Corner Bookstore

Henry Alford launches his new book I Dream of Joni
2025-01-21 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Joni Mitchell’s life, psyche, and evolving legacy are explored here in vivid technicolor—from her childhood in Saskatoon, Canada, to her arrival in Laurel Canyon that turned her into, as Alford puts it, “the bard of heartbreak and longing.” Each period of Mitchell’s life is observed via the artists, friends, family, and lovers she encountered along the way, including James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Georgia O’Keefe, Prince, and, most significantly, Kilauren, the daughter Mitchell gave up for adoption at birth but then reconnected with decades later.
Presented in the impressionistic vein of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, I Dream of Joni explores in fifty-three essays, with the author’s trademark wit and verve, the life of the legendary singer-songwriter.

Cynthia Weiner discusses her new book A Gorgeous Excitement with editor Amy Einhorn
2025-01-23 18:00 - 19:30
There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.
Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?
Amy Einhorn is SVP, Publisher of Fiction at Crown Publishing Group

Diane Kiesel launches her latest book When Charlie Met Joan
2025-02-18 18:00 - 19:30
Charlie Chaplin, the silent screen’s “Little Tramp,” was beloved by millions of movie fans until he starred in a series of salacious, real-life federal courtroom dramas. The 1944 trial was described by ace New York Daily News reporter Florabel Muir as “the best show in town.” The leading lady was a woman under contract to his studio—red-haired ingénue Joan Barry, Chaplin’s protégée and former mistress. Although he beat the federal criminal trial, Chaplin lost a paternity case and had to pay child support despite blood type evidence that proved he was not the child’s father.
A decade later during the Cold War, the U.S. government used the Barry trials as an excuse to bar the left-leaning, sexually adventurous, British-born comic from the country he had called home for forty years. Not only did these trials have a lasting impact on law; they also raise concerns about the power of celebrity, Cold War politics, the media frenzy surrounding high-profile court proceedings, and the sorry history of the casting couch. When Charlie Met Joan examines these trials from the perspective of both parties, asking whether Chaplin was unfairly persecuted by the government because of his left-leaning political beliefs, or if he should have been held more accountable for his cavalier treatment of Barry and other women in his life.
Diane Kiesel is a retired judge of the New York Supreme Court. Her other books include She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer, and Domestic Violence: Law, Policy, and Practice.

Laura Robson launches her debut A Curse for the Homesick
2025-02-20 18:00 - 19:30
On Stenland, there comes a time known as skeld season: one day, any woman on the island can wake with three black lines on her forehead, the mark of a skeld. Skeld season comes around without warning, and while each window of time lasts only three months, anyone a skeld turns to stone is very much dead.
That’s how Tess’s mother killed Soren’s parents. Maybe for this reason alone, Tess and Soren should not have fallen in love. Since the time her mother was a skeld, Tess has wanted to leave Stenland, to run from the windswept island, from her family and friends. She is unwilling to bear the responsibility of one day killing anyone, let alone someone she loves. Soren has been determined to stay, to live out his life in the place he knows as home, even if that life could be cut short during the latest skeld season. They cannot see eye to eye—and yet they cannot stay apart. She tries to come back for him. He tries to leave for her. But can your love for one person outweigh everything else combined? And how do you decide how much you’re willing to risk, if it might mean destroying someone else in the process?

Emma Otheguy launches her latest book Cousins in the Time of Magic
2025-02-25 18:00 - 19:30
History is alive with magic. That’s what zany Tía Xia is always telling cousins Jorge, Camila, and Siggy. Daredevil Jorge couldn’t be more different than his cousins: Camila is a dreamer who adores animals and Siggy is an aspiring influencer who has an exclusive party to attend. And their aunt has many secrets, including a mysterious diamond-encrusted sword that Jorge definitely wasn’t supposed to see.
But when the three stumble upon a time portal in their aunt’s yard, they are transported back to 1862, a past filled with wonders—and dangers. To return to the present, they must race to deliver the sword to General Ignacio Zaragoza in time for the historic Battle of Puebla in Mexico: the foundation of the holiday Cinco de Mayo.
As their journey to Mexico takes them through the Civil War–era United States, the cousins see just how much US history has been shaped by Latin communities. They must find the power within themselves to make sure things happen as they’re supposed to, without altering the past.

Lauren Willig launches her latest novel The Girl from Greenwich Street
2025-03-04 18:00 - 19:30
At the start of a new century, a shocking murder transfixes Manhattan, forcing bitter rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to work together to save a man from the gallows.
Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin’s boarding house—and doesn’t come home. Has she eloped? Run away? No one knows—until her body appears in the Manhattan Well.
Her family insists they know who killed her. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma.
But privately, quietly, Levi’s wealthy brother calls in a special favor….
Aaron Burr’s legal practice can’t finance both his expensive tastes and his ambition to win the 1800 New York elections. To defend Levi Weeks is a double win: a hefty fee plus a chance to grab headlines.
Alexander Hamilton has his own political aspirations; he isn’t going to let Burr monopolize the public’s attention. If Burr is defending Levi Weeks, then Hamilton will too. As the trial and the election draw near, Burr and Hamilton race against time to save a man’s life—and destroy each other.
Part murder mystery, part thriller, part true crime, The Girl From Greenwich Street revisits a dark corner of history—with a surprising twist ending that reveals the true story of the woman at the center of the tale.

Joshua Hammer discusses his latest The Mesopotamian Riddle
2025-03-20 18:00 - 19:30
It was one of history’s great vanishing acts.
Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.
London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.
Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.
From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.

Angela Denker in conversation about her new book Disciples of White Jesus
2025-03-27 18:00 - 19:30
Disciples of White Jesus is a comprehensive look at the rise in radicalization among young white men in America, especially focused on the role of right-wing Christianity in the increase of religious-based hatred and violence. Denker goes deep into the online rabbit holes of right-wing Christian influencers and conservative Christian ideology to understand how the preaching of “traditional gender roles” and “submission of women” has led to anger, outrage, loneliness, depression, and limiting identities for young white Christian men across America.
Casting her journalist’s eye across the US, Denker retraces the steps of a racist South Carolina mass shooter and a Phoenix skinhead turned Evangelical pastor, interviews middle school teachers and coaches in the Midwest, and introduces us to young men across the country who will both confirm and confound our ideas about American boyhood–stories about boys and men who are forging new identities grounded in kindness, grace, respect, and even joy. A must-read for parents, grandparents, educators, coaches, faith leaders, researchers, and all who care about the state of American families, boys themselves, and the safety of American society at large.

Angela Denker will be in conversation with Anne Nelson.

Jillian Berman presents her debut Sunk Cost: Who's to Blame for the Nation's Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix It
2025-04-15 18:00 - 19:30
Student-loan horror stories are a dime a dozen. But students today are faced with a seemingly insurmountable paradox: Research consistently shows that the clearest viable option to financial stability is a college degree. But if and when Americans decide to pursue diplomas, student loan payments quickly follow, and even after securing full-time employment, many borrowers struggle to make ends meet for years. In Sunk Cost, journalist Jillian Berman explores how the nation’s student loan program went from a well-intentioned initiative aimed at helping low- and middle-income students afford college to one that traps borrowers in long-term debt.

Colum McCann reads from his new novel Twist
2025-04-29 18:00 - 19:30
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.
When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Susan Shapiro Barash in conversation about her new book Estranged
2025-05-06 18:00 - 19:30
When life gets hard, we turn to our female friends. Husbands, partners, and jobs come and go, but close friendships are our bedrock. Until they’re not.
What happens when these bonds sabotage instead of support? Who among us has the courage to walk away? And how can we protect ourselves from further heartbreak?
In her provocative new book, Estranged: How Strained Female Friendships are Mended or Ended (Meridian Editions; April 1, 2025), Susan Shapiro Barash takes a deep dive into the complexities of female friendships. By peeling back the societal narrative that our friendships are meant to last forever, she uncovers a more nuanced reality: the closest bonds do falter. Through groundbreaking research and 150 interviews with women ranging in age from 20-80, Barash reveals an emerging trend — estrangement among female friends.
Estranged is an eye-opening investigation/practical guide for women navigating murky waters of suboptimal friendships. The book sheds light on unspoken pain of estrangement—both for the “estranger” who walks away and the “estrangee” who is left behind. Amid candid confessions of betrayal and grief, Barash challenges women to reimagine their friendships and take the bold step of letting go when necessary.
Susan will be in conversation with Meryl Moss, President of Meryl Moss Media Group and Founder of BookTrib.com

Jill Bialosky in conversation about her new book The End is the Beginning
2025-05-13 18:00 - 19:30
When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion, and doubt, all of which were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible for Jill to be with her mother as she was dying and to attend her mother’s funeral.
Now, with a poet’s eye for detail and a novelist’s flair for storytelling, Jill presents a profoundly moving elegy unlike any other. Starting with her mother’s end and the physical/cognitive decline that led her to a care home, The End Is the Beginning explores Iris’s battle with depression, the tragedy of a daughter’s suicide, a failed second marriage, the death of her beloved first husband only five years into their young marriage, her joyful teenage years, and the trauma of losing her own mother at just eight years old. Compounding her challenges of raising four daughters without a livelihood or partner, Iris’s life coincided with an age of unstoppable social change and reinvention, when the roles of wife and mother she was raised to inhabit ceased to be the guarantors of stability and happiness.

Jill Bialosky will be in conversation with Roxana Robinson, author–most recently– of Leaving

Wally Lamb launches his latest book The River is Waiting
2025-06-10 18:00 - 19:30
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?

Jonathan Gluck launches his latest An Exercise in Uncertainty
2025-06-11 18:00 - 19:30
At age thirty-eight, Jonathan Gluck, a new father with a promising journalism career, was shocked to learn he had multiple myeloma, a rare, incurable blood cancer. He was told he had eighteen months to live.
That was more than twenty years ago.
Gluck isn’t just something of a medical miracle. He’s also part of a growing population. Thanks to revolutionary medical advances, many cancers and other serious illnesses are no longer death sentences but chronic diseases people can often live with for years. While doctors continue to look for “magic bullet” cures, they can now extend patients’ lives by slowing the progression of their diseases one treatment at a time. The result is a strange, new no-man’s-land between being sick and being well where Gluck and millions of others reside.
In An Exercise in Uncertainty, Gluck maps this previously uncharted territory. Among the many vexing side effects of chronic illness he explores is uncertainty—never knowing from one day to the next how one’s illness might change them physically, emotionally, spiritually. When you have an incurable disease, how do you cope with knowing that even when you’re in remission, it will eventually return? How do you live with the anxiety, the fear, the near-constant awareness of your mortality? For Gluck, one surprising answer is fly-fishing. If you’re looking for peace in your own sea of uncertainty, it might be something else.
As Gluck will be the first to say, cancer has absolutely nothing good to offer, but almost dying has taught him valuable lessons about how to live.

Amy Blumenfeld in conversation about her new book Such Good People
2025-07-08 18:00 - 19:30
It’s 10 p.m. on a Thursday in the spring of her freshman year of college, and April is standing at the back of a crowded Manhattan bar waiting for her friend, Rudy, to arrive. Their eyes lock the moment he enters the room, and in an instant, lives and legacies are altered forever.
Within hours, Rudy is arrested. Within days, April is expelled. Within weeks, he’s incarcerated. And within months, she meets Peter, a prodigious young attorney who makes her world recognizable again.
Nearly fifteen years later, April is happily living in Chicago married to Peter, a mother of three with a fulfilling career and standing yoga date with her girlfriends. On the eve of Peter’s election for local office, Rudy is up for parole. Headlines explode about April’s past, jeopardizing Peter’s campaign and everything they hold dear. Suddenly, April is faced with an impossible choice: protecting the life she created, or the person who sacrificed everything to make that life a possibility. Such Good People is a captivating portrait of blurred lines, divided loyalties, and what it means to love purely, steadfastly, and interminably.
Amy will be in conversation with author Alyson Richman.

Sarah Stein Lubrano launches her debut Don't Talk About Politics
2025-07-22 18:00 - 19:30
This provocative debut from a bold new voice combines a fascinating range of research to show us the psychological and sociological factors that really shape our politics.
Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. From friendship to community organizing and social infrastructure, she explores the actions that actually do change minds.
In a world where politics keeps getting more irrational, dishonest, violent and chaotic, it’s getting much harder to reach people with words alone. So people who really care about democracy must ask: how can we stop arguing and do the deep work to build stronger foundations for political life, and a better world for us all?

Dr. Lubrano will be in conversation with author Calvin Kalsuke.

Calvin Kasulke is a writer, podcast producer and transsexual menace living in Brooklyn. He is repped by Kent Wolf at Neon Literary.

Alexia LaFata in conversation about her new book She Used To Be Nice
2025-08-12 18:00 - 19:30
One night in college changed the course of Avery’s entire life. Her rapist took everything from her—including the trust of her friends and long-term boyfriend, who were convinced she cheated. A year later, she still can’t bear to tell the truth about what happened and risk her friendship with Morgan, the only friend she has left.
Instead, Avery finds her way under a man or into a bottle just to convince herself that she has power over her feelings and her autonomy—that her body still belongs to her. That is, until she meets Pete, a man so kind and good that he awakens a part of Avery that makes her want to try something new.
But somehow Avery’s rapist has resurfaced in her life as the best man in Morgan’s wedding. And as maid of honor, there’s no way Avery can avoid him. His mere presence grates at Avery’s already raw emotional state, and she begins to drive away the final few who care about her—including Pete.
As the wedding nears, Avery must decide whether to finally let her walls down and tell her truth or risk spiraling toward a darkness she may never be able to recover from.
Alexia will be in conversation with Ella Dawson, author of But How Are You, Really

Eden Collinsworth presents her latest The Improbable Victoria Woodhull
2025-09-02 18:00 - 19:30
In 1894, a remarkably self-possessed American woman, with no formal education to speak of, stood before a British court seeking damages for libel from the trustees of the British Museum. It was yet another stop along the unpredictable route that was Victoria Woodhull’s life. Born dirt-poor in an obscure Ohio settlement, Woodhull was the daughter of an illiterate mother entranced by the fad of Mesmerism—a therapeutic pseudoscience—and a swindler father whose cons exploited his two daughters. It was through her mother, though, that Woodhull familiarized herself with the supernatural realm, earning a degree of fame as a clairvoyant and her first taste of financial success. Woodhull’s life would continue to turn on its axis and then turn again. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Collinsworth tells the story of a woman truly ahead of her time—a radical visionary who made defying mores a habit and brought to the fore societal and political issues still being addressed today. Neither a saint nor a villain, Woodhull emerges as an iconic, complex woman: an entrepreneur; lover of freedom; and a fiercely loyal family member whose political activism and suffragist legacy will cement her in history.

Caroline Sutton launches her new book Eyes in the Soles of My Feet
2025-10-01 18:00 - 19:30
With this fascinating and eye-opening collection of essays, science writer Caroline Sutton provides an intriguing and unique perspective on our natural world, and reveals secret and intimate connections between plant and animal life that we often overlook or malign, be it the industrious mole tunnelling in our backyards to the ancient horseshoe crab scuttling on our shores. Certain to appeal to readers of science and ecology, as well as those curious to look deeper into the seen and unseen intricacies of nature.

Ali Gordon presents her debut We Have Reached the End of Our Show
2025-10-06 18:00 - 19:30
Thanks to an unrelenting cycle of cancer treatments, thirty-two-year-old Gabe is too weak to dance gracefully on stage or through NYC’s sparkling social scene like he once did. And although he and Josie have been in love for six years, lately Gabe’s been feeling more like Josie’s patient than his boyfriend. So one day, Gabe makes a choice: he’ll forgo treatment and live out his remaining days on his own terms.​
Then a harrowing announcement blasts over the news—TWENTY-FIVE DAYS UNTIL IMPACT—and as the world falls into chaos around him, something sparks inside Gabe for the first time in a long time: the chance for adventure. When his cousin, Lisi, shows up with a car and a plan, the three begin a journey none of them ever expected—a road trip through the end of the world.
Profound, moving, and delicate, We Have Reached the End of Our Show is a crystalline depiction of the best of humanity and the love we’re all capable of, even in the bleakest of times. Gabe, Josie, and Lisi take turns at the wheel of this novel, steering readers along hauntingly empty highways and through the adventure that happens when we’re forced to put down the carefully drawn map of our lives and look around at what really matters: each other.

With performances by Christi Somers (Dead Moms Club) and Michael Cruz Kayne (Sorry For Your Loss).

Alyson Richman in conversation about her new book The Missing Pages
2025-10-16 18:00 - 19:30
Harry Widener boards the Titanic holding tight to a priceless book–and his last known words are that he must return to his cabin for his treasure. Neither the young man nor the book will ever be seen again. In his honor, his mother builds the Harry Widener Memorial Library at Harvard to memorialize her son and house his extensive book collection.
​Decades later, Violet Hutchins, a Harvard sophomore recovering from her own great loss, is working as a page at the Widener Library. When strange things begin happening at the library, Violet wonders if Harry Widener’s ghost is trying to communicate the missing pieces of his story from beyond the grave.

Alyson Richman will be in conversation with author Lauren Belfer.

Amanda Vaill launches her new book Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in the Age of Revolution
2025-10-23 18:00 - 19:30
Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, born to wealth and privilege in New York’s Hudson Valley during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were raised to make good marriages and supervise substantial households. Instead they became embroiled in the turmoil of America’s insurrection against Great Britain—and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.
Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment through attachments to powerful men, eloped at twenty with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, first in Paris, then in London, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, one year her junior, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless illegitimate outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career. But after his appointment as America’s first Treasury Secretary, she was challenged by the controversies in which he became involved, not the least of which was the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.
When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one deprived of her animating spirit, the other improbably gaining a new, self-determined life. “You would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun,” wrote Angelica to Eliza, “but then [you would have missed] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.”
Drawing on deep archival research, including never-published records and letters, Amanda Vaill interweaves this family drama with its historical context, creating a narrative with the sweep and intimacy of a nineteenth-century novel. Full of battles and dinner parties, murky politics and transparent frocks, fierce loyalty and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life.

Susan Cheever in conversation with Ben Cheever about her latest When All the Men Wore Hats
2025-10-30 18:00 - 19:30
The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, brought together some of the finest short fiction ever written. The collection was honored with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it would go on to sell millions of copies and to define the American short story and shape generations of writers. Cheever’s chronicles of modern life both emerged from a distinctly American culture and also created it—inspiring everything from Mad Men to a Raymond Carver story, from rock songs to a Seinfeld episode.
Growing up, Susan Cheever, John Cheever’s eldest child and only daughter, read what he read, heard what he heard, bantered and gossiped with him and her brothers and mother at the dinner table, and later watched her father type on the cheap yellow paper he favored. A daughter much like Susan appears in many of Cheever’s stories and a family much like theirs is at the center of his writing.
In When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever looks back on her father’s work and seeks to understand the connections between art and life. How did a bit of local gossip, a slice of Greek myth, and a new translation of Madame Bovary somehow become a brilliant gem like “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer”? In her 1984 book Home Before Dark, published two years after her father’s death, Cheever wrote movingly about her father and the secrets he kept, but here, years later, she tells the story of the remarkable stories themselves, six of which appear in full in the book’s appendix.

Susan Cheever will be in conversation with her brother Ben Cheever author of The Plagiarist & Selling Ben Cheever.

Brigitte Dale in conversation about her new book The Good Daughters
2025-11-05 18:00 - 19:30
In 1912, three young women from wildly different backgrounds are bound together by their desire to have a say in their future.
Charlotte, disappointed to discover that college isn’t the key to the freedom she longed for, shocks her family when she moves to London and joins a group of suffragettes willing to upend social norms for the vote. Aristocratic Beatrice, with a law degree she legally can’t put into practice and a fiancé she’s not particularly excited to marry, escapes to London to spend her last months of unmarried life with the suffragettes, and falls deeply—and dangerously—into forbidden love. Emily, the daughter of the warden of the infamous Holloway Jail, grieves her mother and saves her wages for a better life outside the prison’s walls. Her best chance at escaping the drudgery of her life is to stay out of trouble, but when the suffragettes land in her father’s cells, she must consider risking not only her family’s livelihood, but her own future.
With the dangerous stakes of the suffrage campaign becoming a fight for the women’s bodies and lives, they enter a treacherous world where the laws and justice system are stacked against them. They face violent protests, hunger strikes, and brutal forced feedings, and the women must decide how much they are willing to risk for their freedom and for each other.
Brigitte will be in conversation with author Olivia Muenter

Devin Kelly in conversation about his debut Pilgrims
2025-11-18 18:00 - 19:30
A monk leaves the monastery to search for his teenage brother, who has run away from home in the middle of a high school cross-country race. Alternating between each brother’s perspective, Pilgrims follows its protagonists as they encounter Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, greyhound rescuers, eccentric communists, and tiny cemetery-keepers. A rumination on abandonment and the intimacies we’ve lost to a world obsessed with progress and material success, Pilgrims announces the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction.
Devin Kelly is a high school teacher in New York City. He writes the newsletter Ordinary Plots, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Longreads, LitHub, The Year’s Best Sportswriting, and more. Pilgrims is his first novel.

Devin Kelly will be in conversation with poet Maya Popa.

Andy Beta launches his debut Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane
2026-03-03 18:00 - 19:30
Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) was one of the most misunderstood artists of the last sixty years. For most of her life—and even in the decades since her passing—she was primarily known as the widow of the late John Coltrane. John Coltrane is widely seen as being one of the greatest tenor saxophonists and composers of the 20th century, with a fervor and devotion approaching sainthood. Yet ever so slowly, that level of love and appreciation is also being bestowed upon pianist, organist, harpist, and composer Alice Coltrane.
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane is the first full biography of this remarkable, groundbreaking artist, and is an elegant, deeply researched corrective to the historical—and critical—record. It elevates Alice Coltrane to her proper place, both alongside her husband as one of the greatest musical visionaries of the 20th century, and also as a singular artist in Western music, one who became a spiritual leader in her lifetime.

Linda Stasi reads from her latest The Descendant
2026-03-10 18:00 - 19:30
This based-on-real-events novel tells the story of the family that possibly inspired The Godfather—except this story doesn’t begin with a small robbery in New York. Instead, The Descendant begins with a big, blooming love in the tiny town of Lucca Sicula, Sicily. Told through the lives of the strong Italian women who fought against impossible odds, this historically inspired narrative introduces a whole cast of fascinating characters.
Mariano Barbera was a strong, powerfully built man who saw tiny fourteen-year-old Maria Ragusa at her family’s store and was struck dumb. He had to have her, and she wanted him just as badly. Their life together leads the couple and their children from earthquake-ravaged Sicily to bondage in the mines of Colorado, to cattle ranching in Pueblo, to Mafia life on the mean streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
This sweeping family saga centers around the Barberas’ ten children from their three cowboy gangster sons, Peter, Joe, and Austin to their seven wildly different cowgirl daughters. First there’s little Flo—born on the night of the wolves and whose own alpha wolf never left her side—as she navigates life alongside her best pal and younger sister, Clara. Then there’s Flo’s many older sisters: Callie, who loved and lost; Angie, who loved and left; gorgeous Laura, who loved the wrong man; grouchy but brilliant Helen, who loved many times; and tough-as-nails wrangler Michelina, who loved a woman more than the husband she was forced to marry.

Victoria Shorr reads from her latest Fatherland
2026-03-11 18:00 - 19:30
Martin and Lora Brier, with three young children, possess all the trappings of a perfect life . . . except Martin is having yet another affair. Without warning, he abandons the family for his mistress and a new house on the other side of town.
Set in a prosperous midwestern town in the 1950s, Fatherland is a story about the effect of convenient lies and discovered truths. While Martin’s abandonment throws up new difficulties for bewildered Lora, a housewife, who must now find a way to nurture and provide for herself and children, it unleashes a swirl of emotions in their daughter, Josie, who struggles to come to term with his absence. Fatherland follows Josie from this fateful event, across many decades and milestones and through the phases of her tenuous, emotionally fraught relationship with Martin—and the way she begins to move beyond their shared past.

Celebrate the launch of About Above Around with author Mark Mayer and painted Jason Stopa
2026-04-06 18:00 - 19:30
“We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by,” William James writes. In About, Above, Around, fifty prepositions reveal the subtle syntax of our inner lives, offering a new yet ancient vocabulary for charting how feeling moves within and between and around us. Kaveh Akbar, selecting the collection for the George Garrett Prize, says: “About, Above, Around is thrillingly ambitious and deliciously readable, a remarkable vortex of place and mind and spirit illuminating how our lives are shaped, and how we’re held within them. Mayer has given us one of the most dexterous, impressive books I’ve read in ages.”
Winner of The 2024 George Garrett Fiction Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar

Priya Parmar in conversation about her new novel The Original
2026-04-28 18:00 - 19:30
When young Katharine Hepburn loses her beloved brother, she makes two decisions: She will become famous, and she will never let anyone hurt her again. Leaving home at twenty-one to pursue a career on Broadway, Kate is talent-spotted, screen-tested, and lured to Los Angeles, accompanied by her lover, Laura. Hollywood in the early 1930s is a town full of secrets. Everyone comes with a story. When Kate arrives in California to launch her film career, she leaves behind her East Coast marriage and icy patrician family to live and love on her own terms. Soon she is scooped into the studio system and launched as a star—but stars must play by the rules and Kate, brilliant, bisexual, and strong-willed, refuses to conform.
Surrounded by a legendary circle of intimates, including the powerful David and Irene Selznick, charming and romantically conflicted actor Cary Grant, ambitious director John Ford, and millionaire tycoon Howard Hughes, Kate navigates a web of sex, rivalry, and betrayal. As Kate’s career ascends, she faces an agonizing choice: be the star everyone wants her to be, or risk everything to become the woman she always was.

Priya will be in conversation with author Christina Baker-Kline
