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.

Christine Reilly launches her debut novel Sunday's on the Phone to Monday
2016-04-07 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
The Middlesteins meets The Virgin Suicides in this arresting family love story about the eccentric yet tight-knit Simone family, coping with tragedy during 90’s New York, struggling to reconnect with each other and heal. Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves nestled in domesticity in New York, running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters as best they can: Natasha, an overachieving prodigy; sensitive Lucy, with her debilitating heart condition; and Carly, adopted from China and quietly fixated on her true origins. With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut novelist Christine Reilly tells the unusual love story of this family. Poignant and humane, Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday is a deft exploration of the tender ties that bind families together, even as they threaten to tear them apart.

Brenda Janowitz reads from her new book The Dinner Party
2016-04-13 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
This Passover Seder is not just any Passover Seder. Yes, there will be a quick service and then a festive meal afterwards, but this night is different from all other nights. This will be the night the Golds of Greenwich meet the Rothschilds of New York City. The Rothschilds are the stuff of legends. They control banks, own vineyards in Napa, diamond mines in Africa, and even an organic farm somewhere in the Midwest that produces the most popular Romaine lettuce consumed in this country. And now, Sylvia Gold’s daughter is dating one of them. When Sylvia finds out that her youngest of three is going to bring her new boyfriend to the Seder, she’s giddy. When she finds out that his parents are coming, too, she darn near faints. Making a good impression is all she thinks about. Well, almost. She still has to consider her other daughter, Sarah, who’ll be coming with her less than appropriate beau and his overly dramatic Italian mother. But the drama won’t stop there. Because despite the food and the wine, despite the new linen and the fresh flowers, the holidays are about family. Long forgotten memories come to the surface. Old grievances play out. And Sylvia Gold has to learn how to let her family go.

Paul Vidich reads from his debut novel An Honorable Man
2016-04-14 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
A debut espionage novel in the style of Alan Furst and John le Carré, An Honorable Man is a chilling Cold War spy thriller set in 1950s Washington, D.C. Washington D.C., 1953. The Cold War is heating up: McCarthyism, with all its fear and demagoguery, is raging in the nation’s capital, and Joseph Stalin’s death has left a dangerous power vacuum in the Soviet Union. The CIA, meanwhile, is reeling from a double agent within their midst. Someone is selling secrets to the Soviets, compromising missions around the globe. Undercover agents have been assassinated, and anti-Communist plots are being cut short in ruthlessly efficient fashion. The CIA director knows any news of the traitor, whose code name is Protocol, would be a national embarrassment and compromise the entire agency. George Mueller seems to be the perfect man to help find the mole: Yale-educated; extensive experience running missions in Eastern Europe; an operative so dedicated to his job that it left his marriage in tatters. The Director trusts him. Mueller, though, has secrets of his own, and as he digs deeper into the case, making contact with a Soviet agent, suspicion begins to fall on him as well. Until Protocol is found, no one can be trusted, and everyone is at risk.
Paul Vidich will be in conversation with Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

Joshua Hammer reads from The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
2016-04-19 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers. In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. Over the past twenty years, journalist Joshua Hammer visited Timbuktu numerous times and is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Haidara’s heroic and ultimately successful effort to outwit Al Qaeda and preserve Mali’s—and the world’s—literary patrimony. Hammer explores the city’s manuscript heritage and offers never-before-reported details about the militants’ march into northwest Africa. But above all, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is an inspiring account of the victory of art and literature over extremism.

Please join Rebekah McLeod Hutto, Associate Minister at The Brick Church, to launch her book The Day When God Made Church
2016-04-25 18:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York)
Pentecost, the Church’s birthday, is an often-overlooked holiday. This book celebrates the miraculous events that occurred on Pentecost and the ways in which the Holy Spirit shaped and continues to shape who we are as God’s Church. Children will learn the story of Pentecost: the sights, the sounds, and the people that began the community of the Church. They will discover who the Holy Spirit is and how God calls each of us to follow Jesus. Parents, educators, and ministers can discover new ways to celebrate Pentecost with children in their churches and families.

Ariel Winter reads from his latest Barren Cove
2016-04-26 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee–and former Corner Bookstore bookseller–Ariel S. Winter explores the secret legacy of an enigmatic family in this thrillingly atmospheric novel with a compelling and unexpected twist.
Sapien is a relic of a bygone age, searching for meaning in a world where his outdated allegiances to a time long past have left him isolated and hopeless. Seeking peace and quiet, he retires to a beach house at Barren Cove, a stately Victorian manor even more antiquated than he. He becomes increasingly fascinated with the family whose lives are entwined with the home—angry and rebellious Clark; flamboyant Kent; fragile, beautiful Mary; and most of all, Beachstone, the mysterious man whose history may hold all the answers Sapien has been searching for. As Sapien unlocks their secret loves and betrayals, the dangerous past of Barren Cove will indelibly change him…and who he is fated to become.

Celebrate the publication of Robin Newman's latest Hildie Bitterpickles Needs Her Sleep
2016-04-28 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
A redheaded young witch named Hildie can’t get to sleep after a giant moves in next door with a “noisy beanstalk elevator” that goes “clangity, clank, clunk all night long.” Then an elderly woman with a “gazillion” noisy children shows up (their home is part Converse sneaker, part retro mobile home), and a wolf huffs, puffs, and blows the roof off Hildie’s house.
This is an exceptionally strong debut for Chris Ewald whose gauzy, caricatured images meld playful modern details with familiar storybook figures: readers will have fun spotting cameos by Humpty Dumpty, Little Miss Muffet, and more.

Lorraine Boissoneault reads from her debut The Last Voyageurs
2016-05-02 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
In 1976, America’s bicentennial, 24 young men set out to re-create French explorer La Salle’s voyage down the entire length of the Mississippi River, abandoning their modern identities in order to live like the voyageurs of the 1600s. Together they set off on an eight-month, 3,300-mile expedition across the major waterways of North America. They fought strong currents on the St. Lawrence, paddled through storms on the Great Lakes, and walked over 500 miles across the frozen Midwest during one of the coldest winters of the 20th century.

Please celebrate the launch of Jay Greenfield's debut Max's Diamonds
2016-05-03 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
A stunning decades-spanning debut novel, about a man forced to confront his moral culpability, the legacy of impossible loss, and the claims of his Jewish identity.
Paul Hartman, coming of age in postwar Rockaway, grows up haunted by the specter of his cousin Max, an Auschwitz survivor, and Max’s mysterious cache of diamonds, which fund Paul’s Harvard Law education and even sparkle in his fiancée’s engagement ring. When a stranger from his past confronts him with an impossible demand, one that could destroy his law career, his marriage and his sense of self, Paul must make choices that will change his fate forever.

Betsy Lerner launches her new book The Bridge Ladies
2016-05-04 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. Tentatively at first, Betsy becomes a regular at her mother’s Monday Bridge club. Through her friendships with the ladies, she is finally able to face years of misunderstandings and family tragedy, the Bridge table becoming the common ground she and Roz never had.
Betsy Lerner will be in conversation with Julie Klam, author of You Had Me at Woof.
