Margaretta Colt reads from her new book Martial Bliss
2015-06-09 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | NY
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.

Celebrate the NYC launch of A Day with Bonefish Joe with author Elizabeth Howard and Illustrator Diana Wege
2015-09-15 18:00 - 19:30 UTC
An enchanting story about an adventurous girl and her day at sea with Bonefish Joe, one of the best-known bonefish guides in the Bahamas.
Young and fearless Flossie lives on Harbour Island, a small outpost in the Bahamas known for its exquisite three-mile pink sand beach and for bonefishing, a compelling catch-and-release enterprise that pits a determined angler against an inedible, surprisingly powerful, and elusive quarry. Flossie’s persistent dream is to go fishing with the legendary guide Bonefish Joe, a beloved island institution who picks up his wealthy clients at the dock and returns with them hours later still fishless but satisfied. One Sunday, after church, surprisingly Flossie’s wish is granted and she and her friend discover the allure, the challenge, and the delights of hooking (and releasing) one of angling’s greatest prizes. Diana Wege’s lush and vibrant illustrations of the island, its inhabitants, its customs, and its architecture, bring this story alive, perfectly catching the character, culture, and charm of Harbour Island.

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.

Susan Cheever reads from her latest Drinking in America: Our Secret History
2015-10-15 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
In Drinking in America, bestselling author Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has changed our nation’s history. This is the often-overlooked story of how alcohol has shaped American events and the American character from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Seen through the lens of alcoholism, American history takes on a vibrancy and a tragedy missing from many earlier accounts. From the drunkenness of the Pilgrims to Prohibition hijinks, drinking has always been a cherished American custom: a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. At many pivotal points in our history–the illegal Mayflower landing at Cape Cod, the enslavement of African Americans, the McCarthy witch hunts, and the Kennedy assassination, to name only a few-alcohol has acted as a catalyst. Some nations drink more than we do, some drink less, but no other nation has been the drunkest in the world as America was in the 1830s only to outlaw drinking entirely a hundred years later. Both a lively history and an unflinching cultural investigation, Drinking in America unveils the volatile ambivalence within one nation’s tumultuous affair with alcohol.

Mark Molesky reads from his debut This Gulf of Fire
2015-11-03 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
On All Saints Day of 1755, the tremors from a magnitude 9.0 earthquake swept furiously from its epicenter in the Atlantic Ocean toward the Iberian Peninsula. Nowhere was it felt more than in Lisbon, then the thriving capital of a great global empire. In a few minutes most of Lisbon was destroyed—but that was only the beginning. A tsunami swept away most of the ruined coast along the Tagus River and carried untold souls out to sea. When fire broke out across the city, the surviving Lisboetas were subject to a firestorm reaching temperatures over 1,832ºF. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, on modern science (geology did not exist then), and on a sophisticated grasp of Portuguese history, Molesky gives us the definitive account of the destruction, of history’s first international relief effort, and of the effects these events had on the optimistic spirit of the Enlightenment.

Celebrate the publication of Palm Beach Chic and Artists Living with Art with Jennifer Rudick, Amanda Benchley, and Stacey Goergen
2015-11-09 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
In Palm Beach Chic, Jennifer Ash Rudick leads the tour of newly restored Mediterranean Revival houses by Mizner, Fatio, and Volk, charming cottages, Moorish casbahs, and vintage condos. Lush photographs capture extraordinary gardens, verandas, lakeside pavilions, a rustic ranch, and simple pastel houses sheltered by dense thickets of Norfolk pines and age-old banyans. It is this eclectic mix of old and new, of Spanish and Caribbean, of contemporary design and sun-faded WASP thrift, that makes Palm Beach chic.

Artists Living with Art invites readers into the homes and personal art collections of some of the world’s most renowned contemporary artists, including Cindy Sherman, Helen and Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, Glenn Ligon, and Pat Steir. Here readers will find beautifully renovated lofts in SoHo, 19th-century Brooklyn brownstones, and a restored farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley, all filled with cherished artworks as well as objects, textiles, and ceramics set on display in artful and creative ways. Photographed by Oberto Gili, these interiors will inspire readers to rethink the display of their own art and treasured possessions, whether it’s a perfectly placed painting or rocks found on a beach.

Thomas Vinciguerra reads from his debut Cast of Characters
2015-11-11 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
The professional and personal lives of the pioneers of an enduring magazine.
From its birth in 1925 to the present day, The New Yorker has been the country’s most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra revisits the early years of that creative cauldron. At the heart of the narrative is the largely forgotten life of Wolcott Gibbs, the magazine’s theater critic and all-around wit, author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. Around him swirled a legendary roster of names, E. B. and Katharine White, James Thurber, Charles Addams, Peter Arno, and John O’Hara among them. Their stories—along with those of equally colorful but overlooked figures like managing editor St. Clair McKelway, head fact-checker Frederick Packard, and the flamboyant film reviewer John Mosher—are told here. Drawing on extensive interviews, multiple manuscript collections, and myriad secondary sources, Cast of Characters may be the most revealing book yet about the unique personalities who built what founding editor Harold Ross called not a magazine but a “movement.”

Please join editor Andrew Blauner and contributors Samuel G. Freedman, Charles McGrath, and Daniel Menaker as we celebrate the publication of The Good Book
2015-11-17 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
In The Good Book, thirty-two of today’s most prominent writers share never-before-published pieces about passages in the Bible that are most meaningful to them.
The Good Book, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik, collects new pieces by writers from many different faiths and ethnicities including literary fiction writers (Colm Tóibín, Edwidge Danticat, Tobias Wolff, Rick Moody); bestselling nonfiction writers (A.J. Jacobs, Ian Frazier, Thomas Lynch); notable figures in the media (Charles McGrath, Cokie Roberts, Steven V. Roberts); and social activists (Al Sharpton, Kerry Kennedy). While these contributors are not primarily known as religious thinkers, they write intelligently and movingly about specific passages in the Bible that inform the way they live, think about past experiences, and see society today. Some pieces are close readings of specific passages, some are anecdotes from everyday life, and all will inspire, provoke, or illuminate.
Addressing some of the best-known and best-loved characters and stories from Genesis to Revelation, The Good Book will be a beautiful, enlightening gift for secular readers and readers of faith as well as a collection of interest to reading groups, readers of creative nonfiction and personal essays, and fans of each of the individual contributors.

Roger Angell reads from his latest This Old Man
2015-11-18 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Long known for his range and supple prose (he is the only writer elected to membership in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Angell won the 2015 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Best Essay award for “This Old Man,” which forms a centerpiece for this book. This deeply personal account is a survey of the limitations and discoveries of great age, with abundant life, poignant loss, jokes, retrieved moments, and fresh love, set down in an informal and moving fashion. A flood of readers from different generations have discovered and shared this classic piece. Angell’s fluid prose and native curiosity make him an amiable and compelling companion on the page. The book gathers essays, letters, light verse, book reviews, Talk of the Town stories, farewells, haikus, Profiles, Christmas greetings, late thoughts on the costs of war. Whether it’s a Fourth of July in rural Maine, a beloved British author at work, Derek Jeter’s departure, the final game of the 2014 World Series, an all-dog opera, editorial exchanges with John Updike, or a letter to a son, what links the pieces is the author’s perceptions and humor, his utter absence of self-pity, and his appreciation of friends and colleagues—writers, ballplayers, editors, artists—encountered over the course of a full and generous life.

Judy Batalion discusses her debut memoir White Walls
2016-01-07 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk and layers of crumbs and dust; suffocated by tuna fish cans, old papers and magazines, swivel chairs, tea bags, clocks, cameras, printers, VHS tapes, ballpoint pens…obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity—one made of order, regimen, and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life’s biggest chaos: motherhood. Confronted with the daunting task of raising a daughter after her own dysfunctional childhood, Judy reflected on not only her own upbringing but the lives of her mother and grandmother, Jewish Polish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust. What she discovered astonished her. The women in her family, despite their differences, were even more closely connected than she ever knew—from her grandmother Zelda to her daughter of the same name. And, despite the hardships of her own mother-daughter relationship, it was that bond that was slowly healing her old wounds. Told with heartbreaking honesty and humor, this is Judy’s poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other’s lives.
Judy will be in discussion with Amy Klein. Amy Klein wrote the fertility diary column for the New York Times. She’s working on a memoir of her own about her four-year journey to have a baby.
A wine & cheese reception will follow the reading.

Bill Keenan reads from his debut Odd Man Rush
2016-01-12 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
In his hilarious, gritty, and touching debut, Bill Keenan—a hockey star once on the fast-track to the NHL—tells of how he overcame multiple obstacles to find fulfillment and redemption in the strange world of European minor-league professional hockey. Keenan’s hockey obsession begins as a five-year-old on Lasker Rink in New York’s Central Park—“love at first stride,” as he calls it. He then becomes the youngest, and skinniest, player on the New York Bobcats, a Junior B hockey team. Later, after his hockey career at Harvard doesn’t end as planned—with a fat NHL contract—Keenan decides to play in the minor leagues in Europe, where the glamour of professional sports is decidedly lacking. Part fish-out-of-water travelogue, part coming-of-age memoir, Odd Man Rush will capture the interest of not just hockey fans, but also fans of good writing. Throughout, Keenan’s deep affection for the game shines through, even as he describes fans who steal players’ clothes from the locker room or toss empty beer cans onto the rink after games. Abusive fans, cold showers, long bus rides—nothing diminishes his love for the sport. “Because that’s the way it works with me and hockey. Even when it’s horrible, it’s wonderful.”

Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig read from The Forgotten Room
2016-01-19 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
New York Times bestselling authors Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig present a masterful collaboration—a rich, multigenerational novel of love and loss that spans half a century….
1945: When the critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into a complex mystery that connects three generations of women in her family to a single extraordinary room in a Gilded Age mansion. Who is the woman in Captain Ravenel’s portrait miniature who looks so much like Kate? And why is she wearing the ruby pendant handed down to Kate by her mother? In their pursuit of answers, they find themselves drawn into the turbulent stories of Gilded Age Olive Van Alen, driven from riches to rags, who hired out as a servant in the very house her father designed, and Jazz Age Lucy Young, who came from Brooklyn to Manhattan in pursuit of the father she had never known. But are Kate and Cooper ready for the secrets that will be revealed in the Forgotten Room? The Forgotten Room, set in alternating time periods, is a sumptuous feast of a novel brought to vivid life by three brilliant storytellers.

Celebrate the publication of Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine with author Diane Williams
2016-01-26 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called “folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,” and these 40 new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny.
Not a single moment here is what you might expect. While there is immense pleasure to be found in Williams’s spot-on observations about how we behave in our highest and lowest moments, the heart of the drama beats in the language of American short fiction’s grand master, whose originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief.

Maureen Sherry reads from her debut adult novel Opening Belle
2016-02-03 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
A whip-smart and funny novel told by a former Wall Street insider who reveals what it’s like for a working woman to balance love, ambition, and family in a world of glamorous excess, outrageous risk-taking, and jaw-dropping sexism. In 2008, Isabelle—a self-made, thirty-something Wall Street star—appears to have it all: an Upper West Side apartment, three healthy children, a handsome husband, and a high-powered job. But her reality is something else. Her trading desk work environment resembles a 1980s frat party, her husband feels employment is beneath him, and the bulk of childcare and homecare still falls in Belle’s already full lap. Enter Henry, the former college fiancé she never quite got over; now a hedge fund mogul. He becomes her largest client, and Belle gets to see the life she might have had with him. While Henry campaigns to win Belle back, the sexually harassed women in her office take action to improve their working conditions, and recruit a wary Belle into a secret “glass ceiling club” whose goal is to mellow the cowboy banking culture and get equal pay for their work. All along, Belle can sense the financial markets heading toward their soon-to-be historic crash and that something has to give—and when it does, everything is going to change: her marriage, her career, her world, and her need to keep her colleagues’ hands to themselves.
From Maureen Sherry, a prize winning writer, a former Managing Director on Wall Street (who never signed a nondisclosure agreement when she left), Opening Belle takes readers into the adrenaline-fueled chaos of a Wall Street trading desk, the lavish parties, the lunch-time rendezvous, and ultimately into the heart of a woman who finds it easier to cook up millions at work than dinner at home.

Cristina Alger reads from her new novel This Was Not the Plan
2016-02-04 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
From the acclaimed author of The Darlings comes an incisive, hilarious, and tender exploration of fatherhood, love, and family life through the story of a widower who attempts to become the father he didn’t know he could be. Charlie Goldwyn’s life hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. Widowerhood at thirty-three and twelve-hour workdays have left a gap in his relationship with his quirky five-year-old son, Caleb, whose obsession with natural disasters and penchant for girls’ clothing have made him something of a loner at his preschool. The only thing Charlie has going for him is his job at a prestigious law firm, where he is finally close to becoming a partner. But when a slight lapse in judgment at an office party leaves him humiliatingly unemployed, stuck at home with Caleb for the summer, and forced to face his own estranged father, Charlie starts to realize that there’s more to fatherhood than financially providing for his son, and more to being a son than overtaking his father’s successes. At turns heartbreaking and hilarious, This Was Not the Plan is a story about loss and love, parenthood, and friendship, and what true work-life balance means.

Susan Jacoby reads from her latest Strange Gods
2016-02-16 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
In this original and riveting exploration, Susan Jacoby argues that conversion—especially in the free American “religious marketplace”—is too often viewed only within the conventional and simplistic narrative of personal reinvention and divine grace. Instead, the author places conversions within a secular social context that has, at various times, included the force of a unified church and state, desire for upward economic mobility, and interreligious marriage—the latter as critical in the early Christian era as in the United States today, where half of Americans have switched faiths at least once in their adult lives. The sometimes tragic, sometimes inspiring story is shaped by the competing absolute truth claims of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam and their impact on Jews—the only monotheistic believers with an older historical stake. Moving through time, continents, and cultures—dealing with the often-ignored forced conversion of American slaves to Christianity as well as with the better-known story of the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of both atheists and Christians in modern Islamic theocracies—the story also includes conversions to authoritarian secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, that resemble traditional, unquestioning faith. Finally, the author examines true religious choice—a product of the Enlightenment pioneered by the U.S. Constitution. This history is punctuated by portraits of individual converts, including the Catholic Church father Augustine of Hippo; the German Jewish convert to Catholicism Edith Stein, murdered at Auschwitz and canonized by the church; boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who scandalized white Americans in the 1960s by becoming a Muslim, and even politicians such as George W. Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair. In a forthright conclusion to this enthralling history, Strange Gods takes on the question of why the freedom to choose a religion—or to reject religion altogether—is a fundamental human rights issue that remains a breeding ground for violence in areas of the world that never experienced an Enlightenment.

Molly Peacock reads from her latest Alpabetique
2016-02-29 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions is unique, but nevertheless fits perfectly with Molly Peacock’s extraordinary body of work, drawing on the same wellsprings of creativity and artistry as her poetry, her memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece, and her bestselling work of biography (and so much more), The Paper Garden. These charming, incisive, sensual stories of love, yearning, and self-discovery are complimented by Kara Kosaka’s layered, jewel-bright collages.

Jane Mendelsohn reads from her new book Burning Down the House
2016-03-15 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
“It begins with a child . . .” So opens Jane Mendelsohn’s powerful new novel. Or really with two children, two girls. One, from the Caucasus, sold into the sex trade; the other, the adopted daughter—his beloved sister’s orphaned child—of Steve, patriarch of the Zane family. In cinematic, dazzlingly described scenes—from lavish weddings to the transglobal underworld; from London, Rome and New York to Laos and Istanbul—we meet all the Zanes, their staff, and their friends. In precise yet lush prose, Mendelsohn captures the emotional worlds of these characters with visceral immediacy, and transforms their private stories into a larger drama about the forces of globalization, human trafficking, and sexual violence, finding inextricable connections between the personal and the political.

Ellen Feldman reads from her new book Terrible Virtue
2016-03-22 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
The daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued free thinker and a mother worn down by thirteen children, Margaret Sanger vowed her life would be different. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception. It was a battle that would pit her against puritanical, patriarchal lawmakers, send her to prison again and again, force her to flee to England, and ultimately change the lives of women across the country and around the world. This complex enigmatic revolutionary was at once vain and charismatic, generous and ruthless, sexually impulsive and coolly calculating—a competitive, self-centered woman who championed all women, a conflicted mother who suffered the worst tragedy a parent can experience. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916 through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Margaret Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children, and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom.

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Wild By Design with Margie Ruddick
2016-03-30 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Can nature—in all its unruly wildness—be an integral part of creative landscape design? In her beautifully illustrated book, Wild by Design, award-winning designer Margie Ruddick urges designers to look beyond the rules often imposed by both landscaping convention and sustainability checklists. Instead, she offers a set of principles for a more creative and intuitive approach that challenges the entrenched belief that natural processes cannot complement high-level landscape design. Wild by Design defines and explains the five fundamental strategies Ruddick employs to give life, beauty, and meaning to landscapes: Reinvention, Restoration, Conservation, Regeneration, and Expression. Drawing on her own projects–from New York City’s Queens Plaza, formerly a concrete jungle of traffic, to a desertscape backyard in Baja, California, to the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China–she offers guidance on creating beautiful, healthy landscapes that successfully reconnect people with larger natural systems.

Please join us for the launch of Lilac Girls with author Martha Hall Kelly
2016-04-06 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
New York socialite Caroline Ferriday, posted at the French consulate in Paris, finds her world is forever changed when Hitler’s army sets its sights on France. Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, sees her carefree youth disappear as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance. Herta Oberheuser, a young German doctor, answers an ad for a government medical position and finds herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi power. The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when Kasia is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women.
