Corner Bookstore

Susannah Marren reads from her new book Palm Beach Confidential
2026-06-09 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)

Tom Means launches Beginner's Italian
2026-06-10 17:30 - 19:00
A language steeped in history, culture and art, Italian is spoken by over 65 million people worldwide. Italian is also one of the most widely-studied Romance languages.
Ideal for those new to Italian, learning at home or in the classroom, Beginner’s Italian with Online Audio & Video teaches both written and spoken Italian using modern pedagogy and engaging audio and video.

Follow the adventures of Chiara and Luca! Chiara is an American visiting Italy for the first time and Luca is her tour guide. Across the book’s 16 chapters, they visit eight Italian cities from Rome up to Milan and down to Sicily. Food, family, art, history, fashion and romance await them. Join Chiara and Luca for an Italian language and culture avventura!

Includes:

An introduction to the Italian language and basics of pronunciation
Fourteen carefully-paced lessons, each one opening with dialogues about an everyday topic followed by vocabulary, grammar lessons, and exercises
Free companion YouTube channel, @BeginnersItalian, with over 200 videos that reinforce how to use Italian in everyday situations

Teddy Wayne reads from his latest The Au Pair
2026-06-29 18:00 - 19:30
Steven Hammer was once a literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children—and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous.
As a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power, and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he’s created—and the deeper insecurities that fueled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?
With inexorable momentum and sly, lucid prose, Teddy Wayne’s The Au Pair is a sleek literary thriller about desire, deception, and the unraveling of a man as he grapples with his fading relevance—when the lies others spin pale beside the fictions we tell ourselves.

Lindsey Palmer in conversation about her novel Salt Sisters
2026-07-15 18:00 - 19:30
Twin sisters Jocelyn and Maddy Marx grew up in a tight-knit family on Cape Cod, but they couldn’t be more different. Jocelyn, laid-back and dreamy, still lives in their hometown as a Realtor. Maddy, intense and ambitious, left for New York after college and never looked back. Until the summer they turn thirty-one.
After a dramatic fall from grace in her career, a pregnant Maddy returns to the Cape with her husband and announces she’s back for good. For Jocelyn, it’s less a reconciliation than a reminder of a life that was ripped away from her and the deep grief she’s carried ever since. Back in each other’s orbit, the sisters reopen old wounds and are forced to confront what it will take to heal.

Lindsey Palmer will be in conversation with author Emily Nemens.

Maya C. Popa reads from her latest If You Love That Lady: Poems
2026-07-20 18:00 - 19:30
If You Love That Lady is a hymn to the pursuit of the unattainable. The title sequence dramatizes the paradox of correspondence: The private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the expectant silences that charge our lives. Drawing from nineteenth-century courtship letters, the collection lingers in the rush of love and the resurrection that follows: “Happiness was no small thing, / but neither was its cost.” Delivered with piercing elegance and signature wit—“What a formidable excuse he was. / What a pair of borrowed eyes / with a side of Keats”—these poems teach us that desire, like poetry, depends on revelation and restraint alike.
Part elegy to the passing of impossible things, part ars poetica to the possibility of remaking, If You Love That Lady explores the inventiveness of longing and its relentless drive, proving that what breaks us open at last reveals us to ourselves.

Frank Kirby launches his debut novel Michaela
2026-09-10 18:00 - 19:30 | The Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10128, United States
An Irish-American family and the shadow of an untimely death
Frank Kirby’s exquisite debut spans six decades
The spirit of Alice McDermott, Colm Tóibín
Michaela is the story of the Murphys, who meet on a playground in Upper Manhattan, court at Coney Island, and bring four children into the world. It’s a great life until catastrophe strikes, and the surviving Murphy kids find church, family and one another inadequate for coming to terms with the loss.

Published by Tivoli Books

Anna Nordberg in conversation about her debut When She Was Ours
2026-09-15 18:00 - 19:30
Thea Erickson, a renowned surgeon, is filled with both joy and grief as her family gathers at their home on a summer night in 1995. Her elder daughter Phoebe is getting married, but even the happiness of the day feels bittersweet, as Thea grapples with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She worries she won’t be around to support her younger daughter Astra, who’s still in college, but even Thea cannot foresee what is to come―a terrible accident the night of the wedding that changes Astra’s life forever. In a last-ditch effort to protect her family, Thea arranges a secret meeting with an old family friend and extracts a promise that will reverberate long after she’s gone.
Years after her mother’s death, Astra has moved forward with a career and relationship, but she still struggles with her grief. When a man reaches out to her and Phoebe, offering a window into their mother’s past, Astra must make a choice, and her decision forces her to face what it means to love someone after they’re gone, who we decide to forgive, and how families reckon with the past.

Anna will be in conversation with Nicola Kraus, author, most recently, of The Best We Could Hope For

Juana Libedinsky launches her new memoir Downhill: A Memoir of an Accident, Two Comas, Many Books and Starting Over
2026-09-23 18:00 - 19:00
When a devastating skiing accident leaves Conrado, a young, successful professional, in a coma, it is not only his fate that hangs in the balance. His wife, Juana, and their two children have their lives upended overnight.
Juana, an Argentine journalist living in New York, tells the story in the first person, tracing a journey from the vast stillness of the Patagonian Andes to the fluorescent-lit hospital corridors in Buenos Aires—and, eventually, to the relentless pace and demands of Manhattan, where life does not pause, even when everything else has.
As she navigates the punishing world of coma care, hospital bureaucracy, and—perhaps even more bewildering for a foreigner—the peculiarities of the Manhattan private school circuit, Juana clings to a few anchors: racket sports, an eclectic cohort of friends and neighbors, and books. Lots of books.
Downhill is Juana’s account of a couple of terrible years, told with the sharp eye of a seasoned reporter and a signature dry humor that surfaces in unexpected places. Woven throughout are reflections on the writers who sustained her through interminable hospital stays and the logistical ropes course of caregiving: Joan Didion on grief, Jorge Luis Borges on memory, Abraham Verghese on the orderly nature of tennis. Their voices form a kind of chorus, grounding Juana as she—and we—are reminded of the transcendental and practical powers of reading.

Lauren Willig launches her new book What Happens at Nightfall
2026-10-06 18:00 - 19:30
In the sprawling Gothic expanse of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, some secrets refuse to stay buried.
Recently laid off and searching for purpose, Jess reluctantly joins her best friend on a supposedly fun nighttime cemetery tour. Separated from her group by accident, she discovers a bunch of terrified boys and a strange, ancient key. Both lead to Green-Wood’s surprisingly handsome resident arborist, Adam Chervinsky.
Recently widowed, Adam has more to protect than the leafy residents of Green-Wood. His children, still dealing with the loss of their mother, are acting strangely. A haunting is afoot, and Jess seems to know more than she’s letting on. Sparks fly between Jess and Adam—and the unquiet spirits of Green-Wood rise from their century-long slumber.
As Jess and Adam delve deeper into the cemetery’s haunted history, they uncover a Gilded Age curse, a ghostly socialite, and a demonic pact that stretches across generations. What lies hidden in the Green-Wood’s splendid Vanderwilt mausoleum? As the line between the living and the dead blurs, and the shadows of Green-Wood begin to stir with malevolent intent, Jess must confront not only the supernatural forces but a shocking connection to the past if she and Adam truly want to live happily ever after.

Carol LaHines in conversation about her new book Miracle Grow of the Mind
2026-10-13 18:00 - 19:30
Miracle Grow of the Mind is a funny, heartbreaking exploration of parenthood, disability, medical bureaucracy, Big Agro, food allergies, and environmental pathogens. When Amy and Michael’ s son is born prematurely, they are thrust into a world of pediatric neurologists, sensory reintegration therapy, and endless evaluations.

Michael also struggles with a mother suffering from dementia, who insists he is the grown-up version of a brother who died in infancy. When the Kafkaesque Bureau of Preschool Special Education threatens to make their son repeat kindergarten, the family must confront how they are living and decide which therapies— everything from Mel Finkelstein’ s sensory reintegration sessions to pediatric neurologist visits— are worth the emotional toll.

With the help of Griffin’ s babysitter Estella— caught in a secret affair with Josef, a Hungarian psychiatris navigating his own child’ s special needs— they arrive at an unexpected, poignant resolution. Smart, wry, and deeply human, this novel examines the ways love, absurdity, and hope intersect in the messy work of raising a child.

Carol will be in conversation with Sheila Kohler, author of twelve novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, Once We Were Sisters.

Julian Tepper launches his new novel Getting Even / Letting Go
2026-10-20 18:00 - 19:30
On a single spring afternoon in New York City, Gene Mills—a once-successful writer now living on fumes—hosts friends in his apartment while waiting for an art auction that could change everything. The paintings on the block were made by his ex-wife, now a global art star. They depict her affair, her ambition, and the life she detonated when she left him. Gene believes selling them is justice. Or survival. Or both.
As the clock ticks toward the auction lots, Gene spirals through old resentments, legal threats, parental guilt, financial desperation, and the corrosive pleasure of retaliation. What unfolds is an intimate portrait of a man trying to convert emotional injury into cash, to reclaim dignity through ownership, and to convince himself that getting even might finally allow him to let go.
With biting wit and relentless psychological precision, Julian Tepper explores the moral gray zones of divorce, custody, authorship, and art-world power—where love becomes leverage, memory becomes inventory, and victory may cost more than defeat. Getting Even/Letting Go is a novel about what remains when intimacy turns transactional, and whether freedom can ever be purchased without exacting a final, private price.
