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David Tamarkin: COOK90 w/ Amanda Shapiro
Monday January 21 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Can you COOK90?
It's easier than you think. For 30 days, challenge yourself to cook every meal--and you'll transform the way you eat and feel. The 150,000+ people who take the COOK90 challenge every year know that cooking for yourself is one of the most satisfying, effective, and easy ways to improve your wellbeing. With expert support from the editors of Epicurious, the web's most trusted recipe site, you'll say goodbye to pricey takeout, crummy pizza delivery, and fast food that's no good for you. And you'll say hello to all the benefits of home cooking: healthier and more delicious meals, a fatter wallet, a clearer mind, and sharper skills. David Tamarkin is the editor and digital director of Epicurious, the most trusted recipe website in the world. Since David joined the brand in 2015, Epicurious has won 5 IACP Awards, 4 Webbys (including dual Webby and People's Voice Awards for Best Food and Drink Site in 2018), and several James Beard Award nominations. In 2018, David released COOK90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier Meals, a book based on Epi's annual new-year-new-cook initiative. David has written about food, wine, cooking and restaurants for publications such as Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Details, Cooking Light, Condé Nast Traveler, Food Network Magazine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Wine & Spirits, Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago, where he was the food editor for several years. In 2013, David published Middlewest, an experimental cooking magazine designed by the Chicago artists Sonnenzimmer. His heart is in Ohio; he physically resides in Harlem. Find him on Instagram and Twitter: @davidtamarkin Amanda Shapiro is the editor of Healthyish, a site from Bon Appétit that covers the wide world of wellness through the lens of delicious food. Previously she was a freelance journalist covering gender and health for publications like Vice, BuzzFeed, and the Oxford American. She was born in San Francisco, home to the best farmers’ markets, and raised in New Haven, home to the best pizza. She likes to run long distances and never cook the same thing twice. Her dream meal involves sweet potatoes and salmon in some configuration with a chocolate tahini brownie for dessert. This event is free and in collaboration with Bon Appétit. Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Sam Lipsyte: Hark w/ Keith Gessen
Tuesday January 22 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status. It’s a role he never asked for, and one he is woefully underprepared to take on. But his inner-circle of modern pilgrims have other plans, as do some suddenly powerful fringe players, including a renegade Ivy League ethicist, a gentle Swedish kidnapper, a crossbow-hunting veteran of jungle drug wars, a social media tycoon with an empire on the skids, and a mysteriously influential (but undeniably slimy) catfish.
In this social satire of the highest order, Sam Lipsyte, the New York Times bestseller and master of the form, reaches new peaks of daring in a novel that revels in contemporary absurdity and the wild poetry of everyday language while exploring the emotional truths of his characters. Hark is a smart, incisive look at men, women, and children seeking meaning and dignity in a chaotic, ridiculous, and often dangerous world. Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. Keith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and son. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Stephanie Land: Maid w/ Alissa Quart
Wednesday January 23 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.
Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children. Stephanie Land is a journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She focuses on social and economic justice as a writing fellow through both the Center for Community Change and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Alissa Quart is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four books including Squeezed, Branded, Republic of Outsiders and the poetry book Monetized. She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian. This year, she received Columbia University's Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and an Emmy in Documentary in the Social Issue category. She was a 2010 Nieman fellow and a National Magazine Award finalist. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Juliet Lapidos: Talent w/ Liesl Schillinger
Thursday January 24 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In this wickedly funny debut, a young graduate student writing about-and desperately searching for-inspiration stumbles upon it in the unlikeliest of places.
Anna Brisker is a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English at Collegiate University who can't seem to finish her dissertation. Her project: an intellectual history of inspiration. As Anna's adviser is quick to remind her, time is running out. She needs the perfect case study to anchor her thesis-and she needs it now. Amid this mounting pressure, Anna strikes up a tenuous friendship with the niece of the famous author Frederick Langley. Freddy wrote three successful books as a young man, then published exactly nothing for the rest of his wayward, hermetic life. Critics believe Freddy suffered from an acute case of writer's block, but his niece tells Anna that there's more to the story: When he died, he was at work on something new. Fascination with Freddy blooms into obsession, and Anna is drawn irrevocably into the criminal machinations of his sole living heir. A modern twist on the Parable of the Talents, Lapidos's debut is a many-layered labyrinth of possible truths that reveal at each turn the danger of interpreting another person's intentions-literary or otherwise. Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at The Atlantic. Previously she worked at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Slate. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University and her MPhil in English Literature from Cambridge University, which she attended on a Gates Scholarship. Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the New School in New York City. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and other publications, and her translations have been published by Penguin Classics, Viking, Tin House, and Words Without Borders. She is the author of Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century, and in 2017 was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Sandy Allen: A Kind Of Mirraculas Paradise w/ Ashley Ford
Friday January 25 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Originally published in hardcover last winter, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise is Sandy Allen’s rendition of the life story of their uncle Bob, who for years was known to Allen only as the “crazy” hermit who sometimes showed up at family vacations, and who had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But in 2009, Bob mailed Allen – by then an MFA student in the University of Iowa’s creative nonfiction program – his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps and riddled with errors, the often-incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a “true story” about being “labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic,” and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out into the world.
Sandy Allen is a writer, speaker, editor and teacher. Their essays and features stories have been published by BuzzFeed News, CNN Opinion, Bon Appétit's Healthyish and Pop-Up Magazine. Sandy writes about constructs of normalcy that enforce hierarchies of power, like madness and gender. Sandy is non-binary trans. Sandy was previously a features editor for BuzzFeed News. They also founded and ran the online-only literary quarterly Wag's Revue. Originally from Muir Beach, CA, they live in the Catskills. In January, 2018, Scribner published their critically acclaimed debut book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia. For more, visit www.hellosandyallen.com Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana. She’s currently working on her memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, to be published by Flatiron Books under the imprint An Oprah Book. She also hosts the Brooklyn-based news and culture TV show and podcast, 112BK, contributes to CupOfJo.Com, and hosts Fortune Favors The Bold. She maintains a regular blog and Twitter feed. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Storytime with Michael George: Life at the Zoo
Saturday January 26 | 11:00AM - 12:00PM
Have you wondered what life at the zoo is really like? With breathtaking original images from a National Geographic photographer, this book gives a unique behind-the-scenes view.
This is the perfect book for every budding zoologist and animal-loving kid! Featuring illuminating photography and writing from Michael George, Life at the Zoo provides a precious glimpse inside the beloved institution. Children can meet the creatures who live there—and the people who care for them, too. They’ll have so much fun, they won’t even realize how much they’re learning! Michael George is a photographer and writer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Teen Vogue, WIRED, and more. He guest lectured at Yale University and taught workshops internationally. Michael lives in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more at michaelgeorgephoto.com and follow him on Instagram @MichaelGeorge. This event is free and family-friendly! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Daisy Johnson: Everything Under w/ Lauren Groff
Monday January 28 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.
One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it. In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung. Daisy Johnson is the author of the short-story collection Fen. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in Oxford, England, by the river. Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She has won the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, along with several Best American Short Stories anthologies, and she was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Leslie Jamison: The Recovering w/ Meghan O'Rourke
Wednesday January 30 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction--both her own and others'--and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.
For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come. Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their two daughters. Meghan O’Rourke has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. O’Rourke is also the author of the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007). A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She is currently working on a book about chronic illness. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Dana Czapnik: The Falconer w/ Kaitlyn Greenidge
Thursday January 31 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Told in vibrant, quicksilver prose, The Falconer is a “wholly original coming-of-age story” (Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists), providing a snapshot of the city and America through the eyes of the children of the baby boomers grappling with privilege and the fading of radical hopes. New York Times bestselling author Claire Messud calls The Falconer an “exhilarating debut,” adding that “Dana Czapnik’s frank heroine has a voice, and a perspective, you won’t soon forget.”
Dana Czapnik is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she was awarded an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. Czapnik earned her MFA at Hunter College where she was recognized with a Hertog Fellowship. She’s spent most of her career on the editorial side of professional sports including stints at ESPN the Magazine, the United States Tennis Association and the Arena Football League. A native New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan with her husband and son. Kaitlyn Greenidge was born in Boston and received her MFA from Hunter College. Her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction, and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Community Council’s Workspace Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2017 Whiting Award in Fiction. She is a contributing editor for LENNY Letter and lives in Brooklyn, NY. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Frédéric Morin and David McMillan: Joe Beef
Monday February 04 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
It’s the end of the world as we know it. Or not. Either way, you want Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse in your bunker and/or kitchen.
In their much-loved first cookbook, Frédéric Morin, David McMillan, and Meredith Erickson introduced readers to the art of living the Joe Beef way. Now, they’re back with another deeply personal, refreshingly unpretentious collection of more than 150 new recipes, some taken directly from the menus of Fred and Dave’s acclaimed Montreal restaurants, others from summers spent on Laurentian lakes and Sunday dinners at home. Think Watercress Soup with Trout Quenelles, Artichokes Bravas, and seasonal variations on Pot-au-Feu—alongside Smoked Meat Croquettes, a Tater Tot Galette, and Squash Sticky Buns. Also included are instructions for making your own soap and cough drops and guidance on stocking a cellar with apocalyptic essentials—Canned Bread, Pickled Pork Butt, and Smoked Apple Cider Vinegar—for throwing the most sought-after in-bunker dinner party. In this book filled with recipes, reflections, and ramblings, you’ll find chapters devoted to the Québécois tradition of celebrating Christmas in July, the magic of public television, and Fred and Dave’s unique take on barbecue (Burnt-End Bourguignon, Cassoulet Rapide), as well as ruminations on natural wine and gluten-free cooking, and advice on why French cuisine rocks at a dinner party. Whether you’re holing up for a zombie apocalypse or just cooking at home, Joe Beef is a book about doing it yourself, about making it on your own, and about living—or at least surviving—in style. A graduate from no prestigious cooking school, Fred Morin has long forgotten all about the art of plating good-looking food. From the daily task of heading the tiny kitchen at Joe Beef ten years ago he now mostly cooks ingredients that don’t touch one another for three adorable yet very talkative offspring, Henry, Ivan, and Eleanor. He does sometimes cook overly complex and poorly budgeted, ambitious, classic French meals at home for his wife, Allison. His life is still ruled by brief but intense bouts of diverse endeavors that somehow all come back to restaurants and cooking, be they gardening, trying to fly-fish in Alaska, preparing very large first-aid kits, or building bread ovens. In recent years, he casually alternated between yoga and drinking with an elegance rivaled only by the likes of Beau Brummell and Little Lord Fauntleroy. David McMillan is the co-owner/chef of Joe Beef, Liverpool House, Vin Papillon, Mon Lapin and McKiernan as well as partner in Les Vins Dame-Jeanne wine agency. Born and raised in Quebec City, David has been involved in Montreal’s restaurants since the age of seventeen and continues to explore, teach, and be fascinated by unique traditional French country cooking. David is father to his three daughters, Dylan, Lola, and Cecile, whom he loves, and when not found at any of the three restaurants on the Little Burgundy block, he’s at his Barkmere cottage. This event is free! 
Marlon James: Black Leopard, Red Wolf w/ Jacqueline Woodson
Tuesday February 05 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.
Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both. Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James divides his time between Minnesota and New York. Jacqueline Woodson is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. She received the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and Children’s Literature Legacy Award. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award, Newbery Honor Award, and NAACP Image Award. Her adult book, Another Brooklyn, was a National Book Award finalist, and her many books for young readers include Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and the picture book Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, She lives in Brooklyn. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Peter Mendelsund: Same Same w/ Leanne Shapton
Wednesday February 06 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In the shifting desert sands on the outskirts of a Middle Eastern city sits a mysterious Institute, where Fellows in every field of knowledge and endeavor under the (inhospitably hot) sun work on Projects and give Discourses(TM) and dedicate themselves to copying, cloning, replicating, and reproducing a world to which none of them seem to have any intention of returning. Same Same is Percy Frobisher's account of his tenure as a Fellow at the Institute, and his attempt to realize—or is it simulate?--his own audacious Project. Imagining a world in which simulacra have as much value as the real--so much so that any distinction between the two vanishes, and even language seeks to reproduce meaning through ever more degraded copies of itself—Peter Mendelsund has crafted a deeply unsettling novel about what it means to exist, and to create . . . and a future that may not be far off.
Peter Mendelsund is a designer and writer. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two daughters. Leanne Shapton is an illustrator, author, and publisher based in New York City. She is a cofounder of J&L Books. She has been the art director of the National Post’s Avenue page and Saturday Night magazine, and from 2008 to 2009 she was also the art director for The New York Times Op-Ed page. Shapton is the author of six books: Toronto; Was She Pretty?; Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry; Native Trees of Canada; Swimming Studies, which won the 2013 NBCC award for Autobiography; and Sunday Night Movies. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Mary Adkins: When You Read This w/ Kate Tellers
Thursday February 07 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
For four years, Iris Massey worked side by side with PR maven Smith Simonyi, helping clients perfect their brands. But Iris has died, taken by terminal illness at only thirty-three. Adrift without his friend and colleague, Smith is surprised to discover that in her last six months, Iris created a blog filled with sharp and often funny musings on the end of a life not quite fulfilled. She also made one final request: for Smith to get her posts published as a book. With the help of his charmingly eager, if overbearingly forthright, new intern Carl, Smith tackles the task of fulfilling Iris’s last wish.
Before he can do so, though, he must get the approval of Iris’ big sister Jade, an haute cuisine chef who’s been knocked sideways by her loss. Each carrying their own baggage, Smith and Jade end up on a collision course with their own unresolved pasts and with each other. Told in a series of e-mails, blog posts, online therapy submissions, text messages, legal correspondence, home-rental bookings, and other snippets of our virtual lives, When You Read This is a deft, captivating romantic comedy—funny, tragic, surprising, and bittersweet—that candidly reveals how we find new beginnings after loss. Mary Adkins is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic. A native of the American South and a graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School, she lives in New York City with her family. She also teaches storytelling for The Moth. Kate Tellers is a storyteller, writer and host on-staff at The Moth and the co-host of I'M STILL HERE, a podcast on making art after kids premiering in January (www.imstillherepodcast.com). This event is free! 
Sigrid Nunez presents The Friend
Friday February 08 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.
While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion. Sigrid Nunez's latest novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction. She is author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, and For Rouenna, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Nunez lives in New York City. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Storytime w/ Monique Fields & Yesenia Moises: Honeysmoke
Saturday February 09 | 11:00AM - 12:00PM
This engaging and beautiful picture book follows a young biracial girl named Simone as she searches for her own place in the world. She wants to find the perfect color to understand her heritage, a color that isn’t brown or pink or black or white.
Eventually, Simone creates a special word to describe the combination of her mom's dark and her dad's light skin colors: honeysmoke. Through simple text, this heartfelt and inspirational story empowers all children to forge their own unique identity. Monique Fields is an award-winning journalist. Her essays about race and identity have appeared on air, in print, and online, including NPR’s All Things Considered, Ebony magazine, and TheRoot.com. She is the founder and editor of Honeysmoke.com, a site for parents raising multiracial children, and she is a member of the SCBWI. Monique lives in Alabama with her husband and their two daughters. Yesenia Moises is a freelance illustrator/designer with a specialty in product design. She is also an Afro Latina and random skill enthusiast. When she’s not making toys for kids, her pastimes include indulging in really silly dating sims and playing with her wildly photogenic dog Divo. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
TASTE presents Diana Kuan: Red Hot Kitchen w/ Matt Rodbard
Monday February 11 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In partnership with TASTE, we are hosting Diana Kuan for her new book, Red Hot Kitchen, a hot sauce manifesto focused on homemade Asian chili sauces and delicious dishes to make with them. In this completely unique Asian cookbook, culinary instructor and trained chef Diana Kuan offers a flavorful education in the art of cooking with homemade Asian hot sauces. From Thai Sriracha to Indonesian sambal to Korean gochujang and other fiery favorites, Asian chili sauces have become staples in restaurants and homes across America. They add a palate-pleasing subtle kick or a scorching burn to the stir-fries, appetizers, and noodle dishes so many people love. But until now, these tantalizing flavors haven’t been easy to recreate at home with fresh, all-natural ingredients. Kuan offers more than 100 easy-to-follow recipes for nine sauces fundamental to Asian cooking, along with a “Know Your Chili Pepper” chart so you can easily shop for the ingredients you need and customize the heat level of each sauce. Each chapter then offers recipes incorporating each spicy sauce, broadening the range of Asian dishes you can cook at home. From Kung Pao Sweet Potatoes and Spicy Beef Bulgogi, to Cumin-Crusted Red Curry Rack of Lamb, and even Sriracha Sea Salt Brownies, Red Hot Kitchen is packed with enticing recipes you’ll want to cook right now. Diana Kuan is a food writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Chinese Takeout Cookbook, on Chinese food and culture in America. Her work has also appeared in Food & Wine, Time Out New York, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Epicurious. In addition to writing and photography, Diana has taught cooking classes for the past ten years in both Beijing and New York. Her favorite foods are dumplings, ramen, and tacos, usually with hot sauce on the side. Diana will be in conversation with Matt Rodbard, the Editor-in-Chief of TASTE. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Jill Schlesinger: Dumb Things Smart People Do With Their Money w/ Tara Siegel Bernard
Tuesday February 12 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
After decades working as a Wall Street trader, investment adviser, and money expert for CBS, Jill Schlesinger reveals thirteen costly mistakes you’re probably making right now with your money without even knowing it. Drawing on heartfelt personal stories (yes, money experts screw up, too), Schlesinger argues that it’s not lack of smarts that causes even the brightest, most accomplished people among us to behave like financial dumb-asses, but simple emotional blind spots. When it comes to big important financial decisions, it’s so easy to let your heart lead instead of your brain. So if you’ve made well-intentioned mistakes like saving for college for your kids before your own retirement, or taken on too much risk when you invest, you’ve come to the right place. And if you’ve avoided uncomfortable moments such as sitting down to make a will or planning long-term care for an aging parent, this is the book for you. Jill also points out signs that you may be saddling your kids with your own money issues and shows you how to end the cycle.
By breaking bad habits and following Jill’s pragmatic and accessible rules for financial management, you can save tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention avoid countless sleepless nights. Practical, no-nonsense, and often counterintuitive, The Dumb Things Smart People Do with Their Money tells you what you really need to hear about retirement planning, college financing, insurance, real estate, how to save money, and more. It might just be the smartest investment you make all year. Jill Schlesinger is an Emmy-nominated and Gracie Award-winning business analyst for CBS News, a weekly guest on NPR’s Here and Now, and a Certified Financial Planner. During her decades as a Wall Street trader, investment adviser, and money expert for CBS News she watched clients, friends, viewers, and listeners repeatedly become their own worst financial enemies. Tara Siegel Bernard is a reporter for The New York Times covering personal finance and consumer issues. Before joining The Times in 2008, she was a deputy managing editor at FiLife, a personal finance Web site, and a news editor at CNBC. She also spent a decade at Dow Jones, where she wrote a weekly personal finance column and was a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Elizabeth McCracken: Bowlaway w/ Rumaan Alam
Wednesday February 13 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley.
From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century—nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person—Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark—with Bertha its most notable resident. When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Elizabeth McCracken is the author of Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN/Winship Award, as well as Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry?, a collection of stories. She has received grants and awards from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. Rumaan Alam's short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Meridian, and at Wigleaf. Other writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied writing at Oberlin College. He now lives in New York with his husband and two kids. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Corey Ann Haydu: Eventown w/ Alex Arnold
Friday February 15 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
The world tilted for Elodee this year, and now it’s impossible for her to be the same as she was before. Not when her feelings have such a strong grip on her heart. Not when she and her twin sister, Naomi, seem to be drifting apart. So when Elodee’s mom gets a new job in Eventown, moving seems like it might just fix everything.
Indeed, life in Eventown is comforting and exciting all at once. Their kitchen comes with a box of recipes for Elodee to try. Everyone takes the scenic way to school or work—past rows of rosebushes and unexpected waterfalls. On blueberry-picking field trips, every berry is perfectly ripe. Sure, there are a few odd rules, and the houses all look exactly alike, but it’s easy enough to explain—until Elodee realizes that there are only three ice cream flavors in Eventown. Ever. And they play only one song in music class. Everything may be “even” in Eventown, but is there a price to pay for perfection—and pretending? Corey Ann Haydu is the author of Rules for Stealing Stars, The Someday Suitcase, and four acclaimed books for teens. She grew up in the Boston area, earned her MFA at the New School, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family. Find out more at www.coreyannhaydu.com. Alex Arnold is an editor at Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. She edits middle grade and YA fiction, and works with critically acclaimed and bestselling authors such as Corey Ann Haydu, Brittany Cavallaro, and Kali Wallace. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer: To Night Owl From Dogfish
Saturday February 16 | 2:00PM - 3:00PM
Avery Bloom, who's bookish, intense, and afraid of many things, particularly deep water, lives in New York City. Bett Devlin, who's fearless, outgoing, and loves all animals as well as the ocean, lives in California. What they have in common is that they are both twelve years old, and are both being raised by single, gay dads.
When their dads fall in love, Bett and Avery are sent, against their will, to the same sleepaway camp. Their dads hope that they will find common ground and become friends-and possibly, one day, even sisters. But things soon go off the rails for the girls (and for their dads too), and they find themselves on a summer adventure that neither of them could have predicted. Now that they can't imagine life without each other, will the two girls (who sometimes call themselves Night Owl and Dogfish) figure out a way to be a family? Holly Goldberg Sloan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and spent her childhood living in Holland, Istanbul, Turkey, Washington DC, Berkeley, California and Eugene, Oregon. After graduating from Wellesley College and spending some time as an advertising copywriter, she began writing and directing family feature films, including Angels in the Outfield and Made in America. Counting by 7s, her first middle-grade novel, was a New York Times Bestseller. The mother of two sons, Holly lives with her husband in Santa Monica, California. Meg Wolitzer was born in Brooklyn, New York, studied Creative Writing at Smith College, and graduated from Brown University (where she wrote her first published novel, Sleepwalking, while still an undergraduate). She is the New York Times-bestselling author of numerous novels for adults, including The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Wife, and The Female Persuasion; the young adult novel Belzhar; and the middle-grade novel The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman. This event is free and kid-friendly! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Booki Vivat: Frazzled #3
Monday February 18 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In the third and final installment of the New York Times bestselling series Frazzled, Abbie Wu is about to venture off to an Outdoor School trip and has to make new friends—but of course, she is totally freaking out!
Pointdexter Middle School is gearing up for an outdoor adventure. Abbie and her classmates will spend one week camping in the woods, learning stuff about nature, and making new friends. While Abbie’s usual friends seem to adjust fine to their assigned groups, she doesn’t quite fit in—with anyone! If that isn’t bad enough, her camp counselors are totally weird and she can’t figure out what is up with the Golden Pig. Abbie feels all alone at camp. Will she learn how to fit in yet stay true to herself? Or will she finally reach her breaking point? Packed with hilarious black-and-white illustrations and doodles throughout, the final Frazzled book takes readers through more of Abbie Wu’s hysterical middle school adventures. Booki Vivat has been doodling somewhat seriously since 2011 and not-so-seriously since childhood. She grew up in Southern California and graduated from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). In the past, she's taught middle school English abroad, fallen off a ladder during a very brief stint as a bookseller, and worked as a book minion in children's publishing. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of the FRAZZLED series. You can follow her on Instagram at @bookibookibooki and on Twitter at @thebookiv. This event is free and family-friendly! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Esmé Weijun Wang: The Collected Schizophrenias w/ Alice Sola Kim
Tuesday February 19 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang details her journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood. Written with a sharp analytic eye, which she honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, these essays range from exploring the depths of a rare form of psychosis to how she uses fashion to present as high-functioning; from the failures of the higher education system to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease.
Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Wang discusses also the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness and examines the ways in which schizophrenia manifests in her own life. Exhaustively researched and deeply moving, The Collected Schizophrenias is an essay collection of undeniable power. Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of The Border of Paradise. She received the Whiting Award in 2018 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco. Alice Sola Kim, a left-handed anchor baby currently residing in New York, is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Tin House, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, Lenny, BuzzFeed Books, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Christopher Castellani: Leading Men w/ Emma Straub
Wednesday February 20 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysteriously taciturn young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives.
Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in the present-day U.S., until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only surviving copy of Williams’s final play. What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can’t save ourselves? Like The Master and The Hours, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century. Christopher Castellani is the author of three previous novels (A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, and All This Talk of Love) and The Art of Perspective, a book of essays on the craft of fiction. He is the son of Italian immigrants, a Guggenheim fellow, and the artistic director of GrubStreet, one of the country's leading creative writing centers. He lives in Boston. Emma Straub is from New York City. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Modern Lovers and The Vacationers. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, Time, Slate, the New York Times, and Rookie. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, where she co-owns Books Are Magic. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Erin Hosier: Don't Let Me Down
Thursday February 21 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
A fierce, vivid memoir about a father-daughter relationship steeped in God, rebellion, and the Beatles.
Erin Hosier’s coming-of-age was full of contradiction. Born into the turbulent 1970s, she was raised in rural Ohio by lapsed hippies who traded 1960s rock ‘n’ roll for 1950s-era Christian hymns. Her mother’s newfound faith was rooted in a desire to manage her husband’s mood swings, which could alternately fill the house with music or with violence. All the while, Jack was larger than life to his adoring daughter. Full of conflict, their complex relationship set the tone for three decades of Erin’s relationships with men; the Beatles provided the soundtrack. Jack bonded with Erin over their iconic songs, even as they inspired her to question authority—both his and others’. Don’t Let Me Down is about a brave girl trying to navigate family secrets and tragedies and escape from small-town small-mindedness. It is a searing and often funny exploration of how women first see themselves through the lens of a parent’s love, and of the ties that bind us to our childhood heroes, who ultimately lead us to ask that most profound of questions: Is love really all you need? Erin Hosier is the coauthor of Patty Schemel's Hit So Hard and is a literary agent with Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner. She lives in Brooklyn. This event is free! 
Sophia Shalmiyev: Mother Winter w/ Melissa Febos
Monday February 25 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Mother Winter is the story of Sophia’s emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev grew up under the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad. An imbalance of power and widespread anti-Semitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America and abandoning her estranged and alcoholic mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her.
Mother Winter depicts in urgent vignettes Sophia’s years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connection with the worlds she occupies. The result is a searing meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and the pursuit of wholeness after shattering loss. And ultimately, it is an aching observation of the human heart across time and culture. Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, she was the nonfiction editor for The Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurels scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s fellowship awards. She has a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from The School of Visual Arts, where she worked with survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in Vela Magazine, Bellows American Review, Electric Lit, The Seattle Review of Books, Ravishly and The Literary Review, among others; all with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland. Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ragdale, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University, MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She grew up on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Lucy Knisley: Kid Gloves
Tuesday February 26 | 6:00PM - 8:00PM
New York Times–bestselling author Lucy Knisley writes about fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood in this emotionally compelling and thought-provoking graphic memoir.
If you work hard enough, if you want it enough, if you're smart and talented and “good enough,” you can do anything. Except get pregnant. Her whole life, Lucy Knisley wanted to be a mother. But when it was finally the perfect time, conceiving turned out to be harder than anything she’d ever attempted. Fertility problems were followed by miscarriages, and her eventual successful pregnancy was plagued by health issues, up to a dramatic, near-death experience in labor and delivery. Kid Gloves follows Lucy’s personal transition into motherhood, and it also illustrates the history and science of reproductive health from all angles, full of curious facts and inspiring (and notorious) figures in medicine and midwifery. Lucy Knisley is the author and illustrator of beloved graphic novels about memory, identity, food, and family. She previously published the New York Times bestseller Relish: My Life in the Kitchen and Something New with First Second. She lives and works in Chicago, with her husband and child. This event is free and family-friendly; there will be portrait drawings, kids activities and music! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Chloe Aridjis: Sea Monsters
Wednesday February 27 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca.
Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.” Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds.Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London. This event is free! 
Karen Ellis: Last Night w/ Alex Segura
Thursday February 28 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
NYPD detective Lex Cole tracks a missing Brooklyn teen whose bright future is endangered by the ghosts of his unknown father's past, in this highly anticipated sequel to A Map of the Dark.
One of the few black kids on his Brighton Beach block, Titus "Crisp" Crespo was raised by his white mother and his Russian grandparents. He has two legacies from his absent father, Mo: his weird name and his brown skin. Crisp has always been the odd kid out, but a fundamentally good kid, with a bright future. But one impulsive decision triggers a horrible domino effect--an arrest, no reason not to accompany his richer, whiter friend Glynnie on a visit to her weed dealer, and a trip onto his father's old home turf where he'll face certain choices he's always strived to avoid. As Detective Lex Cole tries to unravel the clues from Crisp's night out, they both find that what you don't know about your past can still come back to haunt you. Karen Ellis lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers. Alex Segura is the author of the Anthony Award-nominated Pete Fernandez Mystery series, which includes the upcoming Miami Midnight. He has also written a number of short stories that have appeared in numerous anthologies, and many best-selling and critically acclaimed comic books. He also co-created and co-wrote the scripted crime podcast, LETHAL LIT. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Andrea Bartz: The Lost Night w/ Jason Diamond
Friday March 01 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Come party like its 2009 with Andrea Bartz and Jason Diamond!
In 2009, in a loft complex in Bushwick, Edie is the shining star of a group of recent college graduates. Seductive, mercurial, and beguiling, Edie has the social world in her thrall, and she and her best friends treat New York like a playground. When she commits suicide at the end of a long, drunken night, no one can quite believe it. But an overwhelming mix of grief, shock, and long-standing resentment force each friend into their own corner, and, for years, that’s where they stay. A decade later, Lindsay is content with her life and has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has a thriving career in magazines, lives in a cozy apartment, and has true adult friendships. But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that terrible, hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse perhaps, if she herself was involved. As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memory—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light. Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and coauthor of the blog-turned-book Stuff Hipsters Hate (Ulysses Press, 2010), which The New Yorker called "depressingly astute." Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among other titles. Jason Diamond founded the site Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Vol 1., launched Julius Singer Press and curates regular free literary events, including the popular 3-Minute Stories series. He has written for The New York Times, Outside, The Paris Review, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Eater, The Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Vice, Bookforum, Tablet, The Awl, Pitchfork, McSweeny's, NPR, and many other fine outlets. His memoir, Searching For John Hughes, was released in November 2016. His next book, The Sprawl, will be released by Coffee House Press in 2020. He lives in Brooklyn. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Jennifer E. Smith: Field Notes on Love w/ Jenny Han
Tuesday March 05 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM
It’s the perfect idea for a romantic week together: traveling across America by train. But then Hugo’s girlfriend dumps him. Her parting gift: the tickets for their long-planned last-hurrah-before-uni trip. Only, it’s been booked under her name. Nontransferable, no exceptions.
Mae is still reeling from being rejected from USC’s film school. When she stumbles across Hugo’s ad for a replacement Margaret Campbell (her full name!), she’s certain it’s exactly the adventure she needs to shake off her disappointment and jump-start her next film. A cross-country train trip with a complete stranger might not seem like the best idea. But to Mae and Hugo, both eager to escape their regular lives, it makes perfect sense. What starts as a convenient arrangement soon turns into something more. But when life outside the train catches up to them, can they find a way to keep their feelings for each other from getting derailed? Jennifer E. Smith is the author of eight novels for young adults, including The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and her work has been translated into thirty-three languages. She lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter at @JenESmith or visit her at jenniferesmith.com. Jenny Han is the New York Times bestselling author of Shug, The Summer I Turned Pretty series, co-author of the Burn for Burn series, and most recently, the To All the Boys I've Loved Before trilogy. A former children’s bookseller, she earned her MFA in creative writing at the New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her at DearJennyHan.com. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Salvatore Scibona: The Volunteer w/ Colm Tóibín
Wednesday March 06 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie’s path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning.
With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style, Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are capable of both inventing and discovering our true families and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling. Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award; and the New Yorker named him one of its "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch. He is the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Colm Tóibín is the author of nine novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections, and Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, a look at three nineteenth-century Irish authors. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Jordy Rosenberg: Confessions of the Fox w/ Katy Waldman
Thursday March 07 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Jack Sheppard and Bess Edgeworth were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found.
Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying expose of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Dated 1724, the book depicts an London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with London’s newly established police force, queer subcultures thrive, and ominous threats of the plague abound. Jack—a transgender carpenter’s apprentice—has fled his master’s house to become a legendary prison break artist, and Bess has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind. Is Confessions of the Fox an authentic autobiography, or a hoax? Dr. Voth obsessively annotates the manuscript, desperate to find the answer. As he is drawn deeper into Jack and Bess’s tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all. Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and recognized by The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature and the Feminist Press as one of the Best Books of 2018. Jordy is a professor of 18th-Century Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies + Critical Theory at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a staff writer at Slate, where she wrote about language, culture, and politics, and hosted the Slate Audio Book Club podcast. She is the winner of a 2018 American Society of Magazine Editors award for journalists younger than thirty. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
T Kira Madden: Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls
Friday March 08 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight.
As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful. T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. This event is free! 
Storytime with Lysa Mullady: Three Little Birds
Saturday March 09 | 11:00AM - 12:00PM
When Red and Yellow go find worms, they don’t invite Blue and his feelings are hurt. So Blue decides to start a rumor, which quickly spirals out of control. Can he make things right before it’s too late? Includes a Note to Parents, Caregivers, and Professionals with more information on dealing with gossip and helping children build positive relationships.
Blue’s feelings are hurt when he’s not invited to find worms with Red and Yellow. So Blue impulsively starts a rumor. Before he knows it, his little fib has spiraled out of control, and all the birds are caught up in the big drama. Can Blue make things right before it’s too late? Includes a Note to Parents, Caregivers, and Professionals with more information on dealing with gossip and helping children build positive relationships. Lysa Mullady is the author of Bye Bye Pesky Fly, which was her first book. She has been an elementary school counselor for 29 years and is known for her engaging, enthusiastic, and creative counseling style. Her passion is to teach her students to be problem solvers by talking it out and thinking good things. Lysa was born and raised on Long Island, where she still lives with her family and two goldendoodles. You can find her on the weekends enjoying the beach with her husband, walking the dogs and searching for beach glass, all while imagining ways to help others become the best they can be. Visit her website at lysamullady.com. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Boris Fishman: Savage Feast
Monday March 11 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected.
Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate. Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love. Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at the age of nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Travel & Leisure, and New York Magazine. His first novel, A Replacement Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2014), winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal; a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2016), and received rave reviews. Boris teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program, and lives in New York City. This event is free! 
Halle Butler: The New Me
Tuesday March 12 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again.
When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she’s envisioning - one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence - within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become. Darkly hilarious and devastating, The New Me is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of American consumer culture. Halle Butler is the author of Jillian. She has been named a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist. This event is free! 
Mallory O'Meara: The Lady from the Black Lagoon w/ Maria Dahvana Headley
Thursday March 14 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
The Lady from the Black Lagoon uncovers the life and work of Milicent Patrick – one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman to create one of Hollywood’s classic movie monsters.
As a young woman working in the horror film industry, Mallory O’Meara was thrilled to discover that one of her favorite movies, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, featured a monster designed by a woman, Milicent Patrick. But for someone who should have been hailed as a pioneer in the genre there was little information available. For, as O’Meara soon discovered, Patrick’s contribution had been claimed by a jealous male colleague, her career had been cut short and she soon after had disappeared from film history. No one even knew if she was still alive. O’Meara set out to right the wrong, and in the process discovered the full, fascinating story of an ambitious, artistic woman ahead of her time. Patrick’s contribution to special effects proved to be just the latest chapter in a remarkable, unconventional life, from her youth growing up in the shadow of Hearst Castle, to her career as one of Disney’s first female animators. And at last, O’Meara discovered what really had happened to Patrick after The Creature’s success, and where she went. Mallory O’Meara is an author, screenwriter and genre film producer. Every week, she co-hosts the literary podcast Reading Glasses. Whether it's for the screen or the page, Mallory seeks creative projects imbued with the weird; horror and monsters are her passion. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their collection of books and cats. The Lady from the Black Lagoon is her first book. For more about Mallory, please visit, www.malloryomeara.com, follow her on Twitter and connect on Instagram, @malloryomeara. Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor. Her novels include The Mere Wife, Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and she has also written a memoir, The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of The Mere Wife was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn. This event is free! 
Julian Glander: 3D Sweeties
Friday March 15 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
This is a debut short comics collection, featuring pastel-hued, emoji-like characters dealing with twenty-first century (and beyond!) problems.
In a digitally drawn, three-dimensional universe, characters grapple with interior decorating woes, amorous microbiology, and where to find the absolute most aspirational succulents. Readers will fall in love with “America’s favorite mug,” Cuppy; hear the familial bickering of sentient purple slime molds; and encounter Sarah Something and her musings about gaming culture and conceptual art. Julian Glander is a 3D animator, designer, and illustrator. Mostly self-taught, his work has been featured on Disney, MTV, Adult Swim, and The New York Times. He received the Art Directors Club (ADC) "Young Guns" Award in 2015. In 2016, his animated short film debuted at South by Southwest and GLAS Animation Festival. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. This event is free! 
NYRB Book Club: The Pure and the Impure
Monday March 18 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Books Are Magic is proud to host the (NYRB) Books Are Magic Book Club, a book club that discusses a different book by a female author in the New York Review Books catalog every other month.
This month we are discussing The Pure and the Impure by Collette. Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, “the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography.” This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the strange power of desire. Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature’s subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the always unlikely nature of love. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette [1873-1954], was born in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, where she led an idyllic childhood. At the age of twenty, she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, a Parisian man of letters under whose name she published the Claudine novels. Separated from Willy in 1905, Colette supported herself as an actress before establishing her own reputation as a writer. She was celebrated in later years as one of the great figures of twentieth-century French life and letters, and was the first woman to be accorded a state funeral by the French Republic. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
David Means: Instructions for a Funeral w/ Tara Westover
Tuesday March 19 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
The O. Henry Prize–winning author David Means presents a collection of harrowing and personal tales in Instructions for a Funeral. Previously appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Vice, and other publications, the fourteen stories collected here run the gamut from the playful to the private. “The Terminal Artist” skirts reportage in grappling with the revelation that the death of a hospitalized loved one was in fact a murder. “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” is a wry anatomy of the moments before an FBI raid goes spectacularly wrong. “The Chair” gives us a clear-eyed look at fatherhood, with all its paradoxes, recriminations, and rewards gloriously intact.
Means’s work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver—but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own. David Means was born and raised in Michigan. His Assorted Fire Events earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and The Secret Goldfish was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. The Spot was selected as a 2010 Notable Book by The New York Times and won the O. Henry Prize. His first novel, Hystopia, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Means’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous other publications. He lives in Nyack, New York, and teaches at Vassar College. Tara Westover is an American author. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Educated is her first book. This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. 
Bon Appétit presents Carla Lalli Music: Where Cooking Begins
Wednesday March 20 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
A gateway cookbook for novices and anyone who wants to be a better home cook, Where Cooking Begins gives readers a modern approach to shopping, simple cooking methods, and more than 70 innately flexible recipes.
The indispensable recipes and simple cooking methods in Where Cooking Begins are an open invitation to dive into Carla Lalli Music’s intuitive, laid-back cooking style. Her recipes are designed to give readers the ability to make perfect dishes with dead-simple seasonings and endless ingredient swaps, and her food shopping strategy will teach readers how to find inspiration at the market. Designed for busy lives and to make anyone a better cook, Where Cooking Begins empowers readers with intuitive solutions for pulling together easy, but sophisticated meals. Carla Lalli Music is the food director at Bon Appétit, where she oversees the brand’s food and recipe content across all digital platforms. She writes frequently for the magazine and its websites—bonappetit.com, Basically, and Healthyish—and is a frequent host on the Bon Appétit foodcast. Music also hosts recipe and technique videos on BA’s YouTube channel, where millions of subscribers tune in to see what’s cooking in the test kitchen. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. Find her on Instagram @lallimusic. This event is free! 
Polly Rosenwaike: Look How Happy I'm Making You
Thursday March 21 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or—having recently given birth—are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its depiction of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about what having a baby looks like.
One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another woman nervous about her biological clock “forgets” to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother’s Day contend with their losses and what it would mean to have a child. Witty, empathetic, and precisely observed, Look How Happy I’m Making You offers the rare, honest portrayal of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women’s most intimate choices. Polly Rosenwaike has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The New York Times Book Review, Glimmer Train, New England Review, The Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The fiction editor for Michigan Quarterly Review, she lives in Ann Arbor with the poet Cody Walker and their two daughters. This event is free! 
Clive Thompson: Coders
Tuesday March 26 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Programmers are among the most quietly influential people on the planet, and any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences. Clive Thompson takes readers close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women.
Who exactly are the coders building today’s world? When most are college-educated, white men, how does that impact the digital world they are building? For example, if women or people of color had been involved in the early days of Twitter, would their experiences with bullying have shaped how the platform dealt with cyberbullying? Thompson also examines the intersection of coding and groundbreaking developments in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and virtual reality. Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. This event is free! 
Bryan Washington: Lot w/ Jia Tolentino
Wednesday March 27 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.
Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms. Bryan Washington has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston. Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She grew up in Texas, went to University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Trick Mirror, her first essay collection, will be published by Random House in 2019. This event is free! 
Duncan Hannah: 20th Century Boy w/ Gerry Howard
Thursday March 28 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Celebrated painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place. Full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more, it is a rollicking account of an artist’s coming of age.
Duncan Hannah was born in Minneapolis in 1952. He attended Bard College from 1971 to 1973 and Parsons School of Design from 1973 to 1975. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Art Institute. Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies is his first book. Gerry Howard is executive editor and vice president of Doubleday Books. He received the 2009 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction, and has worked over the years with authors such as Paul Auster, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Pat Barker, and Hanya Hanagihara. Howard’s essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Tin House, American Scholar, London Review of Books, n+1, Salon, and other publications. This event is free! |