Corner Bookstore

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Medwed reads from Barred: Why the Innocent Can't Get Of Prison
2022-09-27 18:00 - 19:30
Thousands of innocent people are behind bars in the United States. But proving their innocence and winning their release is nearly impossible.
In Barred, legal scholar Daniel S. Medwed argues that our justice system’s stringent procedural rules are largely to blame for the ongoing punishment of the innocent. Those rules guarantee criminal defendants just one opportunity to appeal their convictions directly to a higher court. Afterward, the wrongfully convicted can pursue only a few narrow remedies. Even when there is strong evidence of a miscarriage of justice, rigid guidelines, bias, and deference toward lower courts all too often prevent exoneration.
Offering clear explanations of legal procedures alongside heart-wrenching stories of their devastating impact, Barred exposes how the system is stacked against the innocent and makes a powerful call for change.

William Miller reads from his book Steel City
2022-10-11 18:00 - 19:30 | Wetherby-Pembrisge, 7 East 96th Street, New York, NY, 10128
*PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY CARNEGIE HILL NEIGHBORS AND WILL HAPPEN OFFSITE AT WETHERBY-PEMBRIDGE SCHOOL 7 EAST 96th STREET*
RSVP to: events@chneighbors.org
Steel City is the story of the 1890’s golden age of Pittsburgh when its technological innovations and wealth creation made it the Silicon Valley of its day. Pittsburgh was first in steel, food processing and electricity, and the leaders of those industries – Carnegie, Frick, Heinz and Westinghouse -are names we still know today. Amid this fevered atmosphere Jamie Dalton, a recent Yale graduate and son of a corporate lawyer, must decide whether to accede to his father’s wishes and pursue a career in law or the steel business, or follow his own instincts and become a newspaperman. The greatest natural disaster of the 19th century, the Johnstown Flood, confirms his choice to be a journalist, and Jamie goes on to cover Pittsburgh’s business titans, labor strikes and assassination attempts. While reporting on the unions of the era, he is exposed to a very different world, symbolized by his infatuation with a mysterious woman under the sway of an Eastern European anarchist. Jamie struggles with balancing the access he has to Pittsburgh’s business elite while maintaining the objectivity to tell the hard truths about those same people. Ultimately, he must thwart a terrorist plot that could disrupt the massive corporate merger that would restructure the nation’s largest industry: steel.

Sabeeha Rehman reads from her new book It's Not What You Think
2022-10-13 18:00 - 19:30
It’s Not What You Think is a wry, incisive account of working in Saudi Arabia that offers insight into that insular patriarchal society, what is so attractive to expatriates living there, and what was contradictory or confining about it for a naturalized American who is a woman and a Muslim. A hospital executive in New Jersey, Sabeeha relocated with her oncologist husband to Riyadh, the most conservative city in the country, intending to remain two years. They ended up staying for six. Her book takes the reader on a journey of discovery that mirrors her own.

Kate Manning reads from her new book Gilded Mountain
2022-11-01 18:00 - 19:30
In a voice full of questions and sly humor, Sylvie recounts the story of leaving her family’s snowbound mountain cabin to work in the local manor house for the Padgetts, owners of the marble mining company that employs her father and dominates the town. Sharp-eyed Sylvie is awed by the luxury around her, fascinated by her employer, the charming “Countess” Inge, and confused by the erratic affections of Jasper, the bookish heir to the family fortune. When she learns that a European King will soon arrive for a hunting party, her fairy-tale ideas of glamour and romance take a dark turn, as she realizes the Padgetts’ lofty philosophical talk is at odds with the unfair labor practices that have enriched them. Their servants, the Gradys, descendants of formerly enslaved people have long known this to be true—and are making plans to form a utopian community on the Colorado prairie.
Drawn from true stories of Colorado history, Gilded Mountain is an unforgettable saga of a bygone American West seized by robber barons and settled by immigrants; a novel about resilience in the midst of hardship, and a story infused with longing—for family and equality, beauty and joy.

Molly Peacock reads from her new book A Friend Sails in on a Poem
2022-11-03 18:00 - 19:30
For the last forty-five years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem they have written–an unparalleled friendship in poetry. Here Peacock collects her most important essays on poetic form and traces the development of her formalist aesthetic across their lifelong back-and-forth.

Maya Popa reads from her new collection of poems Wound is the Origin of Wonder
2022-11-08 18:00 - 19:30
“This book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure: ‘It’s plain we didn’t see / the future coming,’ she announces. Searching for a spring that brings renewal, lamenting ‘snow / that vanishes with touch,’ her poems register a unique combination of imperilment and possibility, with imagistic precision one can’t forget: ‘A faint hiss—that is / your own life now, hurrying / from one light to another.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder reflects to us our own historical moment with unusual clarity, even as its lyric exploration of psychic and social landscapes stand outside of time. This is a book I will return to.” —Meghan O’Rourke

Willie Mae Brown reads from her debut My Selma
2023-01-03 18:00 - 19:30
As the civil rights movement and the fight for voter rights unfold in Selma, Alabama, many things happen inside and outside the Brown family’s home that do not have anything to do with the landmark 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yet the famous outrages which unfold on that span form an inescapable backdrop in this collection of stories. In one, Willie Mae takes it upon herself to offer summer babysitting services to a glamorous single white mother—a secret she keeps from her parents that unravels with shocking results. In another, Willie Mae reluctantly joins her mother at a church rally, and is forever changed after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a defiant speech in spite of a court injunction. Infused with the vernacular of her Southern upbringing, My Selma captures the voice and vision of a fascinating young person—perspicacious, impetuous, resourceful, and even mystical in her ways of seeing the world around her—who gifts us with a loving portrayal of her hometown while also delivering a no-holds-barred indictment of the time and place.

Elinor Lipman reads from her latest novel Ms. Demeanor
2023-01-05 18:00 - 19:30
Ms. Demeanor
A Novel
Elinor Lipman
Hardcover
List Price: 27.99*
* Individual store prices may vary.

Jane Morgan is a valued member of her law firm—or was, until a prudish neighbor, binoculars poised, observes her having sex on the roof of her NYC apartment building. Police are summoned, and a punishing judge sentences her to six months of home confinement. With Jane now jobless and rootless, trapped at home, life looks bleak. Yes, her twin sister provides support and advice, but mostly of the unwelcome kind. When a doorman lets slip that Jane isn’t the only resident wearing an ankle monitor, she strikes up a friendship with fellow white-collar felon Perry Salisbury. As she tries to adapt to life within her apartment walls, she discovers she hasn’t heard the end of that tattletale neighbor—whose past isn’t as decorous as her 9-1-1 snitching would suggest. Why are police knocking on Jane’s door again? Can her house arrest have a silver lining? Can two wrongs make a right? In the hands of “an inspired alchemist who converts serious subject into humor” (New York Times Book Review)—yes, delightfully.

Daniel Turtel reads from his new book The Family Morfawitz
2023-02-21 18:00 - 19:30
From acclaimed author Daniel H. Turtel, winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel, comes The Family Morfawitz, a gripping Jewish family saga inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
When Hadassah Morfawitz flees Nazi Germany with her siblings and arrives in New York, she is determined to turn the city into her own Mount Olympus–at any cost. In choosing orphaned concentration camp survivor Zev Kretinberg as her husband and accomplice–ensuring his loyalty with the promise of riches and the burial of a dark past–she begins a ruthless journey toward the upper echelons of Park Avenue synagogue society. Their combined ambition knows no limits, and nothing will stand in the way of their realization of the American ideals of wealth and beauty, even if it means abandoning their son, Hezekial.
Decades later, through machinations worthy of his parents, Hezekial becomes entrusted as the family’s chronicler. As he sits with his aging father, transcribing a litany of Zev’s sins–from serving as a kapo at Gusen, to betraying the friends who helped him, to his blood-bound commitment to Hadassah despite numerous affairs and illegitimate children–the younger Morfawitz is faced with a choice: whitewash a lifetime of cruelty, indifference, and lust, or repay his mother at last.

Leigh McMullan Abramson launches her debut novel A Likely Story
2023-03-14 18:00 - 19:30
Growing up in the nineties in New York City as the only child of famous parents was both a blessing and a curse for Isabelle Manning. Her beautiful society hostess mother, Claire, and New York Times bestselling author father, Ward, were the city’s intellectual It couple. Ward’s glamorous obligations often took him away from Isabelle, but Claire made sure her childhood was always filled with magic and love.
Now an adult, all Isabelle wants is to be a successful writer like her father but after many false starts and the unexpected death of her mother, she faces her upcoming thirty-fifth birthday alone and on the verge of a breakdown. Her anxiety only skyrockets when she uncovers some shocking truths about her parents and begins wondering if everything she knew about her family was all based on an elaborate lie.
Wry, wise, and propulsive, A Likely Story is punctuated with fragments of a compulsively readable book-within-a-book about a woman determined to steal back the spotlight from a man who has cheated his way to the top. The characters seem eerily familiar but is the plot based on fact? And more importantly, who is the author?

Joanne Lipman discusses her new book NEXT!
2023-03-23 18:00 - 19:30
The profound disruptions of recent years have sparked a collective reckoning. We reprioritized our lives, and reordered how we envisioned the future. Businesses were forced to pivot, while leaders scrambled to rethink their roles. There has been an unprecedented global reset. But in truth, almost everyone goes through this kind of reappraisal at least once in their life—and probably more often than that. Whatever the catalyst, it prompts in us the urgent need to pivot, to ask the question:
What’s next—and how do I get there?
In Next!, bestselling author and journalist Joanne Lipman distills hundreds of personal interviews along with the latest scientific research to answer just this question. Through irresistible storytelling, she takes us inside successful career reinventions (ad executive to bestselling novelist; stay-at-home mom to CEO) and astonishing business transformations (wait until you hear what Play-Doh and Viagra have in common). From the laboratories of neuroscientists to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, to the frontlines of the social justice movement, Lipman explores how and why these transformations succeed.
Joanne Lipman will be in discussion with former Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive

Peter D. Kramer reads from his new book Death of the Great Man
2023-04-04 18:00 - 19:30
When Peter D. Kramer wrote about his work with psychiatric patients in books like Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave?, Joyce Carol Oates said, “To read his prose on virtually any subject is to be provoked, enthralled, illuminated.” When Kramer switched to fiction, Publishers Weekly wrote, “The depth, quality, and ambition of Kramer’s prose will surprise those expecting a superficial crossover effort.”
In his new novel, Death of the Great Man, Kramer uses those literary skills to introduce readers to an unforgettable character, Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch. From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader. What begins as comic mystery and political satire matures into a moving journey of self-exploration and a commentary on the fate of truth-telling in an era when lying has become a norm in public life.

Lucienne Bloch reads from Whistling in the Dark
2023-04-25 18:00 - 19:30
Lucienne S. Bloch’s beautifully written personal essays explore her world on the Upper West Side of New York City. Growing up in the 1950s as the daughter of refugees from Hitler’s Europe who longed for their former lives and culture, these essays explore her youth, her mother’s Viennese upbringing, her father’s work in the diamond business and long battle with Alzheimer’s, her typewriter, the landscapes of New York, her ongoing sense of alienation, and her development as a writer.
Readers will be swept up in the graceful prose that distinguishes Lucienne S. Bloch’s award-winning work. The universal themes of memory, belonging, family, identity, survival, and aging are artfully woven throughout the essays in Whistling in the Dark and will resonate with readers of all ages and backgrounds.

Madeline Lindvall Radman and Michael Lindvall present their debut Ashes to Ashes
2023-04-26 18:00 - 19:30
In a Manhattan brownstone that has long served as a manse for him and his predecessors, the Rev. Seth Ludington discovers the bones of an infant…49 years dead. With his sidekick, the acid-tonged Harriet van der Berg, Ludington struggles to resolve the mystery of the bones long hidden in the ash pit of his home while trying to outrun a dark secret from his past. The answers he discovers set Ludington onto an ominous path from which he cannot return, forcing him to explore haunting questions of forgiveness and time.

Corie Adjmi launches her new book The Marriage Box
2023-05-02 18:00 - 19:30
Casey Cohen, a Middle Eastern Jew, is a sixteen-year-old in New Orleans in the 1970s when she starts hanging out with the wrong crowd. Then she gets in trouble–and her parents turn her whole world upside down by deciding to return to their roots, the Orthodox Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn.
In this new and foreign world, men pray daily, thanking God they’re not women; parties are extravagant events at the Museum of Natural History; and the Marriage Box is a real place, a pool deck designated for teenage girls to put themselves on display for potential husbands. Casey is at first appalled by this unfamiliar culture, but after she meets Michael, she’s enticed by it. Looking for love and a place to belong, she marries him at eighteen, believing she can adjust to Syrian ways. But she begins to question her decision when she discovers that Michael doesn’t want her to go to college–he wants her to have a baby instead.
Can Casey integrate these two opposing worlds, or will she have to leave one behind in order to find her way?

Lindsay Cameron discusses her latest thriller No One Needs to Know
2023-05-09 18:00 - 19:30
UrbanMyth: It was lauded as an alternative to the performative, show-your-best-self platforms—an anonymous discussion board grouped by zip code. The residents of Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side disclosed it all, things they would never share with their friends or their spouses: secret bank accounts, steamy affairs, tidbits of juicy gossip. The same people who, as parents, go to astonishing lengths to ensure that their children gain admission to the most prestigious boarding schools and universities. So when a “hacktivist” group breaks into the forum and exposes the real identity of each poster, the repercussions echo down Park Avenue with a force that none could have anticipated.
And someone ends up dead.
Is the murderer Heather, the outsider who would do anything to get her daughter into the elite’s good graces and into their even better schools? Norah, the high-powered executive failing to balance work with the emotional responsibilities of motherhood? Or Poppy, whose perfect-on-the-outside façade conceals more than her share of secrets?
Each of them has something to hide.
Each of them will do anything to keep secrets hidden.
And each of them just might kill to protect their own.
Lindsay Cameron will be in discussion with author Andrea Bartz, author of The Herd, The Lost Night and the forthcoming The Spare Room

Kate White reads from her latest Between Two Strangers
2023-05-16 18:00 - 19:30
Struggling artist Skyler Moore is flabbergasted when she receives a suspicious phone call from a lawyer she’s never met regarding a “private matter.” As soon as she arrives at the law firm’s office, she learns she’s the recipient of a large inheritance, a life-changing sum that will allow her to realize her long-held dream of becoming a mother. But who was her benefactor, Christopher Whaley? The late man’s name means nothing to Skyler, and she has no idea why he would leave her such an enormous bequest.
Looking into his background, Skyler finally realizes they met once at a hotel bar and shared a one-night stand. But they never exchanged numbers, or even last names, and that was over a decade ago. She wonders if the inheritance is meant to be a message of some kind, but can’t imagine what it might be.
Chris’ family is confused and suspicious too, and his widow accuses Skyler of having an affair with her late husband, then threatens revenge. In order to protect herself, Skyler has to understand the reason the money was left to her. But as she digs for the truth, it becomes clear that Chris Whaley might have taken other secrets to the grave, ones that could have terrifying consequences for her . . .

Brooke Kroeger reads from her new book Undaunted: How Women Changed Journalism
2023-05-18 18:00 - 19:30
Undaunted is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism’s most valued work. From Margaret Fuller’s improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women’s rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today’s racial and gender disparities. Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.

Hannah Wunsch discusses her debut The Autumn Ghost
2023-05-25 18:00 - 19:30
Americans knew polio as the “summer plague.” In countries further North, however, the virus arrived later in the year, slipping into the homes of healthy children as the summer waned and the equinox approached. It was described by one writer as “the autumn ghost.”
Intensive care units and mechanical ventilation are the crucial foundation of modern medical care: without them, the appalling death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic would be even higher. In The Autumn Ghost, Dr. Hannah Wunsch traces the origins of these two innovations back to a polio epidemic in the autumn of 1952. Drawing together compelling testimony from doctors, nurses, medical students, and patients, Wunsch relates a gripping tale of an epidemic that changed the world.
In vivid, captivating chapters, Wunsch tells the dramatic true story of how insiders and iconoclasts came together in one overwhelmed hospital in Copenhagen to save the lives of many polio patients dying of respiratory failure. Their radical advances in care marked a turning point in the treatment of patients around the world–from the rise of life support and the creation of intensive care units to the evolution of rehabilitation medicine.

Rose Styron in conversation about her new book Beyond This Harbor
2023-06-13 18:00 - 19:30
An intimate portrait of a celebrated magic life and the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with, played with, and the decades of friendship with everyone from Truman Capote and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, the Bernsteins, Alexander Calder, John Hersey, and Lillian Hellman.
Here as well are the years of dedication and risk, traveling the world, from Pinochet’s Chile to El Salvador, Belfast, and Sarajevo, as Rose Styron, in search of those hiding from dictators and autocrats, bore witness to atrocities and human rights violations . . .

Styron writes of her childhood, born into a German Jewish, assimilated Baltimore family; a rebel from the start, studying poetry at Wellesley, Harvard, Johns Hopkins; traveling to Rome and her (second) meeting with Bill (the first time, “I can’t remember even shaking hands. I wasn’t thinking about him at all.”); their eventual marriage, and their more than fifty years together–in bucolic Roxbury, Connecticut, and on Martha’s Vineyard.
Rose Styron will be in conversation with her editor, Victoria Wilson. Ms. Wilson is a Vice President, Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers. She has served on the boards of PEN American Center, the National Board Review of Motion Pictures, the Writing Program of the New School for Social Research, and Poets & Writers. Wilson is the author of A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940, Volume One and is at work on the concluding volume.

Susannah Marren in conversation about her new book Maribelle's Shadow
2023-06-27 18:00 - 19:30
Maribelle, the eldest of the three Barrows sisters, deserves to be envied. Not only for her plum position as editorial director of Palm Beach Confidential, but for her impressive husband, Samuel, and his involvement in the family business. Together, they present themselves as the “it” couple of Palm Beach. She might have even aced her two stunning younger sisters.
But things aren’t always what they seem. When Samuel unexpectedly dies, suspicion around the Barrows family swirls. Suddenly the authenticity of their socially ambitious mother, Lucinda, and their lavish existence of mansions, prestige, privilege, and couture wardrobe are in question.
As their carefully constructed image unravels, their tidily placed aspirations are challenged. Each sister realizes she must fend for herself and fight for not only what she longs for, but believes in. For Maribelle, it is the will to rise above the discovery that her husband was not who he seemed. For Caroline, the middle sister, it is facing the fact that she is suffocating from the life she built to please her family. For Raleigh, the youngest, her double life surfaces, threatening her status of wife and young mother.
As each of the Barrows sisters searches for a pathway out, an unexpected power play emerges. Until the price of escape is too dear and worth any risk. Until the winner takes all.
Susannah Marren will be in conversation with Kara Feifer, producer of the podcast She Wants More

Sam Freedman presents his new book Into the Bright Sunshine
2023-07-11 18:00 - 19:30
During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president -the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate -but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to keep a bloc of Southern segregationists-the so-called Dixiecrats-in the New Deal coalition.
On the convention’s final day, Hubert Humphrey, just 37 and the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium. Defying Truman’s own desire to occupy the middle ground, Humphrey urged the delegates to “get out of the shadow of state’s rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Humphrey’s speech put everything on the line, rhetorically and politically, to move the party, and the country, forward.
To the surprise of many, including Humphrey himself, the delegates voted to adopt a meaningful civil-rights plank. With no choice but to run on it, Truman seized the opportunity it offered, desegregating the armed forces and in November upsetting the frontrunner Thomas Dewey, a victory due in part to an unprecedented surge of Black voters.
The outcome of that week in July 1948-which marks its 75th anniversary as this book is published-shapes American politics to this day. And it was in turned shaped by Humphrey. His journey to that pivotal speech runs from a remote, all-white hamlet in South Dakota to the mayoralty of Minneapolis as he tackles its notorious racism and anti-Semitism to his role as a national champion of multiracial democracy. His allies in that struggle include a Black newspaper publisher, a Jewish attorney, and a professor who had fled Nazi Germany. And his adversaries are the white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and America Firsters of mid-century America – one of whom tries to assassinate him.
Here is a book that celebrates one of the overlooked landmarks of civil rights history, and illuminates the early life and enduring legacy of the man who helped bring it about.

Janet Wallach reads from her new book Flirting with Danger
2023-08-01 18:00 - 19:30
Born a privileged child of America’s Gilded Age, Marguerite Harrison rebelled against her mother’s ambitions, married the man she loved, was widowed at thirty-seven, and set off on a life of adventure. Hired as a society reporter, when America entered World War I she applied to Military Intelligence to work as a spy.
She arrived in Berlin immediately after the Armistice and befriended the enemy, dining with aristocrats and dancing with socialists. Late into the night she wrote prescient reports on the growing power of the German right. Sent to Moscow, she sneaked into Russia to observe the results of the Bolshevik Revolution. Although she carried press credentials she was caught and imprisoned as an American spy. Terrified when told her only way out was to spy for the Cheka, she became a double agent, aiming to convince the Russian rulers she was working for them while striving to stay loyal to her country.
In Germany and Russia, Harrison saw the future–a second war with Germany, a cold war with the Soviets–but her reports were ignored by many back home. Over a decade, Harrison’s mysterious adventures took her to Europe, Baghdad, and the Far East, as a socialite, secret agent, and documentary filmmaker. Janet Wallach captures Harrison’s daring and glamour in this stranger-than-fiction history of a woman drawn to the impossible.

Nick McDonell reads from his new book Quiet Street: On American Privilege
2023-09-19 18:00 - 19:30
Nick McDonell grew up on New York City’s Upper East Side, a neighborhood defined by its wealth and influence. As a child, McDonell enjoyed everything that rarefied world entailed–sailing lessons in the Hamptons, school galas at the Met, and holiday trips on private jets. But as an adult, he left it behind to become a foreign correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Quiet Street, McDonell returns to the sidewalks of his youth, exhuming with bracing honesty his upbringing and those of his affluent peers. From Galápagos Island cruises and Tanzanian safaris to steely handshakes and schoolyard microaggressions to fox-hunting rituals and the courtship rites of sexually precocious tweens, McDonell examines the rearing of the ruling class in scalpel-sharp detail, documenting how wealth and power are hoarded, encoded, and passed down from one generation to the next. What’s more, he demonstrates how outsiders–the poor, the nonwhite, the suburban–are kept out.
Searing and precise yet ultimately full of compassion, Quiet Street examines the problem of America’s one percent, whose vision of a more just world never materializes. Who are these people? How do they cling to power? What would it take for them to share it? Quiet Street looks for answers in a universal experience: coming to terms with the culture that made you.
Nick will be in conversation with his editor, Lisa Lucas.
Lisa Lucas is the Senior Vice President & Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books at Penguin Random House. Previously, Lucas was the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation for five years. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as the Publisher of Guernica, a non-profit online magazine focusing on writing that explores the intersection of art and politics with an international and diverse focus.
