Corner Bookstore

CANCELLED: Michael Callahan reads from his debut Searching for Grace Kelly
2015-01-27 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
BECAUSE OF THE WEATHER, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
WE STILL HAVE THE BOOK!

For a small-town girl with big-city dreams, there is no address more glamorous than New York’s Barbizon Hotel. Laura, a patrician beauty from Smith, arrives to work at Mademoiselle for the summer. Her hopelessly romantic roommate, Dolly, comes from a working-class upstate town to attend secretarial school. Vivian, a brash British bombshell with a disregard for the hotel’s rules, rounds out the trio of friends. Together, the girls embark on a journey of discovery that will take them from the penthouse apartments of Park Avenue to the Beat scene of Greenwich Village to Atlantic City’s Steel Pier — and into the arms of very different men who will alter their lives forever.

Lisa Green reads from her debut On Your Case
2015-02-19 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
The legal guide every woman needs to protect herself and her family
If your best friend had a law degree, she would offer the useful counsel Lisa Green delivers in On Your Case. From dating, marriage, and kids to divorce, retirement, and aging parents, On Your Case offers smart, jargon-free lessons on how to solve the legal challenges that arise over the course of every woman’s lifetime. A lawyer and television legal analyst herself, Lisa shares court cases and real-life legal horror stories (including her own) to illustrate how readers can not only solve problems, but learn how to protect themselves before a crisis hits.
Lisa’s warm, inviting voice imparts essential information about these important topics and many more:
Always clear and often funny, Lisa will help you take legal charge of your life, telling it to you straight without putting you to sleep or scaring you to death. She provides all the essential tools and inspiration necessary to care for yourself, your assets, your family, and your career.

Lili Anolik launches her debut novel Dark Rooms
2015-03-03 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
The Secret History meets Sharp Objects in this stunning debut about murder and glamour set in the ambiguous and claustrophobic world of an exclusive New England prep school.
Death sets the plot in motion: the murder of Nica Baker, beautiful, wild, enigmatic, and only sixteen. The crime is solved, and quickly—a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide note confession—but memory and instinct won’t allow Nica’s older sister, Grace, to accept the case as closed.
Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer.
Compulsively readable, Lili Anolik’s debut novel combines the verbal dexterity of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topic in Calamity Physics and the haunting atmospherics and hairpin plot twists of Megan Abbott’s Dare Me.

Celebrate the NYC launch of The Fifth Gospel with author Ian Caldwell
2015-03-04 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
In Ian Caldwell’s follow-up to his international sensation The Rule of Four, a lost gospel, a contentious relic, and a dying pope’s final wish converge to send two brothers—both Vatican priests—on an intellectual quest to untangle Christianity’s greatest historical mystery.
Ten years ago, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four became a literary phenomenon that earned comparisons to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Hailed as “ingenious…profoundly erudite” (The New York Times), “compulsively readable” (People), and “an exceptional piece of scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle), it spent forty-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold nearly two million copies in North America, and was translated into thirty-five languages around the world. Now, after a decade of painstaking primary research, Ian Caldwell returns with a new intellectual thriller that confirms his place among the most ambitious popular storytellers working today.

James Grissom reads from his debut Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
2015-03-05 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
An extraordinary book; one that almost magically makes clear how Tennessee Williams wrote; how he came to his visions of Amanda Wingfield, his Blanche DuBois, Stella Kowalski, Alma Winemiller, Lady Torrance, and the other characters of his plays that transformed the American theater of the mid-twentieth century; a book that does, from the inside, the almost impossible—revealing the heart and soul of artistic inspiration and the unwitting collaboration between playwright and actress, playwright and director.
At a moment in the life of Tennessee Williams when he felt he had been relegated to a “lower artery of the theatrical heart,” when critics were proclaiming that his work had been overrated, he summoned to New Orleans a hopeful twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written an unsolicited letter to the great playwright asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on the playwright’s behalf to find out if he, Tennessee Williams, or his work, had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him, those who had led him to what he called the blank page, “the pale judgment.”
Among the more than seventy giants of American theater and film Grissom sought out, chief among them the women who came to Williams out of the fog: Lillian Gish, Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley , Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Jo Van Fleet, Rosemary Harris, Eva Le Gallienne, Julie Harris, and Geraldine Page.

Laura J. Snyder launches Eye of the Beholder
2015-03-16 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world.On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld.“See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world.In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today.

Alice Eve Cohen reads from her new book The Year My Mother Came Back
2015-03-31 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
“A riveting journey . . . Funny, painful, absurd, and heartwarming. Alice’s mother comes fully to life in all her complexity, a woman of her times and ahead of her time. Alice’s own struggle to accept her imperfect self is a loving message to mothers who struggle to live life with grace. A beautiful book.” —Julie Metz, New York Times bestselling author of Perfection
Thirty years after her death, Alice’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year of parenting Alice has had to face. As it turns out, it’s entirely possible for the people we’ve lost to come back to us when we need them the most.
Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice navigates it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood and allow herself to be a daughter once more in order to take care of her own girls. Eventually, understanding and then forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept herself and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother.

Mary Norris launches her debut Between You and Me, Confessions of a Comma Queen
2015-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
The most irreverent and helpful book on language since the #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.Between You & Me features Norris’s laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage—comma faults, danglers, “who” vs. “whom,” “that” vs. “which,” compound words, gender-neutral language—and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord’s Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster’s groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world’s only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

A reading by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer from their debut Hissing Cousins
2015-04-07 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
A lively and provocative double biography of first cousins Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, two extraordinary women whose tangled lives provide a sweeping look at the twentieth century.
When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, his beautiful and flamboyant daughter was transformed into “Princess Alice,” arguably the century’s first global celebrity. Thirty-two years later, her first cousin Eleanor moved into the White House as First Lady. Born eight months and twenty blocks apart from each other in New York City, Eleanor and Alice spent a large part of their childhoods together and were far more alike than most historians acknowledge.
But their politics and temperaments couldn’t have been more distinct. Do-gooder Eleanor was committed to social justice but hated the limelight; acid-tongued Alice, who became the wife of philandering Republican congressman Nicholas Longworth, was an opponent of big government who gained notoriety for her cutting remarks (she famously quipped that dour President Coolidge “looked like he was weaned on a pickle”). While Eleanor revolutionized the role of First Lady with her outspoken passion for human rights, Alice made the most of her insider connections to influence politics, including doing as much to defeat the League of Nations as anyone in elective office.
The cousins themselves liked to play up their oil-and-water relationship. “When I think of Frank and Eleanor in the White House I could grind my teeth to powder and blow them out my nose,” Alice once said. In the 1930s they even wrote opposing syndicated newspaper columns and embarked on competing nationwide speaking tours. Blood may be thicker than water, but when the family business is politics, winning trumps everything.
Vivid, intimate, and stylishly written, Hissing Cousins finally sets this relationship center stage, revealing the contentious bond between two political trailblazers who short-circuited the rules of gender and power, each in her own way.

Matt McCarthy reads from his latest The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly
2015-04-09 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor—the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new admission to the critical care unit almost died his first night on call, he found himself scrambling. Visions of mastery quickly gave way to hopes of simply surviving hospital life, where confidence was hard to come by and no amount of med school training could dispel the terror of facing actual patients.
This funny, candid memoir of McCarthy’s intern year at a New York hospital provides a scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, taking readers into patients’ rooms and doctors’ conferences to witness a physician’s journey from ineptitude to competence. McCarthy’s one stroke of luck paired him with a brilliant second-year adviser he called “Baio” (owing to his resemblance to the Charles in Charge star), who proved to be a remarkable teacher with a wicked sense of humor. McCarthy would learn even more from the people he cared for, including a man named Benny, who was living in the hospital for months at a time awaiting a heart transplant. But no teacher could help McCarthy when an accident put his own health at risk, and showed him all too painfully the thin line between doctor and patient.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly offers a window on to hospital life that dispenses with sanctimony and self-seriousness while emphasizing the black-comic paradox of becoming a doctor: How do you learn to save lives in a job where there is no practice?

Patricia Morrisroe reads from her latest book 9 1/2 Narrow: My Life in Shoes
2015-04-14 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
A funny, poignant coming-of-age memoir told through the shoes that she wore.
From baby booties to orthopedic brogues (and all the high and low heels in between) shoes mark important rites of passage, reminding us of both the good and bad times: the road not taken, the prince that got away, the missed opportunities, the traveling, the fun. Most of all, they bring to mind the people we’ve loved and sometimes lost along the way.
Combining tidbits of cultural history, Morrisroe chronicles her life as a bullied Catholic schoolgirl in “Moby Dick” brogues; a besotted college student in granny boots; an aspiring journalist in Annie Hall oxfords; a skeptical bride in her first Manolos; a reluctant fashionista in towering peep-toe pumps; and a concerned daughter, whose elderly mother hoped that her New Balance sneakers would help her regain her old balance. With wit and compassion, she introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters, from her grandfather, who treated the family to legendary foot rubs, to her husband, whose vast collection of vintage Puma sneakers threatened to overwhelm their apartment and derail their marriage.
Morrisroe’s “coming-of-age” is, at its heart, the story of a generation of women who’ve enjoyed a world of freedom and opportunity that was unthinkable to their mothers. Spanning five decades and countless footwear trends, 9 ½ Narrowis, like Love, Loss and What I Wore, about how we remember important events through a coat, or a dress, or in this case, a Beatle boot or Confirmation “wedgie.” With her charming sense of humor and irresistible voice, Morrisroe not only recounts her own story but also everywoman’s. Funny, candid and unexpectedly poignant, 9 ½ Narrow is about how we grow up, grow older, and finally grow into our own shoes.

Juliana Romano reads from her YA debut First There Was Forever
2015-04-23 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
Perfect for fans of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and Huntley Fitzpatrick’s My Life Next Door, Juliana Romano’s expressive debut is an absorbing and bittersweet story about first love, first loss, and the friends that carry us through it all.
Lima and Hailey have always been best friends: Lima shy and sensitive, Hailey funny and free-spirited. But Hailey abandons Lima to party with the popular kids and pursue Nate, her disinterested crush. As their friendship falters, Lima and Nate begin spending more time together. And before Lima knows what she’s feeling, she and Nate do something irreversible. Something that would hurt Hailey….if she knew it happened. Lima thinks she’s saving her friendship by lying, but she’s only buying time. As the secrets stack up, Lima is forced to make a choice: between her best friend forever, and the boy who wasn’t meant to be hers.

Janice Nimura reads from her debut Daughters of the Samurai
2015-05-04 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors—Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda—grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels feted by newspapers across the nation. The passionate friendships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection. Ten years later, they returned to Japan—a land grown foreign to them—determined to revolutionize women’s education.Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, Daughters of the Samurai is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment.

Josh Davis launches his debut book Two Awesome Hours
2015-05-06 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
Whether we love our jobs or not, the amount of work on our plate has reached unsustainable levels. We start each workday anxious about how we will get it all done, and which important tasks will have to be sacrificed—again—so we can keep our heads above water. We often respond to our out-of-control to-do lists by focusing on being more efficient—trying to get more done in less time. According to Josh Davis, Ph.D., we’re going about it the wrong way. The answer is not to get more done faster, but rather to create the conditions for at least two awesome hours of peak productivity each day.
Neuroscience and psychology research is revealing what those conditions are. Drawing on this research, Davis explains that our minds operate according to complex factors that, when leveraged the right way, can make us truly effective. Davis shows us five deceptively simple strategies to create the conditions for incredible productivity and to restore sanity and balance to our lives.

Mary Davis launches her debut for young adults Oliphant Island
2015-05-12 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
The Oliphant sisters–Miranda, Lulu and Leggy–spend every summer at their family’s run-down Great Camp in the Adirondacks built by their great-great grandfather, back when the family was prosperous. As much as the girls look forward to time away from their New York City all-girls school, the tedium of an entire summer enjoying unspoiled nature, with no wireless connection anywhere, is more than they can bear. This summer their parents, Professor and Judge Oliphant, are busy with work and have handed them over to their kind but absentminded Aunt Ariel, who provides even less structure than their parents. Miranda daydreams about redecorating their moldy, book-filled camp; Lulu hungers for competitive sports; and Leggy, the littlest Oliphant, drives everyone crazy with her constant talk of fairies. When their odious cousins arrive unexpectedly, bringing with them all the tensions the girls thought they had left behind for the summer, the girls, who were each adopted from China, fight for their place in the family and for their beloved summer home. They discover that being an Oliphant brings lots of surprises.

Victoria Shorr reads from her debut novel Backlands
2015-05-13 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
In this Bonnie and Clyde story of love and betrayal, a band of outlaws fight for control of the brutal Brazilian outback.Backlands tells the epic, historically based story of a group of indigenous, nomadic outlaws who rode through the backlands of Brazil from around 1922 until 1938. Led by the one-eyed bandit Lampiao and his lover Maria Bonita—still folk heroes to this day—the bandits marched across the vast, open reaches of their dry, desolate, starkly beautiful landscape, taking from the rich, entertaining the poor, controlling an area roughly the size of France, and fighting off all the police and soldiers the region could muster.Lampiao had everything—brains, money, power, charisma, and luck. Everything but love, until he met Maria Bonita. Together they would become the most wanted people in Brazil, maintaining their freedom through cunning. This vividly rendered work of historical fiction chronicles the reign and eventual betrayal of a band of romantic outlaws living a near-impossible existence.

Ginger Adams Otis reads from her debut Firefight
2015-05-28 18:30 - 20:00 UTC
In 1919, when Wesley Williams became a New York City firefighter, he stepped into a world that was 100% white and predominantly Irish. As far as this city knew, black men in the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) tended horses. Nearly a century later, many things in the FDNY had changed—but not the scarcity of black firemen. New York had about 300 black firefighters—roughly 3 percent of the 11,000 New York firefighters in a city of two million African Americans. That made the FDNY a true aberration compared to all the other uniformed departments, like the NYPD. Decades earlier, women and blacks had sued over its hiring practices and won. But the FDNY never took permanent steps to eradicate the inequities, which led to a courtroom show-down between New York City’s billionaire Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, and a determined group of black activist firefighters. It was not until 2014 that the city settled the $98 million lawsuit.
At the center of this book are stories of courage—about firefighters risking their lives in the line of duty but also risking their livelihood by battling an unjust system. Among them: FDNY Captain Paul Washington, a second generation black firefighter, who spent his multi-decade career fighting to get minorities on the job. He faced an insular culture made up of relatives who never saw their own inclusion as favoritism.
Based on years of on the ground reporting, Firefight is an exciting blend of the high-octane energy of firefighting and critical Civil Rights history.

Laura Dave reads from her latest Eight Hundred Grapes
2015-06-02 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
A breakout novel from an author who “positively shines with wisdom and intelligence” (Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I leave You). “Laura Dave writes with humor and insight about relationships in all their complexity, whether she’s describing siblings or fiancés or a couple long-married. Eight Hundred Grapes is a captivating story about the power of family, the limitations of love, and what becomes of a life’s work” (J. Courtney Sullivan, Maine).
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…
Growing up on her family’s Sonoma vineyard, Georgia Ford learned some important secrets. The secret number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine: eight hundred. The secret ingredient in her mother’s lasagna: chocolate. The secret behind ending a fight: hold hands.
But just a week before her wedding, thirty-year-old Georgia discovers her beloved fiancé has been keeping a secret so explosive, it will change their lives forever.
Georgia does what she’s always done: she returns to the family vineyard, expecting the comfort of her long-married parents, and her brothers, and everything familiar. But it turns out her fiancé is not the only one who’s been keeping secrets…

Wednesday Martin reads from her latest Primates of Park Avenue
2015-06-04 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
Please note that we do not reserve seats. Rather, seating is on a first-come, first serve basis. We recommend arriving early.
Thank you!

Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday’s memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want—safety, happiness, and success—and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday’s life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are.
Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world—the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood.

Margaretta Colt reads from her new book Martial Bliss
2015-06-09 18:00 - 20:00 UTC
In the seedy New York of 1976, Harris Colt, a Wall Street refugee, opened, with his wife, Margaretta, a specialty antiquarian bookstore, The Military Bookman. The store, in a brownstone in New York’s Carnegie Hill, was a confluence of old and rare military, naval, and aviation history books with the rare characters, near and far, who wanted them. Customers said “it was like Cheers without the booze.” New York lovers and book and bookstore lovers will savor Martial Bliss, Margaretta Colt’s light-hearted memoir of The Military Bookman, a fantasy-turned-reality and a unique enterprise that flourished in the late 20th century.

Kate White reads from her latest The Wrong Man
2015-06-17 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
New York Times bestselling author of Eyes on You and The Sixes delivers a compelling thriller of mistaken identity and psychological suspense about an accomplished career woman who thinks she’s met the man of her dreams—but instead he turns out to be her worst nightmare. Bold and adventurous in her work as one of Manhattan’s hottest interior decorators, Kit Finn couldn’t be tamer in her personal life. So, while on vacation in the Florida Keys, Kit resolves to do something risky for once. Flirting with Matt Healy—the rugged stranger she literally bumps into at her hotel—is one thing. Going back to his room after their date is another. Instead, Matt offers to cook her dinner when they’re both back in the city. But when Kit arrives at his luxury apartment ready for the date of a lifetime, who is the man who opens the door? Kit’s usually so good at reading people. How could she have been taken in by the deceptions of a con man? And why has he targeted her? Piece by piece, Kit realizes that this treachery goes a lot deeper, and gets a lot deadlier. Now the only way out is to expose the vicious puppet master who’s turned her life upside-down.
Adrenaline-charged and filled with harrowing twists at every turn, The Wrong Man will leave readers guessing until the final page.

Jessica Jackley launches her debut Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do The Most With the Least
2015-06-23 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
In the tradition of Kabul Beauty School and Start Something That Matters comes an inspiring story of social entrepreneurship from the co-founder of Kiva, the first online microlending platform for the working poor. Featuring lessons learned from successful businesses in the world’s poorest countries, Jessica Jackley’s Clay Water Brick will motivate readers to more deeply appreciate the incredible entrepreneurial potential that exists in every human being on this planet—especially themselves.

“With only a dream and a lot of determination, Jessica Jackley founded Kiva, an organization that has empowered millions of people around the world. Clay Water Brick is the inspiring story of her own far-flung journeys as an entrepreneur, but it’s also a blueprint for anyone who wants to make the world a better place and find fulfillment in the process, no matter how scarce their resources or how steep the challenge.”—Arianna Huffington

Jill Bialosky reads from her new novel The Prize
2015-09-09 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
What do we prize most? Are integrity and ambition mutually exclusive, as we seek a place in the world? How do we value, ultimately, a piece of art — or a life? These are the questions at the core of the evocative new novel by New York Times bestselling author Jill Bialosky.
Talented, successful, blessed with a loving wife and daughter, Edward Darby has everything a man should hope for. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalists of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living. A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals, The Prize is as well an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.
Inspired by her work as a poet and the need to preserve a private space for the creation of art, The Prize by Jill Bialosky is her most moving novel yet.

Jesse Kornbluth reads from his new novel Married Sex
2015-09-10 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
When a husband convinces his wife to join him in a tryst with another woman, there are unintended consequences in this sharply observed erotic tale about the challenges of modern marriage.
As a divorce lawyer for Manhattan’s elite, David Greenfield is privy to the intimate, dirty details of failed marriages. He knows he’s lucky to be married to Blair—a Barnard dean and the mother of their college-age daughter, a woman he loves more today than when they tied the knot. But when seductive photographer Jean Coin asks David to be her lover for six weeks until she leaves for Timbuktu, David is tempted, reasoning that “it’s not cheating if your wife’s there.” A one-night threesome would relieve the pressure of monogamy without wrecking their marriage. What harm could come of fulfilling his longtime sexual fantasy?

Celebrate the publication of The Way of Wanderlust with travel writer Don George
2015-09-11 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
As a professional travel writer and editor for the past 40 years, Don George has been paid to explore the world. Through the decades, his articles have been published in magazines, newspapers, and websites around the globe and have won more awards than almost any other travel writer alive, yet his pieces have never been collected into one volume. The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George fills this void with a moving and inspiring collection of tales and reflections from one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved travel writers.
From his high-spirited account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on a whim when he was 22 years old to his heart-plucking description of a home-stay in a muddy compound in Cambodia as a 61-year-old, this collection ranges widely. As renowned for his insightful observations as for his poetic prose, George always absorbs the essence of the places he’s visiting.
Other stories here include a moving encounter with Australia’s sacred red rock monolith, Uluru; an immersion in country kindness on the Japanese island of Shikoku; the trials and triumphs of ascending Yosemite’s Half Dome with his wife and children; and a magical morning at Machu Picchu.

Lily Tuck reads from her new novel The Double Life of Liliane
2015-09-16 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
Lily Tuck has had a wonderful and accomplished career as a National Book Award winning novelist, story writer, essayist and biographer. She is one of our most distinguished contributors to American literature. With The Double Life of Liliane, Tuck writes what may well be her crowning achievement to date.
As the child of a German movie producer father who lives in Italy and a beautiful, artistically talented mother who resides in New York, Liliane’s life is divided between those two very different worlds. A shy and observant only child with a vivid imagination, Liliane uncovers the stories of family members as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Mary Queen of Scots and an early Mexican adventurer, and pieces together their vivid histories, through both World Wars and across continents. ?
What unfolds is an astonishing and riveting metanarrative: an exploration of self, humanity, and family in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Told with Tuck’s inimitable elegance and peppered with documents, photos, and a rich and varied array of characters, The Double Life of Liliane is an intimate and poignant coming of age portrait of the writer as a young woman.

Frederick A.O. Schwarz reads from his latest book Democracy in the Dark
2015-09-29 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
From Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe to the National Security Agency’s massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government’s modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important new book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the U.S. Church Committee on Intelligence—which uncovered the FBI’s effort to push Martin Luther King to commit suicide; the CIA’s enlistment of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA’s thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States—uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: how much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden.

David Jaher reads from his debut The Witch of Lime Street
2015-10-06 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
The 1920s are famous as the golden age of jazz and glamour, but it was also an era of fevered yearning for communion with the spirit world, after the loss of tens of millions in the First World War and the Spanish-flu epidemic. A desperate search for reunion with dead loved ones precipitated a tidal wave of self-proclaimed psychics—and, as reputable media sought stories on occult phenomena, mediums became celebrities.
Against this backdrop, in 1924, the pretty wife of a distinguished Boston surgeon came to embody the raging national debate over Spiritualism, a movement devoted to communication with the dead. Reporters dubbed her the blonde Witch of Lime Street, but she was known to her followers simply as Margery. Her most vocal advocate was none other than Sherlock Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed so thoroughly in Margery’s powers that he urged her to enter a controversial contest, sponsored by Scientific American and offering a large cash prize to the first medium declared authentic by its impressive five-man investigative committee. Admired for both her exceptional charm and her dazzling effects, Margery was the best hope for the psychic practice to be empirically verified. Her supernatural gifts beguiled four of the judges. There was only one left to convince…the acclaimed escape artist, Harry Houdini.

Judith Hannan reads from her latest The Write Prescription
2015-10-13 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
A hands-on, hearts-on guide to writing about illness. Using intimate prompts and personal stories, Judith Hannan takes the reader and emerging-writer on a journey through what it means to reckon with illness. Having gone through her daughter’s cancer diagnosis and treatments, Hannan is an experienced, thoughtful, and caring guide for anyone wanting to find a way through the labyrinth of the illness experience.

Robert Pennoyer reads from his memoir As It Was
2015-10-14 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
“Robert M. Pennoyer was born into a storied family – his maternal grandfather was the legendary J. P. Morgan. His irresistible memoir traces his sheltered childhood on the Gold Coast of Long Island; an adolescence overshadowed by the gathering clouds of World War II; and a young adulthood that survived one of the decisive engagements of the Pacific Theater – Iwo Jima. The author gives us as well a heartwarming account of a romance that blossomed into a lifelong matrimonial partnership and a close family life, tested nonetheless by crisis. And he chronicles a distinguished career, the early part of which was spent in the service of President Eisenhower and the latter part in private law practice and pro bono work.”
— Scott Horton, author of Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare (2015), contributing editor,Harper’s Magazine.
