Past Events
November 2015
The Untold Story of Psychiatry
Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry tells the fascinating story of psychiatry’s origins, demise, and redemption, by a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman. …
The Sporting Life: Two Memoirs
By embarking on a quest to dunk a basketball at the age of 34, journalist Asher Price investigates the limits of human potential — starting with his own — in the memoir, Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity. William Finnegan’s memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer.…
Novels of War
From Elliot Ackerman, a decorated veteran of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, and White House Fellow, comes Green on Blue, a stirring debut novel about a young Afghan orphan and the harrowing, intractable nature of war. Haunted by the disappearance of his older brother in the first Gulf War, the tragic deaths of his parents, and the felony conviction that has branded him for a decade, the central character in Skip Horack’s novel, The Other Joseph,…
Novels of War
The World Over: Memoirs of Place
Sponsored by the Green Family Foundation. In Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey, Mockett is guided through rituals of grief by a colorful cast of Zen priests and ordinary Japanese. M.J. Fievre’s coming-of-age memoir, A Sky the Color of Chaos, brings to life the horrors and the beauty of growing up in Aristide-era Haiti. Nikki Moustaki’s The Bird Market of Paris tells the story of the author’s love of birds,…
Cultural Explorations: Readings from Memoirs
Clifford Thompson’s Twin of Blackness is a culturally important memoir that traces an artist’s evolution in the post-civil rights era. Julie Marie Wade’s Tremolo: An Essay seamlessly weaves together the writer’s search for sexual self-knowledge with insights into the poetry of Galway Kinnell. Award-winning poet Michael White presents Travels in Vermeer, Longlisted for a 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction, which is part travelogue, part soul-searching meditation on love, and an intimate discourse on art,…
The Soundtrack of Your Life
In his most recent book of nonfiction, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, John Seabrook, a staff writer at the New Yorker tells a fascinating story of creativity and commerce that explains how today’s songs have become so addictive.…
Three Music Legends of the 20th Century
Dennis Dunaway presents a riveting account of the original shock-rock band’s over-the-top experiences and career in Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! : My Adventures in The Alice Cooper Group. Just in time for the “The Voice’s” centennial, comes Sinatra: The Chairman, James Kaplan‘s definitive biography of Sinatra that picks up the day after his Academy Award in 1954. Petty: The Biography is an exhilarating and intimate account of the life of music legend Tom Petty, by Warren Zanes,…
NYC in Fact and Fiction
In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews and dozens of rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun presents a vibrant narrative history of three hallowed Manhattan blocks the epicenter of American cool — in St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street. In Stacy Wakefield’s latest novel, The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory, a young woman arrives in New York in 1995, and is determined to make a home for herself by squatting in a rough building in Williamsburg,…
Cultural Explorers: A Reading from Essays and Memoirs
Celebrated essayist Meghan Daum’s collection, My Misspent Youth, implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her. Gamelife: A Memoir is Michael W. Clune’s reflection on a childhood transformed by technology. Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude is a gorgeous memoir of solitude in an age of superficial connection, which probes the profoundly human questions of perception, time, identity and meaning.…
November 2016
Book Clubs: What’s Trending
Join Carol Fitzgerald from ReadingGroupGuides.com as she takes the audience on a tour of great book club reads for fall and winter and interviews author Gayle Forman about her newest novel, Leave Me.…
Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on Family
Freeman’s: Family is the second literary anthology in the highly respected series, which this time turns its contributors loose on the topic of family, resulting in never-before-published stories, essay, and poetry. With Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, David Kirby and Claire Vaye Watkins. Moderated by John Freeman.…
Kaylie Jones Presents Two Novels from her Eponymous Imprint at Akashic Books
J. Patrick Redmond’s Some Go Hungry is a fictional account drawn from the author’s own experiences working in his family’s provincial Indiana restaurant—and wrestling with his sexual orientation—in a town that was rocked by the scandalous murder of his gay high school classmate in the 1980s. Barbara Taylor’s All Waiting Is Long,is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania against the backdrop of the sweeping eugenics movement and rogue coal mine strikes, where the Morgan sisters must choose between duty and desire.…
On Writing and the Writing Life
In Kim Addonizio‘s Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, an utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age. From the best-selling author of The Dead Lands, Benjamin Percy, comes Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction, bold new essays on how to craft a thrilling read—in any genre. In Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life,…
Historical Novels: A Reading
Set during the years following the Civil War, Robert Hicks‘s The Orphan Mother, tells the story of a former slave’s quest for justice following her son’s murder. Bestselling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie present America’s First Daughter, which draws from thousands of letters and original sources to tell the fascinating story of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph—a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father and shaped an American legacy.…
Gender Transitions: Two Memoirs
Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality by a transgender woman, Kate Bornstein‘s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us breaks all the rules and leaves the reader forever changed. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is Laura Jane Grace’s searing account of her search for identity and true self.…
Thrillers: A Reading
In Lawrence H. Levy’s Brooklyn on Fire, Brooklyn’s most witty and daring detective risks everything to solve a dangerous triple-murder case. Lawrence H. Levy’s Second Street Station is a historical mystery featuring the witty and wily Mary Handley, the first woman detective in Brooklyn, as she tries to prove herself in a man’s world while solving a high profile murder. Amy Stewart’s latest in her series about the forgotten true story of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs…is Lady Cop Makes Trouble (A Kopp Sisters Novel),…
Strange New Worlds: A Reading from Three Novels
In Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel, Gold Fame Citrus, a couple squat in a former starlet’s mansion in a near-future dystopian society where unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. In Aaron’s Thier’s Mr. Eternity, two young filmmakers meet an old sailor in Key West, who claims to be 560 years old and calls himself Daniel Defoe. In Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines, it’s the present day: smartphones, social networking,…
Happy Families Are All Alike: Readings from Three Novels
In Sharon Guskin’s The Forgetting Time: A Novel, the four-year old son of a single mother is plagued by memories of a past life he wishes to return to. A brilliantly funny novel about ambition and marriage, Jennifer Close‘s The Hopefuls tells the story of a young wife who follows her husband and his political dreams to Washington, D.C., a city of idealism, gossip, and complicated friendships among the young aspiring elite. The Wangs vs.…
Three Novels of Science: A Reading
In Eileen Pollack’s A Perfect Life, a young researcher at MIT searches for the genetic marker for a neurodegenerative disorder she may inherit from her mother, and falls in love with a man who may carry the same fatal gene. In Jonathan Levi’s Septimania, an organ tuner discovers he is the heir to the Kingdom of Septimania, and is crowned King of the Jews, Holy Roman Emperor, and possibly Caliph of All Islam. In John Pipkin’s The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter,…
November 2017
Fresh Fiction: A Reading
Achy Obejas’s short story collection, The Tower of the Antilles focuses on Cuban characters, and poignantly captures how history and fate intrude on even the most ordinary of lives. Siel Ju‘s first novel in short stories is Cake Time, which grapples with urgent, timeless questions: why intelligent girls make terrible choices, where to negotiate a private self in an increasingly public world, and how to love madly without losing a sense of self. Elizabeth Nunez’s Even in Paradise is a modern-day King Lear,…
Journeys in Fiction: Three Novels
Laleh Khadivi’s timely coming-of-age novel, A Good Country tracks the progression of a fourteen-year-old son of Iranian immigrants from straight-A student, to happy-go-lucky stoner, to religious radical. Set across a backdrop of refugee migration that spans Africa, America and Australia, Harriet Levin Millan‘s How Fast Can You Run is the inspiring story of Michael Majok Kuch and his journey to find his mother. Set in the shadow of Kenya’s independence from Great Britain, Dr. Peter Kimani‘s Dance of the Jakaranda reimagines the special circumstances that brought black,…
Three Novels: A Reading
Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear is a novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist and the young translator who turns her life upside down to follow her author’s trail. In Yasmine El Rashidi‘s debut novel, Chronicle of a Last Summer, a young Egyptian woman recounts her personal and political coming of age. Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, Patricia Engel‘s novel The Veins of the Ocean delivers a profound and riveting story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world,…
On Identity: Three Novels
In her collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. In Lambda Award-winning Sylvia Brownrigg’s novel, Pages for Her, two former lovers meet at a conference and find that the passion and understanding between them has endured. Rakesh Satyal‘s No One Can Pronounce My Name is a distinctive, funny,…
Women in Search of Themselves: Three Novels
Akhil Sharma‘s collection of short stories, A Life of Adventure and Delight, provides an intimate, honest assessment of human relationships between mothers and sons, sons and lovers, and husband and wives. Jessie Chaffee‘s vivid, visceral debut, Florence in Ecstasy, gives us an arresting new vision of a woman’s attempt to find meaning―and find herself―in an unstable world. Karen Shepard’s collection of short stories, Kiss Me Someone, is inhabited by women who walk the line between various states: adolescence and adulthood,…
Cultural Alchemists
Award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff presents The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, in which she reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. In Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince, Ben Greenman presents a unique and kaleidoscopic look into the life, legacy, and electricity of the pop legend Prince and his wide ranging impact on our culture.…
Essay Collections: A Reading
August Kleinzahler‘s Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2016 gathers the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection. In The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics, Jim Shepard explores how we enter conversations with specific genres and films in order to construct and refine our most cherished illusions about ourselves. Sponsored by:…
Secrets and Lives: Two Biographies
Jefferson Morley’s biography, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, tells the story of one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century. Nicholas Reynolds’s biography, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, tells the stunning untold story of Ernest Hemingway’s dangerous secret life –including his role as a Soviet agent code-named “Argo” –that fueled his art and led to his undoing.…
Perspectives on America
A powerful narrative and a brilliant defense of American values, Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song makes the compelling case that the American Revolution is still being fought today and that its ideals are worth defending. Richly illustrated and meticulously researched, David Baron‘s American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World, depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius.…
America Reconsidered: Nonfiction
Bhu Srinivasan’s Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism is a thrilling alternative history of modern America that reframes events, trends, and people we thought we knew through the prism of the value that this nation holds dearest: capitalism. Jack Davis’s The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea colorfully reinstates the Gulf region within the American narrative—from the age of Spanish conquistadors to the present day—into a disastrous pattern of exploitation.…
Social Lubricants
Christopher M. Finan presents a social history of alcoholism in the United States, from the seventeenth century to the present day, in Drunks: An American History. In Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter.…
Miami’s Days of Decadence: Hotel Scarface
Roben Farzad‘s Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami tells the wild, true story of the Mutiny, the hotel and club that embodied the decadence of Miami’s cocaine cowboys heyday—and an inspiration for the blockbuster film, Scarface. In conversation with Billy Corben.…
November 2018
Readings from New Novels
Bernice L. McFadden’s novel Praise Song for the Butterflies is a contemporary story that offers an eye-opening account of the practice of ritual servitude, and its toll on women, in West Africa. Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel is a mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar’s violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both. Idra Novey’s Those Who Knew is a taut,…
Readings from New Novels
In Alyson Hagy’s Scribe, with the country under civil war, a woman who barters letter-writing for supplies receives an unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motives. Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife: A Novel is a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia. Aaron Thier’s The World Is a Narrow Bridge is a darkly comic road novel about a millennial couple facing the ultimate question: how to live and love in an age of catastrophe.…
New Fiction: A Reading
Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon is a tour de force that charts with bold intimacy and immersive sensuality the life of a married woman in the grip of a magnetic affair. R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries: A Novel is a powerful, darkly glittering novel of violence, love, faith, and loss, as a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into a cult’s acts of terrorism.…
Historical Novels Today: A Reading
A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California in Hernan Diaz’s novel, In the Distance, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. As the first wave of pioneers travel westward to settle the American frontier, two women discover their inner strength when their lives are irrevocably changed by the hardship of the wild west in The Removes, a historical novel from award-winning author Tatjana Soli. Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King,…
#TurnItUP with University Presses: Little-Known Stories and Unheard Voices
University presses play a vital role in book publishing, but many people don’t know how their work differs from that of larger publishers. University press directors and authors will talk about how UPs strive to amplify voices, disciplines, and communities of diverse types. University presses publish authors from around the world and right here at home in southern Florida, writing on subjects that are broad, niche, and every level of inquiry in between. Without university presses, many of these authors or subjects would not be heard so clearly in the marketplace of ideas. …
Readings from New Novels
In Rebecca Serle’s captivating The Dinner List: A Novel, Sabrina arrives at her thirtieth birthday dinner to find not just her best friend, but also three significant people from her past, and well, Audrey Hepburn. Joanna Cantor’s Alternative Remedies for Loss is a slyly funny coming-of-age novel about a young woman fumbling her way into the mysteries of loss and the travails of adulthood as she tries to make sense of a vanished mother’s legacy. Marci Vogel’s funny,…
Family Stories: Readings from New Fiction
Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging. Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant: A Novel is an exuberant and wise multigenerational debut novel about the complicated lives and loves of people working in everyone’s favorite Chinese restaurant. After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity–and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution in Chanel Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana. …
Family Stories: Readings from New Novels
In The Family Tabor: A Novel by Cherise Wolas, a man is haunted by the long-buried secret that drove him, decades ago, to relocate his young family to the California desert. Melanie Hobson’s Summer Cannibals is a bold and gripping literary debut about three very different sisters who return to their family home to face imminent tragedy and their tumultuous pasts.…
The Art of the Quest: Readings from Three Novels
A girl embarks on a quest to find a missing friend in Almahue, a small town in the Chilean Patagonia in Malamor Trilogy: To The End of the World by José Ignacio Valenzuela. Set against a culture that often fetishizes violence, Maria Hummel’s Still Lives is a page-turning exodus into the art world’s hall of mirrors. Heidi Sopinka’s The Dictionary of Animal Languages is a thrillingly elegant yet raw evocation of a woman clawing her way to a creative life,…
November 2019
Readings From New Novels
A woman finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with remarkable and disturbing abilities in Kevin Wilson’s novel, Nothing to See Here. A turf war between neighbors leads to a small-town crisis in Julie Langsdorf’s novel, White Elephant. In Brock Clarke’s Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?: A Novel, a sheltered man is whisked off on a grand (and treacherous) tour of Europe after the death of his mother.…
Girls, Gods, and Friends
Shobha Rao´s Girls Burn Brighter explores the extraordinary bond between two poor, ambitious girls driven apart by circumstance, but relentless in their search for one another. In Tupelo Hassman’s novel, gods with a little g, threats against the Psychic Encounter Shoppe become serious actions in a California town run by evangelical Christians. Lisa Howorth’s Summerlings is a Cold War coming-of-age story in which three best friends confront their fears of the Bomb, Russian spies, bullies,…
Fantastic Loves
Jose Ignacio “Chascas” Valenzuela’s To The End of the World, the first installment in English of his popular Trilogia del Malamor, is a story of love, betrayal and fantasy – and the ultimate quest for survival. Carolina de Robertis’s Cantoras is a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family, under an oppressive dictatorship in Uruguay. Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous,…
Two Novels: A Reading
In her debut novel, A Woman Is No Man, Palestinian-American author Etaf Rum offers an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world. In Thirty Umrigar’s The Secrets Between Us: A Novel, a former servant struggles against the circumstances of class and misfortune to forge a new path for herself and her granddaughter in modern India.…
Crossing Borders: Three Novels
In A Door in the Earth, Amy Waldman tells the story of a young Afghan-American woman who returns to her country of birth only to find herself trapped between her ideals and the complicated truth. In Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar weaves a story that is an incandescent investigation of love—despite, beyond, and across dividing lines. Helon Habila’s novel, Travelers, follows a Nigerian graduate student who finds his connection to Africa among a community of immigrants in Berlin.…
Immigrants’ Lives: Three Novels
Xuan Juliana Wang’s first collection of short stories Home Remedies introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth, while upending the immigrant narrative. Angie Cruz’s Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world. Ernesto Quiñonez’s novel, Taína, delivers a subtle yet poignant critique of Latino culture weaved in an absorbing, magical narrative.…
Three Novels: A Reading
Monique Truong’s novel The Sweetest Fruits is an ingenious retelling of the many lives of Greek-Irish globetrotting writer Lafcadio Hearn, through the voices of the women who knew him best. Curdella Forbes’s novel, A Tall History of Sugar, tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a Jamaican man who was “born without skin,” so that no one can tell to which race he belongs. A servant and former slave is accused of murdering her employer and his wife in The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins.…
Three Novels, A Reading
Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie is a disarmingly honest, boldly political, and truly inclusive novel that will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and found something very different in its place. Karen Dukess’s The Last Book Party is a propulsive tale of ambition and romance, set in the publishing world of 1980s New York and the timeless beaches of Cape Cod. Lauren Acampora’s novel, The Paper Wasp, is a riveting, knife-edge story of two women’s dark friendship of twisted ambition.…
Border Crossings: Three Novels
In Daniel Jose Older’s novel, The Book of Lost Saints, a woman who vanished during the Cuban Revolution comes back in spirit to her nephew to ask questions in a family story of revolution, loss, and family bonds. Oscar Cásares’s Where We Come From is a stunning and timely novel about a Mexican-American family in Brownsville, Texas that reluctantly becomes involved in smuggling immigrants into the United States. In Steph Cha’s novel, Your House Will Pay,…
Immigrants’ Lives: Nonfiction
Philippine born author Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers retraces a family history threaded with violence, abuse and cancer, ultimately shining a light of hope into the darkness. Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story reveals the human consequences of militarizing the U.S. border.…
November 2022
Mario Cartaya on Journey Back into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints: Nonfiction
In Journey Back into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints, Cuban American architect Mario Cartaya travels to his birthplace for the first time to reclaim his Cuban childhood memories. It’s a search for “the now faded footprints I once left behind in the homes, school, and playgrounds of the first nine years of my life.”…
Marie Rutkoski, Alex Segura & Steve Almond: A Conversation
In Marie Rutkoski‘s Real Easy: A Novel, there’s a murder and a missing person involving two Lovely Lady strip club dancers. Holly, the detective, and Georgia, a dancer that wants to help, round up their suspects as the story’s point of view shifts between dancers, detectives, children, club patrons – and the killer. In Secret Identity: A Novel, Alex Segura uses his expertise as a comics creator and his unabashed love of noir fiction to create a one-of-a-kind novel – a writer and her female superhero,…
J.M. Miro, GennaRose Nethercott & Yaffa S. Santos: A Conversation
Set in Victorian London, J.M. Miro‘s Ordinary Monsters: A Novel follows two children with paranormal powers. Charlie Ovid’s body heals itself, erasing the scars of a brutal childhood. Foundling Marlowe glows with a strange bluish light and can melt or mend flesh. As they discover the truth about their abilities – and find other children with supernatural gifts – a new question arises: What truly defines a monster? In her debut novel, Thistlefoot, GennaRose Nethercott offers a modern reinterpretation of the myth of Baba Yaga.…
Marshall Jon Fisher With Michelle Kaufman: A Conversation
In Seventeen and Oh: Miami, 1972, and the NFL’s Only Perfect Season, Marshall Jon Fisher traces the arc from a ragtag bunch of overlooked, underappreciated, or just plain old players – losers in the previous Super Bowl – to an unbeatable team. Led by Don Shula, a genius young coach with a reputation that he couldn’t win the big game, the Miami Dolphins headed into only their seventh season with a team marked by generational and cultural divides. It featured party animals such as the late Jim “Mad Dog” Mandich;…
Laura Warrell, Tia Williams & Tomi Obaro: A Conversation
In Laura Warrell‘s Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm: A Novel, a 41-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man learns that the woman closest to his heart is pregnant by him. His response is to flee, which sets off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. It’s a story about unrequited love and the perennial dangers of desire. Tia Williams‘ Seven Days in June: A Novel is a story of love found,…
David Yoon & Brendan Slocumb: A Conversation
David Yoon‘s City of Orange: A Novel is an end-of-the-world story about reassembling the things that make us who we are and finding our way back home. A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone. He used to live in a place called California. How did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket? Growing up Black in rural North Carolina, Ray McMillian, the main character in Brendan Slocumb’s The Violin Conspiracy: A Novel,…
Ann Leary, Sarai Walker & Phong Nguyen: A Conversation
Ann Leary‘s The Foundling: A Novel tells the story of two friends raised in the same orphanage who meet years later, in 1927, at a public asylum for women – one as an employee, the other an inmate. When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the place is not what it seems, Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences. In Sarai Walker‘s The Cherry Robbers: A Novel, Iris Chapel and her five sisters,…
Angie Cruz, Cleyvis Natera & Ru Freeman: A Conversation
When Cara Romero loses her job, she is in her mid-50s and forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. In Angie Cruz‘s How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water: A Novel, we follow Cara in her sessions with a job counselor, where she narrates her life story and we come to know a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight. The Guerreros have lived in Nothar Park, a predominantly Dominican enclave of New York City,…
Fatimah Asghar, Rasheed Newson & Moriel Rothman-Zecher: A Conversation
In When We Were Sisters: A Novel, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. As Kausar, the youngest, grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency she knows, or carve out a new path for herself. Rasheed Newson‘s debut novel, My Government Means to Kill Me: A Novel,…
Bruce Holsinger & Lan Samantha Chang: A Conversation
When Luna – the world’s first Category 6 hurricane – hits Miami, it upends everything the Larsen-Hall family has taken for granted. Their deluxe home is destroyed, two members are missing, and their finances are abruptly cut off. Bruce Holsinger‘s The Displacements: A Novel explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world. Lan Samantha Chang‘s The Family Chao: A Novel, Big Leo Chao, his wife, Winnie, and their sons own Fine Chao,…
November 2023
CROSSING BORDERS & EXPLORING DIASPORAS
The collection comprising JAMEL BRINKLEY‘s Witness: Stories are set in New York City and feature a range of characters – from children to grandmothers – living the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. RU FREEMAN addresses subjects as diverse as Bowie and Dylan, personal and cultural identity, and #MeToo in Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life, and explores crossing borders, both real and imagined, in Sleeping Alone: Stories.…
FOUR AUTHORS ON MYSTERIES & THE MISSING
In ANA CASTILLO’s Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home: Stories, Katia leaves home in search of her mother, but finds she’s no longer the traditional Mexican American mom she knew before. When a severed hand washes ashore in a wealthy Palm Beach, Florida, enclave in DEBORAH GOODRICH ROYCE’s Reef Road: A Novel, two women’s lives collide as the world shutters amid the pandemic lockdown. In CLAIRE JIMÉNEZ’s What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez: A Novel,…
CULTURAL EXPECTATIONS & COMPLICATED CHILDHOODS
In NIGAR ALAM‘s Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel, it is 1964 in Karachi, Pakistan, and Rozeena is about to lose her home as the lives of her childhood best friends seem to be unraveling. Fifty-five years later, she receives a call – and a voice she never thought she’d hear again unearths long-buried secrets. In ETAF RUM’s Evil Eye: A Novel – a striking exploration of the expectations of Palestinian American women – when Yara is placed on probation at work for fighting with a racist coworker,…
ON ESCAPES & BREAKING FREE
In DUNYA MIKHAIL’s The Bird Tattoo: A Novel, a young Yazidi woman’s life is changed forever when her husband, a journalist, goes missing, and her search for him results in her captivity. In JAMILA MINNICKS’ Moonrise Over New Jessup: A Novel, a young woman who flees to a 1950s all-Black town in Alabama falls in love with a man who challenges the town’s long-standing status, actions that could lead to the couple’s expulsion – or worse.…
ON HORRORS REAL & IMAGINED
In The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, TANANARIVE DUE’s second collection of short fiction, there are classic tales of horror, several stories set in a Florida town, and two sections of post-apocalyptic futures. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic (chillingly, written before 2020), Due masterfully evokes a sense of dread and fear, balanced with heart and hope. Buy The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. – Due Sponsored by…
HISTORICAL FICTION & FATEFUL DECISIONS
JON CLINCH’s historical The General and Julia: A Novel explores how Ulysses S. Grant’s views on race and Reconstruction changed over time. In AANCHAL MALHOTRA’s The Book of Everlasting Things: A Novel, a perfumer’s apprentice and a calligrapher’s apprentice make a series of fateful decisions that will change the course of their lives forever. In KIRTHANA RAMISETTI’s Advika and the Hollywood Wives, a shocking stipulation in an ex-wife’s will compels a man’s current wife to investigate her new husband.…
SHORT STORIES: AN EXPLORATION OF HOME & LONGING
In her debut collection Tomb Sweeping: Stories, ALEXANDRA CHANG probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. HALLE HILL’s Good Women: Stories, chronicles the stories of 12 Black women across the Appalachian South, from a woman meeting her sugar daddy’s mother to a state fair employee considering revenge on a local preacher. And in JENNIFER MARITZA MCCAULEY’s When Trying to Return Home: Stories, the question of belonging is at the fore,…
THE GHOSTS THAT HAUNT US
In JOHN MANUEL ARIAS’ Where There Was Fire: A Novel, 27 years after a blaze erupts at a banana plantation in Costa Rica, a woman is still trying to understand the machinations behind her family’s rupture. In KEVIN JARED HOSEIN’s Hungry Ghosts: A Novel, two sharply disparate households become entwined after a patriarch goes missing. And in RAUL PALMA’s A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens: A Novel, a man mired in debt makes a deal he’ll come to regret.…
GOTHIC MAGIC & DARK DESIRES
Set at a Victorian London circus, AMIEE GIBBS‘ The Carnivale of Curiosities: A Novel is a tale of Faustian bargains, jealousy, and murder, where for the right price, any wish may be granted. In DEENA MOHAMED’s Shubeik Lubeik, three wishes sold at an unassuming Cairo kiosk link three people, changing their perspectives as well as their lives. Buy The Carnivale of Curiosities: A Novel. – Gibbs Buy Shubeik Lubeik. – Mohamed…
BETH RAYMER ON FIREWORKS EVERY NIGHT: A NOVEL
In Fireworks Every Night: A Novel, a young woman trapped in a deeply dysfunctional family in the seedy wilds of South Florida must make a choice – save her family or save herself. BETH RAYMER’s unforgettable protagonist fights against the structural and cultural challenges of growing up in poverty, determined to create a better life for herself than the one she was born into. Buy Fireworks Every Night: A Novel. – Raymer…
JULIA NAVARRO ON FROM NOWHERE
JULIA NAVARRO’s From Nowhere tells the story of a teenage boy who witnesses his family’s murder during a mission of the Israeli Army; meanwhile, one of the killers struggles with the repercussions of fighting an enemy he never chose. When the men’s lives astonishingly intersect years later, they’re forced to confront identities they can’t escape. Moderating is writer and journalist MARCIA MORGADO. This session will have simultaneous translation from Spanish to English. Buy From Nowhere.…
LOVE & WAR
In ARMANDO CORREA‘s The Night Travelers: A Novel, four generations of women experience love, loss, war, and hope from the rise of Nazism and the Cuban Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. JOSH TUININGA’s graphic novel We Are Not Strangers follows a young boy as he learns of his Jewish grandfather’s allyship for Japanese families during the incarceration camps of World War II. And in ALICE WINN’s Memoriam: A Novel,…
LOVE & WAR
A PAST THAT HAUNTS: STORIES THAT SPAN TIME
BRIAN BANDELL’s The Rabbi and the Condemned it’s 2053 and a man sits on death row on Stark Station in the asteroid belt – will the rabbi who’s had proof of his innocence for 31 years set him free? And in JOHN LANTIGUA’s In the War Zone of the Heart and Other Stories: Willie Cuesta Mystery Stories, the histories and issues of Miami’s Latin American communities, and how the past continues to haunt them, is the focus.…
November 2024
JULIE MARIE WADE ON THE MARY YEARS – NONFICTION
The Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of JULIE MARIE WADE. Buy The Mary Years – Wade…
LADIES WHO LIVE, LOVE & LAUGH – FICTION
LAUREN APPELBAUM’s Rachel Weiss’s Group Chat is about feeling stuck, friendship, and being open to love. Rachel relies on her juicy group chat for entertainment – until her circle of friends begins falling apart. But when she meets the millionaire next door, she realizes he may be the one person who truly sees her. ASHA ELIAS’ Pink Glass Houses: A Novel is the story of the elite world of PTA moms at Miami Beach’s most coveted elementary school.…
ROCK & ROMANCE – FICTION
ISABEL BANTA’s Honey: A Novel follows the meteoric rise of a female pop star during the late 1990s and early aughts after she escapes her small town to join a popular girl group, navigating intensifying fame, exploitation, and complicated relationships. MARISSA STAPLEY’s The Lightning Bottles follows Jane Pyre, one half of the famous duo the Lightning Bottles, as she tries to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who disappeared five years earlier.…
IT’LL BE A LONG, GREAT TRIP – NONFICTION
In Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic MushROOM Experience, EUGENIA BONE presents a definitive guide to how and why people from all walks of life use “magic” mushrooms to enhance their lives – from microdosing to heroic trips – and shares her personal journey through this world. BENJAMIN BREEN’s Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science follows anthropologists and lovers Margaret Mead and Gary Bateson, whose partnership unlocked an untold chapter in history.…
WHAT IS LOVE? BABY, DON’T BURDEN ME – FICTION
In ABRAHAM YU-YOUNG CHANG’s 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers: A Novel, college student Young falls in love with the brilliant and charismatic Elena. But Young’s beloved uncle believes everyone gets just seven great loves in their life, and Elena is number six. Are they meant to be or fated for failure to make room for his final, seventh love? In JACKIE LAU’s Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie: A Novel, writer and barista Emily is tired of hearing her mother’ fixation on marrying her off,…
COMING OF AGE AMID POLITICAL UNREST – FICTION
GINA MARÍA BALIBRERA’s The Volcano Daughters: A Novel introduces Graciela, a young Indigenous girl who meets the sister she never knew, who has been claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. When genocide strikes, they believe each other to be dead and escape across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate reunites them. Inspired by true events, JOY CASTRO’s One Brilliant Flame: A Novel follows six young friends in late 1800s Key West, Florida, during the height of the cigar industry.…
All HAPPY FAMILIES ARE ALIKE – FICTION
In CRIS ASCUNCE’s My Best Plan: A Novel, Gene has it all – a wonderful daughter, a flourishing career, and the love of her life, Isa. After same-sex marriage is legalized in Spain, Gene has an idea: move there, marry, and finally secure parental rights for her daughter. But Isa refuses, and Gene must make a decision that puts their love to the test. A.J. BERMUDEZ’s Stories No One Hopes Are About Them explores convergences of power,…
FOUR VOICES ON SAFETY & SURVIVAL – FICTION
In ELYSHA CHANG’s A Quitter’s Paradise, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as memories surface of her cold, strict upbringing with immigrant parents. How do you love a person who refused to make herself known? In CRYSTAL HANA KIM’s The Stone Home: A Novel, Eunju and her mother are living on the street in South Korea when they’re captured and sent to a state-sanctioned facility – a reformatory hiding a violent reality.…
THE JOYS & HEARTBREAK OF YOUTH – FICTION
MARIE-HELENE BERTINO’s Beautyland: A Novel is a story about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. Beautyland’s gentle, unforgettable alien possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. As she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Narrated by an ensemble cast of independent outsiders who have chosen counterculture lives, STEPHEN HUNDLEY’s Bomb Island journeys through the weirds and wilds of coastal Georgia.…
POWER DYNAMICS & COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS – FICTION
MESHA MAREN’s Shae: A Novel is the story of a young couple in the heart of West Virginia: the title character, who is pregnant, and Cam, who begins using female pronouns. After the traumatic birth of their child, Shae struggles with opioid addiction while Cam continues to transition, embracing new relationships and facing the reality of being a trans woman in rural America. JENNIFER BELLE’s Swanna in Love: A Novel begins with its 14-year-old protagonist being picked up at summer camp by her mom and her new Russian lover.…
SEEKING HOME – FICTION
RACHEL KHONG’s Real Americans: A Novel spans generations of one family, from early 2000s New York City, where young and broke Lily Chen falls for dashing Matthew, to 2021, when 15-year-old Nick Chen searches for his biological father, a journey that produces more questions than answers. In DINAW MENGESTU’s Someone Like Us: A Novel, after abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush found love and created a family with Hannah,…