Kate Axelrod launched her debut novel The Law of Loving Others at McNally Jackson Books. She was joined by Emily Gould, author of Friendship and Una LaMarche, author of Like No Other for a panel discussion moderated by Jessica Almon.
If there is a literary equivalent of a shock-jock radio D.J., it might be Emily Gould, the essayist, memoirist, and blogger known for honest confessionalism, sometimes criticized as bordering on narcissism. Her 2010 collection of personal essays And the Heart Says Whatever earned her a $200,000 advance, and then the book flopped, as she describes in the essay “How Much my Novel Cost Me.” Gould now returns with a new book, the novel Friendship, but the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narrative remains insignificant. Gould pulls inspiration from her own life and that of her close friends creating a story of the friendship of two young women as they bumble through their twenties in New York City. Comparisons have been drawn to Lena Dunham’s Girls, though perhaps without the glitz and glitter of an HBO set. While Dunham’s girls’ blunders transpire across the Disneyland like paradise of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, a romanticized version of an already saccharine sweet world, Gould’s young women, Amy and Bev, find themselves in the distinctly less glamorous if equally expensive brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
Powerhouse Books hosted the launch party for essay anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. The anthology collects twenty-eight essays from women authors on the subject of leaving New York, although not all of them remain outside the city. The collection is edited by Sari Botton, who read part of […]