Justin Taylor’s new collection of stories, Flings, traverses the globe with disconnected characters. Jess Row’s new novel, Your Face in Mine follows the story of Kelly Thorndike’s return to his hometown of Baltimore where he meets a former childhood friend who has undergone racial reassignment surgery, becoming a black man. The two met up at Housing Works to talk about the construction of place and setting in fiction.

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Vanessa Manko’s debut novel, The Invention of Exile, explores the life of a man in exile. Russian national Austin Voronkov is deported from the United States during the first red scare and spends a lifetime trying to return. Manko launched the book, with help from H.I.P. Lit, at Powerhouse Arena, discussing the novel and what it means to be American with Salman Rushdie.

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Matthew Thomas read from his debut novel We Are Not Ourselves, an family novel based around Irish immigrants in New York City, at BookCourt in Brooklyn. Thomas was born in the Bronx and raised in Queens, but he says his grandmother lived in an apartment in Brooklyn not far from BookCourt until the 1990s. Then she paid, he estimated, a mere $170 a month. In college at the time, he had begged his family to hold onto the apartment. Now he figures the apartment is probably closer to $4,000. “Brooklyn is so different in general,” he muses.

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Mark Chiusano’s debut collection of stories, Marine Park, chronicles the lives of the often overlooked Brooklyn neighborhood by the same name. The characters populating Chiusano’s world sometimes leave, but in the end, all are tied to the place. Salon editor Dave Daley joined Chiusano at McNally Jackson Books for a discussion of the collection, the neighborhood, and Brooklyn.

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Marie-Helene Bertino launched her debut novel, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas last night at Greenlight Bookstore. Vintage jazz band Lapis Luna began the evening setting the mood for Bertino’s novel that takes place in The Cat’s Pajama’s, a Philadelphia jazz club. Bertino, who previously published the short story collection Safe as Houses (2012), celebrated the novel’s launch with a reading that included a dozen guest readers each sharing a portion of the opening chapter.

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Paul Rome’s debut novel We All Sleep In The Same Room captures emotional chilliness of two people distanced from each other by the grinding banality of their lives raising a son in a single bedroom apartment. Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing explores similar emotional distance, though in the case of her narrator, the distance is also a physical one; Elyria taking flight to New Zealand. Both authors sat down at McNally Jackson with Soho Press editor Mark Doten for a conversation about their books.

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Edan Lepucki and Emma Straub have been friends since they attended Oberlin College together. Both women released novels this year, and McNally Jackson hosted them to talk about their books and friendship in the literary world. David Gutowksi introduced the writers.

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WORD Bookstore hosted Amy Sohn to talk about her latest novel, The Actress, (July 2014), with Choire Sicha, co-proprietor of The Awl. Sohn provided pierogies from a neighborhood restaurant and Sicha set the mood as casual, insisting members of the audience should call out questions or comments they pair could answer or refute.

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