Last year, New York City’s literary community wondered if the city retained the magic of writerly mythology. For some, the question was never serious. For others, they had already left. The woman responsible for all of this sudden concern with place was Sari Botton, editor of the essay collection Goodbye to All That. Last December, Botton celebrated that book at Housing Works. The book had launched in October, leading to months long contemplation for many writers confronting their own debate as to whether they should stay or go.

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Thomas Page McBee, a long time columnist at The Rumpus, read from his memoir Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man. He was joined at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn by poet and Buzzfeed editor Saeed Jones, author of the collection Prelude to Bruise.

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Jac Jemc read from the collection of very short stories, A Different Bed Every Time at Community Bookstore at an event sponsored by Volume 1 Brooklyn. She was joined by Sasha Fletcher.

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Novelist and scholar Siri Hustvedt celebrated the release of the paperback edition of her novel The Blazing World at McNally Jackson Books. The novel unfolds as a series of documents that slowly reveal the puzzle of the plot.

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David Shafer’s debut novel Whiskey Tango Foxtrot follows three young people as they entangle themselves in a global conspiracy. Two college friends, Mark and Leo, along with non-profit worker Leila, find themselves fighting a conspiracy to privatize all data. Shafer was joined at Community Bookstore by Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, a trilogy of books about a young man from Brooklyn who enrolls in a magician’s school.

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ARTS By The People (ABTP) is a nonprofit organization based in Northern New Jersey that runs workshops in the fields of visual and performing arts as well as creative writing. ABTP also holds reading series throughout the year and an open mic event, The Platform, the first Wednesday of every month at Drip Coffee in Morristown, New Jersey. Most recently, ABTP collaborated with Warrior Writers (WW), a national nonprofit that works with servicemen and veterans, hosting a reading at Drip on Tuesday, October 14th. Paul Rabinowitz, the founder of ABTP and a veteran himself, read alongside six Warrior Writers. The reading was the embodiment of ABTP’s belief that “the arts can bridge social divisions and strengthen understanding, collaboration and acceptance in communities.”

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Jane Smiley has launched a new trilogy titled The Last Hundred Years focusing on, unsurprisingly, a century of time. Some Luck, the first novel of the series, begins in 1919 in the heartland of central Iowa focused on a family of fivec children. Smiley read from the book at BookCourt last week.

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