Books are Magic

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: Bold & Brave at St. Ann's Church

Saturday December 15 | 1:00PM - 2:00PM

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand presents her new picture book Bold & Brave, about ten suffragists who fought for women's right to vote.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was inspired by her own great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother to be bold and brave—to stand up and fight for what she believes in. But who inspired them? The long chain of women before them who spoke out for what's right—women who taught each generation that followed how to be bold and brave.

Here are the stories of ten leaders who strove to win the right to vote for American women—a journey that took more than seventy years of passionate commitment. From well-known figures, such as Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth to lesser known women such as Alice Paul and Mary Church Terrell, these are heroes who dreamed big and never gave up. Senator Gillibrand highlights an important and pithy lesson from each woman's life—from "dare to be different" to "fight together."

On the eve of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women suffrage, Bold & Brave looks both backward and forward. It introduces children to strong women who have raised their voices on behalf of justice—and inspires them to raise their own voices to build our future.

With gorgeous illustrations by renowned artist Maira Kalman, this is a book that will inspire and uplift, a book to be cherished and shared.
The suffragists included are: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Jovita Idár, Alice Paul, Inez Milholland, Ida B. Wells, Lucy Burns, and Mary Church Terrell.

Kirsten Gillibrand is one of New York’s Senators and a passionate advocate for girls’ and women’s rights like her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother before her. Senator Gillibrand was born and raised in upstate New York. She lives there with her family: her husband, Jonathan, their sons, Theo and Henry, and their dog, Maple. Her book for adults, Off the Sidelines, was a New York Times bestseller, and BOLD & BRAVE is the Senator’s first book for children.

Please note that this event will be held at St. Ann's Church at 157 Montague Street in Brooklyn, NY. All tickets include a copy of Bold & Brave. Ticket options are available to admit 2, 3, and 4 people on the same ticket.

Get tickets here!

Saint Ann's Review presents Volume 13, Number 1

Tuesday January 08 | 7:00PM - 8:30PM

Please join us as Saint Ann’s Review launches their latest issue with a reading featuring Natalya Sukhonos, Asiya Wadud and Benjamin Gantcher!

Natalya Sukhonos is bilingual in Russian and English and also speaks Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Natalya has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She teaches Spanish at Ramaz School, and works as a consultant for Writing Curriculum at Minerva Schools, CGI. Her poems are published by the Saint Ann's Review, Driftwood Press, Middle Gray Magazine, the Really System and other journals. Natalya was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015 and the Best New Poets Anthology of 2015.

Asiya Wadud writes about borders, limits, and the variegated truth. She teaches third grade in the daytime and English to new immigrants and refugees in the evening. Her first book, Crosslight for Youngbird, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September 2018 and she has other books forthcoming in 2019 and 2020 from Ugly Duckling Presse and Nightboat. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she loves animals.

Benjamin Gantcher’s first book of poems, Snow Farmer (CW Books, 2017), was a finalist in several book contests. His work has appeared in national and international journals including Tin House, Slate, Guernica and the Brooklyn Rail. His chapbook Strings of Math and Custom was published by Beard of Bees Press, and his first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. A recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center, Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a former poetry editor of failbetter. He teaches math and English at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, where he lives with his family.

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Laura Sims: Looker w/ Helen Phillips

Friday January 11 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

In this taut and thrilling debut, an unraveling woman, unhappily childless and recently separated, becomes fixated on her neighbor—the beautiful, famous actress. The unnamed narrator can’t help noticing with wry irony that, though she and the actress live just a few doors apart, they are separated by a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment. The actress, a celebrity with her face on the side of every bus, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and their three adorable children, while the narrator, working in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.

When an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what began as an innocent preoccupation spirals quickly, and lethally, into a frightening and irretrievable madness. Darkly witty and searingly sharp, Looker is enormously entertaining—part tightly coiled Hitchcockian thriller and part send-up of life in the Instagram-ready city. Driven by a fresh and fearlessly original voice, this slender novel packs a powerful punch.

Laura Sims is the author of Looker, a novel; four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive; and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. She lives outside of New York City with her family.

Helen Phillips’s fifth book, The Need, is forthcoming in the summer of 2019. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a Notable Book by the Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.

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NYRB Book Club: The True Deceiver

Monday January 14 | 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 True Deceiver by Tove Jansson.

Deception—the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, The Summer Book, to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate.

Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Jansson loved books as a child and set out from an early age to be an artist; her first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym. After attending art schools in both Stockholm and Paris, she returned to Helsinki, where in the 1940s and ’50s she won acclaim for her paintings and murals. From 1929 until 1953 Jansson drew humorous illustrations and political cartoons for the left-leaning anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine Garm, and it was there that what was to become Jansson’s most famous creation, Moomintroll, made his first appearance. Jansson went on to write about the adventures of Moomintroll, the Moomin family, and their curious friends in a long-running comic strip and in a series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world, inspiring films, several television series, an opera, and theme parks in Finland and Japan. Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, of which The Sculptor’s Daughter, The Summer Book, Sun City, Fair Play, and The True Deceiver have been translated into English. In 1994 she was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy.

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Karen Thompson Walker: The Dreamers with Emily St. John Mandel

Tuesday January 15 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned. Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. After his wife falls victim to the sleep, a husband tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A survivalist father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

Karen Thompson Walker is the author of The Age of Miracles, which was named a best book of the year by People, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Financial Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon. It was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and it was translated into twenty-seven languages. She was born and raised in San Diego and is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. Walker lives in Portland with her family, where she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award. She lives in New York City with her family.

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Dani Shapiro: Inheritance: A Memoir w/ Meg Wolitzer

Wednesday January 16 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us? In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

Timely and unforgettable, Dani Shapiro's memoir is a gripping, gut-wrenching exploration of genealogy, paternity, and love.

Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Also an essayist and a journalist, Shapiro's short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University; she is cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.

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John Kenney: Talk to Me w/ Courtney Maum

Thursday January 17 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

It's a story that Ted Grayson has reported time and time again in his job as a network TV anchor: the public downfall of those at the top. He just never imagined that it would happen to him. After his profanity-laced tirade is caught on camera, his reputation and career are destroyed, leaving him without a script for the first time in years.

While American viewers may have loved and trusted Ted for decades, his family certainly didn't: His years of constant travel and his big-screen persona have frayed all of his important relationships. At the time of his meltdown, Ted is estranged from his wife, Claire, and his adult daughter, Franny, a writer for a popular website. Franny views her father's disgrace with curiosity and perhaps a bit of smug satisfaction, but when her boss suggests that she confront Ted in an interview, she has to decide whether to use his loss as her career gain. And for Ted, this may be a chance to take a hard look at what got him to this place, and to try to find his way back before it's too late.

Talk to Me is a sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately warm story about a man who wakes up too late to the mess he's made of his life... and about our capacity for forgiveness and empathy.

John Kenney is the author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014. He has worked as a copywriter in New York City for seventeen years. He has also been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine since 1999. Some of his work appears in a collection of The New Yorker's humor writing, Disquiet, Please! He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, and the chapbook "Notes from Mexico." She has been published in outlets such as the New York Times; Tin House; O, The Oprah Magazine; andBuzzFeed; and has worked as a trend forecaster, a fashion publicist, and a party promoter for Corona Extra in the past. She currently works as a makeup shade and product namer from her home in Litchfield County, CT where she founded the interdisciplinary retreat, The Cabins.

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David Tamarkin: COOK90 w/ Amanda Shapiro

Monday January 21 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

Can you COOK90?

It's easier than you think. For 30 days, challenge yourself to cook every meal--and you'll transform the way you eat and feel.

The 150,000+ people who take the COOK90 challenge every year know that cooking for yourself is one of the most satisfying, effective, and easy ways to improve your wellbeing.

With expert support from the editors of Epicurious, the web's most trusted recipe site, you'll say goodbye to pricey takeout, crummy pizza delivery, and fast food that's no good for you. And you'll say hello to all the benefits of home cooking: healthier and more delicious meals, a fatter wallet, a clearer mind, and sharper skills.

David Tamarkin is the editor and digital director of Epicurious, the most trusted recipe website in the world. Since David joined the brand in 2015, Epicurious has won 5 IACP Awards, 4 Webbys (including dual Webby and People's Voice Awards for Best Food and Drink Site in 2018), and several James Beard Award nominations. In 2018, David released COOK90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier Meals, a book based on Epi's annual new-year-new-cook initiative. David has written about food, wine, cooking and restaurants for publications such as Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Details, Cooking Light, Condé Nast Traveler, Food Network Magazine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Wine & Spirits, Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago, where he was the food editor for several years. In 2013, David published Middlewest, an experimental cooking magazine designed by the Chicago artists Sonnenzimmer. His heart is in Ohio; he physically resides in Harlem. Find him on Instagram and Twitter: @davidtamarkin

Amanda Shapiro is the editor of Healthyish, a site from Bon Appétit that covers the wide world of wellness through the lens of delicious food. Previously she was a freelance journalist covering gender and health for publications like Vice, BuzzFeed, and the Oxford American. She was born in San Francisco, home to the best farmers’ markets, and raised in New Haven, home to the best pizza. She likes to run long distances and never cook the same thing twice. Her dream meal involves sweet potatoes and salmon in some configuration with a chocolate tahini brownie for dessert.

This event is free and in collaboration with Bon Appétit. Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

Sam Lipsyte: Hark w/ Keith Gessen

Tuesday January 22 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status. It’s a role he never asked for, and one he is woefully underprepared to take on. But his inner-circle of modern pilgrims have other plans, as do some suddenly powerful fringe players, including a renegade Ivy League ethicist, a gentle Swedish kidnapper, a crossbow-hunting veteran of jungle drug wars, a social media tycoon with an empire on the skids, and a mysteriously influential (but undeniably slimy) catfish.

In this social satire of the highest order, Sam Lipsyte, the New York Times bestseller and master of the form, reaches new peaks of daring in a novel that revels in contemporary absurdity and the wild poetry of everyday language while exploring the emotional truths of his characters. Hark is a smart, incisive look at men, women, and children seeking meaning and dignity in a chaotic, ridiculous, and often dangerous world.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Keith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and son.

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Stephanie Land: Maid w/ Alissa Quart

Wednesday January 23 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.

Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.

Stephanie Land is a journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She focuses on social and economic justice as a writing fellow through both the Center for Community Change and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Alissa Quart is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four previous acclaimed books, Branded, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids and the poetry book Monetized. She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation and The New York Review of Books. She has won the Columbia Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award.

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Juliet Lapidos: Talent w/ Liesl Schillinger

Thursday January 24 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

In this wickedly funny debut, a young graduate student writing about-and desperately searching for-inspiration stumbles upon it in the unlikeliest of places.

Anna Brisker is a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English at Collegiate University who can't seem to finish her dissertation. Her project: an intellectual history of inspiration. As Anna's adviser is quick to remind her, time is running out. She needs the perfect case study to anchor her thesis-and she needs it now. Amid this mounting pressure, Anna strikes up a tenuous friendship with the niece of the famous author Frederick Langley. Freddy wrote three successful books as a young man, then published exactly nothing for the rest of his wayward, hermetic life. Critics believe Freddy suffered from an acute case of writer's block, but his niece tells Anna that there's more to the story: When he died, he was at work on something new.

Fascination with Freddy blooms into obsession, and Anna is drawn irrevocably into the criminal machinations of his sole living heir. A modern twist on the Parable of the Talents, Lapidos's debut is a many-layered labyrinth of possible truths that reveal at each turn the danger of interpreting another person's intentions-literary or otherwise.

Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at The Atlantic. Previously she worked at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Slate. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University and her MPhil in English Literature from Cambridge University, which she attended on a Gates Scholarship.

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the New School in New York City. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and other publications, and her translations have been published by Penguin Classics, Viking, Tin House, and Words Without Borders. She is the author of Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century, and in 2017 was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

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Sandy Allen: A Kind Of Mirraculas Paradise w/ Ashley Ford

Friday January 25 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

Originally published in hardcover last winter, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise is Sandy Allen’s rendition of the life story of their uncle Bob, who for years was known to Allen only as the “crazy” hermit who sometimes showed up at family vacations, and who had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But in 2009, Bob mailed Allen – by then an MFA student in the University of Iowa’s creative nonfiction program – his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps and riddled with errors, the often-incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a “true story” about being “labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic,” and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out into the world.

Sandy Allen is a writer, speaker, editor and teacher. Their essays and features stories have been published by BuzzFeed News, CNN Opinion, Bon Appétit's Healthyish and Pop-Up Magazine. Sandy writes about constructs of normalcy that enforce hierarchies of power, like madness and gender. Sandy is non-binary trans. Sandy was previously a features editor for BuzzFeed News. They also founded and ran the online-only literary quarterly Wag's Revue. Originally from Muir Beach, CA, they live in the Catskills. In January, 2018, Scribner published their critically acclaimed debut book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia. For more, visit www.hellosandyallen.com

Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana. She’s currently working on her memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, to be published by Flatiron Books under the imprint An Oprah Book. She also hosts the Brooklyn-based news and culture TV show and podcast, 112BK, contributes to CupOfJo.Com, and hosts Fortune Favors The Bold. She maintains a regular blog and Twitter feed.

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Daisy Johnson: Everything Under w/ Lauren Groff

Monday January 28 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.

One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it.

In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.

Daisy Johnson is the author of the short-story collection Fen. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in Oxford, England, by the river.

Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She has won the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, along with several Best American Short Stories anthologies, and she was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.

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Marlon James: Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Tuesday February 05 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York.

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TASTE presents Diana Kuan: Red Hot Kitchen w/ Matt Rodbard

Monday February 11 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

In partnership with TASTE, we are hosting Diana Kuan for her new book, Red Hot Kitchen, a hot sauce manifesto focused on homemade Asian chili sauces and delicious dishes to make with them.

In this completely unique Asian cookbook, culinary instructor and trained chef Diana Kuan offers a flavorful education in the art of cooking with homemade Asian hot sauces. From Thai Sriracha to Indonesian sambal to Korean gochujang and other fiery favorites, Asian chili sauces have become staples in restaurants and homes across America. They add a palate-pleasing subtle kick or a scorching burn to the stir-fries, appetizers, and noodle dishes so many people love. But until now, these tantalizing flavors haven’t been easy to recreate at home with fresh, all-natural ingredients.

Kuan offers more than 100 easy-to-follow recipes for nine sauces fundamental to Asian cooking, along with a “Know Your Chili Pepper” chart so you can easily shop for the ingredients you need and customize the heat level of each sauce. Each chapter then offers recipes incorporating each spicy sauce, broadening the range of Asian dishes you can cook at home. From Kung Pao Sweet Potatoes and Spicy Beef Bulgogi, to Cumin-Crusted Red Curry Rack of Lamb, and even Sriracha Sea Salt Brownies, Red Hot Kitchen is packed with enticing recipes you’ll want to cook right now.

Diana Kuan is a food writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Chinese Takeout Cookbook, on Chinese food and culture in America. Her work has also appeared in Food & Wine, Time Out New York, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Epicurious. In addition to writing and photography, Diana has taught cooking classes for the past ten years in both Beijing and New York. Her favorite foods are dumplings, ramen, and tacos, usually with hot sauce on the side.

Diana will be in conversation with Matt Rodbard, the Editor-in-Chief of TASTE.

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Jill Schlesinger: Dumb Things Smart People Do With Their Money

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

After decades working as a Wall Street trader, investment adviser, and money expert for CBS, Jill Schlesinger reveals thirteen costly mistakes you’re probably making right now with your money without even knowing it. Drawing on heartfelt personal stories (yes, money experts screw up, too), Schlesinger argues that it’s not lack of smarts that causes even the brightest, most accomplished people among us to behave like financial dumb-asses, but simple emotional blind spots. When it comes to big important financial decisions, it’s so easy to let your heart lead instead of your brain. So if you’ve made well-intentioned mistakes like saving for college for your kids before your own retirement, or taken on too much risk when you invest, you’ve come to the right place. And if you’ve avoided uncomfortable moments such as sitting down to make a will or planning long-term care for an aging parent, this is the book for you. Jill also points out signs that you may be saddling your kids with your own money issues and shows you how to end the cycle.

By breaking bad habits and following Jill’s pragmatic and accessible rules for financial management, you can save tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention avoid countless sleepless nights.

Practical, no-nonsense, and often counterintuitive, The Dumb Things Smart People Do with Their Money tells you what you really need to hear about retirement planning, college financing, insurance, real estate, how to save money, and more. It might just be the smartest investment you make all year.

Jill Schlesinger is an Emmy-nominated and Gracie Award-winning business analyst for CBS News, a weekly guest on NPR’s Here and Now, and a Certified Financial Planner. During her decades as a Wall Street trader, investment adviser, and money expert for CBS News she watched clients, friends, viewers, and listeners repeatedly become their own worst financial enemies.

This event is free!

Sophia Shalmiyev: Mother Winter w/ Melissa Febos

Monday February 25 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

Mother Winter is the story of Sophia’s emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev grew up under the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad. An imbalance of power and widespread anti-Semitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America and abandoning her estranged and alcoholic mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her.

Mother Winter depicts in urgent vignettes Sophia’s years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connection with the worlds she occupies. The result is a searing meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and the pursuit of wholeness after shattering loss. And ultimately, it is an aching observation of the human heart across time and culture.

Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, she was the nonfiction editor for The Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurels scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s fellowship awards. She has a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from The School of Visual Arts, where she worked with survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in Vela Magazine, Bellows American Review, Electric Lit, The Seattle Review of Books, Ravishly and The Literary Review, among others; all with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ragdale, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University, MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She grew up on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn.

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Andrea Bartz: The Lost Night w/ Jason Diamond

Friday March 01 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

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.

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David Means: Instructions for a Funeral w/ Tara Westover

Monday March 04 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

The O. Henry Prize–winning author David Means presents a collection of harrowing and personal tales in Instructions for a Funeral. Previously appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Vice, and other publications, the fourteen stories collected here run the gamut from the playful to the private. “The Terminal Artist” skirts reportage in grappling with the revelation that the death of a hospitalized loved one was in fact a murder. “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” is a wry anatomy of the moments before an FBI raid goes spectacularly wrong. “The Chair” gives us a clear-eyed look at fatherhood, with all its paradoxes, recriminations, and rewards gloriously intact.

Means’s work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver—but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.

David Means was born and raised in Michigan. His Assorted Fire Events earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and The Secret Goldfish was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. The Spot was selected as a 2010 Notable Book by The New York Times and won the O. Henry Prize. His first novel, Hystopia, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Means’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous other publications. He lives in Nyack, New York, and teaches at Vassar College.

Tara Westover is an American author. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Educated is her first book.

This event is free!