My relationship with technology could be a romantic comedy—with blogs starring as that guy right under my nose, the guy who’s so perfect for me in his imperfection, so stellar with his boyish charm and manly good looks. Like any good romcom, let’s start with images of my past as the opening credits roll, so you can understand all future plot points:
Kate Zambreno first published Green Girl three years ago through the small Emergency Press. She had the rare opportunity to revise the novel and relaunch the book to a wider audience through HarperCollins. The new edition is longer and includes an extra post-novel section as well as an original essay. She launched the new edition at Powerhouse Arena with Tin House co-founder and editor-at-large Elissa Schappell.
Us Conductors, the debut novel by music critic Sean Michaels, launched at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn on Monday night. The novel tells a fictionalized story about the real life of inventor and musician Lev Termen. Termen invented the theremin, the magical musical instrument played without physically touching the device. Accompanying the launch was theremin expert Rob Schwimmer who performed renditions of Rachmaninoff to demonstrate the instrument’s sound.
Tom Rachman began his career as a journalist, but his true desire was always to write fiction. His debut novel, The Imperfectionists (2010), perhaps unsurprisingly, told the story of decline of a once great newspaper. The Rise & Fall of Great Powers shifts settings from a newspaper office to a bookstore, another cultural spaced threatened by modernity.Rachman read from the new novel at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn and discussed it with his Random House editor, Susan Kamil.
Megan Abbott launched her latest novel, The Fever, at BookCourt in Brooklyn. The Fever follows the close-nit Nash family in a rural town afflicted by a mysterious illness infecting teenage girls.
Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life (June 2014) merges an immigrant narrative with a political caper as a group of eastern Europeans settling in New York City defraud the German government of holocaust reparations.
Remember Me LIke This (May 2014) is Bret Anthony Johnston’s debut about a boy in south Texas who disappears only to be found unharmed some time later, but his happy reunion exposes the fractures and wounds of his family. Skateboarding plays a significant role in the novel as it does in his life, and Johnston showed up at the event with a skateboard painted with the book’s cover on it, special edition board produced by a friend of his. He raffled the board to the audience.
Cristina Henríquez’s latest book, The Book of Unknown Americans (June 2014), focuses on the lives of a group of immigrants residing in Newark, Delaware. A cast of eleven voices comes together from various Central American nations as they acclimate to life in the United States, some legally, some with more questionable circumstances. She was joined at McNally Jackson by her editor Robin Desser for a conversation about the book.