Corner Bookstore

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 (America/New_York)
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

Jeanette Settembre launches her debut Little Red Flags
2026-05-05 18:00 - 19:30
Mia De Luce is a successful, twenty-five-year-old food writer with zest and appetite. She’s built her dream life in Manhattan while working at her family’s red sauce restaurant. But she’s missing one thing—love.
Then, one thrilling weekend away in the Hamptons, she is seduced by a charismatic and attractive stranger named Ben Cohen. Caught up in the whirlwind romance, Mia ignores the little red flags she and others see—like Ben’s adrenaline-seeking tendencies and reckless attitude. She turns a blind eye because, for the first time, she feels truly seen by someone.
But a single event shatters their all-consuming chemistry and forces Mia to live a double life. One as a food writer, savoring caviar bumps and champagne at the world’s best restaurants…and one in secret, filled with shame and deception.
Can Mia confront the truth about herself, Ben, and their relationship? Or, will she lose herself forever to Ben’s world and his toxic manipulation, destroying the enviable life she built for herself in New York City?

Alexandra Andrews reads from her new book The Fine Art of Lying
2026-05-07 18:00 - 19:30
In the beginning, there was art.
It was Clare Bast’s love of art that saved her from a bleak, predictable life in upstate New York, and drew her to the cultured world of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where she met Jed, her doting, affluent husband.
Despite her best efforts—including a half-finished PhD, abandoned when her daughter Sadie was born—Clare secretly can’t help but feel like an imposter in Jed’s one-percent, Park-Avenue life.
When the well-connected wife of Jed’s new boss introduces her to influential friends—a curator here, a gallerist there, an aficionado abroad—Clare feels an essential part of herself coming alive again. And when she discovers that an important work painted by the subject of her unfinished dissertation is hanging in the brownstone of a seductively attractive dealer, she believes fate is leading her where she belongs . . . until she finds herself at the scene of a gruesome murder and a stolen masterpiece. Caught in the perfectly wrong place at the perfectly wrong time, every clue the investigation uncovers points back to her.
Suddenly, Clare is trapped inside a dark and treacherous art world filled with unscrupulous dealers and international criminals. What, exactly, has she gotten herself into . . . and how is she going to get herself, and her family, out?

David Harris discusses his new book Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know
2026-06-03 18:00 - 19:00
History teaches that antisemitism is a disease which begins with the Jews but does not end with them. Once antisemitism is unleashed, it knows no bounds and can attack the very fabric of society. This deadly strain of hatred often turns against other minority groups too, not to mention foundational democratic values, beginning with equal rights and equal protection before the law. Therefore, antisemitism should be viewed as a universal human rights issue of importance to all, and not solely as a parochial Jewish or Israeli concern.
Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know® explores how, in the 21st century, antisemitism is once again resurgent. In recent years, the FBI reported that well over half of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States targeted Jews, even though Jews comprise just over two percent of the population. It is striking how little understood antisemitism, including the term itself, still is. This extends quite widely to political leaders, educational authorities, law enforcement and the judiciary, civic groups, and media outlets. Polls have also shown how knowledge of the Holocaust, which was widely considered to be a firewall against the resurgence of antisemitism, is declining, notwithstanding ongoing attention to the topic in education, museums and memorials, and culture.

Susannah Marren reads from her new book Palm Beach Confidential
2026-06-09 18:00 - 19:30

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.
