Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Friday, March 1st at 7pm as we welcome Aurelie Vialette to discuss her book, Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (Perdue Studies in Romance Literatures #73).

What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of an uprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urban surge of the working-class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency, he or she devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking on himself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual hero invested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. Intellectual Philanthropy examines cultural practices used by philanthropists in modern Iberia. It explains the meaning and role of intellectual philanthropy by focusing on the devices and apparatuses philanthropists devised to realize their projects. Intellectual philanthropists considered themselves activists in that they aimed to impact social structures and deployed a rhetoric of the affect to convince the workers to join their philanthropic enterprise.

Philanthropy, in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily linked to money. Motivations could be moral or political; they could arise from a desire to enhance social status or to acquire influence. To explicitly designate this conceptualization of the philanthropic act, the author proposes its own name: intellectual philanthropy. Intellectual philanthropy is the use of philanthropic platforms by intellectuals to deploy cultural and educational structures in which workers could acquire a cultural capital constructed and organized by the philanthropists. Vialette argues that intellectual philanthropy appeared as a reaction to the feared political and cultural organization of the working class, rather than as a process of worker emancipation.

These philanthropic processes aimed at organizing the -workers emotionally and rationally into what she calls micro-societies. Philanthropists used the technique of seduction and expressed love to and for a targeted class. However, this seduction prevented real communication, and created a moral and symbolic indebtedness. This process was perverse in that, through its cultural and educational structures, philanthropy would give workers cultural capital that was not just emancipatory, but also a way to restrict their agency.

Layli Long Soldier - winner of the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her vital debut poetry collection WHEREAS - will be in conversation with award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, 2018 PEN/Jean Stein judge and author of Citizen: An American Lyric and forthcoming published play, The White Card. These two formidable poets will read from their work and then share more about their literary lineage, writing double consciousness, and their use of language to illuminate and excavate the past.

Presented in collaboration with the Creative Writing Program at The New School.

PEN Out Loud is a partnership between Strand Book Store & PEN America. Ticketed guests may receive emails and updates from both organizations.

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 New School's Tishman Auditorium at 63 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003.

Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. Most recently, she received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Come party like its 2009 with Andrea Bartz and Jason Diamond!

In 2009, in a loft complex in Bushwick, Edie is the shining star of a group of recent college graduates. Seductive, mercurial, and beguiling, Edie has the social world in her thrall, and she and her best friends treat New York like a playground. When she commits suicide at the end of a long, drunken night, no one can quite believe it. But an overwhelming mix of grief, shock, and long-standing resentment force each friend into their own corner, and, for years, that’s where they stay.

A decade later, Lindsay is content with her life and has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has a thriving career in magazines, lives in a cozy apartment, and has true adult friendships. But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that terrible, hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse perhaps, if she herself was involved. As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memory—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light.

Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and coauthor of the blog-turned-book Stuff Hipsters Hate (Ulysses Press, 2010), which The New Yorker called "depressingly astute." Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among other titles.

Jason Diamond founded the site Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Vol 1., launched Julius Singer Press and curates regular free literary events, including the popular 3-Minute Stories series. He has written for The New York Times, Outside, The Paris Review, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Eater, The Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Vice, Bookforum, Tablet, The Awl, Pitchfork, McSweeny's, NPR, and many other fine outlets. His memoir, Searching For John Hughes, was released in November 2016. His next book, The Sprawl, will be released by Coffee House Press in 2020. He lives in Brooklyn.

You go through life thinking there’s so much you need…. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.

An intimate whisper that packs an indelible punch, We Are Okay is Nina LaCour at her finest. This gorgeously crafted and achingly honest portrayal of grief will leave you urgent to reach across any distance to reconnect with the people you love.

Nina LaCour is the Michael L. Printz Award winning and bestselling author of We Are Okay, Hold Still, Everything Leads to You and The Disenchantments. She is also the co-author, with David Levithan, of You Know Me Well. A life-long lover of books and storytelling, she is on the faculty of Hamline University's MFAC program, runs The Slow Novel Lab, an online novel writing course, and hosts "Keeping a Notebook: a podcast on writing." She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and daughter. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @nina_lacour or at ninalacour.com

This event is free!

A discussion of the brilliant writers—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, to name a few—featured in Michelle Dean’s Sharp, a mix of biography, literary criticism and cultural history examining how they asserted themselves through their writing in the male-dominant and often hostile intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York.

A discussion of the brilliant writers—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, to name a few—featured in Michelle Dean’s Sharp, a mix of biography, literary criticism and cultural history examining how they asserted themselves through their writing in the male-dominant and often hostile intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York.

In the context of MoMA’s “Carte Blanche: Mariette Rissenbeek on German Women Cinematographers” film series (March 1–12) and in cooperation with German Films Service and Marketing GmbH, Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a conversation about "The Vision She Sees: A Conversation among Female Film Professionals" among Mariette Rissenbeek and cinematographers Daniela Knapp, Sophie Maintigneux, Jakobine Motz, Ulrike Ottinger, and Leah Striker, which will be moderated by Professor Fatima Naqvi.

About the film series at MoMA:

In 2020, Mariette Rissenbeek will become the first woman to lead the Berlin Film Festival (as executive director, with newly appointed artistic director Carlo Chatrian)—and, by extension, any of the “big three” European festivals (including Cannes and Venice). This milestone, which took 69 years to achieve, is cause for long-overdue celebration. Rissenbeek began her career in production, before becoming familiar to lovers of German cinema through her work as head of the film-promotion agency German Films. In celebration of her staunch support for women throughout the industry, MoMA has invited her to select 11 must-see films shot by German women cinematographers. “It was very exciting but at the same time quite challenging when MoMA offered me a Carte Blanche to present a number of recent German films,” Rissenbeek says. “For me personally, the female view on society and its topics has always played a crucial role. From its very beginnings, cinema tells its stories in pictures, and they are right at the center of cinematographic art. So it seemed not only natural but, rather, mandatory to work with exactly that point of view: pictures made by women, women behind the camera.”

About the speakers:

Daniela Knapp was born in Austria and is currently based in Berlin. Since graduating from the Film Academy Baden Württemberg, she has been working consistently with (her partner in crime) director Sven Taddicken (Emmas Glück and Gleissendes Glück, among other films). Her loyalty also has resulted in an ongoing creative partnerships with Julia von Heinz (Hannas Reise and Katharina Luther, among other films). For Katharina Luther Daniela Knapp received the „Bavarian Fernsehpreis for Best Cinematography“and for her work on Poll, directed by Chris Kraus, the prestigious „Deutscher Filmpreis for Best Cinematography.”

Sophie Maintigneux was born in Antony (France). After training as an assistant camera operator, she began working as a cinematographer in 1984. She participated as director of photography in over 70 fiction feature films and documentaries to date, having worked with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Klier, Jan Schütte, Rudolph Thome, Helga Reidemeister, Philipp Gröning, Marcel Gisler, Judith Kennel, Lilo Mangelsdorff, Erica von Moeller, Maria Teresa Camoglio, Michael Radford, Mareike Wegener, Ingo Haeb, Doris Metz, and Immogen Kimmel. In 1990, Sophie Maintigneux was presented with the German Film Critics' Association Award for Best Photography. Other awards and nominations include: Best Photography Award at the Dignes Film Festival (1989); Best Photography from Hessen Federal State (1990); the Max Ophüls Festival: Femina Award (2001); a Camerimage Golden Frog nomination (2001); Silver Award at the 22nd International Film Camera Festival in Vitola (2001); Best Photography at the 45th Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival (2002); the German Camera Award in the Documentary Category (2003 and 2009); plus a nomination for the same award in 2006 and another for the German Camera Award in the Feature Film category (2007). In 2017, she received the Cinematographer Award at The WIFTS Foundation International Visionary Awards. Her film credits include (among other things): Le Rayon vert (1984); Les quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (1985); King Lear (1987); Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind (1988); Rupture (1988); Winkelmanns Reisen (1990); Ostkreuz (1991); Liebe auf den ersten Blick (1991); Rosa Negra (1991), Das Tripas Coração (1992), Frankie, Johnny und die anderen (1992), Küss mich (1994); F. est un salaud (1997); L' amour, l' argent, l' amour (2000); Heidi M. (2000); Gotteszell (2000); Venus Boyz (2001); NeuFundLand (2001); Liebe und Verlangen (2002); Damen und Herren ab 65 (2002); Siehst du mich? (2004); Hannah (2006); Alter und Schönheit (2008); Fräulein Stines fährt um die Welt (2008); Die dünnen Mädchen (2008); Liebe Geschichte (2009); Michel Petrucciani (2010); Mark Lombardi—Kunst und Konspiration (2011); Rosie (2012); Sternstunde meines Leben (2013); Das Zimmermädchen Lynn (2014); CinéKino (2015); Der Primus. Franz Joseph Strauß (2015); Draußen (2016); Mario (2017); Widerstandsmomente (2017); and In Transition (2018). Sophie Maintigneux is currently a professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. She has taught at several film schools, chiefly at the DFFB (German Film and Television Academy Berlin). She is currently based in Berlin and holds dual German–French nationality.

Jakobine Motz was born in 1967 and grew up in the GDR. She studied cinematography at the University of Film and Television “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In 1994, she went to Ghana for one year as a DAAD scholarship holder. From 1996 until 1998, she attended the Advanced Film and Television Studies for Cinematography at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where she graduated with a Master Degree of Fine Arts. Afterwards, she returned to Germany and worked as lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Film and Television “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg unti 2003. Since then, she has been working as director of photography as well as editor, author for documentary and fiction film, and lecturer.

Fatima Naqvi (moderator) is professor of German and Film Studies at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2000. Professor Naqvi’s research interests include the intersection of architecture and literature; the theorization of interdisciplinarity; ecological films; Austrian authors and filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries; and affect studies. She has written books on the perception of victimhood in Western European culture between 1968 and the new millennium (The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood, Palgrave 2007); the films of Michael Haneke (Trügerische Vertrautheit, Synema 2010; The While Ribbon, Camden House, forthcoming 2019; Michael Haneke: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming 2019); and the intersection of architecture and educational discourse in the works of Thomas Bernhard (How We Learn Where We Live; Northwestern 2016). One current research project focuses on the topic of “fremdschämen”—the sense of shame for another—in contemporary media culture (special attention is devoted to the works of Ulrich Seidl, Erwin Wurm, and Elfriede Jelinek). A second project delves into the problem of generosity and environmental consciousness in recent documentary films. Professor Naqvi teaches courses on Vienna 1900; Robert Musil and His Age; the German novel of the post-1945 period; literature and architecture; modernism; and film (“From Haunted Screen to Hyperreality,” “Screening German Histories,” ”Our Threatened Planet: Documentary Films and Ecocriticism,” “Weimar Cinema.”)

Ulrike Ottinger has been a unique and provocative voice in German cinema since her debut in the early 1970s. Over the past 37 years, she has directed 26 films, including feature-length fiction films and experimental documentaries. She received numerous awards, including the Audience Jury Prize in Montréal, the Bundesfilmpreis, and the German Film Critics Award. Her films have been shown at multiple retrospectives, including the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ulrike Ottinger has been a photographer throughout her career presenting works at the Biennale di Venezia, the Documenta, and the Berlin Biennale, among others. She has also worked as a theatre director and ethnographer and she has published several books.

Mariette Rissenbeek studied German Language & Literature at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) and at the Free University of Berlin. After moving to Berlin she started her career in film at the independent distribution company Tobis Filmkunst. Being in charge of acquisitions and PR coordination, she was responsible for, among others, La Reine Margot by Patrice Chereau; The Fabulous Baker Boys by Steve Kloves; Thelma and Louise by Ridley Scott; L’Amant by Jean-Jacques Annaud; La Petite Vouleuse by Claude Miller; and Belle Epoque by Fernando Trueba. Tobis Filmkunst was co-producer on Wim Wenders’ award-winning film Faraway, So Close! and Mariette Rissenbeek was in charge of the international sales of the film. In 1995, she started to work as a producer at the independent production company Regina Ziegler Filmproduktion in Berlin. She was responsible for the production of theatrical projects like The Waiting Room by Jos Stelling; Elephants Never Forget by Detlev Buck; Samolico by Mika Kaurismäki; and Solo für Klarinette by Nico Hofmann. In addition, she produced a number of films for the public broadcaster ZDF including the miniseries Sturmzeit by Bernd Böhlich and Beckmann & Markowski by Kai Wessel, as well as the romantic comedy Champagner und Kamillentee by Marijan Vajda. Mariette Rissenbeek established her own production company in 1998 in Hamburg and produced the feature film Highway Society by Mika Kaurismäki, which starred the well-known German actors Kai Wiesinger and Marie Zielke. In 2000, she moved to Munich and produced a television film Aus Liebe zu Tom by Juliane Hohl for the commercial broadcaster SAT1, working at Hofmann & Voges Entertainment, Munich. Mariette Rissenbeek was responsible for festival promotion and public relations at German Films Service + Marketing GmbH when she started working there in 2003. Since 2011, she is the Managing Director of German Films, the national institution in charge of the international promotion of German cinema.

Leah Striker had a background in mathematics, punkrock music, and photography before she pursued an MfA at the American Film Institute (AFI) conservatory in Los Angeles. Since graduating in 2005, she has shot a wide range of feature films for both cinema and television in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of her collaborations for feature films with European directors include Stiller Sommer (director: Nana Neul); Wolfskinder and Krieg (director: Rick Ostermann), both of which opened at the Venice Film festival; and South African apartheid-era Shepherds and Butchers (director: Oliver Schmitz) which premiered at the Berlinale in 2016.

Attendance information:

Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!

"The Vision She Sees: A Conversation among Female Film Professionals" is a DAAD-sponsored event.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking "nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, and] nice people'." This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade-ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. Led by Wade and Wade's partner Michael Stoneman, Foucault experimented with psychotropic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth. Foucault in California is Wade's firsthand account of that long weekend. Felicitous and often humorous prose vaults readers headlong into the erudite and subversive circles of the Claremont intelligentsia: parties in Wade's bungalow, intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest (whose denizens call Foucault "Country Joe"); and, of course, the fabled synesthetic acid trip in Death Valley, set to the strains of Bach and Stockhausen. Part search for higher consciousness, part bacchanal, this book chronicles a young man's burgeoning friendship with one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

Simeon Wade (1940-2017) In all parts of his multi-dimensional life in Southern California, teaching at Claremont Graduate School, Otis College of Art and Design, and Samra Acupuncture School and practicing as a psychiatric nurse at the Ventura County Psychiatric Ward, Simeon stressed the teachings and practices of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, even living his life in a Deleuzian revolutionary framework.

In the tradition of Shel Silverstein, these poems bring a fresh new twist to the classic dilemmas of childhood as well as a perceptive eye to the foibles of modern family life. Full of clever wordplay and bright visual gags—and toilet humor to spare—these twenty-three rhyming poems make for an ideal read-aloud experience.

Taking on the subjects of a bullying baseball coach and annoying little brothers with equally sly humor, renowned lyricist Rhett Miller's clever verses will have the whole family cackling.

Join us as Rhett shares his book!

Rhett Miller is a singer-songwriter known for fronting the popular rock band Old 97's. Between projects with the Old 97's Miller has released six solo albums, most recently 2018's The Messenger. In addition to his songwriting, Miller has branched out to write fiction and nonfiction. He has authored short stories, essays and articles that have been featured in Rolling Stone, Bookforum, Sports Illustrated, McSweeney's, The Atlantic and Salon. When not on tour, Miller resides in New Paltz, New York with his wife and two children.

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.

Known as the twice-born—first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation—the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. In a globalized world, to be modern is to renounce India—and yet the tide of nationalism is rising, heralded by cries of “Victory to Mother India!” and an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence.

From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.

Aatish Taseer was born in 1980. He is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands and the acclaimed novels: The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize; The Temple-Goers, which was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award; and Noon. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a contributing writer for The International New York Times and lives in New Delhi and New York.

Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, India and moved to the US for college. His first novel, Family Planning (2008), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. It was published in nine countries. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times. Karan's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker online, The New Republic and other venues. From 2018-2019 he will be a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

This event is free!

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Tuesday, March 5th at 7pm for an evening of poetry with Charlie Bondus, Rachel Hadas, and Gardner McFall on their new collections, Divining Bones (Bondus), Poems for Camilla (Hadas), Iphigenia Plays (Hadas) and On The Line (McFall).

Divining Bones:

Boys become crones; baked bread becomes a baby; electricity turns out to be Jesus; a first grade class stages Oedipus Rex. At the center of it all stands Baba Yaga, the child-eating forest witch and earth goddess of Russian folklore. Under her tutelage,

Charlie Bondhus uses the occult and the magical to explore the fluidity of age, gender, and self-perception in this radical and playful book.

Poems for Camilla

Rachel Hadas's remarkable new book treats the Aeneid as a commentary on our times. Just as Virgil wrote against the backdrop of the self-conflicted, imperial turbulence of Rome, Hadas examines our republic as it veers off into possibly irreversible disorder. The good news, as Hadas reminds us with her characteristic humanity and intelligence, is that individuals and societies often survive crises rather than succumbing to them. Against the jolts and jars of history, she asserts life's quiet miracles, including, in her case, the generational continuity extending from her revered father to the beloved grandchild to whom this book is dedicated.

Iphigenia Plays:

At the heart of Iphigenia’s enduring story are an ambitious, opportunistic, and indecisive leader and the daughter whose life he is willing to sacrifice. In The Iphigenia Plays, poet Rachel Hadas offers a new generation of readers a graceful, clear, and powerful translation of Euripides’s two spellbinding (and very different) plays drawn from this legend: Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians.

Even for readers unfamiliar with Greek mythology or drama, these plays are suspenseful, poignant, and haunting. Euripides’s ability to evoke emotion and raise difficult questions has long engaged viewers and readers alike. Taken together, the two plays illuminate timeless human conflicts, showcasing individuals and families ensnared by the fury of war, of politics, of religion, and of ambition. Euripidean characters are always second-guessing themselves; now new readers can also ponder their dilemmas.

Poet and translator Rachel Hadas highlights the lyricism, emotion, and sheer humanity of Euripides’s plays. Mordant humor is here; so are heartbreak and tenderness. Hadas offers an Iphigenia story that resonates with our own troubled times and demonstrates anew the genius of one of the world’s supreme dramatists.

On The Lines:

The poems in Gardner McFall’s poignant, stirring collection “On the Line” fit together like links in a bracelet. Love and light irradiate from the story of her pilot father lost at war and his daughter’s becoming herself in his absence, while keeping all the doors of her life open, though she knows the “death-plane” will never return out of the foggy night. Anger, longing, regret, & grief are part of this translucent self-portrait, but also the lucky knowledge that nothing is to be gained from lingering in “history’s dark rooms.” Out of the blood and valor of war, with its infinite losses, Gardner McFall has created a polished, durable sequence of poems lit with piercing glances into the American life. What a touching and wonderful little book.

–Henri Cole

On the Line is a remarkable collection of poems whose loss is both universal and deeply personal. Gardner McFall, the daughter of an American pilot who went missing in the Vietnam war, portrays her own daily experience as wife and mother while all the while lamenting her father’s death: “I have kept / all the doors open in my life / so that he could walk in.” Ironically, she remembers how he dutifully accepted his command, yet privately confessed, “We can’t win,” a bitter truth the world was to discover about the war. Decades later, trying to make sense of it all, the poet retraces her father’s path by traveling to Vietnam. Deepening the quest, she delves into history, myth, and the truth that can be found in the poet’s imagery. Her search is never-ending, and it is our search. Her grief is ours.

–Grace Schulman

Join Harper's Magazine and Book Culture on Columbus on Tuesday, March 5th at 7pm, as we welcome Tom Hansell for a discussion of his book, They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France.

“Highly detailed and fast-paced, Charles Glass’s They Fought Alone is a must-read for those whose passion is the Resistance literature of World War II.” —Alan Furst, author of A Hero of France

From the bestselling author of Americans in Paris and The Deserters, the astounding story of Britain's Special Operations Executive, one of World War II's most important secret fighting forces

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze." The agents infiltrated Nazi-occupied territory, parachuting behind enemy lines and hiding in plain sight, quietly but forcefully recruiting, training, and arming local French résistants to attack the German war machine. SOE would not only change the course of the war, but the nature of combat itself. Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

While both brothers were sent across the channel to organize against the Germans, their fates in war could hardly have been more different. Captain George Starr commanded networks of résistants in southwest France, cutting German communications, destroying weapons factories, and delaying the arrival of Nazi troops to Normandy by seventeen days after D-Day. Younger brother Lieutenant John Starr laid groundwork for resistance in the Burgundy countryside until he was betrayed, captured, tortured, and imprisoned by the Nazis in France and sent to a series of concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Feats of boldness and bravado were many, but appalling scandals, including George's supposed torture and execution of Nazis prisoners, and John's alleged collaboration with his German captors, overshadowed them all. At the war's end, Britain, France, and the United States awarded both brothers medals for heroism, and George would become one of only three among thousands of SOE operatives to achieve the rank of colonel. Yet, their battle honors did little to allay postwar allegations against them, and when they returned to England, their government accused both brothers of heinous war crimes.

Here, for the first time, is the story of one of the great clandestine organizations of World War II, and of two heroic brothers whose ordeals during and after the war challenged the accepted myths of Britain's wartime resistance in occupied France. Written with complete and unrivaled access to only recently declassified documents from Britain's SOE files, French archives, family letters, diaries, and court records, along with interviews from surviving wartime Resistance fighters, They Fought Alone is a real-life thriller. Renowned journalist and war correspondent Charles Glass exposes a dramatic tale of spies, sabotage, and the daring men and women who risked everything to change the course of World War II.

It’s the perfect idea for a romantic week together: traveling across America by train. But then Hugo’s girlfriend dumps him. Her parting gift: the tickets for their long-planned last-hurrah-before-uni trip. Only, it’s been booked under her name. Nontransferable, no exceptions.

Mae is still reeling from being rejected from USC’s film school. When she stumbles across Hugo’s ad for a replacement Margaret Campbell (her full name!), she’s certain it’s exactly the adventure she needs to shake off her disappointment and jump-start her next film.

A cross-country train trip with a complete stranger might not seem like the best idea. But to Mae and Hugo, both eager to escape their regular lives, it makes perfect sense. What starts as a convenient arrangement soon turns into something more. But when life outside the train catches up to them, can they find a way to keep their feelings for each other from getting derailed?

Jennifer E. Smith is the author of eight novels for young adults, including The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and her work has been translated into thirty-three languages. She lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter at @JenESmith or visit her at jenniferesmith.com.

Jenny Han is the New York Times bestselling author of Shug, The Summer I Turned Pretty series, co-author of the Burn for Burn series, and most recently, the To All the Boys I've Loved Before trilogy. A former children’s bookseller, she earned her MFA in creative writing at the New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her at DearJennyHan.com.

Goodreads Choice Award-winning poet and USA TODAY bestselling author Amanda Lovelace presents the mermaid’s voice returns in this one — the third and final installment in her “women are some kind of magic” series, featuring a foreword from Lang Leav and 13 guest poems from leading voices in poetry such as Nikita Gill, KY Robinson, and Orion Carloto.

The mermaid is known for her siren song, luring bedroom-eyed sailors to their demise. However, beneath these misguided myths are tales of escapism and healing, which Lovelace weaves throughout this empowering collection of poetry, taking you on a journey from the sea to the stars. They tried to silence her once and for all, but the mermaid’s voice returns in this one.

Joining Amanda are a group of writers who will be reading some of their work, featuring:

Trista Mateer

Caitlyn Siehl

Clementine von Radics

Gretchen Gomez

Sophia Elaine Hanson

Alison Malee

Join us on the second floor as Amanda shares her latest work!

Growing up a word-devourer & avid fairytale lover, it was only natural that Amanda Lovelace began writing books of her own. When she isn’t reading or writing, she can be found waiting for pumpkin spice coffee to come back into season and binge-watching Gilmore girls (before you ask: Team Jess all the way). The lifelong poetess and storyteller currently lives in New Jersey with her spouse, their bunnycat, and a combined book collection so large it will soon need its own home. She has her B.A. in English literature with a minor in sociology. Winner of two Goodreads choice awards for best poetry and a USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestseller.

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Wednesday, March 6th at 7pm as we welcome Mary Gordon to discuss her latest book, On Thomas Merton. Author Katheen Hill will be joining Mary in conversation.

From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings.

“If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.”

So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton “writer to writer,” Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as “a man of dialogue,” and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as external—an unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer.

Rich with excerpts from Merton’s own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who “lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”

New Yorker cartoonist and NYT bestselling author Roz Chast, native Brooklynite-turned-suburban commuter deemed the quintessential New Yorker, has always been intensely alive to the glorious spectacle that is Manhattan—the daily clash of sidewalk racers and dawdlers, the fascinating range of dress codes, and the priceless, nutty outbursts of souls from all walks of life.

For Chast, adjusting to life outside the city was surreal (you can own trees!? you have to drive!?), but she recognized that the reverse was true for her kids. On trips into town, they would marvel at the strange visual world of Manhattan—its blackened sidewalk gum wads, "those West Side Story—things" (fire escapes)—its crazily honeycombed systems and grids.

Told through Chast's singularly zany, laugh-out-loud, touching, and true cartoons, Going into Town is part New York stories (the "overheard and overseen" of the island borough), part personal and practical guide to walking, talking, renting, and venting—an irresistible, one-of-a-kind love letter to the city.

Join us as Roz Chast shares and signs her book!

The award-winning author launches the paperback of her New York Times bestselling novel — a masterpiece of storytelling which tells the story of a couple ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined.

“An exquisite, timely, and powerful novel that feels both urgent and indispensable." —Edwidge Danticat

“Haunting . . . Beautifully written.” —The New York Times Book Review

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. Evenings include an actor performing an excerpt, an interview, a conversation with the audience, and a book signing on stage following the event.

Actors subject to change.

Group discounts are available for groups of fifteen people or more - please contact the Box Office

A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie’s path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning.

With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style, Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are capable of both inventing and discovering our true families and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling.

Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award; and the New Yorker named him one of its "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch. He is the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Colm Tóibín is the author of nine novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections, and Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, a look at three nineteenth-century Irish authors. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

Join Harper's Magazine and Book Culture on Columbus on Thursday, March 7th at 7pm, as we welcome Emily Bernard and Mychal Denzel Smith for a discussion of the new book, Black is the Body.

This event is ticketed. Tickets are $25 and include a copy of Black is the Body and a one-year subscription to Harper’s Magazine.

An extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race—in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way—in twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America's New England today. From the acclaimed editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten ("A major contribution," Henry Louis Gates; "Magnificent," Washington Post).

"I am black—and brown, too," writes Emily Bernard. "Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell."

And the storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's storytelling, of getting to the truth, begins with a stabbing in a New England college town. Bernard writes how, when she was a graduate student at Yale, she walked into a coffee shop and, along with six other people, was randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife ("I remember making the decision not to let the oddness of this stranger bother me"). "I was not stabbed because I was black," she writes (the attacker was white), "but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations. There was no connection between us, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness."

Bernard explores how that bizarre act of violence set her free and unleashed the storyteller in her ("The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental to black American experience").

She writes in Black Is the Body how each of the essays goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt, how each is anchored in a mystery, and how each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book."

And what most interests Bernard is looking at "blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness in fear and hope, in anguish and love."

It’s hard times out there. In what seems like a never-ending cycle of frustrating news and difficult world events, most of us our constantly searching for any outlet possible for self-care and soothing. More than ever, we need the newest book by Insta-poet sensation Tyler Knott Gregson.

In Miracle in the Mundane: Poems, Prompts, and Inspiration to Unlock Your Creativity and Unfiltered Joy, Tyler gives his fans what they need most right now — he pulls back the curtain on how to unlock creativity, lead a more mindful and compassionate life, and shows us how he finds the beauty in the mundane moments in our lives.

As with Tyler’s previous books, Miracle in the Mundane showcases his inspiring poems in his signature typewriter style, while also giving readers insights into how to uncover creativity, find inspiration, and live a life that is "more." Each section includes a challenge (write, draw, photograph, etc.) designed to push readers out of their comfort zones and see the world differently, with prompts like:

“Take an ache, make it sing”: Write a poem, be it a haiku or free verse, about something or someone you’re passionate about and yearning for.

“Clean your slate”: Learn for yourself what’s worth keeping in your life, what is worth adding to, and what needs to go away.

“Be a conduit, not a conductor”: Stop fighting your thoughts and let them work for you instead.

“Break it up, build it down”: Sift through your life and see which doors can be safely closed, leading to the triumphant opening of others.

Featuring exercises on mindfulness and self-expression, as well as one of his signature poems for every prompt, Miracle in the Mundane is a primer to broaden your heart and mind to see the miracles hidden all around you.

Join us as Tyler reads from his new collection, followed by a book signing.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree” (“Mugumo” in this collection), written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.

Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States— Ngugi’s collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society; big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngugi’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure.

Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories is a major literary event that celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.

Join us on the second floor art department as Ngugi celebrates his new collection!

Jack Sheppard and Bess Edgeworth were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found.

Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying expose of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Dated 1724, the book depicts an London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with London’s newly established police force, queer subcultures thrive, and ominous threats of the plague abound. Jack—a transgender carpenter’s apprentice—has fled his master’s house to become a legendary prison break artist, and Bess has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind.

Is Confessions of the Fox an authentic autobiography, or a hoax? Dr. Voth obsessively annotates the manuscript, desperate to find the answer. As he is drawn deeper into Jack and Bess’s tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all.

Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and recognized by The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature and the Feminist Press as one of the Best Books of 2018. Jordy is a professor of 18th-Century Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies + Critical Theory at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a staff writer at Slate, where she wrote about language, culture, and politics, and hosted the Slate Audio Book Club podcast. She is the winner of a 2018 American Society of Magazine Editors award for journalists younger than thirty.

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight.

As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.

With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three non-fiction works, the most recent of which is the forthcoming memoir (from Henry Holt, in August 2019), The Long Accomplishment. He teaches at Brown University.

Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax

The acclaimed Jaime Hernandez, comics artist behind the long-running Love and Rockets series, will be here in the Rare Book Room to discuss Is This How You See Me?, his latest graphic novel, with Assistant Books Editor at Oprah Magazine Michelle Hart!

In Is This How You See Me?, Maggie and Hopey get the band back together — literally. Now middle-aged, they leave their significant others at home and take a weekend road trip to reluctantly attend a punk rock reunion in their old neighborhood. The present is masterfully threaded with a flashback set in 1979, during the very formative stages in Maggie and Hopey’s lifelong friendship, as the perceived invincibility of youth is expertly juxtaposed against all of the love, heartbreak, and self-awareness that comes with lives actually lived. The result is no sentimental victory lap, however — this is one of the great writers of literary fiction at the peak of his powers, continuing to scale new heights as an artist.

Hernandez’s acclaimed ongoing comics series Love and Rockets has entertained readers for over 35 years, and his beloved characters — Maggie, Hopey, Ray, Doyle, Daffy, Mike Tran, and so many others — have become fully realized literary creations. Is This How You See Me? collects Hernandez’s latest interconnected vignettes, serialized over the past four years in Love and Rockets, into a long-form masterpiece for the first time.

Join us at Book Culture on 112th Street on Monday, March 11th at 7pm for a book event that’s as much rock show than lecture with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill English Professor, writer, and musician Florence Dore and her husband, musician Will Rigby, along with rock novelist Rick Moody. Celebrate the release of Dore’s Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll with remarks on rock and literature by Dore and Moody, and a performance by Will Rigby and the Novel Sounds—featuring Peter Holsapple . Various singers will contribute, including Florence and Rick.

The 1950s witnessed both the birth of both rock and roll and the creation of Southern literature as we know it. Around the time that Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley put their electric spin on Southern vernacular ballads, a canonical group of white American authors native to rock's birthplace began to write fiction about the electrification of those ballads, translating into literary form key cultural changes that gave rise to the infectious music coming out of their region. In Novel Sounds, Florence Dore tells the story of how these forms of expression became intertwined and shows how Southern writers turned to rock music and its technologies—tape, radio, vinyl—to develop the "rock novel."

Dore considers the work of Southern writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and William Styron alongside the music of Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, and Bob Dylan to uncover deep historical links between rock and Southern literature. Along with rock pioneers, Southern authors drew from blues, country, jazz, and other forms to create a new brand of realism that redefined the Southern vernacular as global, electric, and notably white. Resurrecting this Southern literary tradition at the birth of rock, Dore clarifies the surprising but unmistakable influence of rock and roll on the American novel. Along the way, she explains how literature came to resemble rock and roll, an anti-institutional art form if there ever was one, at the very moment academics claimed literature for the institution.

Florence Dore is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll (Columbia University Press 2018), and she released her album Perfect City (Slewfoot Records) in 2001. Dore has published writing on the blues, the rock novel, and her first book on literary censorship came out on Stanford University Press in 2001. She is a member of the board of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at University of Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Archive and has organized two major public conferences on rock and literature: at the National Humanities Center and Carolina Performing Arts in 2016-2017; and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. She worked with Eric Ambel (Joan Jett, The Del-Lords, Steve Earle) and Dennis Diken (The Smithereens) to make Perfect City, and has toured with many notable artists including Dan Baird (Georgia Satellites), Ken Coomer (Wilco), and Dave Jacques (John Prine). Her song Christmas was recorded by the Posies for the 1996 Geffen Records release Just Say Noel.

Rick Moody is the author of six novels, including, THE ICE STORM and HOTELS OF NORTH AMERICA; three collections of stories; and three works of non-fiction, including ON CELESTIAL MUSIC, and the forthcoming memoir THE LONG ACCOMPLISHMENT. He writes regularly on music at The Rumpus and elsewhere, and has released six albums, three with The Wingdale Community Singers, and, most recently, a jazz/noise album entitled The Unspeakable Practices. He teaches at Brown University.

Will Rigby is a founding member of The dBs, formed with Peter Holsapple, Chris Stamey, and Gene Holder in the late 1970s. The dB’s all hailed from Winston-Salem although they were a New York band, and are remembered as highly influential purveyors of intelligent melodic rock. He has recorded and toured with many artists, most notably with Steve Earle and the Dukes from 1999 to 2015, touring extensively and playing on five albums, one of which won a Grammy Award. Rigby wrote and performed lead vocals on the song Write Back, on The dB’s 2012 reunion album Falling Off the Sky (Bar/None). He has released two solo albums and two singles. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo had this to say of Wills solo act: "I think Georgia and I combined have a pretty good claim on being Will Rigbys biggest fan. . . . He’s just the greatest. We put out his first solo album, Sidekick Phenomenon on Egon, which is a great record, but it’s not as great as Paradoxaholic, his second record. I could listen to that record every day, and it was nice to be reminded of his greatness on that day”

Join us at Book Culture on 112th Street on Monday, March 11th at 7pm for a book event that’s as much rock show than lecture with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill English Professor, writer, and musician Florence Dore and her husband, musician Will Rigby, along with rock novelist Rick Moody. Celebrate the release of Dore’s Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll with remarks on rock and literature by Dore and Moody, and a performance by Will Rigby and the Novel Sounds—featuring Peter Holsapple . Various singers will contribute, including Florence and Rick.

The 1950s witnessed both the birth of both rock and roll and the creation of Southern literature as we know it. Around the time that Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley put their electric spin on Southern vernacular ballads, a canonical group of white American authors native to rock's birthplace began to write fiction about the electrification of those ballads, translating into literary form key cultural changes that gave rise to the infectious music coming out of their region. In Novel Sounds, Florence Dore tells the story of how these forms of expression became intertwined and shows how Southern writers turned to rock music and its technologies—tape, radio, vinyl—to develop the "rock novel."

Dore considers the work of Southern writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and William Styron alongside the music of Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, and Bob Dylan to uncover deep historical links between rock and Southern literature. Along with rock pioneers, Southern authors drew from blues, country, jazz, and other forms to create a new brand of realism that redefined the Southern vernacular as global, electric, and notably white. Resurrecting this Southern literary tradition at the birth of rock, Dore clarifies the surprising but unmistakable influence of rock and roll on the American novel. Along the way, she explains how literature came to resemble rock and roll, an anti-institutional art form if there ever was one, at the very moment academics claimed literature for the institution.

About the Book

Darius James’s scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, truly hilarious, and deeply scary NEGROPHOBIA, first published in 1992 and now back in print, is a wild-eyed reckoning with the mutating insanity of American racism. A screenplay for the mind, a performance on the page, a work of poetry, a mad mix of genres and styles, a novel in the tradition of William S. Burroughs and Ishmael Reed that is like no other novel, NEGROPHOBIA begins with the blonde bombshell Bubbles Brazil succumbing to a voodoo spell and entering the inner darkness of her own shiny being. Here crackheads parade in the guise of Muppets, Muslims beat conga drums, Negroes have numbers for names, and H. Rap Remus demands the total and instantaneous extermination of the white race through spontaneous combustion. By the end of it all, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles herself is strangely transformed.

The Unterberg Poetry Center has looked after the voices of literature since 1939, hosting in its reading series—and recording as part of its vast audio archive—just about every major poet of the last eight decades. Billy Collins marks the Poetry Center’s anniversary by emceeing an evening of recorded readings that he has personally selected from across the Center’s illustrious history.

Join us at Book Culture on Columbus as Suzannah Lessard discusses her new book, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape,on Tuesday, March 12th at 7pm!

This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place, and reimagining our American landscape

Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald's work and others of Rebecca Solnit's, but it is Lessard's singular talent to combine this profound book-length mosaic—a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention.

This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.

SUZANNAH LESSARD is the bestselling author of The Architect of Desire, a New York Times Notable Book. A founding editor of The Washington Monthly and a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years, she is a recipient of the Whiting and Lukas Awards, and has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and George Washington University.

Corvus has always had an overactive imagination. Growing up, she develops a unique coping mechanism: she can imagine herself out of any situation, no matter how terrible. To get through each day, Corvus escapes into scenes from fantasy novels, pop songs, and action/adventure movies, and survives by turning the everyday into just another role to play in the movie of her life.

After a tragic loss, Corvus finds a sadness so great she cannot imagine it away. Instead, she finds Tim, a pornographer with unconventional methods, who offers her a new way to escape into movies. But when a sinister plot of greed and betrayal is revealed, Corvus must fight to reclaim her independence, and discovers she is stronger than even she could have imagined.

Written in Richard Chiem’s singular style, this debut novel is equal parts sledgehammer and sweet song, a neon, pulsing portrait of grief. King of Joy tells the triumphant, electrifying story of one woman’s quest for survival against all odds, and serves as a reminder that resilience can be found even in our most hopeless moments.

Richard Chiem is the author of ​You Private Person, which was named one of Publishers Weekly​’s 10 Essential Books of the American West. His work has been published in ​City Arts, ​Vol. 1 Brooklyn​, ​Fanzine​, ​3:AM Magazine​, and ​Moss​, among many other venues. He has taught at Hugo House and at the University of Washington Bothell. He lives in Seattle.

Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, Lucy Corin, and Deb Olin Unferth read at a book party to celebrate the release of Renee Gladman's Morelia. Hosted by Solid Objects.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they emerge in the terrain between drawing and writing. She is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as Prose Architectures, her first monograph of drawings. One Long Black Sentence, a series of white-ink architectures on black paper, and indexed by the poet Fred Moten, is forthcoming in 2019. She lives and makes work in New England.

Amina Cain is the author, most recently, of the short story collection Creature, and a novel, Indelicacy, which will be published next winter by FSG. Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB.

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament as well as a novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Writings have appeared in places like American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House Magazine, and the most recent New American Stories anthology from Vintage. The Swank Hotel, her second novel, is forthcoming from Graywolf. She lives part of the year in Northern California and part of the year in Asheville, NC.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collections Minor Robberies and Wait Till You See Me Dance; and the novel Vacation, winner of the Cabell First Novel Award. Her work appears in Harper’s, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere.

Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, Lucy Corin, and Deb Olin Unferth read at a book party to celebrate the release of Renee Gladman's Morelia. Hosted by Solid Objects.

Renee Gladman is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as Prose Architectures, her first monograph of drawings. One Long Black Sentence, a series of white-ink architectures on black paper, and indexed by the poet Fred Moten, is forthcoming in 2019. She lives and makes work in New England.

Tuesday March 12 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again.

When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she’s envisioning - one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence - within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become.

Darkly hilarious and devastating, The New Me is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of American consumer culture.

Halle Butler is the author of Jillian. She has been named a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.

This event is free!

As the phoenix emerges from its ashes, Zebian emerges ablaze in these pages, not only as a survivor of abuse, but as a teacher and healer for all those who have struggled to understand, reclaim, and rise above a history of pain. The book is divided into six chapters, and six stages of healing: Falling, Burning to Ashes, Sparks of Phoenix, Rising, Soaring, and finally, A New Chapter, which demonstrates a healthy response to new love as the result of authentic healing. With her characteristic vulnerability, courage, and softness, Zebian seeks to empower those who have been made to feel ashamed, silenced, or afraid; she urges them, through gentle advice and personal revelation, to raise their voices, rise up, and soar.

Join us as Najwa shares her work.

Najwa Zebian is a Lebanese-Canadian author, speaker, and educator. Her passion for language was evident from a young age, as she delved into Arabic poetry and novels. The search for a home—what Najwa describes as a place where the soul and heart feel at peace—was central to her early years. When she arrived in Canada at the age of sixteen, she felt unstable and adrift in an unfamiliar place. Nevertheless, she completed her education, and went on to become a teacher as well as a doctoral candidate in educational leadership. Her first students, a group of young refugees, led her back to her original passion: writing. She began to heal her sixteen-year-old self by writing to heal her students. Since self-publishing her first collection of poetry and prose in 2016, Najwa has become an inspiration to millions of people worldwide. Drawing on her own experiences of displacement, discrimination, and abuse, Najwa uses her words to encourage others to build a home within themselves; to live, love, and create fearlessly.

You never know what might happen at a Surprising Night of Shorts. Some of our previous surprising nights have included evenings with Alice Munro, Chuck Palahniuk, and John Irving, and the art of imbibing inspired by Everyman’s Shaken & Stirred collection.

Selected Shorts is produced by Symphony Space and broadcast on more than 150 stations around the country. The Selected Shorts podcast consistently ranks as one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes. The series began in 1985 and enjoys sold-out performances to this day. Selected Shorts was conceived with a simple premise: take great stories by well-known and emerging writers and have them performed by terrific actors of stage and screen. Featuring stories around a lively theme, the favorite works of a guest author, or a special collaboration, each Selected Shorts event is a unique night of literature in performance.

Actors subject to change.

Join us at Book Culture on Columbus as Lisa See discusses her new novel, The Island of Sea Women,on Thursday, March 14th at 7pm!

A new novel from Lisa See, the New York Times bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, about female friendship and family secrets on a small Korean island.

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger.

Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook’s differences are impossible to ignore. The Island of Sea Women is an epoch set over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War and its aftermath, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers. Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and she will forever be marked by this association. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that after surviving hundreds of dives and developing the closest of bonds, forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point.

This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children. A classic Lisa See story—one of women’s friendships and the larger forces that shape them—The Island of Sea Womenintroduces readers to the fierce and unforgettable female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon uncovers the life and work of Milicent Patrick – one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman to create one of Hollywood’s classic movie monsters.

As a young woman working in the horror film industry, Mallory O’Meara was thrilled to discover that one of her favorite movies, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, featured a monster designed by a woman, Milicent Patrick. But for someone who should have been hailed as a pioneer in the genre there was little information available. For, as O’Meara soon discovered, Patrick’s contribution had been claimed by a jealous male colleague, her career had been cut short and she soon after had disappeared from film history. No one even knew if she was still alive.

O’Meara set out to right the wrong, and in the process discovered the full, fascinating story of an ambitious, artistic woman ahead of her time. Patrick’s contribution to special effects proved to be just the latest chapter in a remarkable, unconventional life, from her youth growing up in the shadow of Hearst Castle, to her career as one of Disney’s first female animators. And at last, O’Meara discovered what really had happened to Patrick after The Creature’s success, and where she went.

Mallory O’Meara is an author, screenwriter and genre film producer. Every week, she co-hosts the literary podcast Reading Glasses. Whether it's for the screen or the page, Mallory seeks creative projects imbued with the weird; horror and monsters are her passion. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their collection of books and cats. The Lady from the Black Lagoon is her first book. For more about Mallory, please visit, www.malloryomeara.com, follow her on Twitter and connect on Instagram, @malloryomeara.

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor. Her novels include The Mere Wife, Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and she has also written a memoir, The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of The Mere Wife was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn.

This event is free!

Join us for the launch of MARS: Stories by Asja Bakić and translated by Jennifer Zoble

Mars showcases a series of unique and twisted universes, where every character is tasked with making sense of their strange reality. One woman will be freed from purgatory once she writes the perfect book; another abides in a world devoid of physical contact. With wry prose and skewed humor, an emerging feminist writer explores twenty-first century promises of knowledge, freedom, and power.

This is a debut short comics collection, featuring pastel-hued, emoji-like characters dealing with twenty-first century (and beyond!) problems.

In a digitally drawn, three-dimensional universe, characters grapple with interior decorating woes, amorous microbiology, and where to find the absolute most aspirational succulents. Readers will fall in love with “America’s favorite mug,” Cuppy; hear the familial bickering of sentient purple slime molds; and encounter Sarah Something and her musings about gaming culture and conceptual art.

Julian Glander is a 3D animator, designer, and illustrator. Mostly self-taught, his work has been featured on Disney, MTV, Adult Swim, and The New York Times. He received the Art Directors Club (ADC) "Young Guns" Award in 2015. In 2016, his animated short film debuted at South by Southwest and GLAS Animation Festival. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Engadget and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy.

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Monday, March 18th at 7pm as we welcome Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian to discuss their latest book, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconciousness. Alfredo Carrasquillo, a Lacanian psychoanalyst from San Juan, Puerto Rico, will be joining Patricia and Christopher in converstaion.

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy.

As opposed to most Latin American countries, where psychoanalysis is seen as a practice tied to the promotion of social justice, in the United States psychoanalysis has been viewed as reserved for the well-to-do, assuming that poor people lack the "sophistication" that psychoanalysis requires, thus heeding invisible but no less rigid class boundaries. Challenging such discrimination, the authors testify to the efficacy of psychoanalysis in the barrios, upending the unfounded widespread belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday survival that they only benefit from symptom-focused interventions. Sharing vivid vignettes of psychoanalytic treatments, this collection sheds light on the psychological complexities of life in the barrio that is often marked by poverty, migration, marginalization, and barriers of language, class, and race.

This interdisciplinary collection features essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians. It represents a unique crossover that will appeal to readers in clinical practice, social work, counselling, anthropology, psychology, cultural and Latino studies, queer studies, urban studies, and sociology.

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is Co-founder and Director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group; Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania; Honorary Member at IPTAR; and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003), winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize; Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010); and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). She has edited (with Manya Steinkoler) Lacan on Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans*(Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). https://www.patriciagherovici.com/

Christopher Christian is Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Psychology, a training and supervising analyst, and Dean of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), a component member of the IPA.He is co-editor of the books Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky (Routledge, 2017) and The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Actionwith Michael J. Diamond (Karnac, 2011). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and faculty and a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, affiliated with NYU, School of Medicine. He is the executive producer of the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, winner of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) Video Grant award in 2015. He has a psychoanalytic private practice in Manhattan. https://www.chrischristianphd.com/

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Monday, March 18th at 7pm as we welcome Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian to discuss their latest book, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconciousness. Alfredo Carrasquillo, a Lacanian psychoanalyst from San Juan, Puerto Rico, will be joining Patricia and Christopher in converstaion.

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy.

As opposed to most Latin American countries, where psychoanalysis is seen as a practice tied to the promotion of social justice, in the United States psychoanalysis has been viewed as reserved for the well-to-do, assuming that poor people lack the "sophistication" that psychoanalysis requires, thus heeding invisible but no less rigid class boundaries. Challenging such discrimination, the authors testify to the efficacy of psychoanalysis in the barrios, upending the unfounded widespread belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday survival that they only benefit from symptom-focused interventions. Sharing vivid vignettes of psychoanalytic treatments, this collection sheds light on the psychological complexities of life in the barrio that is often marked by poverty, migration, marginalization, and barriers of language, class, and race.

This interdisciplinary collection features essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians. It represents a unique crossover that will appeal to readers in clinical practice, social work, counselling, anthropology, psychology, cultural and Latino studies, queer studies, urban studies, and sociology.

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is Co-founder and Director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group; Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania; Honorary Member at IPTAR; and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003), winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize; Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010); and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). She has edited (with Manya Steinkoler) Lacan on Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans*(Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). https://www.patriciagherovici.com/

Christopher Christian is Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Psychology, a training and supervising analyst, and Dean of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), a component member of the IPA.He is co-editor of the books Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky (Routledge, 2017) and The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Actionwith Michael J. Diamond (Karnac, 2011). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and faculty and a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, affiliated with NYU, School of Medicine. He is the executive producer of the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, winner of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) Video Grant award in 2015. He has a psychoanalytic private practice in Manhattan. https://www.chrischristianphd.com/

Monday March 18 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Books Are Magic is proud to host the (NYRB) Books Are Magic Book Club, a book club that discusses a different book by a female author in the New York Review Books catalog every other month.

This month we are discussing The Pure and the Impure by Collette.

Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, “the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography.” This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the strange power of desire. Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature’s subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the always unlikely nature of love.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette [1873-1954], was born in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, where she led an idyllic childhood. At the age of twenty, she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, a Parisian man of letters under whose name she published the Claudine novels. Separated from Willy in 1905, Colette supported herself as an actress before establishing her own reputation as a writer. She was celebrated in later years as one of the great figures of twentieth-century French life and letters, and was the first woman to be accorded a state funeral by the French Republic.

This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

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 Tupelo Press.

Featuring the poets: Chaun Ballard, Joseph Campana, Mario Chard, and Nomi Stone.

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

Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely novel comprised of four SF novellas connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future.

Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.

In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.

Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

Join us as Cory shares his new work with fellow author Anand Giridharadas.

CORY DOCTOROW is a coeditor of Boing Boing, a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an MIT Media Lab Research Associate and a visiting professor of Computer Science at the Open University. His award-winning novel Little Brother and its sequel Homeland were a New York Times bestsellers. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in Los Angeles.

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS is the author of The True American and India Calling. He was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016, and has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an Aspen Institute fellow, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a former McKinsey analyst. He teaches journalism at New York University and has spoken on the main stage of TED. His writing has been honored by the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship at Yale, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York

We like to think of ourselves as exceptional beings, but are we really more special than other animals? In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores how many of the things once considered to be exclusively human are not: We are not the only species that communicates, makes tools, uses fire, or has sex for reasons other than procreation. Evolution has, however, allowed us to develop a culture far more complex than any other observed in nature. Humanimal explains how we became the creatures we are today, uniquely able to investigate ourselves. Illuminating the latest genetic research, it is a thrilling account of what unequivocally fixes us as animals—and what makes us truly extraordinary.

Join us in the second floor Art Department as Adam shares his latest work!

Adam Rutherford wrote A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived—finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction—and Creation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. He writes and presents BBC’s flagship weekly Radio 4 program Inside Science; The Cell for BBC Four; and Playing God (on the rise of synthetic biology) for leading science series Horizon; in addition to writing for the Guardian.

The Unterberg Poetry Center has looked after the voices of literature since 1939, hosting in its reading series—and recording as part of its vast audio archive—just about every major poet of the last eight decades. Billy Collins marks the Poetry Center’s anniversary by emceeing an evening of recorded readings that he has personally selected from across the Center’s illustrious history.

Beneath the 24/7 national news cycle and argument over “fake news,” there is a layer of journalism that communities absolutely depend upon. Grit and Ink offers a rare look inside the financial struggles and family dynamic that has kept a Pacific Northwest publishing group alive for more than a century. The newspapers of the Aldrich-Forrester-Bedford-Brown family depict the histories of towns like Pendleton, Astoria, John Day, Enterprise, and Long Beach, Washington. Written by noted historian William Willingham, Grit and Ink describes threats presented by the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Astoria Fire of 1923, the Great Depression, the Aryan Nation, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation, the Digital Revolution, and more.

Join us as author Stephen Forrester talks about the book with Lisa Gibbs, AP Newsroom Director of Partnerships!

From Cecile Richards—president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for more than a decade, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, and a “heroine of the resistance” (Vogue)—comes a story about learning to lead and make change, based on a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and social justice.

Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. She had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. In the Richards household, the “dinner table was never for eating—it was for sorting precinct lists.”

From the time Richards was a girl, she had a front-row seat to observe the rise of women in American politics. She watched her mother, Ann, transform from a housewife to an electrifying force in the Democratic party who made a name for herself as the straight-talking, truth-telling governor of Texas. But Richards also witnessed the pitfalls of public life that are unique to women. Her experiences paint a powerful portrait of the misogyny, sexism, fake news, and even the threat of violence confronting those who challenge authority.

As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning minimum wage and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all at the same time.

She shines a light on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages readers to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way. Richards has dedicated her life to taking on injustice, and her memoir will inspire readers to hope and action.

After a lifetime of buckling to the demands of her strict Indian parents, Anuradha Bhagwati abandons her grad school career in the Ivy League to join the Marines—the fiercest, most violent, most masculine branch of the military—determined to prove herself there in ways she couldn’t at home.

Yet once training begins, Anuradha’s G.I. Jane fantasy is punctured. As a bisexual woman of color in the military, she faces underestimation at every stage, confronting misogyny, racism, and astonishing injustice perpetrated by those in power. Pushing herself beyond her limits, she also wrestles with what exactly drove her to pursue such punishment in the first place.

Once her service concludes in 2004, Anuradha courageously vows to take to task the very leaders and traditions that cast such a dark cloud over her time in the Marines. Her efforts result in historic change, including the lifting of the ban on women from pursuing combat roles in the military.

A tale of heroic resilience grappling with the timely question of what, exactly, America stands for, Unbecoming is about one woman who learned to believe in herself in spite of everything. It is the kind of story that will light a fire beneath you, and that will inspire our next generation of fierce female heroes.

Join us in the 2nd Floor Art Department as author, poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu shares his new collection of poetry No Time Like Now: Poems. See what others are already saying about the new book:

“In his newest collection of lyric poems, the brilliant Andrei Codrescu reveals himself yet again as our funniest/saddest contemporary bard. Newly returned to New York, the city of his youth, Codrescu the flâneur observes the daily disjunctions of Manhattan life in all their absurdity. Astonishingly honest, bittersweet, hilarious, and heart-breaking: No Time Like Now is a book you must read!”—Marjorie Perloff, the eminent critic of modern and post-modern American poetry. Among her recent books is the memoir, The Vienna Paradox.

“Andrei went there as an adolescent (U.S.); later I came here (France): we have known each other forever. I read his new book no time like now and see how similar (semblable) we remain in a zoo world of cellphone-users with customs. Older ones who have mastered their art are left with the glee of language. These poems also contain plenty of love.”—Alice Notley, one of America’s greatest living poets. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be “our present-day Homer.”

“On every page, Andrei provides us with a poetic tap on the shoulder: ‘We are still in the wine roses goat and sesame seed phase of the revolution.’ In other words, there is as much joy as there is threat in the world, as much threat as there is possibility; we are called to respond, and remember. This collection repairs and raises our spirit(s).”—Sharon Mesmer, prolific poet, founder of the Flarf movement, and professor at the New School in New York.

You don’t have to be racist to be biased. Unconscious bias can be at work without our realizing it, and even when we genuinely wish to treat all people equally, ingrained stereotypes can infect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. This has an impact on education, employment, housing, and criminal justice. In Biased, with a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Jennifer Eberhardt offers us insights into the dilemma and a path forward.

Eberhardt works extensively as a consultant to law enforcement and as a psychologist at the forefront of this new field. Her research takes place in courtrooms and boardrooms, in prisons, on the street, and in classrooms and coffee shops. She shows us the subtle—and sometimes dramatic—daily repercussions of implicit bias in how teachers grade students, or managers deal with customers. It has an enormous impact on the conduct of criminal justice, from the rapid decisions police officers have to make to sentencing practices in court. Eberhardt’s work and her book are both influenced by her own life, and the personal stories she shares emphasize the need for change. She has helped companies that include Airbnb and Nextdoor address bias in their business practices and has led anti-bias initiatives for police departments across the country. Here, she offers practical suggestions for reform and new practices that are useful for organizations as well as individuals.

Unblinking about the tragic consequences of prejudice, Eberhardt addresses how racial bias is not the fault of nor restricted to a few “bad apples” but is present at all levels of society in media, education, and business. The good news is that we are not hopelessly doomed by our innate prejudices. In Biased, Eberhardt reminds us that racial bias is a human problem—one all people can play a role in solving.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford and a recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “genius” grant. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She is co-founder and co-director of SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions), a Stanford Center that brings together researchers and practitioners to address significant social problems.

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Thursday, March 28th, at 7pm for the launch of Professor Mary Cregan's newest book, The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery.

At the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it's apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies—plunging Cregan into suicidal despair.

Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on this pivotal experience and attempts to make sense of it. She weaves together literature and research with details from her own ordeal—and the still visible scar of her suicide attempt—while also considering her life as part of the larger history of our understanding of depression. In fearless, candid prose, Cregan examines her psychotherapy alongside early treatments of melancholia, weighs the benefits of shock treatment against its terrifying pop culture depictions, explores the controversy around antidepressants and how little we know about them—even as she acknowledges that the medication saved her life—and sifts through the history of the hospital where her recovery began.

Perceptive, intimate, and elegantly written, The Scar vividly depicts the pain and ongoing stigma of clinical depression, giving greater insight into its management and offering hope for those who are suffering.

Mary Cregan attended Middlebury College and received her PhD from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in theChronicle of Higher Education, and in the Financial Times. A lecturer in English literature at Barnard College, she lives in New York.

Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Unsheltered, is the story of two families in two centuries navigating the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. Richard Powers’s The Overstory is a novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. “It is monumental,” wrote Kingsolver. “A gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange. Using the tools of story, Powers pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility.”

Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Unsheltered, is the story of two families in two centuries navigating the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. Richard Powers’s The Overstory is a novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. “It is monumental,” wrote Kingsolver. “A gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange. Using the tools of story, Powers pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility.”

April is National Poetry Month, and we're starting it off with a night of poetry! We'll be hosting local poets Ysabel Gonzalez, Michelle Chen, and Tamara Zbrizher as they read from their latest works.

Ysabel Gonzalez, Wild Invocation: Ysabel Y. Gonzalez was born in the Bronx, NY and raised in Newark, New Jersey. She received her BA from Rutgers University, an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and serves as the Assistant Director for the Poetry Program at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Ysabel has received invitations to attend VONA, Tin House, Ashbery Home School and BOAAT Press workshops. She is a CantoMundo fellow.

Michelle Chen, Point A to Point B: Michelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent magazine and contributing writer at In These Times. She is also co-producer of “Asia Pacific Forum” on Pacifica’s WBAI and Dissent’s “Belabored” podcast, and studies history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her poetry weaves together her reporting observations with other literary sensibilities. Michelle previously published with Red Bird Chapbooks and Anaphora, and was a 2017 finalist in the Eggtooth Editions Chapbook Contest.

Tamara Zbrizher, Tell Me Something Good: Tamara Zbrizher is a Ukrainian American poet. Her work ranges in subject matter from her Jewish heritage, motherhood, womanhood, immigration and the passage of time. Her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Naugatuck River Review, The New Engagement, Driftwood Press, and Lamplighter Magazine. Her poem “When the Holocaust Burns Your History You Grow Myth” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her son and two overfed cats.

Join us as feminist organizer Jenny Brown discusses her new book, Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women's Work, with Nation and Jacobin columnist Liza Featherstone

When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don’t get busy having more children, we’ll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy.

Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S. and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those “values voters.” But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women’s reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. By some measures our birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike.

In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.

Join us on the second floor Art Department as Jenny and Liza celebrate Jenny's book!

"Tyrants cut out hearts. Rulers sacrifice their own." Princess Hesina of Yan has always been eager to shirk the responsibilities of the crown, but when her beloved father is murdered, she’s thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father’s killer, Hesina does something desperate: she engages the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death... because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago.

Using the information illicitly provided by the sooth, and uncertain if she can trust even her family, Hesina turns to Akira—a brilliant and alluring investigator who’s also a convicted criminal with secrets of his own. With the future of her kingdom at stake, can Hesina find justice for her father? Or will the cost be too high?

In this shimmering Chinese-inspired fantasy, debut author Joan He introduces a determined and vulnerable young heroine struggling to do right in a world brimming with deception.

Join us on the second floor as debut author Joan He shares her book. She'll be in conversation with fellow YA author Amelie Wen Zhao.

"Tyrants cut out hearts. Rulers sacrifice their own." Princess Hesina of Yan has always been eager to shirk the responsibilities of the crown, but when her beloved father is murdered, she’s thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father’s killer, Hesina does something desperate: she engages the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death... because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago.

Using the information illicitly provided by the sooth, and uncertain if she can trust even her family, Hesina turns to Akira—a brilliant and alluring investigator who’s also a convicted criminal with secrets of his own. With the future of her kingdom at stake, can Hesina find justice for her father? Or will the cost be too high?

In this shimmering Chinese-inspired fantasy, debut author Joan He introduces a determined and vulnerable young heroine struggling to do right in a world brimming with deception.

Join us on the second floor as debut author Joan He shares her book. She'll be in conversation with fellow YA author Amelie Wen Zhao.

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Wednesday, April 3rd, at 7pm for a discussion with Bradley W. Hart on his new book, Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States.

A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Bradley W. Hart is Assistant Professor at California State University, Fresno, USA and a former by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, UK. His previous works include a co-edited volume entitled The Foundations of the British Conservative Party: Essays on Conservatism from Lord Salisbury to David Cameron (2013) and George Pitt-Rivers and the Nazis (2015).

Join us at Book Culture on Columbus on Wednesday, April 3rd at 7pm, as we welcome Natalie Silverstein for a discussion on her new book, Simple Acts: The Busy Family's Guide to Giving Back.

Teaching young children to be socially conscious, community oriented, and eager to volunteer seems like a daunting task, especially for busy families with children of varying ages. Simple Acts brings busy parents practical, easy-to-do ideas, to involve the whole family in volunteering and helping others in the community.

Natalie Silverstein, MPH, is the volunteer coordinator of Doing Good TogetherTM in New York City. She is a passionate advocate for family service, and is a frequent consultant and presenter to parents, faculty, students, and community groups on the subject. She has been a writer and editor for several nonprofits, and is a contributor to parenting blogs GrownandFlow.com and Mommypoppins.com. She holds a Bachelor's Degree from Providence College and a Master's Degree in Public Health from Yale University. She and her family regularly make time to volunteer in their community.

Geoff Dyer’s earlier book on film, Zona, was about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, so it was perhaps inevitable that he should next devote his unique critical and stylistic energies to Brian G. Hutton’s Where Eagles Dare. A thrilling Alpine adventure starring a magnificent, bleary-eyed Richard Burton and a dynamically lethargic Clint Eastwood, Where Eagles Dare is the apex of 1960s war movies, by turns enjoyable and preposterous.

‘Broadsword Calling Danny Boy’ is Geoff Dyer’s hilarious tribute to a film he has loved since childhood: it’s a scene-by-scene analysis—or should that be send-up?—taking us from it’s snowy, Teutonic opening credits to its vertigo-inducing climax.

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, Zona (on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker), and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Join us in the second floor art department as debut author Arkady Martine talks about her debut novel A Memory Called Empire with Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M.

About A Memory Called Empire - Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident?or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.

Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan's unceasing expansion?all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret - one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life - or rescue it from annihilation.

About The Book of M - Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Thursday, April 4th, at 7pm for for a discussion with Martin Hägglund on his new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Professor Taylor Carmen will be joining Martin in discussion.

A profound, original, and accessible book that offers a new secular vision of how we can lead our lives. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism.

In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life, and what we do with our time together.

Hägglund develops new existential and political principles while transforming our understanding of spiritual life. His critique of religion takes us to the heart of what it means to mourn our loved ones, be committed, and care about a sustainable world. His critique of capitalism demonstrates that we fail to sustain our democratic values because our lives depend on wage labor. In clear and pathbreaking terms, Hägglund explains why capitalism is inimical to our freedom, and why we should instead pursue a novel form of democratic socialism.

In developing his vision of an emancipated secular life, Hägglund engages with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard andMartin Luther King, Jr. This Life gives us new access to our past—for the sake of a different future.

MARTIN HÄGGLUND is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he was a Junior Fellow (2009-2012). He is the author of three highly acclaimed books and his work has been translated into eight languages. In his native Sweden, he published his first book, Chronophobia (2002), at the age of twenty-five and he is the recipient of the Swedish Academy's Schück Prize. His first book in English, Radical Atheism (2008), was the subject of a conference at Cornell University, a colloquium at Oxford University, and a 250-page special issue of The New Centennial Review, titled Living On: Of Martin Hägglund. His most recent book, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a "revolutionary" achievement. In 2018, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City.

The world is crazy. Creative work is hard. And nothing is getting any easier!

In his previous books—Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!, New York Times bestsellers with over a million copies in print combined—Austin Kleon gave readers the key to unlock their creativity and then showed them how to share it. Now he completes his trilogy with his most inspiring work yet.

Keep Going gives the reader life-changing, illustrated advice and encouragement on how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself in the face of personal burnout or external distractions. Here is how to Build a Bliss Station—a place or fixed period where you can disconnect from the world. How to see that Every Day Is Groundhog Day—yesterday’s over, tomorrow may never come, so just do what you can do today. How to Forget the Noun, Do the Verb—stop worrying about being a “painter” and just paint.

Keep working. Keep playing. Keep searching. Keep giving. Keep living. Keep Going. It’s exactly the message all of us need, at exactly the right time.

Join us in the Rare Book Room as Austin talks about and signs his new

If only things had been different...

It is the wrong time to get sick. Speeding down the highway on the way to work, her two little girls sleeping in the back seat, medical resident Claire Rawlings doesn't have time for the nausea overtaking her. But as the world tilts sideways, she pulls into a gas station, runs to the bathroom, and passes out. When she wakes up minutes later, her car?and her daughters?are gone.

The police have no leads, and the weight of guilt presses down on Claire as each hour passes with no trace of her girls. All she has to hold on to are her strained marriage, a potentially unreliable witness who emerges days later, and the desperate but unquenchable belief that her daughters are out there somewhere.

As hopeful and uplifting as it is devastating, Little Lovely Things is the story of a family shattered by unthinkable tragedy, and the unexpected intersection of heartbreak and hope.

Join us on the second floor as Maureen shares her debut work!

Maureen is a former owner of a consulting firm that helped specialty drug companies to develop medications for ultra-rare diseases. Maureen received her Bachelor’s degree in physiology from Michigan State University and her Master’s degree in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University. Her background in science and love of the natural world informs and inspires her writing. Little Lovely Things is her debut as a novelist. She is also an award-winning poet, published in diverse outlets such as Emory University’s Lullwater Review and Yankee Magazine.

Maureen is a foodie and appreciates interesting recipes. She also enjoys painting (especially flowers and sycamore trees), competing in races with her dragon boat team (Go Fierce)!, and reading (of course). She relishes spending time with her three children, her husband and her pets; a ridiculous terrier named Huckleberry, and a plump orange cat, Pumpkin.

Hala Alyan’s new collection of poetry is The Twenty-Ninth Year. “Her poems startle us with their beautiful, enigmatic images and capture us with their passionate engagement with the world,” wrote Chitra Divakaruni. Ilya Kaminsky’s new book of poems is Deaf Republic. “He is more than a promising young poet; he is a poet of promise fulfilled,” wrote Carolyn Forché. “I am in awe of his gifts.”

Join us at Book Culture on 112th on Friday, April 5th, at 7pm for a discussion with Subhashini Kaligotla on her book, Bird of the Indian Subcontinent.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Art. The poems in this debut collection chart the passage of a metamorphosing self through euphoria, desire, despair, defiance, equanimity, grief, and loneliness. Appropriating freely from diverse poetic sources, the writer gives voice to a polyglot emotional range. Sanskrit poetics, Jazz lyrics, ekphrasis, the locutions of India's poet-saints, and the Anglo-American writing tradition all find place here. The book's chorus of figures—from Christ to Krishna to Caravaggio—move the reader between present and past, myth and history, bird and human, and across cities and continents.

Subhashini Kaligotla is a poet and architectural historian of medieval India. A graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in Creative Writing and a Kundiman poetry fellow, she has published in such journals as The Caravan, diode, LUMINA, New England Review , and The Literary Review. Anthology appearances include collections of Indian and diaspora poetry, most notably Penguin India's 60 Indian Poets and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Kaligotla is Assistant Professor of South Asian Art at Yale University.