July 20 @ 6:00 pm
Celebrate the NYC launch of Marti’s Song for Freedom with author Emma Otheguy
As a boy, José Martí was inspired by the natural world. He found freedom in the river that rushed to the sea and peace in the palmas reales that swayed in the wind. Freedom, he believed, was the inherent right of all men and women. But his home island of Cuba was colonized by Spain, and some of the people were enslaved by rich landowners. Enraged, Martí took up his pen and fought against this oppression through his writings. By age seventeen, he was declared an enemy of Spain and forced to leave his beloved island.
Martí traveled the world, speaking out for Cuba’s independence. But throughout his exile, he suffered from illness and homesickness. He found solace in New York’s Catskill Mountains, where nature inspired him once again to fight for independence.
Written in verse, with excerpts from Martí’s seminal Versos sencillos, this book is a beautiful tribute to a brilliant political writer and courageous fighter of freedom for all men and women.
August 29 @ 6:00 pm
Please join us for the launch of Melissa Roske’s debut Kat Greene Comes Clean
“How do you help someone with a problem?” I ask. “A problem they don’t think they have.”
Kat Greene lives in New York City and attends fifth grade in the very progressive Village Humanity School. At the moment she has three major problems—dealing with her boy-crazy best friend, partnering with the overzealous Sam in the class production of Harriet the Spy, and coping with her mother’s preoccupation with cleanliness, a symptom of her worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Melissa is a former advice columnist for Just Seventeen magazine in London, where she answered hundreds of letters from readers each week. (Her column was called “Life Sucks,” but it was Melissa’s job to insist it didn’t.) Kat Greene Comes Clean is her debut novel. Melissa lives in New York City.
September 11 @ 6:00 pm
Brooke Kroeger reads from her new book Suffragents
The Suffragents is the untold story of how some of New York’s most powerful men formed the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which grew between 1909 and 1917 from 150 founding members into a force of thousands across thirty-five states. Brooke Kroeger explores the formation of the League and the men who instigated it to involve themselves with the suffrage campaign, what they did at the behest of the movement’s female leadership, and why. She details the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s strategic decision to accept their organized help and then to deploy these influential new allies as suffrage foot soldiers, a role they accepted with uncommon grace. Led by such luminaries as Oswald Garrison Villard, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and George Foster Peabody, members of the League worked the streets, the stage, the press, and the legislative and executive branches of government. In the process, they helped convince waffling politicians, a dismissive public, and a largely hostile press to support the women’s demand. Together, they swayed the course of history.
September 12 @ 6:00 pm
Cherise Wolas reads from her debut The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
I viewed the consumptive nature of love as a threat to serious women. But the wonderful man I just married believes as I do—work is paramount, absolutely no children—and now love seems to me quite marvelous.
These words are spoken to a rapturous audience by Joan Ashby, a brilliant and intense literary sensation acclaimed for her explosively dark and singular stories.
When Joan finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is stunned by Martin’s delight, his instant betrayal of their pact. She makes a fateful, selfless decision then, to embrace her unintentional family. Challenged by raising two precocious sons, it is decades before she finally completes her masterpiece novel. Poised to reclaim the spotlight, to resume the intended life she gave up for love, a betrayal of Shakespearean proportion forces her to question every choice she has made.
Epic, propulsive, incredibly ambitious, and dazzlingly written, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a story about sacrifice and motherhood, the burdens of expectation and genius. Cherise Wolas’s gorgeous debut introduces an indelible heroine candid about her struggles and unapologetic in her ambition.
September 14 @ 6:00 pm
Lily Tuck in conversation with the editor of her new novel Sisters
Lily Tuck’s critically lauded, bestselling I Married You for Happiness was hailed by the Boston Globe as “an artfully crafted still life of one couple’s marriage.” In her singular new novel Sisters, Tuck gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies and scandals of a new marriage sprung from betrayal. Tuck’s unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife—known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise buildup to an eerily wonderful conclusion is a triumph of subtlety and surprise.
Lily Tuck will be in conversation with her editor, Elisabeth Schmitz
October 3 @ 6:00 pm
David Cleveland signing copies of his new novel Time’s Betrayal
Time s Betrayal is an epic multi-generational family saga covering the years from the battle of Antietam to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel chronicles a son s search for a larger-than-life father, a CIA agent who disappeared in the early fifties, leaving behind a distraught wife and lovers, not to mention a Pandora’s box of devastating secrets and unanswered questions that baffled all who investigated his fate–a fate as beguiling as it is mysterious. This is also a story about the crumbling edifice of the eastern Establishment after World War II and in Vietnam-era America. A poignant coming-of-age tale, it is related though the eyes of Peter Alden, whose school days are shattered when he overhears a conversation about his father from two CIA colleagues: how John Alden, a world-famous archaeologist turned OSS and CIA officer, who vanished through Checkpoint Charlie, may have been a traitor.
Although Time’s Betrayal is a literate genre-bender and suspenseful page-turner full of twists and turns, the novel is really about how family history shapes who we are and how memory — the river of Time– guides our joint destinies, testing our most cherished hopes, shaping who we are and what we believe, and teaching us that the essential truths of our humanity–freedom, justice, love, and honor–must be reclaimed in every generation.
October 10 @ 6:00 pm
Please join us to celebrate the publication of It’s My Party with author Jeannette Sanger
Born into a celebrity family (her father was Watson’s son, who turned the company into the powerhouse it still is today, and her mother, Olive, had dated Howard Hughes and John F. Kennedy), Jeannette Watson’s larger-than- life family hid a number of secrets. Behind a façade of order and glamour, Tom Watson often experienced dark moods; his depression was something he passed on to his daughter. Jeannette felt she could never measure up to her mother―a legendary beauty―and kept her nose buried in books.
Through her years as a debutante, then young wife and mother, Watson kept her feelings under wraps until she had a mental breakdown. As part of her fight to heal herself, she left her husband, taking their son and moving to New York City to experience its heady 1970s freedoms. She opened the legendary Upper East Side bookstore Books & Co., which became a gathering place for literati. Her personal life soared once more when she met her second husband, Alex Sanger, grandson of Planned Parenthood’s founder, with whom she had two more sons. After a long and fulfilling run, the bookstore closed and Watson found her way down a new path to become a spiritual healer.
It’s My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman’s effort to understand herself.