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.
Jabari Asim might have been better known as a journalist and author of essential nonfiction works like his social history the N Word. He has always considered himself a fiction writer though, and now he has released a novel Only the Strong. He spoke about the new book at Powerhouse Arena with Mike Sacks, Asim’s former colleague at the Washington Post and a magazine editor.
Scott Alexander Hess celebrated his latest novel, The Butcher’s Sons, last week at Boxers NYC, a rooftop bar in Hell’s Kitchen. Set in that neighborhood in the 1930’s, The Butcher’s Sons follows three Irish brothers. Hess was joined for conversation by Joseph Salvatore, editor at The Brooklyn Rail.