Upcoming Events
November 2019
Readings: New Fiction
Liam Callanan’s novel Paris by the Book tells the story of a missing person, a grieving family, and a curious clue: a half-finished manuscript set in Paris. Angie Kim’s novel Miracle Creek takes place in small-town Virginia, where a group of people utilize a hyperbaric chamber to try to cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. In her debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, Lara Prescott weaves the thrilling tale of two secretaries turned spies and the literary love story of Doctor Zhivago.…
Surreal Fiction, Readings
The surreal and speculative stories in The Trojan War Museum by Ayse Papatya Bucak examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity. Juan Villoro’s collection of short stories, The Guilty, reveals the deep dissatisfactions and absurdities of life in Mexico. In the short stories of The World Doesn’t Require You, author Rion Amilcar Scott is back in fictional Cross River, Md., established as a result of “the country’s only successful slave revolt,” with deadpan humor and a touch of magic realism.…
Readings From Fiction
Ruchika Tomar’s debut novel, A Prayer for Travelers, explores the complicated legacy of the American West and the trauma of female experience. Juliet Grames’s novel The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a family saga about sisterhood, secrets, Italian immigration, the American dream, and one woman’s fight against her own fate. In The Gone Dead from Chanelle Benz, a young woman returns to her childhood home in the American South and uncovers secrets about her father’s life and death.…
Myth, Motherhood, and Mystery: Four Novels
Nina MacLaughlin’s Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, the women of Ovid’s Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth. Jake Wolff’s first novel, The History of Living Forever, tells the story of a chemistry student who falls for his teacher and, at his death, uncovers a centuries-old quest for the elixir of life. Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border in a parallel universe.…
Challenging Ourselves: Three Novels
Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life. In Andrea Bartz’s The Lost Night, a woman looks into a decade old death of a friend, and questions whether she was involved. Inspired by a true story, Eileen Pollack’s The Professor of Immortality is a gripping, heartfelt look at the way we might choose to respond to recent advances in science and technology.…
E. Jean Carroll Wonders What Do We Need Men For?
In What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, America’s longest running advice columnist, E. Jean Carroll goes on the road to speak to women about hideous men and whether we need them. In conversation with Lisa Birnbach, host of the podcast Five Things That Make Life Better with Lisa Birnbach.…
On Our Mind: Nonfiction
Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world. Susan Cahalan’s The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness investigates the 50-year-old mystery behind a dramatic experiment that changed the course of modern medicine. Sponsored by …
Family Matters: Three Memoirs
In History of My Breath, Kristin Kovacic attempts to trap the fugitive knowledge of the durable adventures – childhood, marriage, childbirth, parenting. In Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, Elissa Altman learns to navigate the turbulent waters of the mother-daughter dynamic. Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of a magnetic, complicated mother.”…
Searching for Your Roots: A Memoir
Adoptee Nicole Chung tells of her search for her Korean birth family in All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir. In conversation with Lisa Birnbach, host of the podcast Five Things That Make Life Better with Lisa Birnbach. …
Rhythm Without Rhyme: Essays
In The Unrhymables, authors Julie Marie Wade and Denise Duhamel explore women’s lives and choices with a feminist perspective in thirteen innovative, thematically linked essays.…
Small Wonders: Short Stories
Möbius Strips and Other Stories collects the best of Tom DeMarchi’s short and flash fiction across two decades. In his collection of short stories, Perp Walk, Jim Daniels maps out the emotional capitals and potholes of coming of age in a blue-collar town in Michigan.…