Celebrate the launch of About Above Around with author Mark Mayer and painted Jason Stopa
2026-04-06 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
“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

Connor Martin launches his debut The Silver Fish: A Thriller
2026-04-07 18:00 - 19:30
Journalist Danielle “Dani” Moreau has spent a lifetime trying to outrun the privilege she was born into. Fresh off a personal tragedy, she lands in Ghana to uncover corruption in the local oil industry. But when she crosses paths with James Aidoo, an idealistic young Ghanaian whose father is a local populist politician, Dani remembers what drew her to journalism in the first place: you go looking for a story, but when the real story appears, it’s never the one you expected.
Dani soon finds herself chasing a scoop that involves an American operative with a violent past, a Ghanaian double agent, and a fight between the United States and China over one of the world’s most dangerous and least-known technologies: fiber optic cables. Underwater tubes as thick as a garden hose, the cables snake along the seafloor carrying the world’s information at the speed of light from one continent to another, and the fight to control them is increasingly visible on the world’s front pages. Amidst this world-changing struggle, Dani and her new associates will be forced to make deadly choices that impact each other and their own lives in ways nobody expects.
A twisty double-cross narrative, The Silver Fish opens with a spy operation going horrifically off course and takes the reader sprinting through crowded markets, darkened bars, bustling ports, and steaming jungle on the way to a startling conclusion. It will leave the reader shocked, moved, better-informed—and eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the story.

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?

Lisa Greenwald and Goldy Moldavsky celebrate the publication of their new Middle-Grade Books
2026-05-11 16:00 - 18:00
Sadie and Olive have never been part of their class’s popular friend group. Those girls—Pella, Annabelle, Cleo, and The Other Sadie—seem like creatures from another planet. They wear the trendiest clothes, have the best hair, flirt with the cutest boys, and speak their own language. By comparison, Sadie and Olive are invisible . . . until Sadie is accidentally added to the popular girls’ group chat. Armed with an inside perspective, Sadie sets out to join the friend group—IRL—before they figure out that they’ve got the wrong Sadie.

Gigi and her older sister, Yasmin, are spending the summer at a Jewish bungalow colony in upstate New York, thanks to their dad, who will be the handyman there. Sure, there will be day camp to go to, and the forest to explore, and maybe new friends to make. But Gigi doesn’t feel she fits in. Despite the fact that she’s Jewish too, she can’t help but feel that her Judaism is totally different from the other kids’. It doesn’t help that Mom isn’t around to talk to—she’s back in Brooklyn working. Yasmin has her own friends, and even though her dad speaks five languages, he and Gigi never seem to be speaking the same one.
There’s only one thing Gigi can do—escape. So, she hatches a plan to run away. But unexpected surprises keep drawing her back. Like, why do the boys at the camp keep doing flips? What kind of lake has fish with mustaches? Can Gigi sneakily use her dad’s tools to build a secret treehouse?
Try as she might, Gigi can’t figure out why everyone else loves this place so much. Will she eventually find her way back home, or will she—just maybe—discover something special hidden within the colony?

Trey Sager launches his new book Pretend I'm Not Here
2026-05-26 18:00 - 19:30
Pretend I’m Not Here features characters struggling with sex, identity and meaning in a world collapsing around them. Everyone is longing for something—the beloved, a newborn child, even annihilation. Cities burn, protests rage, isolation intensifies. A motif of masks and costumes runs throughout as characters experiment with who they are and struggle for connection in an absurd world. Though bleak, many of the stories end with a moment of dark optimism.

Tom Means launches Beginner's Italian
2026-06-11 05:30 - 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

Bill Keenan launches his new book The Swan and the Sentinel
2026-06-15 18:00 - 19:30
What happens when the one thing that defines you is ripped away, and you’re forced to rebuild from the ground up?
When NHL forward Liam LeClerc’s career-threatening injury refuses to heal, desperation drives him to an unlikely solution: ballet lessons from Petra Montgomery, a talented soloist overlooked due to her company’s politics.
In secret, after-hours studio sessions, Petra teaches Liam that strength comes in unexpected forms while he reminds her why she fell in love with dance, before ambition complicated everything. But when their unconventional partnership threatens both their careers, they must decide if the connection they’ve found is worth risking everything they’ve worked for.
The Swan and the Sentinel is a story that reminds us sometimes the best comebacks require learning an entirely new discipline, even if it’s performed in fifth position.

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.

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.
