Corner Bookstore

Gayle Feldman reads from her new book Nothing Random
2026-01-20 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What’s My Line? whom TV brought into America’s homes each week. But they didn’t know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.
With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more.
Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame—but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and politics. A fervent democratizer, he published “high,” “low,” and wide, and from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way.
Using interviews with more than two hundred individuals, deeply researched archival material, and letters from private collections not previously available, this book brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Rebecca Kelliher presents her debut Just Pills
2025-09-30 18:00 - 19:30
As women’s rights are increasingly depleted in the US, journalist Rebecca Kelliher dives into the radical history of the abortion pills from invention to distribution to today
Spanning decades and continents with a tenacious cast of doctors, activists, politicians, drug suppliers, and everyday women, Just Pills tells the gripping, little-known history of mifepristone and misoprostol, better known as the abortion pills.
The abortion pills are a safe, cheap, clinic-less means of ending a pregnancy, and these drugs have been quietly—yet steadily—spreading around the world. These pills are already changing the fight for abortion access as we understand it. Rebecca Kelliher dives into the history of the pills’ invention in the 1970s and 80s, unpacks government battles around their approval in the 1990s, and deftly weaves together several perspectives to move beyond the pills’ origin story.
As women’s rights are increasingly infringed upon in the US, this history of radical invention and persistent distribution of a life-saving drug will remind us of the work we’ve already done and inspire us to continue to pursue a world where women are free.

Emily Hurd & Michael Mitnick launch their debut Hello, Broadway: A Young Person's Guide to the World of Musical Theater
2025-09-25 16:00 - 18:00
Visit New York City and take in your first Broadway show. This illustrated soundbook is your guide to the world-famous theater district!

Join Eleanor and Harry as they head to New York City for their first Broadway show.
Discover what it’s like to attend a show, enjoy the performance and delight in the magic of musical theater.
Beautifully illustrated scenes are accompanied by sound buttons that play iconic musical song clips performed by Broadway stars!
Ideal for caregivers who want to share their love of Broadway with their children, Hello, Broadway! is the perfect introduction to the wonderful world of musical theater.

Joan Baker in conversation about her new book In the Swampyland
2025-09-16 18:00 - 19:30
B’rer Rabbit, trickster of the Uncle Remus tales. A chicken’s head bobbing in a bowl of soup, its dead eyes accusing the diner. Cockroaches, venomous snakes, biting frogs. These are among the lively characters in Joan Brooks Baker’s second book, a collection of stories called In the Swampyland, which spans the author’s life from her childhood in New York City to her eye-opening, sometimes-risky world travels. In the Swampyland examines the world in which Baker grew up and aims equally intense scrutiny at the exotic cultures her innate curiosity has motivated her to visit, from the jungles of Colombia to the streets of India and the attractions of the American South, in her search for belonging.

Joan Baker will be in conversation with Laura Yorke, editor, publisher, literary agent and author.

Melissa Dassori signs copies of her latest middle grade novel Greta Ever After
2025-09-11 15:30 - 17:00
Greta Starr has one dream: to be a famous reporter. Unfortunately she’s been assigned to write for the paper’s most boring beat, and she feels stuck. Then, on her twelfth birthday, Greta receives a mysterious cuckoo clock with a wooden dancer named Lulu inside. Every hour, the doll twirls in time with the music—until one night she comes to life. Lulu is infused with magic and mischief. With Lulu’s sly encouragement, Greta engineers a feel-good story to report, setting in motion a series of remarkable, if deceitful, happy endings at school that help Greta gain popularity. But when the truth threatens Greta’s friendships, she is confronted with very real consequences that Lulu’s magic can’t fix.

Leslie Cohen & Sean Avery launch Summer Skate
2025-09-09 15:30 - 17:30
Summer has begun on the East End of Long Island and bestselling author Jessica Riley finds herself unable to deliver on her highly anticipated second book. Her children are demanding. Her husband is preoccupied. With a deadline looming, she fakes a mental breakdown to get away . . . only to find that the house next door is filled with rowdy hockey players.
One of those players is Carter Hughes, a soon-to-be rookie on the New York Rangers, and in Carter and his friends, Jessica discovers a treasure trove of material for her next book. But she quickly finds herself in over her head, as her connection with Carter spirals out of control and his behavior becomes more erratic. Meanwhile, as Carter mixes with the power scene in the Hamptons, one false move could turn what was supposed to be a summer of training and good times into a game he can’t afford to play.
Sexy and addictive, Summer Skate is the sun on your skin in a string bikini. It’s the sound of skates cutting across the ice of a hockey rink, chasing victory. It’s an answer to the question: How bad do you want it?

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.

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

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.

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.

Dr. Harry Agress, Jr. launches his book Next Years Best Years: Taking Your Retirement to the Next Level
2025-06-17 18:00 - 19:30
Following a 36-year medical career in the field of Radiology, Dr. Harry Agress Jr retired at age 68. He is an experienced teacher and nationally recognized lecturer who takes great joy in passing on what he has learned and experienced both in medicine and life.

Dr. Agress has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and appeared on NBC’s “The Today Show,” lectured at the 92NY in New York City and been featured in Marquis Who’s Who in Medicine and Healthcare, Who’s Who in America and America’s Top Doctors.

In Next Years Best Years Dr. Agress dives into the many exploits he and others have embraced as they create a new post-career life from reassessment and self-reflection to volunteering, photography, teaching, sports, coaching, acting and much more.

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.

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?

Sabrina Kleckner launches her new book The Complex Art of Being Maisie Clark
2025-06-09 16:00 - 18:00
All eighteen-year-old Maisie Clark wants to do is leave her tiny town in upstate New York. Crescent Valley is home to Glenna’s, the family-run portrait shop she loves more than anything. But after years of imitating her dad’s artistic style, Maisie fears she will never find her own voice. So, she comes up with a plan: quit working at Glenna’s, go to art school in London, and, most importantly, stop painting portraits. If she can’t find her voice by the end of the year, she’ll give up art entirely.
Unfortunately, pushing outside her comfort zone is (surprise!) uncomfortable. Maisie struggles to connect with her eccentric new flatmates, feels farther away from her best friend than ever, and hates every art course she signed up for—especially photography, where her talented but prickly partner, Eli, is not afraid to point out her every mistake on their semester-long project. Maisie is already questioning all her life choices when a crime strikes Glenna’s, reopening old family wounds she thought she’d long healed from. It’ll take even more discomfort, as well as help from Eli, her older brother, Calum, and his earnest boyfriend, Benji, to confront the layers she’s painted over the past. But maybe, just maybe, the keys to finding herself lie closer to home than she realized.

Jena Kingsley launches her debut Darcy Dates
2025-06-03 18:00 - 19:30
Darcy Dates is a hilarious and unfiltered dating diary based on the popular 2010 blog of the same name. Written at a time when people clung to their BlackBerrys, Instagram didn’t exist, and there was no debate over whether or not skinny jeans were cool. They just were. Seven years of marriage, one child and one divorce later, Darcy found herself back in the dating pool of New York City. Only things were different. She was a single mom living on the Upper East Side, navigating dating as an adult, where people carried more baggage than any bellhop at the Pierre could handle. One night, alone in her room, she began to document her dates in the form of a blog. The blog became her diary. This book is her diary. Darcy Dates is the perfect balance of comedic, cringey and touching. You will belly laugh, you may tear up, you may want to look away at times. Most importantly the reader will be cheering Darcy on in her quest for love. But over time she starts to wonder… maybe it’s not love she was looking for all along. Maybe she was just looking for herself. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent.

Christine Mott launches her debut picture book Free Bird
2025-05-15 16:00 - 18:00
Embark on an exciting journey with Flaco the owl in Free Bird: Flaco the Owl’s Dreams Take Flight! This captivating picture book, perfect for children ages 4-8, is based on a true story that will inspire and delight young readers.
Flaco, a brave and determined owl, dreams of breaking free from his cage at the zoo and soaring through the sky. One day, he seizes the opportunity to escape and finally experience the freedom he has always longed for. Follow Flaco as he navigates the bustling streets of New York City, learns to fly, and makes new friends along the way.
Through Flaco’s eyes, children will learn the importance of following their dreams and showing compassion for wild animals. This heartwarming tale is beautifully illustrated and will leave a lasting impression on readers of all ages. Join Flaco on his incredible adventure and be inspired to reach for the stars!
This book comes with a bonus educational section in the back for all the curious readers. Discover amazing facts about owls that will make early learning fun and help connect the story to the real world.
50% of author’s book royalties will be donated to the Wild Bird Fund, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that rehabilitates sick, injured and orphaned wildlife and releases them back to the wilds of New York City.

Amy Larocca launches her How to Be Well
2025-05-14 18:00 - 19:30
Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women’s lives? And how did we end up spending so much money on products that may not work at all?
Amy Larocca takes readers into the communities that swear by their activated charcoal toothpaste and green juice enemas, explaining what each of these practices really is—and what the science says. Larocca holds a magnifying glass to alternative medicine and nouveau lifestyle prescriptions — and tries a lot herself along the way — ultimately delivering an assessment of how the wellness industry embodies our (gendered, class-based, racialized) perceptions of care and self-improvement, and how it preys on our unshakable fear of the unknown. She traces the history of how the beauty and fashion industries have peddled snake oil to women for decades—and why we keep coming back for more.

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

Lisa Greenwald signs copies of her new book The Summer of the Fortune Tellers
2025-05-08 16:30 - 18:30
Is the magic really back?
When Mille, Nora, and Bea found fortune tellers popping up in unexpected places—with eerily accurate fortunes—they reunited as best friends. Now that they’re back to being besties, they’re excited to spend the summer together outside the city. Recruited into babysitting eight-year-old triplets and staying with Millie’s family, the girls are hoping this will be their own private summer camp, one where they’re in charge, away from annoying siblings and toxic frenemies.
But nothing perfect can last. When everything from homesickness and boy craziness to real estate developers threaten their summer, Millie, Nora, and Bea start stumbling upon fortune tellers in the strangest places. And once again it feels like these fortune tellers are speaking to them: Sometimes in life you just have to jump in. Speak your mind and stand up for what you believe in! You are here for a reason. If they speak up, can Millie, Nora, and Bea really save the summer—and the community—before it’s too late?

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

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?

Amanda Eisenberg launches her debut People Are Talking
2025-04-22 18:00 - 19:30
Mallory Shepard has her back against the wall. Her girlfriend dumped her, her landlord wants to evict her and her literary agent is about to drop her—unless she can come up with a compelling follow-up to her debut novel. A book deal would solve her problems, which is why she agrees to attend an estranged college friend’s wedding in Texas. It’ll be the first time she’s seen that friend group since an incident tore them apart nine years earlier, and Mal intends to secretly squeeze her ex-friends for information. The plan is nearly foolproof, except that her still-raw hurt and righteous anger threatens to expose her agenda, as does her weakness for her college nemesis: Andrew Rosen.
Danit Leibowitz is—was Mal’s best friend. Together they transformed the Newts, a secret society, into a group that tracks alleged rapists long after they graduated from the prestigious halls of Weston College. Now a rising lefty political star, Dani is asked to come up with another plan to reinvent the Newts, which Gen Z deems out of touch amid ever-changing gender and sex politics. When she learns Mal will be there, Dani hatches a plan to appease the Newts and win back her friend, all in 72 hours.
Crammed into an Austin rental for the weekend, the six friends seek to settle old scores and win back ex-friends and lovers. But when the Newts infiltrate the wedding, with deadly consequences, Mal and Dani are forced to consider whether they’re willing to separate the personal from the political—even at the expense of protecting the people they love.

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
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.
