The protagonist of J.R. Thornton’s debut novel, Beautiful Country, has a lot in common with the recent Harvard graduate. Chase Robertson is a fourteen-year-old tennis player training with the Beijing national team, a similar experience to Thornton’s own time playing tennis in China. The novel was first released there several years ago and recently brought to the United States by Harper Collins. Thornton launched the American version of the novel at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn.

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Rebecca Schiff celebrated the launch of her debut collection of stories, The Bed Moved, last week at BookCourt in Brooklyn. The collection has won the adoration of the New York Times, with the paper stating that the collection has a “Nabokovian boldness and crispness of phrase.” Schiff read from a story from the collection before answering audience questions and signing copies.

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Jonathan Corcoran launched his debut collection of short stories, The Rope Swing, earlier this month at AWP. He was joined by Tayari Jones at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn to discuss the story collection. The collection was published by West Virginia University Press. Corcoran studied under Jones at Rutgers Unviersity-Newark where he attended the Creative Writing MFA program and where Jones is a professor.

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Molly Prentiss presented her novel Tuesday Nights in 1980 at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. She was joined by her agent, Claudia Ballard and her editor Alison Callahan. Callahan is an editor at Scout Press books, a new imprint from Simon & Schuster with just one other book previously published, Bill Clegg’s Did you Ever Have a Family.

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The New York City Reading Series Census is an ongoing project to catalogue the contemporary literary scene. Any reading series curator in the New York area can take the survey here.

Writers Read is showcase for writers and a celebration of the spoken word. Here’s the trailer and playlist from a recent sold-out show, “The First Time”.

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Karan Mahajan was at BookCourt in Brooklyn to discuss his novel The Association of Small Bombs with Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers. The Association of Small Bombs explores the lives of the people involved in a minor terror attack in an Indian market. The novel looks at both victims and perpetrators.

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The New York City Reading Series Census is an ongoing project to catalogue the contemporary literary scene. Any reading series curator in the New York area can take the survey here.

What is the name of the series, and what is the significance or meaning of the series name?
Brew: An Evening of Literary Works is somewhat nebulous and all-encompassing in name–intentionally so–so that no type of writing nor any sort of reader should ever be excluded. Brew is a concoction, a contriving, a plan, a mixture of unusual ingredients.

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