Julia Fierro launched her debut novel Cutting Teeth to a full house at Brooklyn’s BookCourt bookstore. Fierro, as the founder of Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop, has influenced the lives of more than 2,000 Brooklyn writers, many of whom had crammed into the store. Her husband, Justin Feinstein introduced her.
Roxane Gay’s debut novel, An Untamed State (May 2014) has garnered widespread praise. Essays editor at The Rumpus and a publisher/editor of [PANK], Gay is a prolific author with an essay collection on feminism due in August and a memoir relating to hunger and body image in 2016. Volume 1 Brooklyn hosted Gay at Community Bookstore to discuss her new novel with The Rumpus columnist Sari Botton.
Traditional war stories have long featured male protagonists by default. But modern war has meant female soldiers serving alongside their male counterparts. Brooklyn’s WORD Bookstore brought together three authors to talk about their war story books books featuring female soldiers. Cara Hoffman’s new novel, Be Safe I Love you (April 2014) explores the family life of a returning war veteran readjusting. Katey Schultz’s collection Flashes of War (2013) contains a mix of flash fiction and short stories. Helen Benedict has spent several years interviewing soldiers and victims of war resulting in a play, a non-fiction book, and a trilogy. She read from Sand Queen (2011), a novel of two opposing narratives, one an Iraqi medical student caught in a war prison and the other a soldier prison guard.
At a time when the independent bookstore has been under scrutiny—Julie Bosman of The New York Times, most notably, investigated whether the burgeoning rent costs would drive sellers out of Manhattan—McNally Jackson Books and Housing Works joined together to host the Second Annual Downtown Literary Festival on Sunday, April 13th. Though there were moments when the young age of the festival showed a bit (some events were simply more organized and better prepared than others), the joint McNally Jackson and Housing Works production succeeded in displaying the vibrant literary culture that still exists around Houston Street, adding, in its own way, to the recent trend of criticism and analyses that has centered on Manhattan as the “Writer Mecca” of the United States.
Bernadine Evaristo launched her latest novel, Mr. Loverman, at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. She was joined by Chris Abani who read from his latest novel, The Secret History of Las Vegas (January 2014). Colin Channer facilitated the discussion.
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.
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 […]