Douglas Watson celebrated the release of his novel A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Watson is a local and the store offered a fitting place for him to launch the novel; much of the novel was workshopped in the very room with the Greenpoint Writers Group. The workshop is run through WORD.
My grandfather, Luigino Adamo, sold most of what he had in the summer of 1957 to buy four one way tickets for a boat to America. He landed with only the Italian language and a fifth grade education. Born in the southern Italian farming town of San Mango D’Aquino, Calabria, his first destination was a relative’s farm in Pennsylvania. After working with them for three months without seeing financial results, Luigino took his family to Brooklyn and set about finding work. As an uneducated laborer, his options revolved around factory work, plumber assistantships, and gardener positions. He worked, saved, and looked toward his future. By 1958, he acquired a part-time, seasonal job in a cemetery that would eventually turn into a full-time gravedigger position and then a heavy equipment operator.
Pacifist, celibate, and highly religious, the Shakers are perhaps best remembered for their furniture. But they also possessed a fascination with the mysticism surrounding teenage girls who spoke tongues. Two of these teenage girls are the focus of Rachel Urquhart’s new novel The Visionist. She was joined by Tin House co-founder Elissa Schappell at Community Bookstore to talk about the novel and the Shaker influence.
No one brought up “The Worm in Philly”—there will be few band names that ever beat the fictional “The Annihilation of the Soft Left”—but Sam Lipsyte moderated a discussion about rock and roll, the alpha male novel and literature with the same gritty humor that permeates his fiction. On Friday night at Housing Works, in […]
Super Sad True Love Story (2010) turned Gary Shteyngart into a superstar. He is now the kind of author that fills venues. In January, he released a memoir, Little Failure. He met up with his longtime friend and fellow author Suketu Mehta at New York City’s Tenement Museum to discuss the book.