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 World I Live In by Hellen Keller. 

The World I Live In is a thought-provoking and deeply moving account of Helen Keller's keenest impressions and deepest feelings ?"as well as a rediscovered classic of American writing.

Out of print for nearly a century, The World I Live In is Helen Keller's most personal and intellectually adventurous work—one that transforms our appreciation of her extraordinary achievements. Here this preternaturally gifted deaf and blind young woman closely describes her sensations and the workings of her imagination, while making the pro-vocative argument that the whole spectrum of the senses lies open to her through the medium of language. Standing in the line of the works of Emerson and Thoreau, The World I Live In is a profoundly suggestive exercise in self-invention, and a true, rediscovered classic of American literature.

This new edition of The World I Live In also includes Helen Keller's early essay "Optimism," as well as her first published work, "My Story," written when she was twelve.

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At nineteen months, she suffered from a mysterious illness, perhaps scarlet fever, that left her deaf and blind. When Helen was five, Anne Sullivan was engaged as her teacher. Their relationship and the legendary strides made as a result of it, particularly Helen’s acquisition of language, are the subject of The Story of My Life. A devoted member of the Socialist Party and a tireless advocate for the blind, Helen spent her adult life fundraising and lecturing all over the world. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

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

On the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way, a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, LITTLE GODS is a sharp, yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard and Hunter College. Little Gods is her first novel.

Catherine Chung won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, and has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice, and a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

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

In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman however, who lived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. With the passage of time, as the truth seemed to slip away, the investigation itself caused its own traumas--turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming a fear of the violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries.

Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America--its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence.

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s work has appeared in Granta, McSweeney's, VQR, Tin House, and The New Republic among other outlets, and has been recognized by the Millay Colony, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Longreads' Best Crime Reporting. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-directs Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. 

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times Critics' Choice, and the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Believer, The Baffler, and the anthologies Tampa Noir, We Can’t Help it if We’re From Florida, and One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. Her novel True Love is forthcoming from Harper in July 2020. She lives in New York City with her true love, the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell. Find her at Sarah-Gerard.com.

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

After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji’s parents return to Korea for work, leaving 15-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in the family’s new California home. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself in a world made strange in her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. 

The letters lay bare the impact of her mother’s departure, as Eun Ji gets to know the woman who raised her and left her behind. Eun Ji is a student, a traveler, a dancer, a poet, and a daughter coming to terms not only with her parents’ prolonged absence, but her family’s history: her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre. Where, Koh asks, do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?

E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She is the recipient of The MacDowell Colony and Kundiman fellowships and a 2017 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship, and was runner-up for the 2018 Prairie Schooner Summer Nonfiction Prize. Her memoir The Magical Language of Others will be published by Tin House Books in January 2020.

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by multiple outlets, including The Washington Post, Booklist, Literary Hub, and Nylon. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction Novel Prize. Kim was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in Elle Magazine, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.

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

Escaping her failing marriage in the United States, Grace Marisola has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she receives an unexpected inheritance—a property on the isolated beaches south of Madras—and discovers a sister: Lucia, four years older, who has spent her life in a residential facility.

Settling into the pink house on its spit of wild beach, Grace builds a new and precarious life with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha, and an ever-multiplying band of dogs, led by the golden Raja. In the lush wilderness of Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonized by flying foxes, its temples shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But her attempts to leave her old self behind prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury, and bewilderment of life with Lucia.

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her previous work includes her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International MPAC Dublin Award. She lives in Chennai. 

Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, Eli Gottlieb has worked as a Senior Editor of Elle Magazine and taught American Literature as a Lecturer at the University of Padova, Italy. His novels have won him the Rome Prize and the Mckitterick Prize of the British Society of Authors and have been published in 14 countries. His most recent novel is Best Boy.

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

A girl follows clues that lead to Mommy! This Level D book is perfect for new readers.

A girl, her mother, and their cat are snuggled up on a couch and reading a book. The girl falls asleep, and when she wakes up, Mommy is gone. Where could she be?

The girl searches the house, picks up clues (including a recipe for kale and a sunhat and gardening gloves that come and go). And she figures out where Mommy is–in the garden!

Author and/or illustrator of over 40 books, Pat Cummings teaches at Pratt and Parsons and runs a summer Boot Camp to bring writers and illustrators together with publishers. She serves on the boards of the Authors Guild, the Authors League Fund and SCBWI and as Chair of the Founders Award Jury for the Society of Illustrators’ Original Art Show. Pat’s latest books include her debut middle grade novel, Trace, from HarperCollins and Where is Mommy?, a picture book from Holiday House. Find her at www.patcummings.com or on Twitter @PatCummingsBook.  

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

Beatrice Fox deserves to go straight to hell.

At least, that’s what she believes. Her last day on Earth, she ruined the life of the person she loves most—her little sister, Emmy. So when Bea awakens from a fatal car accident to find herself on an airplane headed who knows where, she’s confused, to say the least.

Once on the ground, Bea receives some truly harrowing news: she’s in purgatory. If she ever wants to catch a flight to heaven, she’ll have to help five thousand souls figure out what’s keeping them from moving on.

But one of Bea’s first assignments is Caleb, the boy who caused her accident, and the last person Bea would ever want to send to the pearly gates. And as much as Bea would love to see Caleb suffer for dooming her to a seemingly endless future of eating bad airport food and listening to other people’s problems, she can’t help but notice that he’s kind of cute, and sort of sweet, and that maybe, despite her best efforts, she’s totally falling for him.

Gabby Noone is a writer and aspiring gameshow contestant. Her work has appeared in Rookie, the Hairpin, Jezebel, the Cut, and SSENSE, among other places. Her tweets have been featured in many prestigious listicles. She grew up in Abington, PA, and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow her @twelveoclocke.

Estelle Tang is the senior culture editor at Vogue.com

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

It’s winter in the town of Eerie-on-Sea, where the mist is thick and the salt spray is rattling the windows of the Grand Nautilus Hotel. Inside, young Herbert Lemon, Lost and Founder for the hotel, has an unexpected visitor. It seems that Violet Parma, a fearless girl around his age, lost her parents at the hotel when she was a baby, and she’s sure that the nervous Herbert is the only person who can help her find them. The trouble is, Violet is being pursued at that moment by a strange hook-handed man. And the town legend of the Malamander — a part-fish, part-human monster whose egg is said to make dreams come true — is rearing its scaly head. As various townspeople, some good-hearted, some nefarious, reveal themselves to be monster hunters on the sly, can Herbert and Violet elude them and discover what happened to Violet’s kin? This lighthearted, fantastical mystery, featuring black-and-white spot illustrations, kicks off a trilogy of fantasies set in the seaside town.

Thomas Taylor is an award-winning author-illustrator for children whose debut novel, Malamander, kicked off this mystery series. He illustrated the cover for the original British edition of the first Harry Potter book and has since gone on to write and illustrate several picture books and young adult novels, including the graphic novel Scarlett Hart: Monster Hunter by Marcus Sedgwick. Thomas Taylor lives on the south coast of England.

Tom Booth makes marks. He makes marks in books like this one, and he sometimes makes marks that move. Some of his marks — like those in Don’t Blink! and This Is Christmas — have been given stars. Raised just outside Philadelphia, Tom Booth made his earliest marks on his parents’ antique table. He thinks the table looks better now. His parents aren’t so sure. He lives in Brooklyn.

Susan Van Metre is the Executive Editorial Director of Walker Books US, a new division of Candlewick Press. Previously she was at Abrams, where she founded the Amulet imprint. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Pete Fornatale, and their daughter and Lab mix.

Maria T. Middleton is the Art Director of Imprints at Candlewick Press and Walker Books US. After beginning her career at HarperCollins, Maria spent more than a decade designing award-winning books for Abrams Books and then for Random House. In her current role, Maria works across a variety of formats and genres including board books, picture books, middle-grade, young adult, graphic novels, and non-fiction.

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

The year is 1979. The Iranian Revolution is just around the corner, as is a once-in-alifetime solar eclipse. Meanwhile, in the northeastern city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, run an ancient orchard, growing apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries, and looking after several generations of family members. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace and arguments about government corruption and the rise of religious fundamentalism, peppered with tales of ancient Persia that foreshadow the seismic political changes to come. And yet life continues. Bibi, the matriarch, struggles to keep her family together. Her young nephew goes to university, hoping to lead the fi ght for a new Iran and marry his childhood sweetheart. Another nephew surrenders to opium, while his father longs for a life in Europe. Her brother-in-law evolves into a powerful Islamic cleric while her husband retreats into intellectual reflection. Told through a host of vivid, unforgettable characters, ranging from children to servants to friends of the family, To Keep the Sun Alive is the kind of compelling, rich story that not only informs the past, but also reminds us of the human aspirations that animate historical events.

Rabeah Ghaffari was born in Iran and lives in New York City. She is a filmmaker and writer, whose collaborative fiction with artist Shirin Neshat was featured in Reflections on Islamic Art, and her documentary, The Troupe, featured Tony Kushner. To Keep the Sun Alive is her first novel.

Hooman Majd is an Iranian-American writer and the author of three books on Iran, including the New York Times bestselling "The Ayatollah Begs to Differ”. Hooman Majd has also written for The New Yorker, GQ, Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, Vanity Fair, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Politico, and Interview, among others. He has published short fiction in literary journals such as Guernica and The American Scholar. He lives in New York City.

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

Charles Yu launches his new novel Interior Chinatown with Celeste Ng and Thessaly La Force, moderated by Read It Forward's Abbe Wright.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.

Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.

CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.

CELESTE NG is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her writing has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her and her work, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).

THESSALY LA FORCE is the features director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

ABBE WRIGHT is the Senior Editor of Read it Forward, a website that helps users discover their next great read through book round-ups, author interviews, and essays. She is also the host of the Read it Forward podcast. Previously, she was a contributing editor at Glamour and an assistant editor at O, The Oprah Magazine. She has also written for The Cut, Metro, and Philadelphia Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets at @abbewright.

Harvey Weinstein. Brett Kavanaugh. Jeffrey Epstein. Donald Trump. The most infamous abusers in modern American history are being outed as women speak up to publicly expose behavior that was previously only whispered about -- and it's both making an impact, and sparking a backlash. From the leading, agenda-setting feminist editors of Yes Means Yes, Believe Me brings readers into the evolving landscape of the movement against sexual violence, and outlines how trusting women is the critical foundation for future progress.

In Believe Me, contributors ask and answer the crucial question: What would happen if we didn't just believe women, but acted as though they matter? If we take women's experiences of online harassment seriously, it will transform the internet. If we listen to and center survivors, we could revolutionize our systems of justice. If we believe Black women when they talk about pain, we will save countless lives.

Moira Donegan is a writer and feminist living in New York. She is an opinion columnist at the Guardian and a former editor of n+1 and the New Republic. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Jaclyn Friedman is a popular speaker and opinion writer and the host of “Unscrewed,” named a Best Sex Podcast by both Marie Claire and Esquire.

Matt Lubchansky is the associate editor of the Nib and a cartoonist and illustrator living in Queens. Their work has appeared in VICE, Eater, Mad magazine, Go-thamist, the Toast, the Hairpin, Brooklyn Magazine, and their long-running webcomic Please Listen to Me. They are the co-author of Dad Magazine.

Soraya Nadia McDonald is a culture critic for the Undefeated and NPR’s Fresh Air. She graduated from Howard University with a degree in journalism. She grew up in North Carolina and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jessica Valenti is a columnist and the author of six books on feminism, politics and culture. Her latest book, Sex Object: A Memoir, was a New York Times bestseller. 

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

Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down—even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won.

After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation’s hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency—twice. When he retired years later, no one talked him out of it. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created.

Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty must confront his greatest hypocrisy—what to do with the men, women, and children he owns—before he succumbs to death.

Alexis Coe is an award-winning historian and author of the narrative history book Alice + Freda Forever (soon to be a major motion picture). Coe is a consulting producer on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s forthcoming George Washington series on the History Channel, and has frequently appeared on CNN. She’s the cohost of Audible’s “Presidents Are People, Too!” and the host of “No Man's Land.” Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and many others. She holds a graduate degree in American history, and was a Research Curator at the New York Public Library. 

Aminatou Sow is a writer, interviewer, and cultural critic. She host Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast that tackles the feminism, culture and the latest in politics every single week. Aminatou is working on a memoir about friendship with her friend, Ann Friedman. 

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

Every day, all over the world, women are catcalled and denigrated simply for walking down the street. Boys will be boys, women have been told for generations, ignore it, shrug it off, take it as a compliment. But the harassment has real consequences for women: in the fear it instills and the shame they are made to feel.

In Stop Telling Women to Smile, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh uses her arresting street art portraits to explore how women experience hostility in communities that are supposed to be homes. She addresses the pervasiveness of street harassment, its effects, and the kinds of activism that can serve to counter it. The result is a cathartic reckoning with the aggression women endure, and an examination of what equality truly entails.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a classically trained oil painter turned street artist, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient, and one of Brooklyn Magazine’s “Most Influential People.” Her street art series, which began in 2012, Stop Telling Women to Smile, has been covered by numerous national media outlets. Stop Telling Women To Smile is her first book.

Lisa Lucas is the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as the Publisher of Guernica Magazine and the Director of Education at the Tribeca Film Institute. 

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

The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human—even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair “Netted” have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The “Surplus” live on swampland if they’re lucky, on water if they’re not.

The story: To a Surplus couple—he once a professor, she still a lawyer—is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league.

When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though—with a special eye on beating ChinRussia—Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society.

Gish Jen is the author of four previous novels, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction, the latest of which was The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She teaches from time to time in China, and otherwise lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee's novel, The Evening Hero, is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster, her young adult novel, Finding My Voice with Soho Press. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Nation, and the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and forthcoming in Smithsonian Magazine. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction. Lee is a founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction at Columbia where she is Writer in Residence.

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

In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee borrowed $100 from her brother to run a Numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis' mother.

Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for 34 years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Living takes guts."

Bridgett M. Davis' memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is also the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award. She is writer/director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts, and a creative writing and journalism professor at Baruch College, (City University of New York). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Millions, Salon, the LA Times and O, Oprah Magazine. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in Brooklyn with her family. Visit her website at www.bridgettdavis.com.

Natalie Peart is a former bookseller and current writer, reader and podcast producer. Her chaplet Sixty-one has been published with Belladonna*, a Brooklyn press. She is currently working on season 4 of the award-winning podcast, The Stoop. Natalie creates in the county of Kings.

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

The Willies, poet and scholar Adam Falkner’s first full-length collection, offers a sharp and vulnerable new portrait of the journey into queerhood in America. In a voice that Dr. Cornel West heralds as “prophetic in bleak times,” Falkner departs from a more familiar coming out narrative to center the stories of several dueling selves. Masquerading white boy. Child of an addict. Closeted varsity athlete. Grief-struck friend. Through snapshots of “Willies” both tragic and humorous, merciless and humane, Falkner offers powerful new ways of understanding the intersectional linkage that binds queer shame to cultural appropriation. The Willies traverses Wu-Tang Clan listening parties to pine forests in the Catskill Mountains to rehab waiting rooms to depict the various costumes we hide within toward navigating the legacies of toxic masculinity, and the many interior tensions synonymous with queer life. At it’s core, The Willies asks us to consider not Who will we become if we give name to that which scares us? but rather Who might we become if we do not? Drifting seamlessly between the scholarly and conversational, Falkner’s poems showcase a versatility of language and a courageous hunger toward naming, as Aracelis Girmay proclaims it, “the ways we devastate one another daily but also the ways we might be opened into love.”

Dr. Adam Falkner is a poet, educator and arts & culture strategist. He is the author of Adoption (Winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Chapbook Award) and The Willies (forthcoming from Button Poetry, 2020), and his work has appeared in a range of print and media spaces including on programming for HBO, NBC, NPR, BET, in the New York Times, and elsewhere. A former high school English teacher in New York City's public schools, Adam is the Founder and Executive Director of the pioneering diversity consulting initiative, the Dialogue Arts Project, and Special Projects Director for Urban Word NYC.

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

Please join us for a Storytime coloring party 🎉 

How Mischief Changed the World Part 1: at the Laundromat is an interactive story and coloring book for kids about a non-binary hero named Mischief who feels different and finds their own definition of “home” through a secret adventure at the laundromat.

Come join us for a magical adventure to find belonging and connection.
You will get your very own story page to color while author/illustrator Bettina Harriman and RepurposeU co-founder, Jaclyn Harte read the story.

*Limited edition pocket-sized books will also be available for purchase on site.
Brought to you by RepurposeU.

BETTINA HARRIMAN
Co-Founder
Chief Mischief Maker

Bettina is a master in the art of mischief who learned early on that identity is an invention as big as your imagination can stretch. For B, this practice began in kindergarten when B drew a picture of a werewolf and decided that’s what they wanted to be when they grew up. B has been imagining, drawing and creating themselves into being ever since. B was born and raised in Miami then spent a few years in New Orleans before pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts in New York City where B currently resides. Whether it’s in art, work or life, B makes adventure wherever they go and believes that the rules are worth breaking especially when it comes to becoming yourself. As co-founder and chief mischief maker at RepurposeU, B gets to illustrate and write stories and find new ways to make self-discovery and invention fun for kids big and small. B thinks this is pretty awesome;)

DR. HARTE
Co-Founder
Chief Solution Seeker

Dr. Harte's life changed one day in graduate school when  she bought a copy of her first Murakami book. After reading it she felt that not only was imagination possible, it was critical. She began to get some funny ideas about her doctorate: what could she do if she walked out of the library? She rethought her assets: she’d grown up in between an antique shop and a junkyard. Both were places she’d spent years at reading and inventing stories. All the while she was collecting transformations: whether it was new treasures found in dumpster miracles or stories where people made her feel like her own possibilities were bigger than she knew. She realized she could use her education to help others. Her dissertation, "In Search of Lost Women" explored the relationship between trauma, silence, language and the power of storytelling. She used this work to help build trauma-responsive programs and has raised over $14million in funds for trauma-responsive programs. As co-founder and chief solution seeker at RepurposeU she now gets to create new solutions to help people who feel different, feel possible.

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

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award), and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.

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. 

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

Throughout this striking debut collection we meet characters who have lied, who have sometimes created elaborate falsehoods, and who now must cope with the way that those deceptions eat at the very fabric of their lives and relationships. In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less lonely, after his boyfriend catches on to his compulsion for lying and demands to know this friend is real; in “Aim for the Heart”, a man’s lies about a hunting habit leave him with an unexpected deer carcass and the need to parse unsettling high school memories; in “Rorschach”, a theater producer runs a show in which death row inmates are crucified in an on-stage rendering of the New Testament, while being haunted daily by an unrequited love and nightly by ghosts of his own creation.

Peter Kispert’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in OUT magazine, GQ, Esquire, Playboy, The Carolina Quarterly, The Journal, Slice magazine, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Indiana University’s MFA program, where he taught undergraduate fiction writing workshops. He lives in New York.

Garrard Conley is the author of the acclaimed memoir Boy Erased, which has been translated in over a dozen languages and is now a major motion picture. Conley is also a creator and producer of the podcast UnErased, which explores the history of conversion therapy in America through interviews, historical documents, and archival materials provided by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. His work can be found in The New York Times, TIME, VICE, CNN, BuzzFeed, Them, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Huffington Post, among other places. Conley lives in New York City with his husband, and is currently at work on a novel about queer 18th century lives. He can be found online @gayrodcon and garrardconley.com.

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

With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love Poems for Married People such a hit, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection of poems, this time taking on the greatest “joy” in life: children. Kenney covers it all, from newborns, toddlers, and sleep deprivation, to the terrible twos, terrible tweens, and terrible teens. A parent’s love is unconditional, but sometimes that button can’t help but be pushed. Between back to school shopping, summer vacations that never end, the awkwardness of puberty, the inevitable post-college moving back in, and more, a parent’s job is never done, whether they like it or not.

John Kenney is the New York Times bestselling author of the humorous poetry collection Love Poems for Married People, and the novels Talk to Me and Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He has worked for many years as a copywriter. He has also been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine since 1999. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Emily Flake is the author of That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug. Her cartoons and humorous essays run regularly in The New Yorker, The Nib, and many other publications. Her weekly strip, Lulu Eightball, ran in alt-weeklies for many years. She’s written and illustrated two other books: These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves and Mama Tried. Her illustrations and cartoons appear in publications all over the world, including the New York Times, Newsweek, the Globe and Mail, The Onion, The New Statesman, and Forbes. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, daughter, and an absurdly large Ragdoll cat named Gizmo.

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

Learn English and Mandarin words with Gordon and Li Li as they celebrate the traditions and festivities of Chinese New Year in their latest bilingual book!
 
Gordon and Li Li are cousins. Li Li is from Beijing, China and speaks Mandarin. Gordon lives in Brooklyn, New York and speaks English. They are so excited to celebrate Chinese New Year together! 

Children and caregivers can learn about the preparation, the good luck foods, and special greetings that ensure a happy and prosperous New Year while learning words in English and Mandarin. Each word features the English and pinyin spelling along with the Chinese character and the phonetic Mandarin pronunciation to help readers practice.
 
This is an adorable and informative must-have book for any family who wants to get little ones excited to learn about Chinese New Year — and a second language!

Michele Wong McSween is a mom, ex-fashion designer, author, and a fourth generation Chinese American. She resides in Brooklyn, NY with her husband Steve and three boys – Walker, Harry and Stevie. Growing up in Sacramento, CA, she never learned Chinese and wanted to be sure her own boys were confident with Chinese language and culture. After enrolling them in early learning Mandarin classes, McSween looked for appropriate Mandarin bedtime reading and found that little was available.  She created Gordon & Li Li with an appealing, simple and modern design aesthetic that would engage kids and parents alike.

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

For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air. When, one day, she finally musters the courage to introduce herself, the chemistry between them is undeniable: Thomas is wise, witty, handsome, mysterious, clearly a kindred spirit. There's just one tiny problem: He's dead.

Stuck in a surreal limbo governed by bureaucracy, Thomas is unable to "cross over" to the afterlife until he completes a 90-day stint on earth, during which time he is forbidden to get involved with a member of the living -- lest he incur "regrets." When Thomas and Rachel break this rule, they unleash a cascade of bizarre, troubling consequences.

Amy Bonnaffons has an MFA from NYU and is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, The Sun, the Southampton Review, Anderbo, and elsewhere. “Horse” was read on This American Life.

Rachel Lyon is the author of SELF PORTRAIT WITH BOY, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction's 2018 First Novel Prize and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Her short work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including One Story, Longreads, Joyland, and Electric Literature's Recommended Reading. Editor-in-Chief of Epiphany magazine and cofounder of the reading series Ditmas Lit, Rachel has taught at Catapult, the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Slice Literary, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, her hometown.

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

R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went—whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city—he found himself on the outside looking in.

In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Eric redefines what it means to be an “other” through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the verdant school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, about the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election as well as the seismic change that came thereafter. Ultimately, Eric seeks the answer to the ever more relevant question: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Eric finds the answers to these questions by re-envisioning what “normal” means, and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story.

R. Eric Thomas (he/him/his) is a senior staff writer at Elle online where he has written the daily pop culture and politics humor column “Eric Reads the News” since 2016. He’s also been published by The New York Times, among many other publications. As a playwright, his work has been seen on stages around the country; he won the Barrymore Award and the Dramatists Guild Lanford Wilson Award and was a finalist for the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association New Play Award. Off the page, he is the long-running host of The Moth StorySlams in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. He lives in Baltimore with his extraordinary husband, the Reverend David Norse Thomas, and an out-of-control collection of succulents, candles, and tote bags. Here for It is his first book.

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

Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, becomes drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth.

Soon Bibike and Ariyike’s father wagers the family home on a “sure bet” that evaporates like smoke. As their parents’ marriage collapses in the aftermath of this gamble, the twin sisters and their two younger siblings, Andrew and Peter, are thrust into the reluctant care of their traditional Yoruba grandmother. Inseparable while they had their parents to care for them, the twins’ paths diverge once the household shatters. Each girl is left to locate, guard, and hone her own fragile source of power.

Written with astonishing intimacy and wry attention to the fickleness of fate, Tola Rotimi Abraham’s Black Sunday takes us into the chaotic heart of family life, tracing a line from the euphoria of kinship to the devastation of estrangement. In the process, it joyfully tells a tale of grace and connection in the midst of daily oppression and the constant incursions of an unremitting patriarchy. This is a novel about two young women slowly finding, over twenty years, in a place rife with hypocrisy but also endless life and love, their own distinct methods of resistance and paths to independence.

Tola Rotimi Abraham is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. She lives in Iowa City and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in journalism. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught writing at the University of Iowa. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Catapult, The Des Moines Register, The Nigerian Literary Magazine, and other places.

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

Exciting fans of such writers as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Carmen Maria Machado with prose that shimmers and stings, Amber Sparks holds a singular role in the canon of the weird. Now, she reaches new, uncanny heights with And I Do Not Forgive You. In “Mildly Happy, With Moments of Joy,” a friend is ghosted by a simple text message; in “Everyone’s a Winner at Meadow Park,” a teen precariously coming of age in a trailer park befriends an actual ghost. At once humorous and unapologetically fi erce, these stories shine an interrogating light on the adage that “history likes to lie about women”— as the subjects of “A Short and Speculative History of Lavoisier’s Wife” and “You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women” (it’s true, you won’t) will attest. Blending fairy tales and myths with apocalyptic technologies, all tethered intricately by shades of rage, And I Do Not Forgive You offers a mosaic of an all-too-real world that fails to listen to its silenced goddesses.

Amber Sparks is the author of a previous collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, and her fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.

Kate Zambreno is the author of several books including Screen Tests, Heroines, Book of Mutter, and Green Girl. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, VQR, and elsewhere. A novel, Drifts, is forthcoming from Riverhead in May 2020. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

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

Please join us as Valerie Hsiung presents her new poetry collection YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), alongside co-presenters: Sara Deniz Akant, Julia Cohen, t'ai freedom ford, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Timothy Liu and Aristilde Justine Kirby as moderator.*

Valerie Hsiung is a poet, writer, performer, and the author of the poetry collections YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), outside voices, please (CSU, 2021), and e f g (Action, 2016). Her poems and hybrid, sound-based texts can be found in or are forthcoming from places such as The Nation, The Believer, jubilat, Chicago Review, PEN America, The Rumpus, Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, and beyond. She has performed her little poetry theater at Treefort Music Festival, DC Arts Center, Common Area Maintenance, Casa Libre en la Solana, Shapeshifter Lab, and The Silent Barn. Born and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in southern Ohio, she now lives in Brooklyn and Hudson.

*Author bios can be found on Facebook—let us know you're coming!

This event is free and open to the public. 

Please join us as New York Times bestselling author-illustrator Vashti Harrison presents a special storytime reading of Little Legends: Exceptional Men in Black History, in celebration of Black History Month!

This beautifully illustrated board book highlights true stories of black men in history. The exceptional men featured include artist Aaron Douglas, civil rights leader John Lewis, dancer Alvin Ailey, lawman Bass Reeves, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and writer James Baldwin.

The legends in this book span centuries and continents, but what they have in common is that each one has blazed a trail for generations to come.

Vashti Harrison, author and illustrator of the bestselling Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History and Little Dreamers: Visionary Women Around the World, is an artist, author and filmmaker with a passion for storytelling. She earned her MFA in Film/Video from CalArts and BA from the University of Virginia. After a brief stint in television as a production coordinator, she is now a freelance graphic designer and a picture-book-illustrator. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. We invite you to visit her at www.vashtiharrison.com and @VashtiHarrison on Twitter and Instagram.

This event is free!

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the IRA was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children but also IRA members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous IRA terrorists such as Dolours Price, who was planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution when she was barely out of her teens, to a ferocious IRA soldier, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his IRA past—Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine, contributing writer at Wired, and author of A Sense of Direction.

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

Today, the opioid crisis makes nightly news, an epidemic claiming more than 130 lives in the United States each day. The question on everyone's mind is: why? Why do so many people turn to drugs? When Erin Khar's twelve-year-old son, Atticus, asked her this question, it started her on the journey to write this book, a meditation on her fifteen-year opioid addiction and the road to recovery.

STRUNG OUT is a vivid, no-holds-barred account of Erin Khar's personal struggle with opioid addiction. Growing up in LA as the only child of divorced parents, Khar, often consumed with loneliness, looked for an escape from the pervasive belief that she wasn't enough—not enough to keep her parents together or her mother from depression—and yet, she never shared with anyone this private sadness. Instead, she hid behind the façade of a perfect childhood filled with good grades, a popular group of friends, and horseback riding. By the time she was thirteen, the act becoming too difficult to keep up, and she started experimenting with her grandmother's expired painkillers, quickly followed by heroin. The drug allowed her to feel the calm she was missing from her life and suppress all the heavy feelings she couldn't understand. Heroin, while keeping her from other forms of self-harm, became the addiction that destroyed her.

Erin Khar is known for her writing on addiction, recovery, mental health, relationships, parenting, infertility, and self-care. Her weekly advice column, Ask Erin, is published on Ravishly and brings in over 500K unique readers per month. Her personal essays have appeared in SELF, Marie Claire, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and others. She's the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Editor's Choice Prize and her prize-winning essay was featured in Best New Writing 2012 anthology. Her essays have also been published in the Stigma Fighters Anthology (vol 3) and BURN IT DOWN, an anthology edited by Lilly Dancyger. She lives in New York City with her husband and two kids.

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

How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition—if such a thing exists?

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.

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

In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together and torn us apart and changed not just the way we communicate but who we are and who we can be. It has created a new, unprecedented cultural space that we are all a part of—even if we don’t participate, that is how we participate—but by which we’re continually surprised, betrayed, enriched, befuddled. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us and always has been.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought us online and what keeps us there even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic, powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t been told.

Joanne McNeil was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation, and she has contributed to Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired, among other publications. Lurking is her first book.

Sonia Saraiya is Vanity Fair's television critic, covering narrative media and how it intersects with technology, politics, and history.

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

A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend—and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community.

Real Life is a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories—and at what cost.

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has earned him fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

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

An empowering and educational alphabet picture book about women artists, perfect for fans of Rad American Women A-Z.

How many women artists can you name? From Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe, to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Xenobia Bailey, this lushly illustrated alphabet picture book presents both famous and underrepresented women in the fine arts from a variety of genres: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and more. Each spread features a simple line of text encapsulating the creator's iconic work in one word, such as "D is for Dots" (Yayoi Kusama) and "S is for Spider" (Louise Bourgeois), followed by slightly longer text about the artist for older readers who would like to know more. Backmatter includes photos, extended biographies, and discussion questions for budding creatives and trailblazers.

Artists featured: Mirka Mora, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yayoi Kusama, Kay Sage, Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Elizabeth Catlett, Judith Leyster, Leonora Carrington, Carmen Herrera, Edmonia Lewis, Maya Lin, Hilma af Klint, Maria Martinez, Gee's Bend quilters, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Loïs Mailou Jones, Alice Neel, Helen Zughaib, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Dorothea Lange, Xenobia Bailey, and Maria Sibylla Merian.

Melanie LaBarge is a writer living in Upstate New York with her partner, Shane, and her son, Julian. She holds a BA and MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her favorite color is yellow and her favorite museum is MoMA. Women Artists A to Z is her first children’s book.

Caroline Corrigan is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. She works out of her home studio in Upstate New York, where she lives with her husband, Harrison, and their son, Graham. Her favorite color is blue and her favorite museum is Musée d’Orsay. Women Artists A to Z is her first children’s book.

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

When the neighborhood boys tell CeCe that she can't be a pirate, she goes straight to her Grandpa, who must know something about being a pirate. Why else would he have all those tattoos?

As Grandpa shares each tattoo with CeCe, they are transported to imaginative lands where they learn all the qualities a pirate should possess: A pirate must be BRAVE and QUICK, but also FUN and INDEPENDENT. And the most important thing is to believe in yourself, whether you’re a pirate or not.

Formerly of The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Books, and BuzzFeed News’ Twitter morning show #AMtoDM, Isaac Fitzgerald appears frequently on The Today Show and is the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes). How to Be a Pirate, illustrated by Brigette Barrager, is his first picture book.

Mahogany L. Browne is a California-born, Brooklyn-based writer, educator, activist, mentor, and curator. She has published several books of poetry, and she is an Urban Word NYC Artistic Director (as seen on HBO's Brave New Voices), founder of Women Writers of Color Reading Room, and Director of BLM@Pratt Programming, and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country.

Jon Scieszka is the creator of Trucktown, including the New York Times bestselling Smash, Crash!, and the author of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, the Time Warp Trio series, Caldecott Honor Book The Stinky Cheese Man, and many other books that inspire kids to want to read. He has worked as an elementary school teacher and is the founder of GuysRead.com, a literacy initiative for boys.

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

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

This event is free!

Judy never intended to start wearing the dog. But when she stumbled across her son Teddy’s old baby sling during a halfhearted basement cleaning, something in her snapped. So: the dog went into the sling, Judy felt connected to another living being, and she’s repeated the process every day since.

Life hasn’t gone according to Judy’s plan. Her career as a children’s book author offered a glimpse of success before taking an embarrassing nose dive. Teddy, now a teenager, treats her with some combination of mortification and indifference. Her best friend is dying. And her husband, Gary, has become a pot-addled professional “snackologist” who she can’t afford to divorce. On top of it all, she has a painfully ironic job writing articles for a self-help website—a poor fit for someone seemingly incapable of helping herself.

Laura Zigman is the author of Animal Husbandry (which was made into the movie Someone Like You, starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd), Dating Big Bird, Piece of Work, and Her. She has been a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post, produced a popular online series of animated videos called Annoying Conversations, and was the recipient of a Yaddo residency. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and deeply human Sheltie.

After attending NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and interning at Late Night with David Letterman, Julie Klam went on to write for such publications as O: The Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, and for the VH1 television show Pop-Up Video, where she earned an Emmy nomination. Currently she writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the magazines that haven't folded. She is the author of Please Excuse My Daughter, You Had Me At Woof, Love At First Bark, Friendkeeping and The Stars in Our Eyes all with Riverhead Books. Her sixth book is coming out in 2021 and it will have a title by then. She lives in New York City.

Ann Leary is the bestselling author of the novels, THE CHILDREN, THE GOOD HOUSE, OUTTAKES FROM A MARRIAGE, and the memoir, AN INNOCENT, A BROAD. Her novel, THE GOOD HOUSE, has been adapted as a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. It will be released in 2020.  Ann’s New York Times essay, “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” was adapted for the Amazon Modern Love TV Series and stars Tina Fey and John Slattery. She is currently working on a new novel and a collection of essays for Simon and Schuster. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and she has written for numerous publications. Ann and her husband Denis Leary live in New York.

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

In the coastal town of Danvers, MA, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. In chapters dense with ’80s iconography—from Heathers to “big hair”—Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective journeys of this enchanted team as they storm their way to the championship. Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza, whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all, the DHS Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship.

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.

This event is free!

In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.

The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he’s never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm’s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling “fundamentally defective.” But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York’s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A regular contributor to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their son.

This event is free!

What do you do when it is time to go to bed, but you have toes that are too wiggly, feet that want to run, hips that want to shake, legs that want to jump, and a heart that wants to drum? Good night, Wiggly toes is a fun book that helps you to connect with your wiggle body and helps calm it down.

One breath a time.

Roda Ahmed is a Norwegian author and columnist born in Hargeisa, Somalia. Roda is the bestselling author of Forberedelsen (The Preparations) and in 2018 she published her first bestselling children's book Mae Among the Stars with HarperCollins. An Amazon Best Book of the Month. Now in 11th printing! She can speak five languages: Somali, Arabic, Norwegian, English, and French. Roda is the Founder and CEO of Hightree Publishing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. For more info check out instagram:  @rodaworld

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

In her most personal and inspiring book yet, the beloved speaker, philanthropist, activist, and author explores the wild joy we discover when we stop trying to be good for others and start living true to ourselves.

This is how you find yourself.

There is a voice of longing inside every woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good mothers, daughters, partners, employees, citizens, and friends. We believe all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives, relationships, and world, and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful. We hide our simmering discontent—even from ourselves. Until we reach our boiling point.
Four years ago, Glennon Doyle—bestselling Oprah-endorsed author, renowned activist and humanitarian, wife and mother of three—was speaking at a conference when a woman entered the room. Glennon looked at her and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. Soon she realized that they came to her from within.

Glennon was finally hearing her own voice—the voice that had been silenced by decades of cultural conditioning, numbing addictions, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl Glennon had been before the world told her who to be. She vowed to never again abandon herself. She decided to build a life of her own—one based on her individual desire, intuition, and imagination. She would reclaim her true, untamed self.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both a memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It offers a piercing, electrifying examination of the restrictive expectations women are issued from birth; shows how hustling to meet those expectations leaves women feeling dissatisfied and lost; and reveals that when we quit abandoning ourselves and instead abandon the world’s expectations of us, we become women who can finally look at our lives and recognize: There She Is.

Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

This event will be held at St. Ann's Church at 157 Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights. All tickets are seated, and every ticket includes 1 copy of Untamed.  Doors open at 6:15pm.
 

New York City is still regaining its balance in the years following 9/11, when four twenty-somethings—Tess, Tazio, David, and Angelica—meet in a bar, each yearning for something: connection, recognition, a place in the world, a cause to believe in. Nearly fifteen years later, as their city recalibrates in the wake of the 2016 election, their bond has endured—but almost everything else has changed.

As freshmen at Cooper Union, Tess and Tazio were the ambitious, talented future of the art world—but by thirty-six, Tess is married to David, the mother of two young boys, and working as an understudy on Broadway. Kind and steady, David is everything Tess lacked in her own childhood—but a recent freak accident has left him with befuddling symptoms, and she’s still adjusting to her new role as caretaker.

Meanwhile, Tazio—who once had a knack for earning the kind of attention that Cooper Union students long for—has left the art world for a career in creative branding and politics. But in December 2016, fresh off the astonishing loss of his candidate, Tazio is adrift, and not even his gorgeous and accomplished fiancée, Angelica, seems able to get through to him. With tensions rising on the national stage, the four friends are forced to face the reality of their shared histories, especially a long-ago betrayal that has shaped every aspect of their friendship.

Brian Platzer has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as in the New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English in Manhattan.

Susan Chira is editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project. Chira worked for The New York Times from 1981 to 2019 as a reporter and editor, including posts as foreign editor and deputy executive editor, overseeing daily news coverage across The Times. As senior correspondent on gender issues, she was a member of the team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of sexual harassment.

This event is free!

Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company’s sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he’s nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech start-up’s user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret—and wondering whether her death really was an accident. When Lucas hacks into Margo’s computer looking for answers, he is drawn into her secret online life and realizes just how little he knew about his best friend.

With a fresh voice, biting humor, and piercing observations about human nature, Kevin Nguyen brings an insider’s knowledge of the tech industry to this imaginative novel. A pitch-perfect exploration of race and start-up culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship, New Waves asks: How well do we really know each other? And how do we form true intimacy and connection in a tech-obsessed world?

Kevin Nguyen is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This event is free!

Considered one of the richest and most irreverent biographies in history, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written by Gertrude Stein in the style and voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. Published in 1933 and narrated by Alice, this autobiography begins with her initial move to France in 1907, the day after which she meets Gertrude, sparking a relationship that lasts for nearly four decades. Recounting the vibrant and literary life the two make for themselves among the Parisian avant-garde, Alice opens the doors to the prominent salons they held in their home at rue de Fleurus, hosting fellow expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound as well as artists Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Man Ray, and speaks of the twilight of the Paris belle époque.

In this edition, the wildly talented Maira Kalman brings this glittering Parisian world to life, and celebrates Stein and Toklas in vivid color. Her whimsical and inimitable illustrations complement the wit and humor of Stein’s narrative, and elevate the exciting intrigues of these famous women and their friends. Inviting readers to experience this book in a completely new way, the illustrated edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas will prompt a contemporary reading of this cherished and singular classic.

Maira Kalman is an illustrator, author, and designer. She is the author of Beloved Dog, And the Pursuit of Happiness and The Principles of Uncertainty. She is the illustrator of Michael Pollan's Food Rules and the bestselling edition of William Strunk and E. B. White's The Elements of Style. Kalman's work is shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan. 

This event is free!

Eighteen boyfriends, twenty-three jobs, and one ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice: Temporary casts a hilarious and tender eye toward the struggle for happiness under late capitalism.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Hilary Leichter’s writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever, Friendship, and the forthcoming Perfect Tunes. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which sells and publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She is a contributor to Bookforum and The Cut. She teaches writing in New York City, where she lives with her family.

This event is free!

He’s a tall man who likes to fix things. She’s a small mouse who likes to find things. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

On a tall hill, in a tall house, live a tall man and a small mouse. All day the man does tall things, like untangling swings and rescuing cats from trees. All night the mouse does small things, like finding pins and pens, corks and long-lost forks. The two never see each other until the day the mouse takes a snooze in the man’s long shoes…SQUEAK! EEK! Can this duo get along — and maybe even become the perfect mix? A rhythmic, rhyming narration pairs with charming illustrations to celebrate the tall and short of an unlikely friendship — and the surprising benefits of working together.

Mara Bergman is the author of more than twenty books for young children, including Snip Snap! What’s That?, which won a Parents Choice Award, a Society of Illustrators Award and the Stockport Children’s Book Award (UK), as well as Oliver Who Travelled Far and Wide, winner of the Booktrust Early Years Award (UK). Mara was born in NYC and lived in Cobble Hill before moving to England, where she works in London as an editor of children’s books. Mara also writes poetry, and her first full collection, The Disappearing Room, was published last year by Arc Publications (UK). She enjoys swimming, walking her dog, eggplant and hot chocolate (but not together) and was born on leap year day. 

This event is free!

It’s been twenty-seven days since Cleo and Layla’s friendship imploded.

Nearly a month since Cleo realized they’ll never be besties again.

Now Cleo wants to erase every memory, good or bad, that tethers her to her ex-best friend. But pretending Layla doesn’t exist isn’t as easy as Cleo hoped, especially after she’s assigned to be Layla’s tutor. Despite budding friendships with other classmates—and a raging crush on a gorgeous boy named Dom—Cleo’s turbulent past with Layla comes back to haunt them both.

Alternating between time lines of Then and Now, When You Were Everything blends past and present into an emotional story about the beauty of self-forgiveness, the promise of new beginnings, and the courage it takes to remain open to love.

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

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. 

This event is free!

When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?

Later dramatizes a spectacular yet ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention. Following the success of his acclaimed memoir, The Narrow Door, Lisicky fearlessly explores the body, queerness, love, illness, community, and belonging in this masterful, ingenious new book.

Paul Lisicky is the author of the forthcoming memoir Later: My Life At the Edge of the World (Graywolf, March 2020), as well as The Narrow Door (a New York Times Editors' Choice), Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he has served on the Writing Committee since 2000. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently an Associate Professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out earlier this year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn. 

This event is free!

The name of the elite, women-only coworking space stretches across the wall behind the check-in desk: THE HERD, the H-E-R always in purple. In-the-know New Yorkers crawl over each other to apply for membership to this community that prides itself on mentorship and empowerment. Among the hopefuls is Katie Bradley, who’s just returned from the Midwest after a stint of book research blew up in her face. Luckily, Katie has an “in,” thanks to her sister Hana, an original Herder and the best friend of Eleanor Walsh, its charismatic founder.

Eleanor is a queen among The Herd’s sun-filled rooms, admired and quietly feared, even as she strives to be warm and approachable. As head of PR, Hana is working around the clock in preparation for a huge announcement from Eleanor—one that would change the trajectory of The Herd forever. Though Katie loves her sister’s crew, she secretly hopes she’s found her next book subject in Eleanor, who’s brilliant, trailblazing—and extremely private.

Then, on the night of the glitzy Herd news conference, Eleanor vanishes without a trace. Everybody has a theory about what made Eleanor run, but when the police suspect foul play, everyone is a suspect: Eleanor’s husband, other Herders, the men’s rights groups that have had it out for The Herd since its launch—even Eleanor’s closest friends. As Hana struggles to figure out what her friend was hiding and Katie chases the story of her life, the sisters must face down the secrets they’re keeping from each other—and confront just how dangerous it can be when women’s perfect veneers start to crack, crumble, and then fall away all together.

Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and author of The Lost Night. 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.

Andrea Stanley is a features director at Cosmopolitan. Previously, she was an editor at Seventeen. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Marie Claire, the Chicago Tribune, and various other publications. 

This event is free!

Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice—catastrophic events known as Drains—leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him.

After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you’re the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled?

Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD—and her huge attitude problem—but really, she’s hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her.

On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One’s ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold—bigger than the world itself.

And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.

VERONICA ROTH is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide), and many short stories and essays.