Naomi Jackson launched her debut novel The Star Side of Bird Hill last week at Greenlight Bookstore. The novel explores two sisters from Brooklyn sent to live in Bird Hill, Barbados, when their mother can no longer care for them. She discussed the novel with Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning.
Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, Book of Numbers, follows a technocrat billionaire ghostwriting an autobiography with Joshua Cohen. Joshua Cohen is a character, not the author. Cohen cleared this up at McNally Jackson Books. He was joined by his editor Sam Nicholson to discuss the new novel.
A long hot summer has set in across Grinnell, Iowa, the small college town at the center of Dean Bakopoulos’s third novel, Summerlong. He was at Brooklyn’s WORD Bookstore to discuss the novel with Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers, now in paperback.
In Lisa Glatt’s The Nakeds, a young girl is struck by a car. Her parents marriage falls apart. The driver drives on. And Hannah spends the next decade recovering. Glatt read from The Nakeds at BookCourt in Brooklyn discussing the origins of the book and her own childhood trauma when she, like Hannah, was struck by a car.
The Magicians trilogy of books has grown into a genre-bending success for author Lev Grossman. Besides spawning a television series, the third book, The Magician’s Land, is now in paperback. Grossman discussed the book and series with Choire Sicha, coproprietor of The Awl and author of Very Recent History.
Rebecca Dinerstein spent a year living above the arctic circle in Lofoten, Norway. Lofoten is a place of extremes. In winter, the sun barely tints the sky with light. In summer, the sun never truly sets. Dinerstein wrote her first collection of poems Lofoten while living in an artist community. That collection is written in English and then translated by Dinerstein into Norwegian. Both sets of poems appear in the collection. Her debut novel, The Sunlit Night, also finds inspiration in the endless summer days. She launched The Sunlight Night at Powerhouse Arena and talked about the book with writer Darin Strauss.
Nell Zink flutters into a room. She is mesmerizing. She exudes an energy of curiosity interested in observing and experiencing the place around her rather than the performance of reading her book. A bouquet of flowers arrives for her at the store. She says they are from a friend who she has not seen since 1989, a florist in Florida now. Their arrival is symptomatic of the life of Nell Zink; she collects people on a journey that seems forever incomplete.
Meet Bijan Stephen and Alanna Okun.
For those not in the know, Alanna and Bijan are a pretty big deal. Alanna is a senior editor at BuzzFeed; she has appeared on The TODAY Show, Good Morning, America!, The Katie Couric Show, NBC’s Nightly News, and NPR; her writing has appeared in Billfold, Architizer, and Side B, et cetera. Bijan is an associate editor at The New Republic; his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, N+1, VICE, and The New Inquiry; he’s a writer for Rusty Foster’s cult TinyLetter Today in Tabs (subscribe, for real tho), and also happens to be Ta-Nehisi Coates’s twitter-son.