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Geoffrey O'Brien
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WALWORTH: A TALE OF MADNESS AND MURDER IN GILDED AGE AMERICA
(Henry Holt 2010)
Tuesday, September 7, 7PM
Geoffrey O’Brien’s newest historical and psychological thriller, The Fall of the House of Walworth, is a spellbinding tale of madness and murder in a nineteenth century America dynasty. On June 3, 1873, a portly, fashionably dressed, middle-aged man calls the Sturtevant House and asks to see the tenant on the second floor. The bellman goes up and presents the visitor's card to the guest in room 267, returns promptly, and escorts the visitor upstairs. Before the bellman even reaches the lobby, four shots are fired in rapid succession. So begins the fall of the Walworth’s, a Saratoga family that rose to prominence as part of the splendor of New York's aristocracy.
“A century from now, if editors still exist, they’ll be getting pitches for books that promise to reassemble the lives of O.J. Simpson or Bernard Madoff – long-forgotten characters whose discovery has excited some hopeful writer. That aspirant author would be well advised to turn to The Fall of the House of Walworth – a first-rate book about a second-degree murder – for lessons in how to do it.”
--The New York Times Book Review 8/1/10
Mona Simpson
MY HOLLYWOOD
(Knopf 2010)
Thursday, September 9, 7PM
A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood. My Hollywood is a tender, witty, and resonant novel that provides the profound pleasures readers have come to expect from Mona Simpson, here writing at the height of her powers.
“A darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity. Brilliant, in short.”—Joseph O’Neill
Frederic Tuten
SELF PORTRAIT: FICTIONS
(W.W. Norton 2010)
Wednesday, September 22, 7PM
These mysterious, interrelated stories create a portrait of the author’s life, both real and imagined, as he appears in each tale variously as hero, bystander, artist, and ghost, yielding an enchanting autobiography of the imagination. Fantasy and reality collide as the book’s principal characters—two lovers—meet, part, and reunite, time and again, at different stages in life and in landscapes both familiar and exotic. Death appears as a genial waiter in a café across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; talking circus elephants console a ringmaster for his unrequited love; a young boy barters with pirates for his grandmother’s soul; and as a refrigerator begins spilling mini-glaciers into a couple’s East Village apartment, a voyage to Antarctica commences on an icy schooner waiting for them in Tompkins Square Park.
Bragi Olafsson
THE AMBASSADORS
(Open Letter 2010)
Tuesday, October 5, 7PM
Sturla Jón Jónsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, appointed, as he sees it, as the official representative of the people of Iceland to the field of poetry. His latest poetry collection, published on the eve of his trip to Vilnius, is about to cause some controversy in his home country—Sturla is publicly accused of having stolen the poems from his long-dead cousin, Jónas. Translated from the Iclandic by Lytton Smith.
Bragi Ólafsson was born in Reykjavik and is the author of several books of poetry, short stories, and four novels, including Party Games, for which he received the DV Cultural Prize in 2004. The Ambassador was a finalist for the 2008 Nordic Literature Prize and received the Icelandic Bookseller's Award as best novel of the year.
"I'm convinced beyond any doubt that Bragi Ólafsson is among our best authors."
—DV Newspaper (Iceland)
Bo Caldwell
CITY OF TRANQUIL LIGHT
(Henry Holt 2010)
Wednesday, October 13, 7PM
Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng— City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love—and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them?
Harry Matthews
THE NEW TOURISM
(Sand Paper Press 2010)
Tuesday, October 19, 7PM
The New Tourism is Harry Mathews's first full-length poetry collection in nearly 20 years. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French, The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories, The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays, Oulipo Compendium, and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973.
David Thomson
THE NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM
(Knopf 2010)
Thursday, October 28, 7PM
For almost thirty years, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film has been not merely “the finest reference book ever written about movies” (Graham Fuller, Interview), not merely the “desert island book” of art critic David Sylvester, not merely “a great, crazy masterpiece” (Geoff Dyer, The Guardian), but also “fiendishly seductive” (Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone).
In all, the book includes more than 1300 entries, some of them just a pungent paragraph, some of them several thousand words long. In addition to the new “musts,” Thomson has added key figures from film history–lively anatomies of Graham Greene, Eddie Cantor, Pauline Kael, Abbott and Costello, Noël Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Gish, Rin Tin Tin, and more.
Paul Harding
TINKERS
(Bellevue Literary Press 2010)
Wednesday, November 10, 7PM
Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
"There are few perfect debut American novels… To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers, the story of a dying man drifting back in time to his hardscrabble New England childhood, growing up the son of his clock-making father. Harding has written a masterpiece around the truism that all of us, even surrounded by family, die alone."
—John Freeman, NPR's The Best Debut Fiction of 2009
Salman Rushdie
LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE
(Random House 2010)
Tuesday, December 7, 7PM
With the same dazzling imagination and love of language that have made Salman Rushdie one of the great storytellers of our time, Luka and the Fire of Life revisits the magic-infused, intricate world he first brought to life in the modern classic Haroun and the Sea of Stories. This breathtaking new novel centers on Luka, Haroun’s younger brother, who must save his father from certain doom.
Filled with mischievous wordplay and delving into themes as universal as the power of filial love and the meaning of mortality, Luka and the Fire of Life is a book of wonders for all ages.
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Books purchased at the reading will be signed by the author!
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