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.

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What is the name of the series, and what is the significance or meaning of the series name?
Final Fantasy Reading Series. The name is meant to evoke escapism, adventure, and imagination, and is in no way a reference to any intellectual property owned by Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd, or its subsidiaries.

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Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America presciently predicted the rise of American fascism. An alternate history set during the 1940 presidential election, the character of Philip Roth narrates the story of his family living in Newark, New Jersey as Charles Lindbergh challenges the presidential election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the aftermath of a fascist President.

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Mary Miller was at Greenlight Bookstore to discuss her latest story collection, Always Happy Hour, with Helen Ellis, author of the hilarious story collection American Housewife.

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Wendy J Fox is the author of The Pull of It and The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories. She first met Lisa Morrow in Turkey, and for a time were both neighbors in the same apartment block. Ten years have passed, but the two recently caught up to discuss Fox’s new book.

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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.

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My family’s undocumented past in America wasn’t known to me until I applied for dual citizenship with Italy not long ago. The vital records I gathered in the process offered a startling new perspective on our lineage, though it didn’t seem to matter much at the time. Some relatives even chuckled over how my great grandfather could’ve spent eighteen years living and working “illegally” as an economic migrant, not becoming naturalized until the 1930s, well after my grandmother was born. No one ever questioned his, or our family’s, place in this country as Americans. After all, his story was the embodiment of the American dream, having escaped the extreme poverty that ravaged the Sicily he knew in search of a better life.

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