Mark Strand
HOPPER
(Knopf 2011)
Tuesday, January 24, 7PM
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and 192 favorite Mark Strand takes on the role of art critic as he dives into the visual world of Edward Hopper. Accompanied by thirty vividly printed Hopper reproductions, Strand deftly illuminates the work of the frequently misunderstood American painter, whose enigmatic paintings—of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias, and hotel rooms—number among the most powerful of our time. An unforgettable combination of prose and painting in their highest forms, this book is a must for poetry and art lovers alike.
“Mark Strand takes the poet’s entrance into the silent world of Edward Hopper with a gift of words that allows a painter and a poet to become partners in opening up the windows of imagination.” -Wayne Thiebaud
N+1 RELEASE PARTY
Thursday, January 26, 7pm
Join 192 Books and N+1 magazine to celebrate the launch of their latest issue. Readings from sections of a memoir by filmmaker Astra Taylor, and a play by Benjamin Kunkel. There will be wine!
Frederic Tuten presents Chiara Barzini
SISTER STOP BREATHING
(Calamari Press, 2012)
Monday, January 30, 7PM
“A Barzini fiction invites you into its strangeness with poetic and comic authority, and ushers you out before you have a chance to know what hit you. The fabular and the contemporary are tantalizingly conflated such that recognizable settings (Rome, California, Paris) open up into wondrous irreal worlds that entice the senses yet ingeniously elude one’s grasp. Whether she steers us through volcanic craters, antiquity’s sewers, or incestuous swimming pools, Barzini’s imagination, precision and wit make the ride worthwhile. Sister Stop Breathing is as inventive as it is provocative.” --Mary Caponegro, author of All Fall Down
Adam Johnson
THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON
(Random House 2012)
Tuesday, January 31, 7PM
The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. Johnson's highly praised second novel is a thrilling literary discovery.
“Johnson’s novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native.” -Publisher's Weekly
Susanne Kippenberger
MARTIN KIPPENBERGER: THE ARTIST AND HIS FAMILIES
(J and L Books 2012)
Wednesday, February 1st, 7PM
Over the course of his 20-year career, Martin Kippenberger (1952-1997) cast himself alternately as hard-drinking carouser and confrontational art-world jester, thrusting these personae to the forefront of his prodigious creativity. He was also very much a player in the international art world of the 1970s right up until his death in 1997, commissioning work from artists such as Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, and acting as unofficial ringleader to a generation of German artists. Written by the artist's sister, Susanne Kippenberger, this first English-language biography draws both from personal memories of their shared childhood and exhaustive interviews with Kippenberger's extended family of friends and colleagues in the art world. Kippenberger gives insight into the psychology and drive behind this playful and provocative artist.
Susan Bernofsky
BERLIN STORIES
by Robert Walser
(NYRB 2012)
Thursday, February 2, 7PM
In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram.
Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky reads the English translation of one of her favorite subjects, Robert Walser. Bernofsky is the translator of six books by Robert Walser and is currently working on a biography of the late Swiss author.
Jeanette Seaver
THE TENDER HOUR OF TWILIGHT, by Richard Seaver
(FSG 2012)
Monday, February 6, 7PM
Join us for an evening of tribute to legendary editor, translator and publisher, Richard Seaver.
Richard Seaver was at the center of literary life in 1950s Paris, establishing the magazine Merlin, and publishing Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. He championed Samuel Beckett in an essay that got the attention of Barney Rosset, the editor of Grove Press, which helped bring Beckett to American audiences. It also got Seaver a job at Grove. The book follows Seaver from Paris to New York when, as a top editor at Grove Press in the 1960s, he went on to publish books with content that challenged censorship laws— including William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn Son; and the French erotic novel The Story of O, written under a pseudonym. Seaver died in 2009 and The Tender Hour of Twilight is his memoir, condensed by his wife from 900 pages of notes he wrote over the course of his life.
“It was Seaver who manned the barricades so that the rest of us could read. He was also, as anyone who reads The Tender Hour of Twilight will discover, quite a formidable writer himself.”—Jane Kramer
“This book reminds us how much Dick Seaver is missed, and lucky we—publishers, writers, readers, literature itself—were to have had him in our lives. The Tender Hour of Twilight is as fascinating, as insightful, and as generous as the man himself.”—Daniel Okrent
PENGUIN PRESS PRESENTS
Clay Shirky and Eric Klinenberg in conversation
Tuesday, February 7, 7pm
We're more wired together digitally today than at any time in our history, in a great throbbing social-media hive. At the same time, a far greater percentage of us are living alone than at any time in our history. What's the connection between these two phenomena? Where do the trend lines take us from here? The Penguin Press presents celebrated public intellectual Eric Klinenberg, author of the forthcoming Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Along, and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, coming together to discuss what it all means and where we're all heading.
GRANTA RELEASE PARTY
Thursday, February 9, 7PM
Be it a wrong turn, a bad relationship, a debilitating illness or a war, every action creates a reaction, every move is followed by another move. How do we get out of what we've gotten ourselves into? Granta 118 zooms in close on the phenomenon of the exit strategy.
With readings by featured writers Judy Chicurel, Vanessa Manko, and Susan Minot as well as a conversation with Granta assistant editor Patrick Ryan, 192 Books hosts the launch of Granta 118: Exit Strategies.
FENCE Winter Issue reading
Wednesday, February 15, 7PM
FENCE and 192 Books celebrate the launch of FENCE magazine's winter issue. With readings by Deborah Eisenberg, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Anthony Madrid, and Ish Klein.
Wayne Koestenbaum
THE ANATOMY OF HARPO MARX
(University of California Press 2012)
Thursday, February 16, 7PM
Critically-acclaimed Wayne Koestenbaum, poet and cultural critic extraordinaire, reads from his latest, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, a detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx’s physical movements as captured on screen. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo’s body—its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, “cute” pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum’s text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.
“Wayne Koestenbaum is our Roland Barthes, updated, remastered, cleared for the pressure zone of American mythologies. Delicate and brave, discerning and outrageous, the meditations organized around the other Marx track unconscious byways and the remarkable turns of a highly personal investment. Startlingly original, Koestenbaum provides critical understanding with poetic acuity and breathtaking disclosure."--Avital Ronell, author of The Test Drive
- Publisher's Weekly
Edmund White
JACK HOLMES AND HIS FRIEND
(Bloomsbury 2012)
Friday, February 17, 7PM
Jack Holmes and His Friend, Edmund White’s first work of fiction in almost five years, chronicles the turbulent friendship between two men, one gay and one straight, over the course of two decades. Jack Holmes and Will Wright arrive in New York in the calm before the storm of the 1960s. But their friendship is complicated: Jack is also in love with Will. Troubled by his subversive longings, Jack sees a psychiatrist and dates a few women, while also pursuing short-lived liaisons with other men. In the two decades of their friendship, from the first stirrings of gay liberation through the catastrophe of AIDS, Jack remains devoted to Will. And as Will embraces his heterosexual sensuality, nearly destroying his marriage, the two men share a newfound libertinism in a city that is itself embracing its freedom.
Moving among beautifully delineated characters in a variety of social milieus, Edmund White brings narrative daring and an exquisite sense of life's submerged drama to this masterful exploration of friendship, sexuality, and sensibility during a watershed moment in history.
“Edmund White has written an incredibly moving novel, and the range of the book, the indelible characters, the intelligence, the fresh prose, are no surprise from such a master. But still there is something wonderful about White’s approach, as though he has opened a previously unseen window in the room he has occupied for years, and now it is flooded with even more light.
"- Sam Lipsyte
Bill Johnston
IN RED, by Magdalena Tulli
(Archipelago, 2011)
Thursday, February 23rd, 7PM
By the prize-winning Polish author of Dreams and Stones, In Red is a gripping cautionary tale in which real and unreal combine explosively, making us question the nature of the work itself. Set in an imaginary fourth partition of Poland, In Red retraces the turbulent history of the twentieth century in a labyrinth of greed, inheritance, and entropy, enacting – word by tremulous word – the claustrophobia of a small town from which there seems to be no escape. Never have Tulli’s trademark precision of language and her crystalline storytelling been put to such brilliant use.
Bill Johnston’s translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay and Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, and Flaw. His 2008 translation of Tadeusz Rózewicz’s new poems won the inaugural Found in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.
Tom McCarthy
MEN IN SPACE
(Vintage, 2012)
Saturday, February 25th, 7PM
The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy—acclaimed author of Remainder and C— Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the fall of Communism. It follows an oddball cast of characters—dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut—as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. The icon’s melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters’ ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.
“McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories."- The Observer (London)
“I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward... one of the great English novels of the past ten years."- Zadie Smith on Remainder in The New York Review of Books
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