By all accounts, 2016 could have been better, and I’m not even talking about the Presidential election or celebrity deaths. The year had just begun when St. Mark’s Bookshop, an East Village staple known for esoteric consignment zines, art books, and poetry, announced it would close for the second time.
But that wasn’t the last New York City store to shutter in 2016. The Community Bookstore, a used store on Court Street, finally closed up after announcing its slow death a year earlier. The only bookstore in the Bronx, a Barnes & Noble, announced it was leaving the borough. P.S. Bookshop, a DUMBO outlet of used books, couldn’t pay rent in the now ultra hip tech center. Nor could DUMBO’s massive Powerhouse Arena, and the store relocated from the stadium-sized venue to a paltry little space below the elevated tracks of the Manhattan Bridge. Both of those DUMBO store fronts sat empty through the holiday season, and like many DUMBO storefronts, offered nothing but advertisements for retail space for rent.
Perhaps, though, the greatest blow to the literary community was the sudden and somewhat unexpected closing of BookCourt. Authors and publicists planning spring launches were left scrambling for appropriate venues after the thirty-five-year-old store announced a closing. The buildings have been sold to a property developer.
2017 offers what the animated version of Carrie Fisher’s face declares at the end of Rogue One: hope. Greenlight Bookstore is officially opening a second location on Saturday, January 7th, 2017. The Prospect Lefferts Gardens store will be the second Greenlight store. Brooklyn author Emma Straub has promised to restore a neighborhood bookshop to fill the hole left by BookCourt’s sudden departure this spring. And in the Bronx, one hometown woman hopes to open a combination wine bar and bookstore, which sounds way better than a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
As the new year unfolds, English Kills Review will continue the work we have done. When new stores open, we will be there. When new reading series launch, we’ll have the details. When new books launch, we’ll write about them. Below is a summary of the events, interviews, and essays we published in 2016. We hope to publish even more in 2017.
Rumaan Alam
Allison Amend
Jesse Ball
Emily Barton
A. Ignoi Barrett
Brit Bennett
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
Adrien Bosc
Rachel Cantor
Alexander Chee
Tobias Carroll
Sonya Chung
Emma Cline
Jonathan Corcoran
Susan Daitch
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Helen Ellis
Boris Fishman
D. Foy
Helen Garner
Manuel Gonzales
Sharon Guskin
Yaa Gyasi
Lev Grossman
Jennifer Haigh
James Hannaham
Kristopher Jansma
Mira Jaroniec
Brendan Jones
Alexandra Kleeman
Helen Klein Ross
Karan Mahajan
Imbolo Mbue
C.E. Morgan
Idra Novey
Helen Oyeyemi
Camille Perri
Molly Prentiss
Bob Proehl
Patrick Ryan
Rebecca Schiff
Judy Sheehan
Ranbir Singh
Leigh Stein
David Szalay
J.R. Thornton
Tiphanie Yanique
Alejandro Zambra
American Housewife
The Alaskan Laundry
All That Man Is
The Assistants
The Associations of Small Bombs
Beautiful Country
The Bed Moved
Behold the Dreamers
Blackass
Constellation
Deep Singh Blue
Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo
Delicious Foods
The Dream Life of Astronauts
Enchanted Islands
Everywhere I Look
The Forgetting Time
The Girls
Good On Paper
Here Comes the Sun
Heat & Light
Homegoing
How to Set a Fire and Why
A Hundred Thousand Worlds
Intimations
I Woke Up Dead at the Mall
June
Land of Enchantment
Land of Love and Drowning
The Last Civilization
The Loved Ones
The Mothers
Multiple Choice
Patricide
Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover
The Queen of the Night
Rich and Pretty
Reel
The Regional Office is Under Attack
The Rope Swing
The Sport of Kings
Tuesday Nights in 1980
Warp
Ways to Disappear
What is Not Yours is Not Yours
What Was Mine
Why We Came to the City
Brew
Cool as F***
Ditmas Lit
Greenlight Poetry Salon
First Tuesdays
Franklin Electric
Halfway There
At The Inkwell
Lamprophonic
LIC Reading Series
Liar’s League NYC
The Loaded Canon
Live Lit at Montclair State
Lyrics, Lit, Liquor
Manhattanville Reading Series Launch
Miss Manhattan
Pigeon Pages
Prose Bowl
Risk of Discovery
Sackett Street Writers
See No Evil
Segue Series
Vapors
Vica Miller Literary Salons
Writers in Bloom
Writers Read
Scott Hess
Amy Dupcak
Jon Corcoran
Vincent Toro
The Unthinkable
My non-existence Under a Trump Administration
A Month in the Life of an Impending Dictatorship
My Appalachia: Coming Home in a Changing America
Trapped in History
Schrodinger’s Racists
On Football and the Pledge of Allegiance
English Kills Review continues to seek essays reflecting on the Trump presidency and how that effects various groups of people. These do not necessarily need to be about books or writing, but rather how life has changed or is expected to change for you, the people in your life, and the community you are in following the election of Donald Trump. Ideal submissions would be between 500 and 2,000 words. Send your Trumplandia essays and other submissions to:
