Corner Bookstore

Zack O'Malley Greenburg reads from his new book 3 Kings
2018-03-07 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Tracing the careers of hip-hop’s three most dynamic stars, this deeply reported history brilliantly examines the entrepreneurial genius of the first musician tycoons: Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z
Being successful musicians was simply never enough for the three kings of hip-hop. Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z lifted themselves from childhood adversity into tycoon territory, amassing levels of fame and wealth that not only outshone all other contemporary hip-hop artists, but with a combined net worth of well over $2 billion made them the three richest American musicians, period. Yet their fortunes have little to do with selling their own albums: between Diddy’s Ciroc vodka, Dre’s $3 billion sale of his Beats headphones to Apple, and Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service and other assets, these artists have transcended pop music fame to become lifestyle icons and moguls.
Hip-hop is no longer just a musical genre; it’s become a way of life that encompasses fashion, film, food, drink, sports, electronics and more – one that has opened new paths to profit and to critical and commercial acclaim. Thanks in large part to the Three Kings-who all started their own record labels and released classic albums before moving on to become multifaceted businessmen-hip-hop has been transformed from a genre spawned in poverty into a truly global multibillion-dollar industry.

Jane Isay reads from her new book on being a grandparent Unconditional Love
2018-03-08 18:00 - 19:30
A beautiful meditation on the joys of being a grandparent and a practical guide to help you and your adult children make the most of your relationship with a grandchild.
For many grandparents, a grandchild offers a second chance to become the parent they didn’t have the time or the energy to be when raising their own children. Being a grandparent, family relationships expert Jane Isay argues, is the opportunity to turn missed opportunities into delight. Drawing on her personal experience, dozens of interviews, and the latest findings in psychology, Isay shows how a grandparent can use his or her unique perspective and experience to create a deep and lasting bond that will echo throughout a grandchild’s life. She explores the realities of today’s multigenerational families, identifying problems and offering solutions to enhance love, trust, and understanding between grandparents, parents, and grandchildren. She also offers a wealth of practical advice, from when to get involved, when to stay away, and how to foster a strong relationship when you’re separated by long distance. Unconditional Love advocates for honest conversation, thinking in the long run and healing breaches in order to be together, understanding that most of us try to do our best and need to be forgiven if we fail. Isay argues that secrets and surprises may tilt the boat but won’t necessarily sink it and that grandparents and their grown children are happier when they give each other the benefit of the doubt. Most importantly, she writes, the advent of grandchildren offers families the opportunity for healing and redemption—if we seize the moment. In lovely prose and through delightful stories, Isay shows us how we can.

Kate Greathead reads from her debut novel Laura & Emma
2018-03-13 18:00 - 19:30 | The Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10128, United States
A tender, witty debut novel about a single mother raising her daughter among the upper crust of New York City society in the late twentieth century from a nine-time Moth StorySLAM champion.
Laura hails from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, born into old money, drifting aimlessly into her early thirties. One weekend in 1981 she meets Jefferson. The two sleep together. He vanishes. And Laura realizes she’s pregnant. Enter: Emma.
Despite her progressive values, Laura raises Emma by herself in the same blue-blood world of private schools and summer homes she grew up in, buoyed by a host of indelible characters, including her eccentric mother, who informs her society friends and Emma herself that she was fathered by a Swedish sperm donor; her brother, whose childhood stutter reappears in the presence of their forbidding father; an exceptionally kind male pediatrician; and her overbearing best friend, whose life has followed the Park Avenue script in every way except for childbearing. Meanwhile, the apple falls far from the tree with Emma, who begins to question her environment in a way her mother never could. Told in vignettes that mine the profound from the mundane, with meditations on everything from sex and death to insomnia and the catharsis of crying on the subway, a textured portrait emerges of a woman struggling to understand herself, her daughter, and the changing landscape of New York City in the eighties and nineties. Laura & Emma is an acutely insightful exploration of class and family warfare from a new author whose offbeat sensibility, understated wit, and stylish prose celebrate the comedy and pathos that make us human.

Beth Gutcheon reads from her new novel The Affliction
2018-03-14 18:00 - 19:30
The New York Times bestselling author delivers the second installment in her clever romp of a mystery series combining social comedy and dark-hearted murder—a novel set at a girls’ boarding school in a picturesque Hudson River town with more than its share of secrets. Since retiring as head of a famous New York City private school, Maggie Detweiler is busier than ever. Chairing a team to evaluate the faltering Rye Manor School for girls, she will determine whether, in spite of its fabled past, the school has a future at all. At a reception for the faculty and trustees to “welcome” Maggie’s team, no one seems more keen for all to go well than Florence Meagher, a star teacher who is loved and respected in spite of her affliction—that she can never stop talking. Two days later, Florence’s body is found in the campus swimming pool.
What on earth is going on in this idyllic town? Is this a run-of-the-mill marital murder? Or does it have something to do with the school board treasurer’s real estate schemes? And what is up with the vicious cyber-bullying that’s unsettled everyone, or with the disturbed teenaged boy whom Florence had made a pet of? And is it possible that someone killed Florence just so she’d finally shut up?

Daniela Lamas, author of You Can Stop Humming Now, in conversation with Susannah Cahalan
2018-03-27 18:00 - 19:30
A critical care doctor’s breathtaking stories about what it means to be saved by modern medicine

Modern medicine is a world that glimmers with new technology and cutting-edge research. To the public eye, medical stories often begin with sirens and flashing lights and culminate in survival or death. But these are only the most visible narratives. As a critical care doctor treating people at their sickest, Daniela Lamas is fascinated by a different story: what comes after for those whose lives are extended by days, months, or years as a result of our treatments and technologies?
In You Can Stop Humming Now, Lamas explores the complex answers to this question through intimate accounts of patients and their families. A grandfather whose failing heart has been replaced by a battery-operated pump; a salesman who found himself a kidney donor on social media; a college student who survived a near fatal overdose and returned home, alive but not the same; and a young woman navigating an adulthood she never thought she’d live to see — these moving narratives paint a detailed picture of the fragile border between sickness and health.
Riveting, gorgeously told, and deeply personal, You Can Stop Humming Now is a compassionate, uncompromising look at the choices and realities that many of us, and our families, may one day face.
Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. She serves as a book reviewer at the New York Post and is working on a new book that delves into the modern history of psychiatry, The Great Pretender, out soon.

John Loughery reads from his new book Dagger John
2018-04-04 18:00 - 19:30
Acclaimed biographer John Loughery tells the story of John Hughes, son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), builder of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial-school education, and American diplomat. As archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York in the 1840 and 1850s and the most famous Roman Catholic in America, Hughes defended Catholic institutions in a time of nativist bigotry and church burnings and worked tirelessly to help Irish Catholic immigrants find acceptance in their new homeland. His galvanizing and protecting work and pugnacious style earned him the epithet Dagger John. When the interests of his church and ethnic community were at stake, Hughes acted with purpose and clarity.
In Dagger John, Loughery reveals Hughes’s life as it unfolded amid turbulent times for the religious and ethnic minority he represented. Hughes the public figure comes to the fore, illuminated by Loughery’s retelling of his interactions with, and responses to, every major figure of his era, including his critics (Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley) and his admirers (Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln). Loughery peels back the layers of the public life of this complicated man, showing how he reveled in the controversies he provoked and believed he had lived to see many of his goals achieved until his dreams came crashing down during the Draft Riots of 1863 when violence set Manhattan ablaze.

RESCHEDULED Please join us to celebrate the launch of Pure Hollywood with Christine Schutt
2018-04-16 18:00 - 19:30
The sensational new story collection from one of our sharpest, most original, and daringly cinematic stylists, National Book Award finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt.
In one eponymous novella and ten stories, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, from a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn, love and hurt.
With Pure Hollywood Christine Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.

Emily Lodge reads from her new book The Falcon Diaries
2018-05-02 18:00 - 19:30
An American writer joins her husband, a contractor/consultant working in Iraq, to live in Amman, Jordan, and keeps a diary of day-to-day events. Out of this emerge so many stories of the pain and frustration of a forgotten world, which precedes the Iraq war, dating from a half-century earlier—the Palestinians who fled Israel in the ’48 and ’67 wars. In both cases — whether the Iraqi war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — she finds herself squarely within the enemy camp and seeks to find out why that is, delving into the history and layering it within the quotidian.

Laura Jacobs reads from her new book Celestial Bodies
2018-05-08 18:00 - 19:30
As much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad-in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances, and personal stories, Jacobs offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography.
Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated with original drawings, Celestial Bodies is essential reading for all lovers of this magnificent art form.

Elizabeth Winthrop reads from her new novel The Mercy Seat
2018-05-10 18:00 - 19:30
Winthrop tells the arresting tale—from multiple points of view—of a community locked in struggle with itself. Set during the hours leading up to the scheduled execution of a young black man for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1943 small-town Louisiana, Winthrop expertly captures the intimacy and tension of a town, its people, and its injustices.
On the eve of his execution by electric chair, eighteen-year-old Willie Jones sits in his cell in New Iberia awaiting his end. Across the state, a flatbed truck driven by a convict and his keeper carries the executioner’s chair from its home at the state penitentiary in Angola. On a nearby highway, Willie’s father Frank is hauling a gravestone for his son in a wagon pulled by his aged, fading mule. In his office the District Attorney who prosecuted Willie reckons with the sentencing and his own conscience, while at a gas station at the crossroads outside of town, married couple Ora and Dale grapple with their grief and their secrets.As the members of the township reflect on the implications of Willie’s upcoming execution, an intricately layered portrait of a community emerges, bearing the deep stain of the color line. Moving from voice to voice, Winthrop elegantly conveys both the ugly realities and the touching intimacies of a small town and its residents. The Mercy Seat is a brutally smart and tender novel from one of our most acute literary observers.

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers presents her new book Saving Central Park
2018-05-15 18:00 - 19:30
The story of how one woman’s long love affair with New York’s Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life–a middle-class upbringing in Texas; college at Wellesley, marriage, a master’s degree in city planning at Yale. And then her move to New York, where she starts a family and, when she finds being a mother and a housewife is not enough, pours herself into the protection and enhancement of the city’s green spaces. Interwoven into her own story is a comprehensive history of Central Park: its design and construction as a scenic masterpiece; the alterations of each succeeding era; the addition of numerous facilities for sports and play; and finally, the “anything goes” phase of the 1960s and 70s, which was often fun but nearly destroyed the park. The two narratives continue to entwine as she finds a job in the administration of Central Park, founds the Central Park Conservancy, and transforms both the park and herself–a transformation that has led to the writing of her many books, to travels that have taken her to parks and gardens around the world, and to solidifying the prestige of one of New York’s most conspicuous landmarks.

Adam Van Doren presents his new book The Stones of Yale
2018-05-31 18:00 - 19:30
What makes a university great? Its faculty? Its students? Its curriculum? All three to be sure. But also its architecture. Great buildings inspire. They transform how we think, how we see, how we learn—how we act. No one who enters the cathedral of Chartres is the same person coming out.
Too often architectural critics focus on theory and analysis of a building rather than the visceral experience of seeing it and being in it. Van Doren is more interested in the stories, in how Yale’s buildings made people feel, not just the academic origins of their style or where their bricks were made. What was it like to live in them, to study in them? What did people remember?
Painter Adam Van Doren speaks to Yale alumni as diverse as actor Sam Waterston, writers Christopher Buckley and David McCullough, Yale librarian Judith Schiff, former NFL great Calvin Hill, architect Cesar Pelli among others, and illustrates his book in gorgeous watercolor paintings of the buildings of Yale that interest him most.

Lauren Weisberger reads from her new book When Life Gives You Lululemons
2018-06-04 18:00 - 19:30
New York Times bestselling author Lauren Weisberger returns with a novel starring one of her favorite characters from The Devil Wears Prada—Emily Charlton, first assistant to Miranda Priestly, now a highly successful image consultant who’s just landed the client of a lifetime. Welcome to Greenwich, CT, where the lawns and the women are perfectly manicured, the Tito’s and sodas are extra strong, and everyone has something to say about the infamous new neighbor. Let’s be clear: Emily Charlton, Miranda Priestly’s ex-assistant, does not do the suburbs. She’s working in Hollywood as an image consultant to the stars, but recently, Emily’s lost a few clients. She’s hopeless with social media. The new guard is nipping at her heels. She needs a big opportunity, and she needs it now.

Elyssa Friedland launches her new book The Intermission
2018-07-11 18:00 - 19:30
Have you ever had a secret so gut-wrenching you couldn’t tell anyone, not even the person who shares your bed? Told from the alternating perspectives of a husband and wife who both have something to hide, this incisive novel pulls back the curtain on a seemingly-happy marriage, posing the question: how much do we really know–and how much should we want to know–about the people we love the most? After five long years, the unshakable confidence Cass Coyne felt as a bride is gone. Her husband, Jonathan, on the other hand, is still smitten. It’s true that the quirks he once found charming in his wife–her high standards, her refusal to clean the dishes–are beginning to grate. But for him, these are minor challenges in a healthy relationship. So it comes as a complete shock to Jonathan when Cass suddenly requests a marital “intermission”: a six-month separation during which they’ll decide if the comfortable life they’ve built is still the one they both want.
Aside from a monthly custodial exchange of their beloved dog, contact will be limited. But as the months pass, they begin to see that calculated silences just like these have helped to drive them apart–and that it may finally be time to confront the blistering secrets they’ve been avoiding.

Heather Miller launches her debut Prime-Time Parenting
2018-09-05 18:00 - 19:30
A two-hour school-night routine that helps parents support their children’s social, emotional and intellectual development
School nights are a real challenge for most parents. Just as your energy flags, a slew of parenting duties loom ahead. Learn how to create a two-hour school night routine that works for both parent and child. By following this two-hour ritual, you’ll be able to:

Bond with your children
Prepare and enjoy a nutritious dinner
Support your child’s organization and academic success
Read with your child
Follow a book-bath-bed routine to an early bedtime
Enjoy some “me” time once the kids are in bed

The benefits of Prime-Time Parenting include better nutrition, better school performance, a more organized home, and well-rested parents and children.
The hours between 6 and 8pm will never be the same!

Kate Walbert reads from her new novel His Favorites
2018-09-11 18:00 - 19:30
Set in the 1970s, His Favorites is the story of Jo, a teenaged girl who, after a catastrophic and scandalous accident, is sent away to a boarding school. There, she encounters Master Aikens, a charismatic English teacher who encourages her to apply to his sought-after Modern Lit class. Intrigued, Jo agrees. The consequences for Jo are disastrous, immediate and lifelong. His Favorites beautifully shows how the institution closes ranks and protects Aikens when Jo brings his crimes to light, and the very steep price she must pay for being among his favorites.
The silencing of Jo and the underlying complicity of the culture in which she finds herself are all-too familiar and universal. As she recalls the details of the past many years later, she negotiates varying angles of perception, memory, revision, and the limits of language to try to claim and fully voice her history. The result is a devastating, propulsive, unforgettable work of fiction, impossible to put down.

Please join us for the launch of Patrizia Chen's new book Goong-Goong
2018-09-12 18:00 - 19:30
Marrying into a Chinese family, Patrizia was fascinated and puzzled by the myriad of photographs of old Shanghai; the elegant weddings, exclusive club-like settings, sumptuous homes, banquets, and expensive cars. Inquisitive, she fielded questions, began to collect information, and discovered that she had married into an extraordinarily influential and important Chinese family. Yet… no one knew about the stories. Only her father-in-law, shipping magnate C.Y. Chen (or Goong-Goong, as she always respectfully referred to him) was the key to unlocking the family history.
Though rebuffed at first; in the years to come, the one prickly relationship between inquisitive Patrizia and reserved Goong-Goong warmed to become one of profound joy and deep meaning. Patrizia knew that she had to write the story of this remarkable man and the family that took her in with open arms; about exotic traditions; about fascinating people, places, anecdotes and stories–the stuff of novels–that proved to be real once she began to study the history of the Chen family and the meeting of East and West. Chen shows how families may change but can still preserve their traditions.
Goong-Goong is a unique book, which represents a fascinating cultural bridge between two civilizations and spanning two centuries.

Wednesday Martin launches her new book Untrue
2018-09-26 18:00 - 19:30
Wednesday Martin’s newest work of non-fiction, Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Adultery is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free cuts through the junk science and regressive cultural narratives that have shaped our beliefs about female infidelity for centuries, revealing a truth both liberating and disconcerting: women are no more “naturally monogamous” than men; nor are their libidos shrinking violets. Far from it.
Offering insights from thirty experts as well as real women from all walks of life who refuse monogamy, Untrue also analyzes cultural shifts from plow agriculture to polyamory; introduces readers to two important “hidden figures” of American sex research; and takes readers on an immersive, fascinating journey—from the bonobo enclosure at the San Diego Zoo to an exclusive all-female sex party in Manhattan where most of the revelers identify as heterosexual. Untrue asserts that monogamy is a tighter fit for the fairer sex; that females of many species evolved to be “promiscuous”; and that female sexual autonomy may be the most meaningful metric of gender equality. Rich with game-changing data and polemical writing, it promises to take us far out of our comfort zone, and may change the way you think about women and sex forever.

Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein present their new book I Think, Therefore I Draw
2018-11-01 18:00 - 19:30 | The Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10018, United States
With just a few pen strokes and a poignantly sharp caption, cartoons have the power to inspire, seduce, outrage, and amuse. Some of today’s best cartoonists are also some of our keenest observers, and a great cartoon can provide, in addition to humor and well-needed levity, acute psychological and sociological insights. In I Think, Therefore I Draw: Understanding Philosophy Through Cartoons, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, authors of the wildly fun international bestseller, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar…, have culled dozens of cartoons, from magazines like The New Yorker and Punch, that shine a light on mankind’s perennial conundrums—such as “Is there a cosmic scheme?”; “Is there really a difference between girls and boys?”; and “What if your right is my wrong?”. Accompanied by wonderfully witty annotations that explain how these cartoons are profoundly useful in helping us make our way through life, I Think, Therefore I Draw is a Philosophy 101 course that will make readers think and laugh.

Elena Mannes launches her new book Soul Dog
2018-11-13 18:00 - 19:30
Looking for companionship after a near-fatal car crash, Elena Mannes, an award-winning television journalist and producer, decided to get her first dog. But what she found with her dog Brio shook the foundations of her physical and spiritual worlds, sending her on a quest to discover the nature of his spiritual origins and to contemplate and seek out the possibility of interspecies communication–even after death.
Soon after bringing her puppy home, Mannes realized that the master-companion relationship would not be possible with Brio, who quickly showed that he had a mind–and a spirit–of his own. A healer Mannes visited immediately focused on Brio, exclaiming that he was an old soul. Mannes’s growing curiosity about the intelligence, emotions, and consciousness of Brio and other dogs led her to contact an animal psychic in California who described, with amazing accuracy, Brio’s favorite walks and the author’s apartment from the dog’s point of view. Motivated by her experience, Mannes produced a filmed segment with Diane Sawyer featuring the same psychic, who described Sawyer’s country house and her dog’s favorite spots in the yard. Mannes’s skeptical journalist background compelled her to investigate further. She delved into the world of animal communicators, psychics, and scientists studying animal intelligence, including Rupert Sheldrake, to find answers to her multiplying questions: Do animals have thoughts and feelings? Consciousness? Souls? Is interspecies communication possible? Can animals reincarnate?

Dr. Jeremy Mack launches his debut Phantoms of the Hotel Meurice
2018-11-15 18:00 - 19:30
This book is about the denial in contemporary France of the period of German occupation and, in particular, about French disavowal of participation in the final solution. Using then and now pictures of places where terrible and momentous events occurred and of significant actors in the history of the time, it functions as a guidebook to the events that took place and as a guide to understanding how such atrocities could have happened in an eminently civilized nation.

Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen launch their new novel An Anonymous Girl
2019-01-08 18:00 - 19:30
The next novel of psychological suspense and obsession from the authors of the blockbuster bestseller The Wife Between Us

When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she’ll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave. But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she’s thinking…and what she’s hiding.
As Jess’s paranoia grows, it becomes clear that she can no longer trust what in her life is real, and what is one of Dr. Shields’ manipulative experiments. Caught in a web of deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.
From the authors of the blockbuster bestseller The Wife Between Us comes an electrifying new novel about doubt, passion, and just how much you can trust someone.

Paul Batista reads from his new book The Warriors
2019-01-09 18:00 - 19:30
Legendary defense attorney Raquel Rematti represents a presidential candidate—and former First Lady of an ISIS-assassinated President—Senator Angelina Baldesteri in the most watched and explosive trial of the 21st Century. The Senator, a Democrat, sees it as a vendetta show trial orchestrated by the current Republican U.S. President, his Republican Attorney General, and an ambitious Republican United States Attorney in Manhattan. At the trial, a year before the election, the Senator faces charges of election fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering; each of which could deem her unfit for office and all but remove her from the Presidential race.
As the dramatic trial unfolds, Raquel steadily realizes that the Senator’s is hidden trail of lies which she has fought hard to keep from the light of day including a series of complicated and illicit connections. As Raquel’s complex, conflicted relationship with her client begins to gradually endanger herself, she must decide whether to face the recurrent dangers or allow her life and the lives of those she loves to be threatened.

Dani Shapiro reads from her new book Inheritance
2019-01-15 18:00 - 19:30
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.
Inheritance is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

A.F. Brady reads from her new book Once a Liar
2019-01-29 18:00 - 19:30
Peter Caine, a cutthroat Manhattan defense attorney, worked ruthlessly to become the best at his job. On the surface, he is charming and handsome, but inside he is cold and heartless. He fights without remorse to acquit murderers, pedophiles and rapists.
When Charlie Doyle, the daughter of the Manhattan DA—and Peter’s former lover—is murdered, Peter’s world is quickly sent into a tailspin. He becomes the prime suspect as the DA, a professional enemy of Peter’s, embarks on a witch hunt to avenge his daughter’s death, stopping at nothing to ensure Peter is found guilty of the murder.
In the challenge of his career and his life, Peter races against the clock to prove his innocence. As the evidence mounts against him, he’s forced to begin unraveling his own dark web of lies and confront the sins of his past. But the truth of who killed Charlie Doyle is more twisted and sinister than anyone could have imagined…

PLEASE NOTE: VENUE CHANGE Lindsay Stern reads from her debut novel
2019-02-21 18:00 - 19:30
VENUE CHANGE
Due to size considerations this event will now be held at The Ukrainian Institute of America which is located at 2 East 79th Street

Ivan is a tightly wound philosophy professor whose reverence for logic and order governs not only his academic interests, but also his closest relationships. His wife, Prue, is quite the opposite: a pioneer in the emerging field of biolinguistics, she is bold and vibrant, full of life and feeling. Thus far, they have managed to weather their differences. But lately, an odd distance has settled in between them. Might it have something to do with the arrival of the college’s dashing but insufferable new writer-in-residence, whose novel Prue always seems to be reading?
Into this delicate moment barrels Ivan’s unstable father-in-law, Frank, in town to hear Prue deliver a lecture on birdsong that is set to cement her tenure application. But the talk doesn’t go as planned, unleashing a series of crises that force Ivan to finally confront the problems in his marriage, and to begin to fight – at last – for what he holds dear.
A dazzlingly insightful and entertaining novel about the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand each other and ourselves, The Study of Animal Languages marks the debut of a brilliant new voice in fiction.

Victoria Lee reads from her debut YA book The Fever King
2019-03-04 18:00 - 19:30
In the former United States, sixteen-year-old Noam Álvaro wakes up in a hospital bed, the sole survivor of the viral magic that killed his family and made him a technopath. His ability to control technology attracts the attention of the minister of defense and thrusts him into the magical elite of the nation of Carolinia.
The son of undocumented immigrants, Noam has spent his life fighting for the rights of refugees fleeing magical outbreaks—refugees Carolinia routinely deports with vicious efficiency. Sensing a way to make change, Noam accepts the minister’s offer to teach him the science behind his magic, secretly planning to use it against the government. But then he meets the minister’s son—cruel, dangerous, and achingly beautiful—and the way forward becomes less clear.
Caught between his purpose and his heart, Noam must decide who he can trust and how far he’s willing to go in pursuit of the greater good

Victoria Shorr reads from her new book Midnight
2019-03-12 18:00 - 19:30
Exquisite and nuanced in its storytelling, Midnight crafts intimate, humanizing portraits of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc that ask us to behold the women behind the icons.
Midnight is a study in the courage of three women—Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Joan of Arc. Jane Austen was poor in 1802, unmarried and homeless. She had outlines, ideas, and first drafts of her future novels but no place to sit and write them. It is at this bleak moment that she receives an offer of marriage from a rich man. Midnight takes us to the hour of her decision between financial security and her writing life.
When sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin elopes to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she scoffs at the cost—life as an outcast. Together they travel through Europe, reading and writing, but Midnight finds her alone, eight years later, pacing a terrace overlooking the Italian shore, watching for Shelley to sail home over stormy seas in a shaky boat.
Joan of Arc, imprisoned in chains, kept her faith for a long year. Be brave, daughter of God, her saints had whispered, you will be saved—and she believes it, until she is taken to be burned at the stake. Midnight is the story of Joan’s final days, between her terrified recantation and her heroic return to the stake.

Elinor Lipman reads from her new book Good Riddance
2019-03-13 18:00 - 19:30
The delightful new romantic comedy from Elinor Lipman, in which one woman’s trash becomes another woman’s treasure, with deliriously entertaining results. Daphne Maritch doesn’t quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear. The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of ’68 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion, scribbling notes and observations after each one—not always charitably—and noting who overstepped boundaries of many kinds.
In a fit of decluttering (the yearbook did not, Daphne concluded, “spark joy”), she discards it when she moves to a small New York City apartment. But when it’s found in the recycling bin by a busybody neighbor/documentary filmmaker, the yearbook’s mysteries—not to mention her own family’s—take on a whole new urgency, and Daphne finds herself entangled in a series of events both poignant and absurd.

Terese Svoboda reads from her new book of short stories Great American Desert
2019-03-26 18:00 - 19:30
“Great American Desert is a devious and extraordinary new collection of stories from one of our best writers, Terese Svoboda. A kaleidoscopic tour through the Plains that spans decades and beautifully fuses the tonal worlds of comedy, horror, history, and myth. Svoboda is sexy, funny, frighteningly intelligent, and sublimely attuned to the hum of ancient water running underneath our thirsty world.” —Karen Russell
“Terese Svoboda has brought a poet’s lyrical intensity and factual density to prose fiction and writes like no one else.”
—Tom McGuane

Terese Svoboda will be introduced by author Kurt Andersen.
