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Ted Conover
THE ROUTES OF MAN
(Knopf 2010)
Thursday, February 11, 7PM
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Award-winning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.
Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those whose travel them.
A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.
Atul Gawande
THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO
(Metropolitan Books 2009)
Tuesday, February 16, 7PM
In his latest book, acclaimed surgeon and New York Times bestselling writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds. An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.
Lorraine Adams
THE ROOM AND THE CHAIR
(Knopf 2010)
Wednesday, February 24, 7PM
An astonishingly original new novel by the award-winning author of Harbor that moves from a newsroom in the American capital to a cockpit over Afghanistan, from an Iranian cemetery to a military intelligence office in suburban Washington, as it explores a world of entwined conflicts and the way narratives about violence are told, twisted, hidden, or forgotten.
Here are fine-drawn, empathetic portraits of the often overlooked actors of America’s infinite global war: the ridiculed night editor of a prestigious newspaper, an overburdened nuclear engineer, a duty-bound female fighter pilot, a religiously impassioned novice reporter, a sergeant major thrust into the responsibilities of a secretive command. Their longings and loyalties take us, in the course of one shattering year, from a forested city park where child whores set up business to a Dubai hotel where a desperate man tries to disappear, from the nighttime corridors of Walter Reed Hospital to the snow-thickened mountains of the Hindu Kush.
Told in language as stunning for its beauty as for its verisimilitude, dazzlingly bends the conventions of literary suspense to create an unforgettable, groundbreaking chronicle of today’s dangerous world.
Arthur Japin
DIRECTOR'S CUT
(Knopf 2010)
Thursday, February 25, 7PM
Based on a true story, Arthur Japin’s new novel is a tale of consuming love and artistic creation that reimagines the last romance of the legendary filmmaker Federico Fellini.
In Director’s Cut we enter the mind of Snaporaz, the lion of Italian cinema, as he slips into a coma in his final days. Having always drawn inspiration from the world of his dreams, he welcomes the chance to take account of his life and, in particular, his most recent love affair, with a beautiful but tempestuous young actress called Gala.
Snaporaz’s intoxicatingly baroque—Felliniesque—account of the affair slyly challenges us again and again to ask what is dream and what is reality, and to conclude that the difference is irrelevant when such a genius immerses himself in his most natural element: the imagination. A dazzling tale from one of Europe’s most celebrated writers.
Enrique Enriquez
THE JEAN DODAL TAROT
Wednesday, March 10, 7PM
In 1973, Italian writer Italo Calvino wrote The Castle of Crossed Destinies, a novel in which characters who cannot speak to each other recount their tales using tarot cards. The book is divided in two sections, each of them referring to a different tarot deck. The first half of the book, the ‘Castle’, is based on the Visconti Sforza tarot. The second half, called the ‘Tavern’, is based on the Marseilles tarot. In a volume that sets out to explore how narratives are created, Calvino again demonstrates his talent for depicting haunted, fantastic landscapes.
On the occasion of the re-edition of the Jean Dodal tarot, the second-oldest Marseilles tarot known, Enrique Enriquez will be re-enacting Calvino’s feat, turning 192 Books into a Bookshop of Crossed Destinies. After reading a few passages from Calvino’s book, guests will be encouraged to tell their tales using tarot cards. Working as the narrator, Enriquez will put these tales into words.
Enrique Enriquez is a tarot reader who explores the connections between medieval draftsmanship and current cognitive science. His interest focus on the dynamics of meaning-making and on our ontological need for fictions to map our reality. His interest in the tarot as a poetic device has been greatly stimulated by Calvino’s “Castle of Crossed Destinies.”
Howard Mosher
WALKING TO GATLINBURG
(Random House 2010)
Tuesday, March 16, 7PM
A stunning and lyrical Civil War thriller, Walking to Gatlinburg is a spellbinding story of survival, wilderness adventure, mystery, and love in the time of war.
Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession. It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history.
Howard Mosher is the author of ten books. A recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Mosher lives in Vermont.
Sam Lipsyte
THE ASK
(FSG 2010)
Thursday, April 15, 7PM
Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has “not been developing”: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major “ask”—who mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo’s sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the “give” won’t come cheap. Probing many themes—or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.
Annie Cohen-Solal
LEO AND HIS CIRCLE
(Knopf 2010)
Wednesday, May 19, 7PM
Leo Castelli reigned for decades as America’s most influential art dealer. Leo and His Circle is the story of his astonishing life and career.
Arriving in New York in 1941, Castelli would not open a gallery until fifteen years later, at the age of fifty. But being first to exhibit the unknown Jasper Johns, Castelli emerged a tastemaker overnight and fast came to champion a virtual Who’s Who of twentieth-century masters: Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Twombly, among them.
Annie Cohen-Solal has taught at New York University and the Universities of Berlin, Jerusalem, and Paris XIII, and she writes frequently about French intellectuals and cultural policy for a variety of publications. Having served as the Cultural Counselor at the French embassy in the United States from 1989 to 1993, she is currently a Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
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Books purchased at the reading will be signed by the author!
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