The Wodehouse Book Group will be reading A Bounty of Blandings in May, June and July -- one month per story! The book is 10% off during its discussion months.
WORD welcomes back staff favorite and local author Lev Grossman for the paperback launch of The Magician King, sequel to The Magicians. The Magician King brings us the further adventures of Quentin and Julia, spanning Fillory and Earth, and was the best sequel bar none that we read last year. Grossman will be in conversation with Tor.com staff writer Ryan Britt about fandom, the writing process, the relative attractiveness of naiads vs dryads, and more.
Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time magazine. He is also the author of the international bestselling novel Codex, the creator of the Time blog Techland, and a graduate of Harvard and Yale. Ryan Britt's writing has been published with Good Magazine, Nerve.com, Opium Magazine, and Soon Quarterly, as well as the Hugo-Award winning Clarkesworld Magazine. He is the staff writer for the popular science fiction and fantasy blog Tor.com.
Facebook RSVP encouraged, but not required.
Authors Andrew Blackwell (Visit Sunny Chernobyl), James Higdon (The Cornbread Mafia) and Lizzie Stark (Leaving Mundania) will combine forces for a joint reading and discussion on everything from LARPing to radioactive waste to recreational drug use.
For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth—Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It’s rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada’s oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth. From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it’s time to start appreciating our planet as it is—not as we wish it would be.
In the summer of 1987, Johnny Boone set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modem times. In doing so, he set into motion a series of events that defined him and his associates as the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, also known as the Cornbread Maña. In Cornbread Mafia author James Higdon--whose relationship with Johnny Boone, currently a federal fugitive, made him the first journalist subpoenaed under the Obama administration--takes readers back to the 19705 and ’80s and the clash between federal and local law enforcement and a band of Kentucky farmers with moonshine and pride in their bloodlines.
Exposing a subculture often dismissed as “geeky” by mainstream America, Leaving Mundania is the story of live action role-playing (LARP). A hybrid of games—such as Dungeons & Dragons, historical reenactment, fandom, and good old-fashioned pretend—LARP is thriving, and this book explores its multifaceted communities and related phenomena, including the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval reenactment group that boasts more than 32,000 members. Author Lizzie Stark looks at the hobby from a variety of angles, from its history in the pageantry of Tudor England to its present use as a training tool for the US military.
Facebook RSVP encouraged, but not required.
In this interactive class you'll learn about both methods of pickling, fresh and fermented pickling. Participants will learn how to pickle small amounts of extra produce without pulling out the canner pot.
In addition to understading common safety concerns with food preservation, you'll learn the basics of fermentation (brining) as a form of food preservation. Lacto-fermented foods provide numerous health benefits using lactobacillus bacteria to preserve food as opposed to vinegar. We'll discuss how fermentation works, why it's safe and how to try a small-scale fermented pickling project at home.
Every attendee should come with questions, as Kate will make sure there is time to troubleshoot their own projects. Registration also includes a copy of The Hip Girl's Guide to Homemaking.
We've declared this the Summer of Indie Presses, starting with June! Our next pick is Everything Happens Today by local author Jesse Browner, published by the fabulous Europa Editions. 10% off the month leading up to discussion.
Next up is Great Granny Webster, on June 9th. Blackwood was raised in the aristocracy (heiress to the Guinness fortune!) and later in life, used that experience to produce this dark and witty look at the craziness that only the rich can inhabit. 10% off the month leading up to discussion.
Fear of Music discussion 6/9. Jonathan Lethem's entry in the 33 1/3 series revisits a time and place that he's also covered in his fiction: New York City in the late 1970s. In June, we'll talk about Lethem's book, which covers both this album and his own lifelong relationship with it. 10% off leading up to the discussion.
Back by popular demand, join Nathaniel Kressen, local writer and author of Concrete Fever, for an interactive workshop! Kressen will showcase the hand-bound first edition of his debut novel, and will teach attendees how to construct their own bound books. Everyone will make a notebook to take home!
Registration required: $15 (includes materials and workshop); $35 (includes materials, workshop, and a copy of Concrete Fever).
TICKETS ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE ONLINE. There may be spots left, please call the store at 718-383-0096 to verify.
Author David Yoo will present his memoir The Choke Artist, capturing the fears, insecurities, and vicious cycles of the anxiety sufferer with insight and a large dose of humor, in a conversation with journalist Dave Cullen (Columbine).
In this brutally honest collection of often cringe-inducing episodes, David Yoo perfectly captures the cycle of failure and fear from childhood through adulthood. Whether he's wearing four layers of clothing to artificially beef up his slim frame, routinely testing highlighters against his forearm to see if he indeed has yellow skin, or preemptively sabotaging promising relationships to avoid being compared to former boyfriends, Yoo celebrates and skewers the insecurities of anxious people everywhere.
Facebook RSVP encouraged, but not required.
The Wodehouse Book Group will be reading A Bounty of Blandings in May, June and July -- one month per story! The book is 10% off during its discussion months.
Writer and former New Yorker Carissa Halston presents The Mere Weight of Words, a novel that chronicles the efforts of a young woman to reinvent her life when faced with ill health, a career change, and an estranged father suffering from Alzheimer’s. Facebook RSVP encouraged, but not required.
When Meredith initially hears that her estranged father has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she says nothing. When Eliot, a long-time friend of her father’s, calls and asks her to see him, she hangs up. But once she runs out of ways to say no, Mere agrees to visit, reasoning that he’ll soon lose all memory of their estrangement. He’ll forget about her paralysis. He’ll forget about their fights. He’ll forget that he ever stopped loving her mother and be the person Mere adored. She leaves her house certain she’ll say something she can’t take back and arrives at his knowing he’ll someday forget she visited at all. In language honest and heartfelt, Carissa Halston presents Mere’s life with and without her father, and how Mere fills his absence with worry, wit, and words.
More than 50 writers share their struggles and triumphs in The Letter Q, a compilation for LGBT teens following in the steps of “It Gets Better.” Join the East Coast contributors, including Nick Burd, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Diane DiMassa, David Ebershoff, Paula Gilovich, Arthur Levine, David Levithan, Sarah Moon, Eric Orner, Rakesh Satyal, and Bil Wright, for a reading and signing. Facebook RSVP encouraged, but not required.
In this anthology, sixty-three award-winning authors such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin make imaginative journeys into their pasts, telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgendered people. Through stories, in pictures, with bracing honesty, these are words of love and understanding, reasons to hold on for the better future ahead. They will tell you things about your favorite authors that you never knew before. And they will tell you about yourself.
Our next pick is The Coffins of Little Hope, by Timothy Schaffert, from Unbridled Books. Unbridled specializes in plot-driven literary fiction (usually with a big twist). Jenn describes The Coffins of Little Hope as something like a weird blend of Lemony Snicket and The Fates Will Find Their Way -- in the small town of Little Hope, known only for being the site of the printers for an immensely popular children's series, a small girl goes missing. Narrated by an elderly obituary writer, who is not even sure that the missing girl ever existed in the first place, this book is a constant surprise and a dark pleasure to read.
10% off all June!
Pubslush Press presents a social media workshop geared towards writers and authors, published and unpublished, led by development director Amanda Barbara and founder Jesse Potash. Come with questions; refreshments will also be served. Facebook RSVP appreciated, but not required.
Pubslush is a publishing platform: authors raise funds and build an audience for new book ideas, and trendsetting readers pledge their support to bring books to life. Their publishing arm, powered by readers, acquires books from this platform, and for every book they sell, they donate a children's book to a child in need.
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is perhaps the most British book ever written. From the man who brought you Gaslight, a sort-of trilogy full of characters worth loving and hating in equal measure. Due to the length of this book, we'll devote two discussions to it: the first on July 14th and the second on August 11th. 10% off all June and July!
Music Writing Book Group moves on to Margo Jefferson's meditation on one of the most popular (and contentious) musicians of all time, On Michael Jackson. 10% off leading up to discussion!
Akashic Books and Brooklyn Rail present a multi-author reading with Donald Breckenridge (This Young Girl Passing), Nathan Larson (The Nervous System, The Dewey Decimal System), Joe Meno (Office Girl, The Great Perhaps), and Leigh Stein (Dispatch from the Future, The Fallback Plan).
Facebook RSVP appreciated, but not required.
Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust, 1998), and the novels 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), You Are Here (Starcherone 09) and This Young Girl Passing (Autonomedia 11).
Nathan Larson is best known as an award-winning film music composer, having created the scores for over thirty movies, such as Boys Don't Cry, Dirty Pretty Things, and Margin Call. He was deeply involved in the hardcore punk scene in Washington D.C., and in the 1990s, he was the lead guitarist for the influential prog-punk outfit Shudder to Think. The Nervous System is the second novel in his new dystopian-noir series, the first of which is the staff-favorite The Dewey Decimal System.
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright that lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Society of Midland Author's Fiction Prize, he is the author of the novels Office Girl, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, Tender as Hellfire, and How the Hula Girl Sings.
Born in Chicago, and briefly in Albuquerque, Leigh Stein currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she works in children's book publishing and teaches musical theatre. Her first novel, The Fallback Plan, and full-length poetry collection, Dispatch from the Future, are published by Melville House.
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, founders of the must-read blog Go Fug Yourself, present their second YA novel, Messy (sequel to Spoiled), which continues the adventures of Brooke Berlin and Molly Dix.When she teams up with a ghost-writer to create the ultimate Hollywood insider blog, Brooke gets a taste of the big time. But how long can she keep up the charade?
Heather and Jessica will dish on their blog, writing for teens, and the meta-fun of their newest book.
Facebook RSVP appreciated, but not required.
