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We will be hosting storytimes every weekend via Youtube and Youtube Live at 11am. See our channel for videos!

Upcoming story times:

Sunday 10/4: Olivia Cole: Time to Roar

Saturday 10/10: Staff selections

Sunday 10/11: Jacob Kramer & K-Fai Steele: Okapi Tale


 

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Getting to Center is an empathetic offering to those who are looking for a roadmap for finding their way back to equilibrium. This book meditates on endings, grief and joy, hope, addiction, and beginnings, pairing Marlee's own experiences and wisdom with practical exercises and tools for creating balance and understanding through the natural changes of life.

 

In her own constant shifting, improviser and entrepreneur Marlee Grace found ways to pivot within her career, while still maintaining constant threads throughout. She has developed practices that have supported her through opening and closing multiple businesses, a divorce, several cross-country moves, choosing sobriety, and more.

 

Grace's book is for anyone who feels overwhelmed and anxious about these unpredictable times. Getting to Center helps readers feel less alone, and offers a guide to cultivating resources we can replenish and depend on within ourselves.

 

Marlee Grace is a dancer and a writer. Marlee's personal work focuses on improvisation through movement and art making, as well as bringing together the voices of artists through her podcast and artist residency program. As an author and workshop facilitator of How to Not Always Be Working, which she has taught to groups across the country, she delights in the process of showing up to her own practice of being human, and finds great joy navigating it with others. She is currently based near Santa Fe, NM.

 

Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Brooklyn, New York. Róisín’s work exists at the intersections of her identity as a queer, Muslim, South Asian woman interested in spirituality, race and pop culture. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Allure. She has also pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020).

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New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Lindy West was once the in-house movie critic for Seattle's alternative newsweekly The Stranger, where she covered film with brutal honesty and giddy irreverence. In Shit, Actually, Lindy returns to those roots, re-examining beloved and iconic movies from the past 40 years with an eye toward the big questions of our time: Is Twilight the horniest movie in history? Why do the zebras in The Lion King trust Mufasa-WHO IS A LION-to look out for their best interests? Why did anyone bother making any more movies after The Fugitive achieved perfection? And, my god, why don't any of the women in Love, Actually ever fucking talk?!?!

 

From Forrest Gump, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and Bad Boys II, to Face/Off, Top Gun, and The Notebook, Lindy combines her razor-sharp wit and trademark humor with a genuine adoration for nostalgic trash to shed new critical light on some of our defining cultural touchstones-the stories we've long been telling ourselves about who we are. At once outrageously funny and piercingly incisive, Shit, Actually reminds us to pause and ask, "How does this movie hold up?", all while teaching us how to laugh at the things we love without ever letting them or ourselves off the hook.

 

Shit, Actually is a love letter and a break-up note all in one: to the films that shaped us and the ones that ruined us. More often than not, Lindy finds, they're one and the same.

 

Lindy West is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributor to This American Life. She is the bestselling author of the essay collection The Witches Are Coming as well as Shrill, a memoir, which she adapted into a comedy for Hulu starring Aidy Bryant. She lives in Seattle. Photo credit: Jenny Jimenez. 
 

April Wolfe is a screenwriter and host of the genre film podcast Switchblade Sisters on Maximum Fun. Formerly a critic, she wrote for LA Weekly, Village Voice, Film Comment, and other publications. A film she wrote, Black Christmas, released in 2019 from Blumhouse/Universal.
 

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson’s a black day care teacher, and they’ve been together for a few years—good years—but now they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. There’s the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike’s immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they’ve ever known. And just maybe they’ll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.

Bryan Washington is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and The New York Times Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His first book, the story collection Lot, was a finalist for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Lot was a New York Times Notable Book, one of Dwight Garner’s top ten books of the year, and on best-of-the-year lists from Time, NPR, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and many more. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, GQ, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston. Photo credit: Dailey Hubbard.
 

Samantha Irby is the author of three acclaimed essay collections: Meaty, and the New York Times Bestsellers, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. and Wow, No Thank You. Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, she writes the blog bitches gotta eat and the newsletter “who’s on judge mathis today?”

 

 

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Nom Wah Tea Parlor isn’t simply the story of dumplings, though there are many folds to it. It isn’t the story of bao, though there is much filling. It’s not just the story of dim sum, although there are scores and scores of recipes. It’s the story of a community of Chinese immigrants who struggled, flourished, cooked, and ate with abandon in New York City. (Who now struggle, flourish, cook, and eat with abandon in New York City.) It’s a journey that begins in Taishan, runs through Hong Kong, and ends up tucked into the corner of a street once called The Bloody Angle.

 

In this book, Nom Wah’s owner, Wilson Tang, takes us into the hardworking kitchen of Nom Wah and emerges with 75 easy-to-make recipes: from bao to vegetables, noodles to desserts, cakes, rice rolls, chef’s specials, dumplings, and more.

 

We’re also introduced to characters like Mei Lum, the fifth-generation owner of porcelain shop Wing on Wo, and Joanne Kwong, the lawyer-turned-owner of Pearl River Mart. He paints a portrait of what Chinatown in New York City is in 2020. As Wilson, who quit a job in finance to take over the once-ailing family business, struggles with the dilemma of immigrant children—to jettison tradition or to cling to it—he also points to a new way: to savor tradition while moving forward. A book for har gow lovers and rice roll junkies, The Nom Wah Cookbook portrays a culture at a crossroads.

 

Wilson Tang is the owner and operator of Nom Wah Tea Parlor. Prior to taking over the business in 2010, Tang was a financial analyst for Morgan Stanley. Tang has expanded the Nom Wah footprint to include Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Philadelphia and Nom Wah Nolita, a contemporary offshoot in New York City which opened in 2016. Tang lives with his wife and two children, Ryan and Lucy, a few blocks away from Nom Wah Tea Parlor. Photo credit: Natalie Chitwood.

 

Joshua David Stein is an author and editor living in Brooklyn. He is the co-author of Notes from a Young Black Chef (Knopf), Il Buco: Stories and Recipes (Harper Design), Food and Beer (Phaidon), Epicurean Journeys (Assouline) and the author of To Me He Was Just Dad (Artisan) He served as the U.S. editor for the best-selling Where Chefs Eat. Stein is a contributing editor to Food & Wine, and was the former restaurant critic for both the New York Observer and the Village Voice. His work has appeared in New York, The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, and many other outlets. Photo credit: Achilles Heeren Stein. 

 

Maxine Builder is Deputy Editor of The Strategist, New York Magazine’s shopping vertical. She joined the staff in 2017 as one of its first writers and built out the site’s kitchen and dining coverage. Previously, she was a breakfast journalist at Extra Crispy, now part of MyRecipes. Maxine graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University.

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+ Check out the authors’ books!

 

Red Ink is a quarterly series curated and hosted by Michele Filgate, and co-sponsored by Literary Hub. Red Ink makes one think of vitality, blood, the monthly cycle, correcting history, and making a mark on the world. This dynamic series focuses on women writers, past and present. The next discussion, “Choices,” will feature Danielle Evans (The Office of Historical Corrections), Eula Biss (Having and Being Had), Sejal Shah (This Is One Way to Dance), emily m. danforth (Plain Bad Heroines), and Christa Parravani (Loved and Wanted).
 

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation "5 under 35" selection. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
 

Eula Biss is the author of four books, including The New York Times bestseller On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere, and has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Sejal Shah is the author of the debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Her stories and essays have appeared in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, and The Rumpus. The recipient of a 2018 NYFA fellowship in fiction, Sejal recently completed a story collection and is at work on a memoir about mental health. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Rochester, New York.
 

emily m. danforth is the author of the highly-acclaimed young adult novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lives with her wife and two terrible dogs in Rhode Island. Plain Bad Heroines is her first adult novel.
 

Christa Parravani is the bestselling author of Her: A Memoir. She has taught at Dartmouth College, UMass Amherst, SUNY Purchase, and West Virginia University, where she served as an Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction. She earned her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Newark.
 

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

This event is free. Invite your friends on Facebook!