Books Are Magic

LIVE- Aimee Nezhukumatathil: World of Wonders w/ Mira Jacob

Tuesday August 18 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

This talk will be held via Zoom

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of World of Wonders, an illustrated essay collection forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in August 2020, as well as of four books of poetry, including, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Other awards for her writing include fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Council, and MacDowell. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in

Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to

Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for

India’s Tata First Literature Award, longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary

Eagles Prize, and translated into seven languages. Her writing and

drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin

House, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Vogue, and she has a drawn column

on Shondaland. She teaches at The New School, and she is a founding

faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She lives in Brooklyn.

This event is free. Invite your friends on Facebook!

LIVE- Romance & Representation: Reckoning with Book Cover Designs w/ Rosie Danan, Adriana Herrera, EE Ottoman, and Bea Koch!

Friday August 21 | 5:00PM - 6:00PM

This panel will be held via Zoom

Join us for a belated Romance Day panel, co-hosted with The Ripped Bodice, featuring authors Rosie Danan, Adriana Herrera, EE Ottoman, and Bea Koch moderating! The panel will center around a hot topic of debate in Romancelandia: Romance book cover designs. Many ask, who gets to be represented in them? What do designs that use photography or realistic illustrations communicate versus a design that uses animation? When do readers, or authors, prefer one over the other? What do we want to see more of in Romance cover design? Less of?

Rosie Danan writes steamy, bighearted books about the trials and triumphs of modern love. When not writing, she enjoys jogging slowly to fast music, petting other people’s dogs, and competing against herself in rounds of Chopped using the miscellaneous ingredients occupying her fridge. As an American expat living in London, Rosie regularly finds herself borrowing slang that doesn’t belong to her. Learn more at www.rosiedanan.com and connect with her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @rosiedanan.

Adriana Herrera was born and raised in the Caribbean, but for the last fifteen years has let her job (and her spouse) take her all over the world. She loves writing stories about people who look and sound like her people, getting unapologetic happy endings. Her Dreamers series has received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist and has been featured in The TODAY Show on NBC, Entertainment Weekly, OPRAH Magazine, NPR, Library Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Adriana is an outspoken advocate for diversity in romance and has written for Remezcla and Bustle about Own Voices in the genre. When she’s not dreaming up love stories, planning logistically complex vacations with her family or hunting for discount Broadway tickets, she’s a trauma therapist in New York City, working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

EE Ottoman grew up surrounded by the farmlands and forests of upstate New York. He started writing as soon as he learned how and have yet to stop. Ottoman attended Earlham College and graduated with a degree in history, before going on to receive a graduate degree in history as well and a degree in library science. These days he divides his time between history, archiving and romance writing. Ottoman is also a disabled, queer, trans man whose pronouns are: he/him/his. Mostly though he is a person who is passionate about history, stories, and the spaces between the two.

Bea Koch is a writer and historian living in Los Angeles, California. She co-owns The Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore on the West Coast. Bea graduated from Yale with distinction as the last Renaissance Studies major and received an MA from NYU: Steinhardt in Costume History. She is the proud mother of dog Fitzwilliam Waffles. He has more followers on Instagram than she does.

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LIVE- Kristina Forest: Now That I've Found You w/ Ashley Woodfolk + Leah Johnson

Thursday August 27 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

This talk will be held via Zoom

Register to attend here

Eighteen-year-old Evie Jones's entire career—or at least what's left of it—is at the mercy of her reclusive grandma, Gigi. Blacklisted from Hollywood for badmouthing a famous director, only a public appearance with America’s most beloved actress (one who’s been out of the limelight for nearly thirty years) can save Evie’s career. So, of course, the week Evie is meant to present her grandma with a Lifetime Achievement award, Gigi does the unthinkable: She disappears.

No warning, no note, and no forwarding address. Gigi is gone. With time running out and the comeback of a lifetime on the line, Evie enlists the help of the last person who saw her grandmother: Miles, the cute boy who delivers Gigi's groceries.

Along the way, romance blossoms, adventure abounds, and Evie makes some new discoveries about why her grandmother has been hiding from the spotlight.

Kristina Forest is the author of I Wanna Be Where You Are and the forthcoming Now That I’ve Found You. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Writing for Children at The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with two huge bookshelves.

Ashley Woodfolk has loved reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She graduated from Rutgers University with a BA English and currently works in children's book publishing. She wrote her first book, The Beauty That Remains, from a sunny Brooklyn apartment where she lives with her cute husband and her cuter dog. When You Were Everything is her second novel. Find her online at ashleywoodfolk.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @AshWrites

Leah Johnson (she/her) is an editor and eternal Midwesterner currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. You Should See Me in a Crown is her debut YA novel. You can find her on Twitter ranting about pop culture, politics, and the greatest show of all time (Avatar: The Last Airbender, obviously!) @byleahjohnson.

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TICKETED- Mike Birbiglia & J. Hope Stein present The New One

Monday August 31 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

This talk will be held via Zoom

In 2016 comedian Mike Birbiglia and poet Jennifer Hope Stein took their fourteen-month-old daughter Oona to the Nantucket Film Festival. When the festival director picked them up at the airport she asked Mike if he would perform at the storytelling night. She said, "The theme of the stories is jealousy."

Jen quipped, "You're jealous of Oona. You should talk about that."

And so Mike began sharing some of his darkest and funniest thoughts about the decision to have a child. Jen and Mike revealed to each other their sides of what had gone down during Jen's pregnancy and that first year with their child. Over the next couple years, these stories evolved into a Broadway show, and the more Mike performed it the more he heard how it resonated -- not just with parents but also people who resist all kinds of change.

So he pored over his journals, dug deeper, and created this book: The New One: Painfully True Stories From a Reluctant Dad. Along with hilarious and poignant stories he has never shared before, these pages are sprinkled with poetry Jen wrote as she navigated the same rocky shores of new parenthood.

So here it is. This book is an experiment -- sort of like a family.

Mike Birbiglia is a comedian, storyteller, director and actor who has performed for audiences worldwide, from the Sydney Opera House to Broadway. His most recent shows, The New One, Thank God for Jokes, and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend can be found on Netflix. Additionally, Birbiglia is a filmmaker who wrote, directed, and starred in the films Sleepwalk With Me and Don’t Think Twice. Currently he is the host of the weekly podcast, Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out.

His first book, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories, was a New York Times bestseller, and he is the author of the new book, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad, with poems by J. Hope Stein. As an actor Birbiglia has appeared on Inside Amy Schumer, Girls and Broad City, and in the films Trainwreck, The Fault in Our Stars, and Popstar. He plays Danny Pearson on Orange Is the New Black and Oscar Langstratt on Showtime’s Billions.

J. Hope Stein is a poet, and the author of Little Astronaut. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker and Poetry International.

LIVE- Bea Koch: Mad and Bad w/ Emma Straub

Thursday September 03 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

This talk will be held via Zoom

Register to attend here

Regency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the hundreds of romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes.

But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don't fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England. Women like Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose mother was a slave but was raised by her white father's family in England, Caroline Herschel, who acted as her brother's assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own, Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook.

As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as "historically accurate" for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen's Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life on their terms. She also examines broader questions of culture in chapters that focus on the LGBTQ and Jewish communities, the lives of women of color in the Regency, and women who broke barriers in fields like astronomy and paleontology. In Mad and Bad, we look beyond popular perception of the Regency into the even more vibrant, diverse, and fascinating historical truth.

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of three other novels The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, this very bookstore.

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LIVE- Red Ink Series: Unraveling w/ Natalie Diaz, Elisa Gabbert, Raven Leilani, Meredith Talusan, and Vanessa Veselka

Thursday September 10 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

This talk will be held via Zoom

Register to attend here

+ Check out the authors’ books!

Red Ink is a quarterly series curated and hosted by Michele Filgate, and co-sponsored by Literary Hub. Red Ink makes one think of vitality, blood, the monthly cycle, correcting history, and making a mark on the world. This dynamic series focuses on women writers, past and present. The next discussion, “Unraveling,” will feature Vanessa Veselka (The Great Offshore Grounds), Raven Leilani (Luster), Elisa Gabbert (The Unreality of Memory), Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem), and Meredith Talusan (Fairest).

Michele Filgate is a contributing editor at Literary Hub and the editor of a critically acclaimed anthology based on her Longreads essay, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, published by Simon & Schuster. Currently, she is an M.F.A. student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Salon, Interview Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Barnes & Noble Review, Poets & Writers, CNN.com, Time Out New York, People, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, Men's Journal, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Star Tribune, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at NYU, The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, and Catapult.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, just out from FSG, and The Word Pretty. She writes a regular poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, A Public Space, The Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, and many other venues. She lives in Denver.

Raven Leilani's work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and The Cut. She received her MFA from NYU, and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Her debut novel, Luster is out now from FSG.

Meredith Talusan is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoir, Fairest, and has contributed to several essay collections. She has also written features and essays for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Nation, WIRED, and Condé Nast Traveler, among many other publications. She is also the founding executive editor of them., Condé Nast's LGBTQ+ digital platform, where she is currently contributing editor.

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and ZYZZYVA, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, OR.

This event is free. Invite your friends on Facebook!