Corner Bookstore

Burt Weissbourd reads from his latest Minos
2016-05-11 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Minos, the third work in the Corey Logan Trilogy, derives from the mythical king of Crete who every lunar year condemns seven Athenian youths and seven maidens to be eaten by the ferocious Minotaur. Minos begins at the Olympic Academy, where Billy’s friend Sara has just carved a magic circle in the hardwood bathroom floor with an ancient double-edged dagger. She twirls inside her circle calling on the Oracle of Apollo to help her find a modern-day Theseus, the reincarnation of Athens’ “hero of all heroes” who slew the Minotaur. Lost in her magical dance, she knocks over a candle, sets fire to the curtains, and is suspended from school. She is sent to Abe for treatment. Abe discovers that Sara has patched together an entire mythological universe and language with which she tries to make him see that lives are at stake. It is not easy to convince the authorities. But Corey knows that young people are indeed being murdered, and soon Sara’s dire warnings begin to make sense. But who is the modern-day descendant of Minos? The key is inside Sara’s head.

Beth Gutcheon reads from her latest Death at Breakfast
2016-05-12 18:00 - 19:30
From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Still Missing, More Than You Know, and Gossip comes the first entry in a stylish and witty mystery series featuring a pair of unlikely investigators—a shrewd novel of manners with a dark heart of murder at its center, set in small-town New England. Indulging their pleasure in travel and new experiences, recently retired private school head Maggie Detweiler and her old friend, socialite Hope Babbin, are heading to Maine. The trip—to attend a week-long master cooking class at the picturesque Victorian-era Oquossoc Mountain Inn—is an experiment to test their compatibility for future expeditions. Hope and Maggie have barely finished their first aperitifs when the inn’s tranquility is shattered by the arrival of Alexander and Lisa Antippas and Lisa’s actress sister, Glory. Imperious and rude, these Hollywood one-percenters quickly turn the inn upside-down with their demanding behavior, igniting a flurry of speculation and gossip among staff and guests alike.
But the disruption soon turns deadly. After a suspicious late-night fire is brought under control, Alex’s charred body is found in the ashes. Enter the town’s deputy sheriff, Buster Babbin, Hope’s long-estranged son and Maggie’s former student. A man who’s finally found his footing in life, Buster needs a win. But he’s quickly pushed aside by the “big boys,” senior law enforcement and high-powered state’s attorneys who swoop in to make a quick arrest.

Whit Stillman reads from Love & Friendship
2016-05-14 17:00 - 18:30
Austen’s unfinished (funniest and least known) novel is a comedy-of-manners centered on recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon—impossibly beautiful, witty, and completely self-absorbed—who arrives at her brother-in-law’s estate to find husbands for both herself and her daughter. With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility and wry social commentary, filmmaker and writer Whit Stillman cleverly reimagines one of our greatest writers’ unfinished works.
Please note, reading will begin at 5:00 not 6:00.

Gerald Marzorati reads from his new book Late to the Ball
2016-05-17 18:00 - 19:30
An award-winning author shares the inspiring and entertaining account of his pursuit to become a nationally competitive tennis player—at the age of sixty.
Being a man or a woman in your early sixties is different than it was a generation or two ago, at least for the more fortunate of us. We aren’t old…yet. But we sense it coming: Careers are winding down, kids are gone, parents are dying (friends, too), and our bodies are no longer youthful or even middle-aged. Learning to play tennis in your fifties is no small feat, but becoming a serious, competitive tennis player at the age of sixty is a whole other matter. It requires training the body to defy age, and to methodically build one’s game—the strokework, footwork, strategy, and mental toughness.
Gerry Mazorati started playing the game seriously in his mid-fifties. He had the strong desire to lead an examined physical life, to push his body into the “encore” of middle age. In Late to the Ball Mazorati writes vividly about the difficulties, frustrations, and the triumphs of his becoming a seriously good tennis player. He takes on his quest with complete vigor and absolute determination to see it through, providing a rich, vicarious experience involving the science of aging, his existential battle with time, and the beautiful, mysterious game of tennis. Late to the Ball is also captivating evidence that the rest of the Baby Boomer generation, now between middle age and old age, can find their own quest and do the same.

Emily Voigt reads from her debut The Dragon Behind the Glass
2016-05-24 18:00 - 19:30
A young man is murdered for his prized pet fish. An Asian tycoon buys a single specimen for $150,000. Meanwhile, a pet detective chases smugglers through the streets of New York. Delving into an outlandish realm of obsession, paranoia, and criminality, The Dragon Behind the Glass tells the story of a fish like none other: a powerful predator dating to the age of the dinosaurs. Treasured as a status symbol believed to bring good luck, the Asian arowana is bred on high-security farms in Southeast Asia and sold by the hundreds of thousands each year. In the United States, however, it’s protected by the Endangered Species Act and illegal to bring into the country—though it remains the object of a thriving black market. From the South Bronx to Singapore, journalist Emily Voigt follows the trail of the fish, ultimately embarking on a years-long quest to find the arowana in the wild, venturing deep into some of the last remaining tropical wildernesses on earth.
With a captivating blend of personal reporting, history, and science, The Dragon Behind the Glasstraces our modern fascination with aquarium fish back to the era of exploration when intrepid naturalists stood on the cutting edge of modern science, discovering new and wondrous species in jungles all over the world. In an age when freshwater fish now comprise one of the most rapidly vanishing groups of animals on the planet, Voigt unearths a paradoxical truth behind the dragon fish’s rise to fame—one that calls into question how we protect the world’s rarest species. An elegant exploration of the human conquest of nature, The Dragon Behind the Glassrevels in the sheer wonder of life’s diversity and lays bare our deepest desire—to hold onto what is wild.

Ashley Prentice Norton reads from her latest If You Left
2016-06-20 18:00 - 19:30
A seductive novel about a privileged but damaged Manhattan wife whose main source of stability — her marriage — comes under threat, from forces both without and within. For most of their marriage, Althea has fluctuated between extreme depressive and manic states — what she calls “the Tombs” and “the Visions” — and Oliver has been the steady hand that guided her to safety. This summer, Althea decides that she will be different from here on. She will be the loving, sexy wife Oliver wants, and the reliable, affectionate mother their nine year-old daughter Clem deserves. Her plan: to bring Clem to their Easthampton home once school is out — with no “summer girl” to care for her this time — and become “normal.” But Oliver is distant and controlling, and his relationship with their interior decorator seems a bit too close; Clem has learned to be self-sufficient, and getting to know her now feels like very hard work for Althea. Into this scene enters the much younger, David Foster Wallace–reading house painter, who reaches something in Althea that has been long buried.
Fearless, darkly funny, and compulsively readable, If You Left explores the complex dance that is the bipolar marriage, and the possibility that to move forward, we might have to destroy the very things we’ve worked hardest to build.

Michael Craven reads from his latest The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin
2016-06-22 18:00 - 19:30
Attention, fans of Carl Hiaasen, Harlan Coben, and Robert B. Parker! The author of The Detective & The Pipe Girl—nominated for both the Nero Wolfe and Shamus Awards—returns with another whip-smart, funny, and propulsive mystery featuring singular Los Angeles P.I. John Darvelle.
Private Detective John Darvelle is back—drinking cheap beer, playing ping-pong and sharing his philosophy on everything from work/life balance to restaurants with bad air-conditioning. (He doesn’t believe in the former, he despises the latter.) Darvelle is hired to find the killer of Keaton Fuller, a well-born Los Angeles man gunned down in his own driveway. The cops couldn’t solve the case, in part because everyone who came in contact with Keaton despised him. Translation: Anybody could have done it. Following a trail of the dead man’s betrayals, Darvelle finds himself in the exotic, high-stakes world of rare tropical fish. The fish are certainly valuable enough to kill for, but is there something more menacing going on?

Sabeeha Rehman reads from her debut Threading My Prayer Rug
2016-07-06 18:00 - 19:30
Threading My Prayer Rug is a richly textured reflection on what it is to be a Muslim in America today. It is also the luminous story of many journeys: from Pakistan to the United States in an arranged marriage that becomes a love match lasting forty years; from secular Muslim in an Islamic society to devout Muslim in a society ignorant of Islam, and from liberal to conservative to American Muslim; from student to bride and mother; and from an immigrant intending to stay two years to an American citizen, business executive, grandmother, and tireless advocate for interfaith understanding.
Beginning with a sweetly funny, moving account of her arranged marriage, the author undercuts stereotypes and offers the refreshing view of an American life through Muslim eyes. In chapters leavened with humor, hope, and insight, she recounts an immigrant’s daily struggles balancing assimilation with preserving heritage, overcoming religious barriers from within and distortions of Islam from without, and confronting issues of raising her children as Muslims—while they lobby for a Christmas tree! Sabeeha Rehman was doing interfaith work for Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the driving force behind the Muslim community center at Ground Zero, when the backlash began. She discusses what that experience revealed about American society.

Jane Rosen launches Nine Women, One Dress
2016-07-11 18:00 - 19:30
A charming, hilarious, irresistible romp of a novel that brings together nine unrelated women, each touched by the same little black dress that weaves through their lives, bringing a little magic with it. Natalie is a Bloomingdale’s salesgirl mooning over her lawyer ex-boyfriend who’s engaged to someone else after just two months. Felicia has been quietly in love with her boss for seventeen years and has one night to finally make the feeling mutual. Andie is a private detective who specializes in gathering evidence on cheating husbands—a skill she unfortunately learned from her own life—and lands a case that may restore her faith in true love. For these three women, as well as half a dozen others in sparkling supporting roles—a young model fresh from rural Alabama, a diva Hollywood star making her Broadway debut, an overachieving, unemployed Brown grad who starts faking a fabulous life on social media, to name just a few—everything is about to change, thanks to the dress of the season, the perfect little black number everyone wants to get their hands on . . .

Bill Doyle launches his latest book The Prizewinners of Piedmont Place
2016-07-12 18:00 - 19:30
One lucky family is about to win big! The prize? Twenty minutes to grab anything—and maybe even everything—in the world-famous Wish Shoppe. Cal Talaska knows his family was born to win. But before he can prove it, he needs to convince his family to compete. You’ve gotta be in it to win it, right? That means Cal needs to focus on what they want.
Dad wants a new piano . . . no, a whole orchestra! Mom has her eye on a new home gym…which might be hard to grab! His little sister Imo needs tools to build a spaceship. And baby brother Bug? He just wants candy! (To share with the beloved family dog, of course!) But what about Cal? He just wants to win . . . or maybe he has something to prove? There’s only one way to find out. Let the contest begin! This hilarious new series features a loveable family, high stakes, and hijinks.

Elizabeth Birkelund reads from her latest novel The Runaway Wife
2016-07-13 18:00 - 19:30
Recently fired from his high-power finance job and dumped by his fiancée, Jim Olsen has come to the Swiss Alps to clear his head. At the charming Cabane des Audannes, he meets Clio, Thalia and Helene Castellane, who are on a quest of their own: their mother, Calliope, has fled to these mountains to escape her philandering politician husband’s most recent scandal. As snow threatens to descend upon the Alps, the women have come to bring their mother home. But the sisters are at the point of surrender; it is time for them to return to Paris. Buoyed by wine and inspired by their beauty, Jim impetuously volunteers to assume their search, but soon realizes that he is in over his head. The Alps are filled with beauty and danger, not the least of which is Calliope’s desire to stay hidden. And all the while Jim finds himself haunted by the memory of her daughters and conflicted in his desire for them.

Paul Batista reads from his latest Manhattan Lockdown
2016-07-19 18:00 - 19:30
An act of terrorism at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art leaves the mayor injured and a death toll exceeding 1700 people. And the terrorism does not stop there. As the city’s other iconic sites are targeted, the mayor throws Manhattan into lockdown.
New York City Police Commissioner Gina Carbone is closing in on the terrorists. Her tactics well outside legal bounds, her cell operating in total secrecy, Gina takes vigilantism to a new level. Will her extremely aggressive actions succeed—or plunge the city into further catastrophe?

Michael Arlen reads from The Huntress
2016-09-07 18:00 - 19:30
This fascinating biography of the maverick newspaperwoman and intrepid adventurer follows her exceptional exploits through the first half of the twentieth century, from her troublemaking days as the middle child of complicated parents to her successes as publisher of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Newsday.
The authors take us into the lost WASP world of Alicia Patterson: her larger-than-life father—scion of the Patterson-Medill Chicago publishing dynasty—and her traditional mother, her childhood of foreign caretakers, travel, and boarding schools. Married off at twenty-three to a friend of her father’s, Alicia spent little time at home during the brief marriage, instead she earned a transport pilot’s license (only the tenth woman in the country to do so); hunted big game in Indochina and India; and began to write for her father’s newspaper The Daily News. Her second father-orchestrated marriage also failed, but her last to Harry Guggenheim, someone of her own choosing, resulted in the founding of Newsday in 1940. As she guided the paper through investigative exposés and international and liberal political coverage, her influence on the national stage grew along with the newspaper’s reputation and circulation, winning a Pulitzer in 1954 and putting her on the cover of Time. Over the years admirers ranged from the Maharajah of Baroda to Adlai Stevenson. Here is the story of the spirited and formidable young woman who became a preeminent figure of the golden era of print newspapers.

Larry Kudlow & Brian Domitrovic discuss their new book JFK and the Reagan Revolution
2016-09-12 18:00 - 19:30
John F. Kennedy was the first president since the 1920s to slash tax rates across-the-board. He was essentially the first supply-sider. Sadly, today’s Democrats have ignored JFK’s tax-cut legacy and have opted instead for an anti-growth, tax-hiking redistribution program, undermining America’s economy. According to liberal conventional wisdom, “the great postwar prosperity”—the most cherished period of American economic history—came because we were smart enough to tax the rich at very high rates, expand government spending, and redistribute wealth. Yet in fact, the opposite is true. As JFK realized, high taxes that punished success and fanned class warfare harmed the economy. In the 1950s, when high tax rates prevailed, America endured recessions every two or three years and the ranks of the unemployed swelled. Only in the 1960s did an interrupted boom at a high rate of growth (averaging 5 percent per year) drive a tremendous increase in jobs for the long term. The difference was Kennedy’s economic policy, particularly his push for sweeping tax-rate cuts. Kennedy was so successful in the ’60s that he directly inspired Ronald Reagan’s tax cut revolution in the 1980s, which rejuvenated the economy and gave us another boom that lasted for two decades. Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic reveal the secret history of American prosperity by exploring the little-known battles within the Kennedy administration. They show why JFK rejected the advice of his Keynesian advisors, turning instead to the ideas proposed by the non-Keynesians on his team of rivals.

Julian Tepper reads from his latest book, Ark
2016-09-15 18:00 - 19:30
Rebecca Arkin is an attorney in Manhattan. She’s grounded, driven, and successful. Unfortunately, she’s also the granddaughter of Ben Arkin, an artist who has never sold a piece, and the daughter of Oliver Arkin, who—along with his sisters—runs a record company that has never had a hit. When a legal battle breaks out for control of the company, it falls to Rebecca to keep her family from collapsing, all while trying desperately to extricate herself from their grasp.
Told in the vein of a Wes Anderson film, Ark follows three generations of a seemingly wealthy but crumbling New York family on their way from the penthouse to the outhouse. Filled with an absurdly captivating cast of characters who are often despicable yet entirely compelling, Tepper’s sophomore novel is a wry and darkly humorous take on family dynamics.

Celebrate the publication of Paris Nights with Cliff Simon and Loren Stephens
2016-10-04 18:00 - 19:30
Taking a look back, we see twelve-year-old Cliff helming a racing dinghy in the midst of a thunderstorm on the Vaal River. His father yells at him not to be a sissy, and he brings the boat back to shore alone.
We then travel to London with his family escaping the tumult of Apartheid.
He trains for the Olympics, but drops out, enrolling in the South African military where he subjected to harsh treatment and name calling – Fokken
Jood. After a honorable discharge, he works in cabaret at seaside resorts and is recruited as a gymnast in a cabaret, where he realizes that the stage is his destiny. The memoir fast forwards to Cliff’s meteoric rise at the Moulin from swing dancer to principal in “Formidable.” Off stage he gets into fights with street thugs, hangs out with diamond smugglers, and has his pick of gorgeous women. With a year at the Moulin to his credit, doors open for him internationally and back in South Africa. He earns a starring role in
“Egoli: Place of Gold,” and marries his long-time girlfriend, Colette. On their honeymoon to Paris, Cliff says, “Merci Paris for the best year of my life.”

Mary Stewart Hammond reads from her new collection of poetry Entering History
2016-10-13 18:00 - 19:30
Lyrical narratives that chronicle a long marriage, rich with wit, dark irony, and poignancy.
In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.”
Entering History opens on a middle-aged couple, modern-day travelers in an ancient setting. The collection follows their relationship through time and place, combining the personal and the historical in stories of the family—siblings, a daughter, and the very different marriage of the poet’s parents.
The marriage poems share the intimacy, erotic playfulness, irritations, worries, and angers that are part of an enduring love and a long marriage. In “Portrait of My Husband Reading Henry James,” the poet paints her husband using syntax and language that evoke James’s. In “Venasque,” the wintry village, perched on the edge of a cliff, serves as a metaphor for the existential crisis facing the couple.
“Lines composed at Beaufort, South Carolina, a few miles above Parris Island,” about the poet’s brother, moves back and forth between the Civil War and the preparations of troops for today’s wars. In “Jacob and Esau with Sister,” two brothers, in a transaction as old as oral history, highlight its consequences in the twenty-first century. “Anniversary” is a heartbreaking elegy for a third brother who kills himself.
Hammond reaches into the past and present of the American family, closing Entering History where it began, with the couple in bed, now older, harkening back to the bed they shared when they were newlyweds. These powerful, beautifully crafted, lyrical narratives give depth to an examination of life—its joys, sorrows, laughter, and tragedies.

Edward Sorel launches Mary Astor's Purple Diary
2016-10-21 18:00 - 19:00
In a hilarious send-up of sex, scandal, and the Golden Age of Hollywood, legendary cartoonist Edward Sorel brings us a story (literally) ripped from the headlines of a bygone era. In 1965, a young, up-and-coming illustrator by the name of Edward Sorel was living in a $97-a-month railroad flat on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Resolved to fix up the place, Sorel began pulling up the linoleum on his kitchen floor, tearing away layer after layer until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood and starring the actress Mary Astor. Mary Astor’s Purple Diary narrates and illustrates the travails of the Oscar-winning actress alongside Sorel’s own personal story of discovering an unlikely muse. Throughout, we get his wry take on all the juicy details of this particular slice of Hollywood Babylon, including Mary’s life as a child star—her career in silent films began at age fourteen—presided over by her tyrannical father, Otto, who “managed” her full-time and treated his daughter like an ATM machine.

Erica Abeel reads from her latest Wild Girls
2016-10-26 18:00 - 19:30
Three college friends from the 50s blaze their own path in love and work, braving the stifling conventions of the age, and anticipating the social thaw that would arrive ten years later. These “wild girls” pay heavy penalties for living against the grain, but, over the years, rebound and re-set their course, drawing strength from their friendship. The novel follows them from an elite northeastern college, to Paris with Allen Ginsberg, to New York’s avant-garde scene in the early sixties, to a mansion in Newport, to the slopes of Zermatt, to Long Island’s Gold Coast, as it celebrates the nimbleness and vitality of women who defied an entire culture to forge their own journey.

Laurence Bergreen reads from his new book Casanova
2016-11-01 18:00 - 19:30
The definitive biography of the impoverished child, abandoned by his parents, who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius whose name still resonates today: Giacomo Casanova.
Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. Giacomo Casanova was raised by his maternal grandmother, an illiterate peasant. His birthplace, Venice, was a republic in decline, reputedly the most debauched city in Europe. Casanova would add to the republic’s reputation. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than 100 women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, and in one notorious instance, his own illegitimate daughter.
Casanova came of age in a Venice filled with spies and informers. Naturally brilliant, he was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, where he invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. But, intemperate by nature, he made enemies at the French court. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni. And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the 12-volume Story of My Life.
A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel: erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition, Casanova was a self-destructive genius. This witty, roisterous biography exposes his astonishing life in rich, intimate detail. At the same time, it is a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe from serving girls to kings and courtiers. Esteemed biographer Laurence Bergreen brings a sensual world vividly alive in this irresistible book.

Celebrate the publication of Shop Cats of New York with author Tamar Arslanian and photographer Andrew Martilla
2016-11-02 18:00 - 19:30
Humans of New York meets The French Cat in this carefully cultivated, gorgeous full-color collection featuring New York’s iconic felines and the stories behind them.

They inhabit New York City’s most legendary and coziest spots—the Algonquin Hotel, a whiskey distillery, Bleecker Street Records, and a host of yoga studios, bookstores, and bike shops in between. True New Yorkers—masters of people watching—they perch on wine crates, piles of books, and a classic hotel countertop, taking in the activity around them. Depending on their mood, these cats will ignore enthusiastic admirers, offer a few delightful purrs, or occasionally even take a swipe. Some even find a mouse or two to chase.
Shop Cats of New York introduces forty of New York’s favorite felines—all who have an extraordinary story to tell. Popular cat blogger Tamar Arslanian and Instagram pet photographer Andrew Marttila capture these deeply loved and well cared for animals in their city habitat and reveal how they came to reign over their urban kingdoms. A celebration of some of the city’s most revered citizens and a unique look at New York life, this enchanting illustrated volume is a must for every cat lover, and every Big Apple devotee.

Bill Sanderson reads from his debut Bulletins From Dallas
2016-11-09 18:30 - 19:30
An in-depth look at one of the twentieth century’s star reporters and his biggest story.
Thanks to one reporter’s skill, we can fix the exact moment on November 22, 1963 when the world stopped and held its breath: At 12:34 p.m. Central Time, UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith broke the news that shots had been fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade. Most people think Walter Cronkite was the first to tell America about the assassination. But when Cronkite broke the news on TV, he read from one of Smith’s dispatches. At Parkland Hospital, Smith saw President Kennedy’s blood-soaked body in the back of his limousine before the emergency room attendants arrived. Two hours later, he was one of three journalists to witness President Johnson’s swearing-in aboard Air Force One. Smith rightly won a Pulitzer Prize for the vivid story he wrote for the next day’s morning newspapers.
Smith’s scoop is journalism legend. But the full story of how he pulled off the most amazing reportorial coup has never been told. As the top White House reporter of his time, Smith was a bona fide celebrity and even a regular on late-night TV. But he has never been the subject of a biography.
With access to a trove of Smith’s personal letters and papers and through interviews with Smith’s family and colleagues, veteran news reporter Bill Sanderson will crack open the legend. Bulletins from Dallas will tell for the first time how Smith beat his competition on the story, and will show how the biggest scoop of his career foreshadowed his personal downfall.

Diane B. Saxton reads from Peregrine Island
2016-11-15 18:00 - 19:30
The Peregrine family’s lives are turned upside down one summer when so-called “art experts” appear on the doorstep of their Connecticut island home to appraise a favorite heirloom painting. When incriminating papers, as well as other paintings, are discovered behind the artwork in question, the appraisal turns into a full-fledged investigation. Antagonism mounts between grandmother, mother, and child, who begin to suspect one another, as well as the shady newcomers in their midst, of foul play.
As the summer progresses and the Peregrines discover facts about their past in the course of the investigation, they learn that people—including them—are not always who they appear to be. But when they uncover the painting’s deepest secret, it gives them the gift of love that they have unconsciously been seeking all along.

Amy Poeppel reads from her debut novel Small Admissions
2017-01-10 18:00 - 19:30
Despite her innate ambition and Summa Cum Laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being unceremoniously dumped by her handsome, French “almost fiancé,” she abandons her grad school plans and instead spends her days lolling on the couch, watching reruns of Sex and the City, and leaving her apartment only when a dog-walking gig demands it. Her friends don’t know what to do other than pass tissues and hope for a comeback, while her practical sister, Angela, pushes every remedy she can think of, from trapeze class to therapy to job interviews.
Miraculously, and for reasons no one (least of all Kate) understands, she manages to land a job in the admissions department at the prestigious Hudson Day School. In her new position, Kate learns there’s no time for self-pity or nonsense during the height of the admissions season, or what her colleagues refer to as “the dark time.” As the process revs up, Kate meets smart kids who are unlikable, likeable kids who aren’t very smart, and Park Avenue parents who refuse to take no for an answer.
Meanwhile, Kate’s sister and her closest friends find themselves keeping secrets, hiding boyfriends, dropping bombshells, and fighting each other on how to keep Kate on her feet. On top of it all, her cranky, oddly charming, and irritatingly handsome downstairs neighbor is more than he seems. Through every dishy, page-turning twist, it seems that one person’s happiness leads to another’s misfortune, and suddenly everyone, including Kate, is looking for a way to turn rejection on its head, using any means necessary—including the truly unexpected.

Molly Haskell reads from her latest Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films
2017-01-11 18:00 - 19:30
A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades-long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented
“Everything about me is in my films,” Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg’s works for the light they shine upon the man himself. Through such powerhouse hits as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones, to lesser-known masterworks like A.I. and Empire of the Sun, to the haunting Schindler’s List, Haskell shows how Spielberg’s uniquely evocative filmmaking and story-telling reveal the many ways in which his life, work, and times are entwined.
Organizing chapters around specific films, the distinguished critic discusses how Spielberg’s childhood in non-Jewish suburbs, his parents’ traumatic divorce, his return to Judaism upon his son’s birth, and other events echo in his work. She offers a brilliant portrait of the extraordinary director—a fearful boy living through his imagination who grew into a man whose openness, generosity of spirit, and creativity have enchanted audiences for more than 40 years.

Sheila Kohler reads from her memoir Once We Were Sisters
2017-01-17 18:00 - 19:30
“A beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. . . . Highly recommended.” —Joyce Carol Oates
When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood—one marked by death and the misguided love of their mother.
In her signature spare and incisive prose, Sheila Kohler recounts the lives she and her sister led. Flashing back to their storybook childhood at the family estate, Crossways, Kohler tells of the death of her father when she and Maxine were girls, which led to the family abandoning their house and the girls being raised by their mother, at turns distant and suffocating. We follow them to the cloistered Anglican boarding school where they first learn of separation and later their studies in Rome and Paris where they plan grand lives for themselves—lives that are interrupted when both marry young and discover they have made poor choices. Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death.

Adelia Saunders reads from her debut novel Indelible
2017-01-19 18:00 - 19:30
Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees the truth about people written on their skin–names, dates, details both banal and profound–and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank.
When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek. He’s in Paris for the summer, studying a medieval pilgrimage to the coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques is said to have washed ashore, covered in scallop shells. Magdalena, desperate to make things right after her best friend dies–a tragedy she might have prevented–embarks on her own pilgrimage, but not before Neil falls for her, captivated by her pale eyes, charming Eastern European accent, and aura of heartbreak.
Neil’s father, Richard, is also in Paris, searching for the truth about his late mother, a famous expatriate American novelist who abandoned him at birth. All his life Richard has clung to a single memory of his mother–her red shoes–which her biographers agree he never could have seen.
In Adelia Saunders’ arresting debut, secrets are revealed among forgotten texts in the old archives of Paris, on a dusty cattle ranch in the American West, along ancient pilgrim paths, and in a run-down apartment in post-Soviet Lithuania. By chance, or perhaps by fate, the novel’s unforgettable characters converge, and Magdalena’s uncanny ability may be the key to their happiness.

Phillip Lopate reads from A Mother's Tale
2017-01-31 18:00 - 19:30
In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community organizer, clerk, actress, and singer. But paired with exciting anecdotes are the criticisms of the husband who couldn’t satisfy her, the details of numerous affairs and sexual encounters, and, though she succeeded at many of her roles, accounts of how she always felt mistreated, taken advantage of. After the interviews, at a loss for what to do with the tapes, Lopate put them away. But thirty years later, after his mother had passed away, Lopate found himself drawn back to the recordings of this conversation. Thus begins a three-way conversation between a mother, his younger self, and the person he is today.
Trying to break open the family myths, rationalizations, and self-deceptions, A Mother’s Tale is about family members who love each other but who can’t seem to overcome their mutual mistrust. Though Phillip is sympathizing to a point, he cannot join her in her operatic displays of self-pity and how she blames his father for everything that went wrong. His detached, ironic character has been formed partly in response to her melodramatic one. The climax is an argument in which he tries to persuade her—using logic, of all things—that he really does love her, but is only partially successful, of course.
A Mother’s Tale is about something primal and universal: the relationship between a mother and her child, the parent disappointed with the payback, the child, now fully grown, judgmental. The humor is in the details.

Patricia Bosworth reads from The Men in My Life
2017-02-07 18:00 - 19:30
Acclaimed biographer Patricia Bosworth recalls her emotional coming of age in 1950s New York in this profound and powerful memoir, a story of family, marriage, tragedy, Broadway, and art, featuring a rich cast of well-known literary and theatrical figures from the period.
Born into privilege in San Francisco as the children of famous attorney Bartley Crum and novelist Gertrude, Patricia and her brother Bart Jr. lead charmed lives until their father’s career is ruined when he defends the Hollywood Ten. The family moves to New York, suffering greater tragedy when Bart Jr. kills himself. However, his loving spirit continues to influence Patricia as she fights to succeed as an actress and writer. Married and divorced from an abusive husband before she’s twenty, she joins the famed Actors Studio. She takes classes with Lee Strasberg alongside Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and others; she works on Broadway opposite Paul Muni, Helen Hayes, and Elaine Stritch; Gore Vidal and Elia Kazan become her mentors. Her anecdotes of theatre’s Golden Age have never been told before. At the zenith of her career, about to film The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn, Patricia faces a decision that changes her forever.

Please join us for the launch of Organized Enough with Amanda Sullivan
2017-02-15 18:00 - 19:30
This is not a book that tells you to throw everything out and live austerely. You don’t need a sock drawer that brings you joy or a kitchen from a design magazine; what you do need is to be organized enough to feel in control and serene. Organized Enough offers a ground-breaking, science-driven method for maintaining organization: it addresses not just the steps of decluttering but also of developing the habits to stay clutter-free. Amanda Sullivan shares the method that has brought great success to her clients-from celebrities to hoarders. With seven concepts to help you define your goals and seven essential habits to keep chaos and clutter at bay, you will learn to reframe how you think about your space, your stuff, and your life.
