Corner Bookstore

Michael Frank launches his debut novel What is Missing
2019-10-16 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Costanza Ansaldo, a half-Italian and half-American translator, is convinced that she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband, an eminent writer, she returns to the pensione in Florence where she spent many happy times in her youth, and there she meets, first, Andrew Weissman, an acutely sensitive seventeen-year-old, and, soon afterward, his father, Henry Weissman, a charismatic New York physician who specializes in—as it happens—reproductive medicine.With three lives each marked by heartbreak and absence—of a child, a parent, a partner, or a clear sense of identity—What is Missing offers Costanza, Andrew, and Henry the opportunity to make themselves whole when the triangle resumes three months later in New York, where the relationships among them turn and tighten with combustive effects that cut to the core of what it means to be a father, a son, and—for Costanza—a potential mother.

Maya C. Popa reads from her debut collection of poems American Faith
2019-11-07 18:00 - 19:30
“Maya C. Popa’s poems move with a confident, quick-as-dread sweep toward an alarmingly clear articulation of what it is to be an American ‘under/ duress by a language, its failure to imagine the present world or next…’ Her lyrics address our huge unknowns, when ‘The government is cancelled/ but not the body,’ tides of unsorted information threaten to sink us, and in the poisoned sea ‘the shame is that the parrotfish/cannot be remade from scratch.’ American Faith marries a richly detailed music to this careening hour.” —Mark Doty, author of Deep Lane
Maya Catherine Popa is a Romanian-American poet and author of two chapbooks, The Bees Have Been Cancelled and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, published in 2018 (DIAGRAM chapbook series). She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Hippocrates Society, and her writing has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, and Tin House among others. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, and she directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches English literature at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City.

James L. May reads from his debut novel The Body Outside the Kremlin
2020-01-14 18:00 - 19:30
Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization, and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor and others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions. With the brutal winter fast approaching, Tolya Bogomolov, a young mathematician serving a three-year sentence, hopes an acquaintance he’s been cultivating will lead to a less brutal work assignment, maybe even a little more bread in his ration. Knowing Gennady Antonov holds a privileged position restoring the monks’ seized collection of icons ought to improve Tolya’s odds of reassignment. But when Antonov’s body is discovered floating frozen in the bay, their connection turns dangerous. At first the authorities question Tolya, but then he’s mystified when they assign him to assist the elderly detective investigating the case—but better to find the real killer than have the murder pinned on him. Digging into Antonov’s secrets turns up strange expropriations of the museum’s icons, rumors of an escape conspiracy among White Army officers, and an illicit affair with a female prisoner who won’t tell all she knows. To avoid becoming the murderer’s next victim, Tolya must defy Solovetsky’s unforgiving regime and make ruthless use of his fellow prisoners. Putting his story to paper at last means reckoning the true cost of his survival.

Lydia Denworth and Randi Hutter discuss Lydia's new book Friendship
2020-01-30 18:00 - 19:30
In Friendship, science journalist Lydia Denworth takes us in search of friendship’s biological, psychological, and evolutionary foundations. She finds friendship to be as old as early life on the African savannas—when tribes of people grew large enough for individuals to seek fulfillment of their social needs outside their immediate families. Denworth sees this urge to connect reflected in primates, too, taking us to a monkey sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a baboon colony in Kenya to examine social bonds that offer insight into our own. She meets scientists at the frontiers of brain and genetics research and discovers that friendship is reflected in our brain waves, our genomes, and our cardiovascular and immune systems; its opposite, loneliness, can kill. At long last, social connection is recognized as critical to wellness and longevity.With insight and warmth, Denworth weaves past and present, field biology and neuroscience, to show how our bodies and minds are designed for friendship across life stages, the processes by which healthy social bonds are developed and maintained, and how friendship is changing in the age of social media. Blending compelling science, storytelling, and a grand evolutionary perspective, Denworth delineates the essential role that cooperation and companionship play in creating human (and nonhuman) societies.

Lydia Denworth will be in conversation with Randi Hutter Epstein, author Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything.

Lily Tuck and Molly Haskell in conversation about Lily's new book Heathcliff Redux
2020-02-04 18:00 - 19:30
In the title novella, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights at the same time that she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. In the stories that follow, a single photograph illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian café; a forgotten act of violence in New York’s Carl Schurz Park returns to haunt the present; and a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult.
Sharp and unflinching, the novella and stories together form an exquisitely crafted collection from one of our most treasured, award-winning writers.

Lily Tuck will be in conversation with author and critic, Molly Haskell

Joshua Hammer Reads from his new book The Falcon Thief
2020-02-10 18:00 - 19:30
On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were fourteen rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales. So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globetrotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors for royals in the United Arab Emirates—where falcon races have multimillion-dollar purses and a champion bird might just be worth risking prison for—and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who’s determined to protect the world’s birds of prey from one of the most irrepressible predators of our time. It’s a story that’s part true-crime narrative, part epic adventure—and wholly unputdownable until the very last page.

Adrienne Miller in conversation with Jenny Mollen about her new book In the Land of Men
2020-02-11 18:00 - 19:30
A naive and idealistic twenty-two-year-old from the Midwest, Adrienne Miller got her lucky break when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ magazine in the mid-nineties. Even if its sensibilities were manifestly mid-century—the martinis, powerful male egos, and unquestioned authority of kings—GQ still seemed the red-hot center of the literary world. It was there that Miller began learning how to survive in a man’s world. Three years later, she forged her own path, becoming the first woman to take on the role of literary editor of Esquire, home to the male writers who had defined manhood itself— Hemingway, Mailer, and Carver. Up against this old world, she would soon discover that it wanted nothing to do with a “mere girl.”
But this was also a unique moment in history that saw the rise of a new literary movement, as exemplified by McSweeney’s and the work of David Foster Wallace. A decade older than Miller, the mercurial Wallace would become the defining voice of a generation and the fiction writer she would work with most. He was her closest friend, confidant—and antagonist. Their intellectual and artistic exchange grew into a highly charged professional and personal relationship between the most prominent male writer of the era and a young woman still finding her voice.
This memoir—a rich, dazzling story of power, ambition, and identity—ultimately asks the question “How does a young woman fit into this male culture and at what cost?” With great wit and deep intelligence, Miller presents an inspiring and moving portrayal of a young woman’s education in a land of men.

Gigi Levangie in conversation with Molly Jong-Fast about Been There, Married That
2020-02-13 18:00 - 18:30
Agnes Murphy Nash is the perfect Hollywood wife – she has the right friends, the right clothes, and even a side career of her own as a writer. Her husband Trevor is a bigshot producer, and from the outside it looks like they’re living a picture-perfect celebrity life, complete with tennis tournaments and lavish parties.
But the job description of a Hollywood wife doesn’t cover divorce, which is the way Agnes’ life is headed after she comes home one day to find her credit cards cancelled and the security passwords to get into her enormous LA home changed. Oh, and there’s a guy there whose job it is to tase her if she tries to enter…which she does.
Needless to say, Agnes’ husband is dead set on making sure she loses big time, but Agnes isn’t the type to just lie down and take it. In a world of fremenies and hot nannies, personal psychics and “skinny” jello shots, Agnes may be losing her husband, but could that mean getting her own life back?
Been There, Married That is a drop-dead hilarious battle of wills that will make you laugh out loud, cringe, and keep turning the pages to see what crazy disaster will happen to Agnes next…and how she’ll rise from the ashes.

Alan A. Winter reads from his debut novel Wolf
2020-02-18 18:00 - 19:30
Perhaps no man on Earth is more controversial, more hated, or more studied than Adolf Hitler. His exploits and every move are well-documented, from the time he first became chancellor and then dictator of Germany to starting World War II to the systematic killing of millions of Jews. But how did he achieve power, and what was the makeup of the mind of a man who would deliberately inflict unimaginable horrors on millions of people?
Meet Friedrich Richard, an amnesiac soldier who, in 1918, encounters Hitler in the mental ward at Pasewalk Hospital. Hitler, then a corporal, diagnosed as a psychopath and helpless, suffering from hysterical blindness, introduces himself as Wolf to Friedrich and becomes dependent upon Friedrich for assistance, forming an unbreakable bond between the two men.
Follow Friedich—our protagonist—who interacts with real people, places, and events, through the fifteen-year friendship that witnesses Hitler turn from a quiet painter into a megalomaniacal dictator. Using brand-new historical research to construct a realistic portrait of the evolving Hitler, Wolf will satisfy, by turns, history buffs and fiction fans alike. And as this complex story is masterfully presented, it answers the question of how a nondescript man became the world’s greatest monster.

Paul Wolfe reads from his debut novel The Lost Diary of M
2020-02-25 18:00 - 19:30
She was a longtime lover of JFK.
She was the ex-wife of a CIA chief.
She was the sister-in-law of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee.
She believed in mind expansion and took LSD with Timothy Leary.
She was a painter, a socialite and a Bohemian in Georgetown during the Cold War.
And she ended up dead in an unsolved murder a year after JFK’s assassination.
The diary she kept was never found.
Until now. . . .

Sarah-Jane Stratford in conversation with Fiona Davis about Red Letter Days
2020-03-02 18:00 - 19:30
Amid the glitz and glamour of 1950s New York, Phoebe Adler pursues her dream of screenwriting. A dream that turns into a living nightmare when she is blacklisted—caught in the Red Menace that is shattering the lives of suspected Communists. Desperate to work, she escapes to London, determined to keep her dream alive and clear her good name.There, Phoebe befriends fellow American exile Hannah Wolfson, who has defied the odds to build a career as a successful television producer in England. Hannah is a woman who has it all, and is now gambling everything in a very dangerous game—the game of hiring blacklisted writers.
Neither woman suspects that danger still looms . . . and their fight is only just beginning.

Sarah-Jane Stratford will be in conversation with Fiona Davis, author of The Chelsea Girls

Jan Eliasberg reads from her debut Hannah's War
2020-03-03 18:00 - 19:30
Berlin, 1938. Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon’s creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich, her research is belittled, overlooked, and eventually stolen by her German colleagues. Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of science’s greatest achievement.

New Mexico, 1945. Returning wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, Major Jack Delaney arrives in the New Mexican desert with a mission: to catch a spy. Someone in the top-secret nuclear lab at Los Alamos has been leaking encoded equations to Hitler’s scientists. Chief among Jack’s suspects is the brilliant and mysterious Hannah Weiss, an exiled physicist lending her talent to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mission. All signs point to Hannah as the traitor, but over three days of interrogation that separate her lies from the truth, Jack will realize they have more in common than either one bargained for.

Zack O'Malley Greenberg reads from his new book A-List Angels
2020-03-10 18:00 - 19:00
How much is celebrity really worth? In a growing trend, Hollywood’s biggest stars from Ashton Kutcher to Beyoncé have set out to turn their fame into bankable capital by tossing out traditional endorsement deals in favor of strategic partnerships that grant them a stake in today’s top companies. Ushered in by 50 Cent’s deal with Vitamin Water — in which the rapper took equity instead of cash, eventually walking away with a nine-figure haul — celebrities of all different colors, genders, and talents have learned to capitalize on the invaluable benefits of their platform and visibility.

The ever-evolving, mutually beneficial relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley has led to everything from laughable flops and billion-dollar profits to rock star CEOs and paparazzi-worthy boards of directors. Through extensive reporting and exclusive interviews with stars like Shaq, Nas, Sophia Bush, and Steve Aoki, Forbes senior editor Zack O’Malley Greenburg takes an up-close-and-personal look at the rise of celebrity investors and their impact on companies including AirBnB, Spotify, and Uber.

Honor Moore reads from her new book Our Revolution
2020-03-11 18:00 - 19:30
With the sweep of an epic novel, Our Revolution follows Jenny Moore, a charismatic and brilliant woman whose life changed as she became engaged in the great twentieth-century movements for peace and social justice. Born into Boston society in 1923 and the first woman in her family to go to college, she set aside writing ambitions to marry Paul Moore, a decorated war hero who became Bishop Paul Moore. Together they had nine children—”a baseball team,” Jenny said, “a small orchestra.”
Rejecting a conventional path, the Moores moved to an inner-city parish in Jersey City and began their family while collaborating on a socially radical, multiracial ministry. In 1968, Jenny published her first book. “Everything was just starting,” she protested—meaning an independent life inspired in part by the new feminist movement—when she was diagnosed with cancer at fifty.
Jenny bequeathed to her eldest daughter, Honor, then a twenty-seven-year-old poet, her unfinished writing. As Honor pursued her own writing, she was haunted by her mother’s bequest. Decades later, she delves into Jenny’s pages and forges a new relationship with the passionate seeker and truth teller she finds there. Our Revolution is a vivid, absorbing account of two women navigating the twentieth century and a daughter’s story of the mother who shaped her life as an artist and a woman.

***CANCELLED*** Julian Tepper in conversation with Hannah Assadi about his new book Between the Records
2020-03-25 18:00 - 19:30
Jules and Adam Newman’s complex, often hostile, relationship has long fueled their music careers as they followed in their father’s footsteps. After the release of their debut record, and while struggling to write tracks for the followup, the brothers begin to clash. Jules, the younger brother, feels cast aside and ignored by Adam, who has long been accustomed to having things his own way. From the studio to the stage and across the countless miles in between, Julian Tepper’s third novel is a moody and heady work of autofiction based on his days in the Natural History, which he and his brother formed in 2001. Between the Records examines brothers, fathers, rock and roll, and the personal demons therein—both musical and familial.
Julian Tepper is the author of two novels, Balls (Rare Bird) and Ark (Dzanc). As the member of the band The Natural History, he recorded two albums and co-wrote the hit song, “Don’t You Evah” for the legendary indie-group, Spoon.

***CANCELLED*** Bill Keenan reads from his new book Discussion Materials
2020-03-31 18:00 - 19:30
Discussion Materials gives the reader an honest look at Wall Street from someone in the trenches. After graduating from Columbia Business School, Bill Keenan joined Deutsche Bank’s investment banking division as an associate where despotic superiors (and the blinking red light of his BlackBerry) instilled low-level terror on an hourly basis. You’ll join him in his cubicle on the 44th floor of 60 Wall Street as he scrambles to ensure floating bar charts are the correct shade of orange and all numbers are left-aligned, but whatever you do, don’t ask him what any of it means. Leaning heavily on his fellow junior bankers and the countless outsourcing resources the bank employs, he slowly develops proficiency at the job, eventually gaining traction and respect, one deal at a time, over a two-year span, ultimately cementing his legacy in the group by attaining the unattainable—placing a dinner order on Seamless one Sunday night at work from Hwa Yuan Szechuan amounting to $25.00 (tax and tip included), the bank’s maximum allowance for meals—the perfect order.

***CANCELLED*** John Loughery & Blythe Randolph present their new book Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century
2020-04-01 18:00 - 19:30
After a middle-class Republican childhood and a few years as a Communist sympathizer, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for almost fifty years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. Day went to jail challenging the draft and the war in Vietnam. She was critical of capitalism and foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism.
Her protests began in 1917, leading to her arrest during the suffrage demonstration outside President Wilson’s White House. In 1940 she spoke in Congress against the draft and urged young men not to register. She frequented jail throughout the 1950s protesting the nuclear arms race. She told audiences in 1962 that President Kennedy was as much to blame for the Cuban missile crisis. She refused to hear any criticism of the pope, though she sparred with American bishops and priests who lived in well-appointed rectories and tolerated racial segregation in their parishes.
Dorothy Day is the exceptional biography of a dedicated modern-day pacifist, the most outspoken advocate for the poor, and a lifelong anarchist. This definitive and insightful account explores the influence this controversial and yet “sainted” woman still has today.

***IN STORE CANCELLED*** Jamie Brenner reads from her new book Summer Longing on Instagram.com/jamiebrennerwrites
2020-05-05 18:00 - 19:30
Ruth Cooperman arrives in beautiful beachside Provincetown for her retirement, renting the perfect waterfront cottage while she searches for her forever home. After years of hard work and making peace with life’s compromises, Ruth is looking forward to a carefree summer of solitude. But when she finds a baby girl abandoned on her doorstep, Ruth turns to her new neighbors for help and is drawn into the drama of the close-knit community. As summer unfolds and friends and family care for the infant, alliances are made, relationships are tested, and secrets are uncovered. But the unconditional love for a child in need just might bring Ruth and the women of Provincetown exactly what they have been longing for themselves.

Please note: Jamie will be hosting this event live on her Instagram account: Instagram.com/jamiebrennerwrites.
We hope to have signed copies available for purchase, so please check with us.

***CANCELLED*** Chris Beha reads from his new novel The Index of Self-Destuctive Acts
2020-05-06 18:00 - 19:30
The day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for the Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A data journalist and recent media celebrity—he correctly forecasted every outcome of the 2008 election—Sam knows a few things about predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, things turn complicated. Sam’s assigned a profile of disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, a liberal lion turned neocon Iraq-war apologist and author of the great works of baseball lore that first sparked Sam’s love of the game (books he now views as childish mythmaking to be crushed with his empirical hammer). But Doyle is convincing in person, charming and intelligent. Sam takes a liking to him, and to his daughter, Margo, with whom Sam becomes involved—just as his wife, Lucy, arrives from Wisconsin.

***CANCELLED*** Benjamin Taylor reads from his new book Here We Are
2020-05-19 18:00 - 19:30
A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.

Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor’s memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

***POSTPONED*** Ellen Feldman reads from her new novel Paris Never Leaves You
2020-06-02 18:00 - 19:30
Living through WWII with her young daughter Vivi, working in a Paris bookstore, and fighting for her life, Charlotte is no victim, she is a survivor. But can she survive the next chapter of her life?
Alternating between wartime Paris and New York’s 1950s publishing world, Paris Never Leaves You is a story of resilience, love, and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost.

***CANCELLED*** Erin Geiger Smith reads from her debut Thank You for Voting
2020-06-23 18:00 - 19:30
Voting is a prized American right and a topic of debate from the earliest days of the country. Yet in the 2016 presidential election, about 40 percent of Americans—and half of the country’s young adults—didn’t vote. Why do so many Americans choose not to vote, and what can we do about it?
The problem, Erin Geiger Smith contends, is a lack of understanding about our electoral system and a need to make voting more accessible. Thank You for Voting is her eye-opening look at the voting process, starting with the Framers’ perspective, through the Equal Protection amendment and the Voting Rights Act, to the present and simple actions individuals can take to increase civic participation in local, state, and national elections.
Geiger Smith expands our knowledge about our democracy—including women’s long fight to win the vote, attempts to suppress newly enfranchised voters’ impact, state prohibitions against felons voting, charges of voter fraud and voter suppression, and other vital issues. In a conversational tone, she explains topics that can confuse even the most informed voters: polling, news literacy, gerrymandering and the Electoral College. She also explores how age, race, and socioeconomic factors influence turnout.

Adam Van Doren presents In the Founders Footsteps
2022-04-12 18:00 - 19:30
A tour through the original thirteen colonies in search of historical sites and their stories in America’s founding. Obscure, well-known, off-the-beaten path, and on busy city streets, here are taverns, meeting houses, battlefields, forts, monuments, homes which all combine to define our country–the places where daring people forged a revolution. There is always something new to be found in America’s past that also brings greater clarity to our present and the future we choose to make as a nation. Author-artist Adam Van Doren traveled from Maine to Georgia in that spirit. There are thirty-seven landmarks included, with fifteen additional locations noted in brief.

Paul Batista reads from his new thriller Accusation
2022-05-03 18:00 - 19:30
World renowned, revered actor Aaron Julian is awakened at two a.m. by his agent who informs him that he has been accused of sexual harassment. Young actresses will break the story on prime-time TV that morning—with their lawyer, the attorney who led the charge in the priests’ sexual abuse cases.
Aaron and his celebrity pop-singer wife, Veda, vehemently deny the charges, and hire powerful defense lawyer Raquel Rematti. But when the plaintiffs’ lawyer is murdered in Central Park, the stakes skyrocket and the conspiracies spiral out of control.
Despite revelation after revelation, Aaron continues to proclaim his innocence. And in his defense, Rematti uses every tool in the legal system to produce courtroom drama that is unparalleled.

Victoria Shorr reads from her new book Mid-Air
2022-05-17 18:00 - 19:30
Victoria Shorr’s remarkable gift for depicting the inner lives of complex characters shines in two powerful explorations of family, ambition, class, and status.
In “Great Uncle Edward,” a family gathers for dinner. At ninety-three, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy. “Cleveland Auto Wrecking” introduces Sam White, an immigrant from eastern Europe. He cannot read but has a gift for math and an instinct for the value of junk. We follow his clan through the Depression to the postwar boom in the West, where their fortunes soar, creating new tests of loyalty.
Taken together, these two novellas might be the reverse images of the American dream in the twentieth century. They ask to what degree, in the face of such powerful forces as love, death, and social constraints, do any of us have control over our own lives.

Lauren Belfer reads from her new novel Ashton Hall
2022-06-07 18:00 - 19:30
When a close relative falls ill, Hannah Larson and her young son, Nicky, join him for the summer at Ashton Hall, a historic manor house outside Cambridge, England. A frustrated academic whose ambitions have been subsumed by the challenges of raising her beloved child, Hannah longs to escape her life in New York City, where her marriage has been upended by a recently discovered and devastating betrayal.
Soon after their arrival, ever-curious Nicky finds the skeletal remains of a woman walled into a forgotten part of the manor, and Hannah is pulled into an all-consuming quest for answers, Nicky close by her side. Working from clues in centuries-old ledgers showing what the woman’s household spent on everything from music to medicine; lists of books checked out of the library; and the troubling personal papers of the long-departed family, Hannah begins to recreate the Ashton Hall of the Elizabethan era in all its color and conflict. As the multilayered secrets of her own life begin to unravel, Hannah comes to realize that Ashton Hall’s women before her had lives not so different from her own, and she confronts what mothers throughout history have had to do to secure their independence and protect their children.

Caitlin Macy reads from her new story collection A Blind Corner
2022-06-21 18:00 - 19:30
In an era of “hot takes” and easy generalizations, this collection reclaims the absurdities and paradoxes of life as it is actually lived from the American fantasy of “niceness”. In Macy’s world, human desires and fatal blind spots slam headlong into convenient, social-media-driven narratives that would sort us into neat boxes of insider or outsider; good or bad; with us or against us.
Time and again, whether at home or in the age-old role of Americans abroad, Macy’s women see their good intentions turn awry. A woman who tries to do a good deed for an underprivileged child sees it go horribly wrong. A wife, attempting to be a good host to a friend’s strange ex-boyfriend, finds herself in a compromised situation. And, in the title story, a newlywed fancies herself a Euro-sophisticate until an accident reminds her just how truly foreign she really is.

Debbie Babitt reads from her new novel First Victim
2022-06-28 18:00 - 19:30
The Honorable Alice D. McKerrity is no stranger to violence. From the bench at Manhattan Supreme, she has seen the most hardened killers pass through her courtroom. But there’s something about this trial—a defendant charged with the murder of a pregnant woman—that affects her as no other case ever has. Her chaotic, stressful home life only adds to her mounting feelings of panic and fear. She’s also harboring a secret that if exposed could have far-reaching ramifications both personally and professionally. And now, unbeknownst to Alice, her daughter has begun a search for her biological father.
As the trial progresses, Alice’s life starts to unravel. Nightmares she suffered as a girl return with a vengeance. Phantom sightings torment her. Is she being paranoid? Or are the specters real? Almost at the breaking point, she begins to doubt her own sanity. Then she makes a shocking discovery that sends her on a collision course with her past and a terror-filled night in the woods in Upstate New York. Confronted with the unspeakable, she must face a decades-buried truth as she fights for her survival against a cunning adversary that forces her to question everything she ever believed about herself . . . and tests her limits as a woman, a judge, and a mother.

Andrew Bomback reads from his debut Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting
2022-08-09 18:00 - 19:30
When did “parenting” become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure?
In Long Days, Short Years, Andrew Bomback—physician, writer, and father of three young children—looks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent. It’s not a “how to” book (although Bomback has read plenty of these) but a “how come” book, investigating the emergence of an immersive, all-in approach to raising children that has made parenting a competitive (and often not very enjoyable) sport.
Drawing on parenting books, mommy blogs, and historical accounts of parental duties as well as novels, films, podcasts, television shows, and his own experiences as a parent, Bomback charts the cultural history of parenting as a skill to be mastered, from the laid-back Dr. Spock’s 1950s childcare bible—in some years outsold only by the actual Bible—to the more rigid training schedules of Babywise. Along the way, he considers the high costs of commercialized parenting (from the babymoon on), the pressure on mothers to have it all (and do it all), scripted parenting as laid out in How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, parenting during a pandemic, and much more.

Brian McDonald reads from his new book Five Floors Up
2022-09-06 18:00 - 19:30
Seen through the eyes of four generations of a firefighter family, Five Floors Up the story of the modern New York City Fire Department. From the days just after the horse-drawn firetruck, to the devastation of the 1970s when the Bronx was Burning, to the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11, to the culture-busting department of today, a Feehan has worn the shoulder patch of the FDNY. The tale shines the spotlight on the career of William M. Feehan. “Chief” Feehan is the only person to have held every rank in the FDNY including New York City’s 28th Fire Commissioner. He died in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. But Five Floors Up is at root an intimate look at a firefighter clan, the selflessness and bravery of not only those who face the flames, but the family members who stand by their sides. Alternately humorous and harrowing, rich with anecdotes and meticulously researched and reported, Five Floors Up takes us inside a world few truly understand, documenting an era that is quickly passing us by.
