophrenias w/ Alice Sola Kim

  Tuesday February 19 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM In The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang details her journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood. Written with a sharp analytic eye, which she honed as a former lab researcher at …

  Tuesday February 19 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
  
  In The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang details her journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood. Written with a sharp analytic eye, which she honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, these essays range from exploring the depths of a rare form of psychosis to how she uses fashion to present as high-functioning; from the failures of the higher education system to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease.
  
  Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Wang discusses also the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness and examines the ways in which schizophrenia manifests in her own life. Exhaustively researched and deeply moving, The Collected Schizophrenias is an essay collection of undeniable power.
  
  Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of The Border of Paradise. She received the Whiting Award in 2018 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco.
  
  Alice Sola Kim, a left-handed anchor baby currently residing in New York, is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Tin House, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, Lenny, BuzzFeed Books, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

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  Books Are Magic

  • more at books are magic

  255 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
  718-246-2665

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  Wednesday, February 20

  6:30pm

  A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: With Siri Hustvedt and Clémence Boulouque

  On Wednesday, February 20, join prize-winning writer Siri Hustvedt and French novelist Clémence Boulouque as they discuss Hustvedt’s compelling and radical collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Why is there such a wide chasm between the world of literary …

  On Wednesday, February 20, join prize-winning writer Siri Hustvedt and French novelist Clémence Boulouque as they discuss Hustvedt’s compelling and radical collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.
  
  Why is there such a wide chasm between the world of literary intellectuals and that of empirical scientists? In A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Hustvedt, encouraged by thinkers like C.P. Snow, attempts to bridge the gap from both sides.
  
  Siri Hustvedt has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. The author of six novels including What I loved and The Blazing World, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction, Hustvedt is the recipient of numerous awards. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
  
  Clémence Boulouque is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the Religion Department at Columbia University where she focuses on philosophy, psychoanalysis and interreligious encounters. A former radio host and book critique, she is also the author of a dozen novels and essays published by Gallimard in her native France.

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  Albertine

  • more at albertine

  972 5th Ave, New York, NY 10075
  
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  Wednesday, February 20

  7:00pm

  Only As The Day is Long: Dorianne Laux (WILLIAMSBURG)

  Only as the Day Is Long represents a brilliant, daring body of work from one of our boldest contemporary poets, known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian. Drawn from Dorianne Laux’s five expansive volumes, including her confident debut Awake, National Book Critics Circle …

  Only as the Day Is Long represents a brilliant, daring body of work from one of our boldest contemporary poets, known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian. Drawn from Dorianne Laux’s five expansive volumes, including her confident debut Awake, National Book Critics Circle Finalist What We Carry, and Paterson Prize–winning The Book of Men, the poems in this collection have been "brought to the hard edge of meaning" (B. H. Fairchild) and praised for their "enormous precision and beauty" (Philip Levine). Twenty new odes pay homage to Laux’s mother, an ordinary and extraordinary woman of the Depression era.
  
  The wealth of her life experience finds expression in Laux’s earthy and lyrical depictions of working-class America, full of the dirt and mess of real life. From the opening poem, "Two Pictures of My Sister," to the last, "Letter to My Dead Mother," she writes, in her words, of "living gristle" with a perceptive frankness that is luminous in its specificity and universal in its appeal. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long shows Laux at the height of her powers.
  
  Dorianne Laux teaches poetry in the Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University and is a founding faculty member of Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a recipient of the Oregon Book Award and the Paterson Prize, she lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Wednesday, February 20

  7:00pm

  The Atlas of Reds and Blues: Devi S. Laskar (PRINCE STREET)

  When a woman—known only as Mother—moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where…

  When a woman—known only as Mother—moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American-born daughter of Bengali immigrants, she finds that her answer—Here—is never enough.
  
  Mother’s simmering anger breaks through one morning, when, during a violent and unfounded police raid on her home, she finally refuses to be complacent. As she lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, her thoughts race from childhood games with her sister and visits to cousins in India, to her time in the newsroom before having her three daughters, to the early days of her relationship with a husband who now spends more time flying business class than at home.
  
  The Atlas of Reds and Blues grapples with the complexities of the second-generation American experience, what it means to be a woman of color in the workplace, and a sister, a wife, and a mother to daughters in today’s America. Drawing inspiration from the author’s own terrifying experience of a raid on her home, Devi S. Laskar’s debut novel explores, in exquisite, lyrical prose, an alternate reality that might have been.
  
  Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Tin House and Rattle, among other publications. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and is an alumna of The OpEd Project and VONA. Laskar is the author of two poetry chapbooks, and this is her first novel. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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  Wednesday, February 20

  7:00pm

  BLAKE J. HARRIS: THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

  In The History of the Future, Blake J. Harris once again deep-dives into a tech drama for the ages to expertly tell the larger-than-life true story of Oculus, the virtual reality company founded in 2012 that—less than two years later—would catch the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and wind up being …

  In The History of the Future, Blake J. Harris once again deep-dives into a tech drama for the ages to expertly tell the larger-than-life true story of Oculus, the virtual reality company founded in 2012 that—less than two years later—would catch the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and wind up being bought by Facebook for over $2 billion dollars.
  
  This incredible underdog story begins with inventor Palmer Luckey, then just a nineteen-year-old dreamer, living alone in a camper trailer in Long Beach, California. At the time, virtual reality—long-hailed as the ultimate technology—was so costly and experimental that it was unattainable outside of a few research labs and military training facilities. But with the founding of Oculus, and the belief that his tantalizing vision of the future could one day be more than science fiction, Luckey put everything he had into creating a device that would allow gamers like him to step into virtual worlds and, in doing so, hopefully kickstart a VR revolution.
  
  With the help of an industry legend, a serial entrepreneur, and a slew of colorful characters—including those behind gaming sensations like Doom, Words with Friends, and Guitar Hero—Luckey’s scrappy startup would finally deliver the dream of immersive and affordable virtual reality to consumers, leading geeks and gamers to be excited in a way that they hadn’t been in years, and tech firms and investors scrambling to get in on the action before it was too late.
  
  Over the course of three years (and with unprecedented access from Oculus and Facebook), Harris conducted hundreds of interviews with key players in the VR revolution—including Luckey, his partners, and their cult of dreamers—to weave together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns, and human drama of trying to change the world. The result is a supremely accessible, entertaining look at the birth of a new multi-billion-dollar industry; one full of heroes, villains, and twists at every corner. Take, for instance, Harris’ own discovery while writing this story. When he started this endeavor, he had no idea that this tale would somehow involve Donald Trump, billion-dollar lawsuits, illegal practices, and end with Luckey—eventually ousted from Facebook—as one of the most polarizing figures in Silicon Valley.
  
  Join us as Blake J. Harris shares and signs his new book!

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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 20

  7:00pm

  Time Flows Like A River: Amit Chaudhuri and James Wood

  What does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? Is it true that "time flows like a river"? We forget the rituals by which the house of our life was erected and the stories a house can contain. Amit Chaudhuri takes up the question of the divide between fiction and non-fiction, novel …

  What does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? Is it true that "time flows like a river"? We forget the rituals by which the house of our life was erected and the stories a house can contain.
  
  
  Amit Chaudhuri takes up the question of the divide between fiction and non-fiction, novel and memoir in Friend of My Youth (NYRB), the story of a house and a city told through geography, history, politics, and fable. New Yorker critic, essayist and novelist, James Wood (Upstate, 2018) has written extensively about Amit Chaudhuri's work and this will be their first public conversation.
  
  
  Chaudhuri is also a critically acclaimed singer in the North Indian classical tradition. He will perform two of his own compositions, accompanied by guitarist Phil Robson, prefacing the music with remarks that connect his music to his writing and life.
  
  This event is free to attend with no reservation required. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis. For more information, see: http://www.centerforfiction.org/calendar/time-flows-like-a-river-amit-chaudhuri-and-james-wood/

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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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  Wednesday, February 20

  7:30pm

  ROSELEE GOLDBERG: PERFORMANCE NOW ON THE 2ND FLOOR

  Performance Now offers an unprecedented illustrated survey of this temporal medium which is notoriously hard to document, written by respected curator, art historian, and critic RoseLee Goldberg. Six chapters cover different themes of performance art, such as beauty, global citizenship, and activism,…

  Performance Now offers an unprecedented illustrated survey of this temporal medium which is notoriously hard to document, written by respected curator, art historian, and critic RoseLee Goldberg. Six chapters cover different themes of performance art, such as beauty, global citizenship, and activism, as well as its intersection with other media including film and technology, dance, theater and architecture?interspersed with illustrated profiles of some of the world’s best-known performance artists, including Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, and Laurie Simmons. Extended captions assess the importance of specific works in context.
  
  Join us in the 2nd Floor Art Department as RoseLee Goldberg shares her latest book! RoseLee will be joine din conversation by Evan Moffitt, Associate Editor of Frieze Magazine.
  
  Buy a copy of Performance Now or a $15 gift card to attend this event. Please note that payment is required for all online event orders at the time of checkout. The event will be located in the Strand's 2nd floor Art Department at our store at 828 Broadway at 12th Street.

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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 20

  7:30pm

  Christopher Castellani: Leading Men w/ Emma Straub

  Wednesday February 20 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysteriously taciturn young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter…

  Wednesday February 20 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
  
  In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysteriously taciturn young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives.
  
  Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in the present-day U.S., until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only surviving copy of Williams’s final play.
  
  What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can’t save ourselves? Like The Master and The Hours, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century.
  
  Christopher Castellani is the author of three previous novels (A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, and All This Talk of Love) and The Art of Perspective, a book of essays on the craft of fiction. He is the son of Italian immigrants, a Guggenheim fellow, and the artistic director of GrubStreet, one of the country's leading creative writing centers. He lives in Boston.
  
  Emma Straub is from New York City. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Modern Lovers and The Vacationers. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, Time, Slate, the New York Times, and Rookie. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, where she co-owns Books Are Magic.

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  Books Are Magic

  • more at books are magic

  255 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
  718-246-2665

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• Thursday, February 21

  6:30pm

  In Putin's Footsteps: Nina Khrushcheva

  In search of the soul of Russia, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev travels the empire’s eleven time zones. In 2000, after Vladimir Putin was handed the Russian presidency by Boris Yeltsin and then won it himself in a landslide election, he set out on a massive…

  In search of the soul of Russia, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev travels the empire’s eleven time zones.
  
  In 2000, after Vladimir Putin was handed the Russian presidency by Boris Yeltsin and then won it himself in a landslide election, he set out on a massive PR campaign with the intent to restore his country's lost status as a great power. He hopped around the world to nearly two dozen countries and almost a quarter of Russia's own 89 regions. Inspired by his nation's enormity, its "limitless land," Putin aimed to follow it up by traveling to every one of Russia's eleven time zones on New Year’s Eve to deliver a speech in all of them at the stroke of midnight.
  
  As grand as the idea was, it was ultimately deemed a feat too impossible to accomplish in one night.
  
  Nearly twenty years later, in the summer of 2017, Nina Khrushcheva and journalist Jeffrey Tayler set out to travel in what would have been Putin’s footsteps. Focusing on a town in each time zone, and examining how factors from politics to natural resources define each, the two create a portrait of the country, and in doing so measure the success of Putin’s presidency. Khrushcheva, who has made New York her home, speaks about the trans Siberian journey and whether Putin’s promise to restore pride in Russia’s greatness has ultimately been fulfilled.
  
  FIRST COME, FIRST SEATED
  
  For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form one hour before the program.

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  The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

  • more at this location

  5th Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018
  
• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:00pm

  112: Saidiya Hartman on Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

  Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Thursday, February 21st at 7pm as we welcome Saidiya Hartman to discuss her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate …

  Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Thursday, February 21st at 7pm as we welcome Saidiya Hartman to discuss her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
  
  In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.
  
  In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.
  
  Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

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  Book Culture

  • more at book culture

  536 W 112th Street, New York, NY 10025
  212-865-1588

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• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:00pm

  112: Saidiya Hartman on Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

  Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Thursday, February 21st at 7pm as we welcome Saidiya Hartman to discuss her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate …

  Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Thursday, February 21st at 7pm as we welcome Saidiya Hartman to discuss her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
  
  In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.
  
  In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.
  
  Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

  MORE ABOUT THIS EVENT

  Book Culture

  • more at book culture

  536 W 112th Street, New York, NY 10025
  212-865-1588

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• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:00pm

  TOSH: Tosh Berman with Gillian McCain (WILLIAMSBURG)

  TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman,…

  TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty and artist's muse Shirley Berman, raised Tosh between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and their home life was a heady atmosphere of art, music, and literature, with local and international luminaries regularly passing through.
  
  Tosh's unconventional childhood and peculiar journey to adulthood features an array of famous characters, from George Herms and Marcel Duchamp, to Michael McClure and William S. Burroughs, to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, to the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Toni Basil.
  
  TOSH takes an unflinching look at the triumphs and tragedies of his unusual upbringing by an artistic genius with all-too-human frailties, against a backdrop that includes The T.A.M.I. Show, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Easy Rider, and more. With a preface by actress/writer Amber Tamblyn (daughter of Wallace's friend, actor Russ Tamblyn), TOSH is a self-portrait taken at the crossroads of popular culture and the avant-garde. The index of names included represents a who's who of midcentury American—and international—culture.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:00pm

  The Songs of David Bowie: Chris O'Leary with Billy Hough (PRINCE STREET)

  Chris O'Leary's Ashes to Ashes covers every single Bowie song, whether it was sung, written, or produced by him, from 1976, when he first recorded with Iggy Pop on "The Idiot," to his last masterpiece "Blackstar," released just days before his death in 2016. Each song is annotated in depth and explored…

  Chris O'Leary's Ashes to Ashes covers every single Bowie song, whether it was sung, written, or produced by him, from 1976, when he first recorded with Iggy Pop on "The Idiot," to his last masterpiece "Blackstar," released just days before his death in 2016. Each song is annotated in depth and explored in essays that touch upon the song's creation, production, influences and impact. It hits everything from "Heroes" to the Labyrinth soundtrack, from his 1985 camp duet with Mick Jagger on "Dancing In the Street" to "Where Are We Now," his comeback single in 2013.
  
  Along the way we encounter a vast cast of characters, weaving in and out of Bowie's life and his music: Brian Eno, John Cale, Nile Rodgers, Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, Scott Walker, Marc Bolan, Arcade Fire, John Lennon, Mickey Rourke, Gary Oldman, Iman, Hanif Kureishi, Julien Temple, Giorgio Moroder, Neil Young and many others. And we range across the globe from Bowie's years in divided Berlin to his "exile" years in Switzerland through his final years as a New Yorker, recording within walking distance of his home.
  
  Chris O’Leary is a writer based in Massachusetts. He has written for Pitchfork, Slate, New York, Mojo, and Billboard. He is the author Rebel Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie From '64 to '76 (2015) and creator of the acclaimed Bowie blog ‘Pushing Ahead of the Dame’, listed as one of TIME magazine's "Best Blogs of 2011".
  
  Billy Hough is a downtown cabaret star (Scream Along with Billy), erstwhile film actor (Rampart, Time Out of Mind), and ex-punk rocker (the GarageDogs). He works at McNally Jackson where he curates the How Not To ... conversation series.

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  McNally Jackson Books

  • more at mcnally jackson books

  52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012
  212-274-1160

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• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:00pm

  Epic Voices: The Controlling Image: Digges & Levis with Dorianne Laux

  Acclaimed for her own hybrid lyric-narrative long poems that explore wide-ranging experience, from working-class America to sex and love, poet Dorianne Laux discusses two long, discursive poems—by Deborah Digges and Larry Levis—examining how the personal “I” is used to disclose much and yet retain …

  Acclaimed for her own hybrid lyric-narrative long poems that explore wide-ranging experience, from working-class America to sex and love, poet Dorianne Laux discusses two long, discursive poems—by Deborah Digges and Larry Levis—examining how the personal “I” is used to disclose much and yet retain a sense of mystery.
  
  Admission: $10 regular admisison, $7 students and seniors, free for members.
  
  Poets House is an ADA accessible building.

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  Poets House

  • more at poets house

  10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282
  212-431-7920

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• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:00pm

  PEN OUT LOUD: NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH AND ISAAC FITZGERALD

  Join Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – whose bestselling short-story collection, Friday Black, Roxane Gay calls “captivating and essential” – to discuss writing in the hinterlands of satire, where absurdity reflects and challenges reality. A celebrated debut author, Adjei-Brenyah breaks new ground with …

  Join Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – whose bestselling short-story collection, Friday Black, Roxane Gay calls “captivating and essential” – to discuss writing in the hinterlands of satire, where absurdity reflects and challenges reality. A celebrated debut author, Adjei-Brenyah breaks new ground with Friday Black, creating an electrifying vision of the future of fiction, and will be joined in conversation by Isaac Fitzgerald, author and co-host of BuzzFeed News’ Twitter Morning Show, #AMtoDM.
  
  PEN Out Loud is a partnership between Strand Book Store & PEN America. Ticketed guests may receive emails and updates from both organizations.
  
  Admission Options: Buy a $15 ticket to attend this event. Please note that payment is required for all online event orders at the time of checkout. The event will be located in the Strand's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at our store at 828 Broadway at 12th Street.
  
  Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times best-selling author of Friday Black. Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honorees.
  
  Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. Formerly of The Rumpus and McSweeney’s and most recently the founding editor of BuzzFeed Books, Isaac is now the co-host of BuzzFeed News’ Twitter Morning Show, #AMtoDM. He also appears frequently on The Today Show to talk books, and is co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes) (winner of an IACP award). He is the author of three books forthcoming from Bloomsbury: a YA novel, a picture book, and an essay collection titled Dirtbag, Massachusetts.

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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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• 

  Thursday, February 21

  7:30pm

  Erin Hosier: Don't Let Me Down

  A fierce, vivid memoir about a father-daughter relationship steeped in God, rebellion, and the Beatles. Erin Hosier’s coming-of-age was full of contradiction. Born into the turbulent 1970s, she was raised in rural Ohio by lapsed hippies who traded 1960s rock ‘n’ roll for 1950s-era Christian hymns.…

  A fierce, vivid memoir about a father-daughter relationship steeped in God, rebellion, and the Beatles.
  
  Erin Hosier’s coming-of-age was full of contradiction. Born into the turbulent 1970s, she was raised in rural Ohio by lapsed hippies who traded 1960s rock ‘n’ roll for 1950s-era Christian hymns. Her mother’s newfound faith was rooted in a desire to manage her husband’s mood swings, which could alternately fill the house with music or with violence.
  
  All the while, Jack was larger than life to his adoring daughter. Full of conflict, their complex relationship set the tone for three decades of Erin’s relationships with men; the Beatles provided the soundtrack. Jack bonded with Erin over their iconic songs, even as they inspired her to question authority—both his and others’.
  
  Don’t Let Me Down is about a brave girl trying to navigate family secrets and tragedies and escape from small-town small-mindedness. It is a searing and often funny exploration of how women first see themselves through the lens of a parent’s love, and of the ties that bind us to our childhood heroes, who ultimately lead us to ask that most profound of questions: Is love really all you need?
  
  Erin Hosier is the coauthor of Patty Schemel's Hit So Hard and is a literary agent with Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner. She lives in Brooklyn.
  
  This event is free!

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  Books Are Magic

  • more at books are magic

  255 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
  718-246-2665

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• 

  Friday, February 22

  7:00pm

  112th: Diana Senechal presents Mind Over Memes

  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 …

  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.

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  Book Culture

  • more at book culture

  536 W 112th Street, New York, NY 10025
  212-865-1588

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• 

  Friday, February 22

  7:00pm

  112th: Diana Senechal presents Mind Over Memes

  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 …

  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.

  MORE ABOUT THIS EVENT

  Book Culture

  • more at book culture

  536 W 112th Street, New York, NY 10025
  212-865-1588

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• 

  Monday, February 25

  6:30pm

  Albertine Book Club on The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

  Join us for a lively conversation with Caroline Weber, author and professor, and Thibault Lacarrière, Cultural Attaché and Director, Books & Ideas Department at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Mark Treharne (Penguin).…

  Join us for a lively conversation with Caroline Weber, author and professor, and Thibault Lacarrière, Cultural Attaché and Director, Books & Ideas Department at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Mark Treharne (Penguin).
  
  After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.

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  Albertine

  • more at albertine

  972 5th Ave, New York, NY 10075
  
• 

  You Know You Want This:

  "Cat Person" and Other Stories

  by Kristen Roupenian

  Gallery/Scout Press

  $24.99 List Price

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

  Monday, February 25

  6:30pm

  You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories—Kristen Roupenian with Deborah Treisman

  The delights and horrors of womanhood. When “Cat Person” appeared in the New Yorker in December 2017 it quickly took Book Twitter by storm. The short story centers on a young woman's experience dating in a sleepy college town, but with decidedly skin-crawling twists. You Know You Want This is Kristen…

  The delights and horrors of womanhood.
  
  When “Cat Person” appeared in the New Yorker in December 2017 it quickly took Book Twitter by storm. The short story centers on a young woman's experience dating in a sleepy college town, but with decidedly skin-crawling twists. You Know You Want This is Kristen Roupenian's highly anticipated debut collection of stories that explore the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Spanning a range of topics and genres, it is darkly funny, delightfully cringeworthy, and compulsively readable.
  
  Kristen Roupenian graduated from Barnard and holds a PhD in African Literature from Harvard. She is a Zell Fellow in the University of Michigan MFA program, and she has received numerous awards for her work.
  
  Mid-Sentence presents a series of conversations with groundbreaking literary voices. Indie authors and cult favorites explore the intersections between literature and lived experience.

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  The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

  • more at this location

  5th Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018