David Shafer’s debut novel Whiskey Tango Foxtrot follows three young people as they entangle themselves in a global conspiracy. Two college friends, Mark and Leo, along with non-profit worker Leila, find themselves fighting a conspiracy to privatize all data. Shafer was joined at Community Bookstore by Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, a trilogy of books about a young man from Brooklyn who enrolls in a magician’s school.

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ARTS By The People (ABTP) is a nonprofit organization based in Northern New Jersey that runs workshops in the fields of visual and performing arts as well as creative writing. ABTP also holds reading series throughout the year and an open mic event, The Platform, the first Wednesday of every month at Drip Coffee in Morristown, New Jersey. Most recently, ABTP collaborated with Warrior Writers (WW), a national nonprofit that works with servicemen and veterans, hosting a reading at Drip on Tuesday, October 14th. Paul Rabinowitz, the founder of ABTP and a veteran himself, read alongside six Warrior Writers. The reading was the embodiment of ABTP’s belief that “the arts can bridge social divisions and strengthen understanding, collaboration and acceptance in communities.”

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Jane Smiley has launched a new trilogy titled The Last Hundred Years focusing on, unsurprisingly, a century of time. Some Luck, the first novel of the series, begins in 1919 in the heartland of central Iowa focused on a family of fivec children. Smiley read from the book at BookCourt last week.

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Four years ago, Nell Zink wrote an email to Jonathan Franzen. Franzen responded, and soon they found themselves enthralled with a long distance email correspondence. Franzen is the reason Nell Zink is at McNally Jackson Books releasing her debut novel. He convinced her to turn her writings into a manuscript, The Wallcreepers, and to try and have it published.

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Cristina Moracho’s debut novel Althea & Oliver, portrays the effects of Kleine-Levine Syndrome, a rare sleep disorder that causes long term periods of sleepiness and childlike mental acuity. Teenager Oliver finds himself struggling with the disease and Althea, his friend from the age of six, has to grapple with the results. Moracho was joined at McNally Jackson with her editor Sharyn November for conversation.

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English Kills Review contributor Britt Melewski launched a new poetry series entitled Free Water. These readings occur every other month at the KGB Bar in New York City’s East Village. With Free Water, Melewski strives to bring together various voices to a place that is both welcoming and captivating. This young series already delivers on that intention. The environment at a Free Water reading is engaging, smart, and funny. It seems to call out to us: Come on in; the water’s fine.

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“Novels begin not as an idea or thesis but with an image,” Martin Amis begins the evening. He read from his latest novel, The Zone of Interest (August 2014) at what has become his neighborhood bookstore, BookCourt. “You can’t in good conscious start a novel without it,” he adds. In the case of The Zone of Interest, the image is of the horror of German death camps.

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Donal Ryan’s latest novel, The Thing About December examines a year in the life of Johnsey Cunliffe, a country boy who inherits the family farm while the Celtic Tiger infects a sense of greed across the Irish countryside. In Ryan’s first novel, The Spinning Heart, he explores the collapse of the Irish economy in a small village. He read both books at Community Boookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and discussed his rise as an author of recession literature.

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