Threepenny Review Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration and Reading

With Phillip Lopate, Edwin Frank, D. Nurkse, Noah Isenberg, Tom Sleigh, Clifford Thompson, and Magnum photographer Alex Webb. Moderated by Wendy Lesser.

Tuesday, April 20, beginning at 7 p.m.

Wine-and-cheese reception to follow the reading and discussion.

Stephen Benatar reads from WISH HER SAFE AT HOME (New York Review Books Classics), Tuesday, February 23, beginning at 7 p.m. Free reading and signing. Wine and cheese will be served. Grapes, too.

We feel rather privileged to be hosting Mr. Benatar. Some of you may be familiar with the deliciously unsettling tale of Rachel Waring. Having inherited an elegant though moldering house from a senile great-aunt (we all have one), middle-aged Rachel bids adieu to her numbingly predictable spinster’s existence in London and relocates to Bristol.

“I felt now as if I’d never had a real home,” she reflects. Wallpaper is refreshed. Furniture is reupholstered. The front door is painted a yellow “redolent of springtime and daffodils,” up goes a shiny new knocker and mailbox, and dear Rachel is well on her way to having reinvented herself. It’s joie de vivre from dawn to dusk, what with summer lingering, a strapping young gardener toiling away in the garden, and the idea for a historical biographical novel compelling Rachel to splurge on a rather expensive blank notebook and set of biros.

What makes the novel particularly enjoyable is the creeping realization that Rachel is perhaps not the most reliable of narrators. In fact, she might very well be losing her mind. There is, perhaps, a thin line between vigorous fantasizing and pathological self-delusion, and we’re never quite sure to what degree Rachel is straying across it.

WISH HER SAFE AT HOME has been out of print for Far Too Long in this country, and so we’re pleased to see it being re-issued this month in a handsome NYRB Classics edition. NYRB very rarely publishes living authors, and so we’re particularly excited about the prospect of hosting Mr. Benatar this winter.

If you’d like to read a bit more about WISH HER SAFE AT HOME . . .
NYRB’s website here

Asylum Blog’s review here, and

A Write-Up in the Guardian UK here

And some more about the author, from NYRB’s website:

“Stephen Benatar was born in London in 1937. He has taught English at the University of Bordeaux, lived in Southern California, been a schoolteacher, an umbrella salesman, a hotel porter, and an employee of the Forestry Commission. He began writing as a child, but did not publish his first book, The Man on the Bridge, until he was forty-four. Subsequent works include Wish Her Safe at Home, When I Was Otherwise, Recovery, Letters for a Spy, and Two on a Tiger and Stars, a book for young readers. Benatar has four grown children and currently lives in West Hampstead, London, with his partner, John.”

December 15 @ 7:30pm

Nathaniel Rich & Colum McCann

Join us for an evening with a wild cast of Paris Review contributors including (but not limited to) Nathaniel Rich (The Mayor’s Tongue) and Colum McCann (Let The Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer) as they read in celebration of the new anthology of Paris Review interviews and the newly-released 4-volume Paris Review interview boxed set.  A boxed set, wouldn’t that make a lovely holiday gift?  And you could get it signed, too.  And we’ll have free wine and cheese… Oh, December 15^th, come soon!

About the Paris Review Interview series:

Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. In November 2006, the first volume of a four-book set of The Paris Review Interviews was celebrated by reviewers across the English-speaking world… Taken together, these conversations with novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, biographers, journalists, and critics constitute what Salman Rushdie calls “the finest available inquiry into the ‘how’ of literature.”

About The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich:

“Part fable, part magical realism, with a touch of the grotesque, The Mayor’s Tongue is a delightful, literate novel about communication, or the failure thereof – the literal communication of speech and language, and the emotional communication between father and son, man and woman, friend and friend. Nathaniel Rich, the son of New York Times writer Frank Rich, has a talent for storytelling. Language, eccentricity and surrealist absurdities are his – and the reader’s – delight.” –The Washington Times

About Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann:

“In the exact centre of this novel, poised, is a 10-page account of Philippe Petit’s preparation for his 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. Colum McCann’s story of interlocking lives in New York is structured on either side of this interlude, and bears no direct relation to it, but it is the brief impossibility of Petit’s balancing act that holds it together. That breakfast time journey into space has, since 9/11, been widely mythologised, not least in Petit’s own account, To Reach the Clouds, and the recent documentary, Man on Wire, but it has waited 35 years for its full poetic drama to be inhabited in the sinew and cadence of McCann’s sentences” –The Guardian

Wednesday December 2 @ 7pm

100 New York Photographers, book party

Edited by Cynthia Dantzic

“An extensive review of the great range of contemporary New York photographers and their widely diverse, surprisingly divergent, images…  Included are such iconic figures as Annie Liebovitz, Jay Maisel, Amy Arbus, Hugh Bell, Arnold Crane, Bruce Davidson, Carrie Mae Weems, Elliott Erwitt, Helen Levitt, David Gahr, Lee Friedlander, Arthur Leipzig, Builder Levy, Duane Michals, Joel Meyerowitz, Jamel Shabazz, John Loengard, Tony Vaccaro, Mary Ellen Mark, Pete Turner, Burke Uzzle, Deborah Willis, and others, as well as many less familiar but no less brilliant photographers.” –Publisher review

The editor—LIU professor, artist, and editor of 100 NY Painters, Cynthia Dantzic— and several of the photographers themselves will be on hand to sign copies and discuss their work.

*Note: this event was originally scheduled for November 10^th, but will take place on December 2^nd as noted here.

Thursday November 19

Jonathan Safran Foer reads from

Eating Animals

Suggested $10 donation.

Reading @ 6:30pm, Old First Reformed Church (just across the street, at 7^th Avenue and Carroll)

Wine & cheese reception @ 8:00pm at Community Bookstore

Everyone is talking about this book*.  As well they should be; we’re all aware by now that our food choices have enormous environmental, health, and economic consequences, and Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)’s essays are an exceptionally human exploration of the issues.

We hereby invite you to join us for one of the more intimate stops on this nation-wide tour, which takes place in the author’s own neighborhood.  The reading is at Old First, and Jonathan will be joining us for a reception and signing afterwards, here at the bookstore.

More about the book:

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.

Jonathan Safran Foer is one of the most acclaimed young writers of his generation, a “certified wunderkind” (Time) whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He has earned a National Jewish Book Award, a Guardian First Book Award, and remarkable praise for his first two novels, Everything Is Illuminated (adapted for film in 2005) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. EATING ANIMALS is his first work of nonfiction.

*To name just a few… Paste Magazine, PETA, CNN, Salon, The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, NPR, Flavor Pill, Epicurious.com, Vanity Fair… pick a news source; they’ve covered it. Even Natalie Portman has weighed in (in a Huffington Post article, she credits this book for her switch from a vegetarian to a vegan diet).  And I’ve yet to find an even lukewarm review.  What will YOU think?

Tuesday November 17 @ 7pm

Matthea Harvey reads from

The Little General and the Giant Snowflake

Matthea Harvey –professor of poetry at Sarah Lawrence, Kingsly Tufts Poetry Prize-winner, and poetic inspiration/intellectual heartthrob of several members of our staff—will be reading from her allegorical children’s book, published by Tin House (again, be still my heart), and illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel (Is There A Mouse in the Baby’s Room?).  The book is suitable for all ages, but the free wine is just for grown-ups.

More about the book:

In this compelling tale, there is a little general who heads an army called the Realists. Every day he and his troops practice battle formations while the Dreamers, the opposing army, play strange, peaceful games. The little general’s soldiers include Sergeant Samantha, who is very tall and wishes the general would pay more attention to her, and Lieutenant Lyle, an imaginative fellow who always seems to get into trouble.

One day the little general sees a giant snowflake hovering in his garden and realizes he is suffering from a disease of the imagination. He is ashamed and pretends not to see it, but eventually he discovers that everyone in his army has a similar problem. What magical message is the snowflake trying to bring to the general, and to the world? In a time of violent military solutions to global problems, this illustrated allegory by a leading poet has a particular, powerful  resonance.

Matthea Harvey’s books of poetry include Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007), Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004), and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000).  Modern Life was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the winner of the prestigious Kingsly Tufts Poetry Prize for 2009. Harvey has served as the poetry editor of American Letters & Commentary, as well as a contributing editor to jubilat and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

November 3 @7pm

Climate Change: Picturing the Science

With editors Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, and author Frank Zeman

The first book anyone seeking a layman’s understanding of the science of global warming should read…one of the most reasonable, unflappable, pleasantly humorous and least stuffy experts in any subject that we’ve met. ––Popular Mechanics

[A] masterful account of the science of climate change…It will leave you both in awe of the Earth we inhabit and of the science itself, with all of its uncertainties and incomplete answers. ––Seed Magazine

Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA, and photographer Wolfe seek to advance public education about human-induced climate change in a combination of arresting images and lucid explanations of the science of global warming and the pursuit of global cooperation in adopting new, sustainable ways of living. With contributions by 16 scientists, engineers, writers, activists, and photographers, Schmidt and Wolfe address a host of observable changes, from the melting of ice and permafrost at the poles to the rising of sea levels in cities such as Venice and Miami. From discussions of increasing drought, forest fires, and extreme storms to the deadly buildup of industrial and agriculture chemicals, the coverage is clear and bracing. And it’s inspiring to learn about the work of these cutting-edge experts as they marvel over the finely calibrated checks and balances of  the earth’s systems, elucidate the ways human-induced climate change is making the planet less conducive to life, and chronicle inventive approaches to averting environmental catastrophe. In the midst of sobering reportage, the authors manage to appeal to our fascination with epic challenges. –Donna Seaman

Frank Zeman, Ph.D., director of the Center for Metropolitan Sustainability, authored the chapter, “Getting Our Technological Fix.”

Friday October 30 @ 6:30pm
Book party for the new Archipelago volume
Translation is a Love Affair
by Jacques Poulin
translated from the French by Sheila Fischman

A quietly affecting modern fairy tale told with humor and warmth,
Translation is a Love Affair is a slender volume of immense humanity.
A Quebecois novelist with a bad back and his vivacious young
translator discover a stray cat with an SOS attached to its collar.
They embark upon a search for its owner, and when they discover a
young girl with bandaged wrists they are drawn into a mystery they
don’t dare neglect. The world Poulin creates is haunted by dark
memories, isolation, and tragedy, yet it is one in which language—and
love—are the most immediate and vital forces, where one human being
hearing a cry of distress of another is compelled to shed one’s own
inhibitions to respond.

Jacques Poulin (b. 1937) is the author of eleven novels including
Volkswagen Blues, which was selected for the 2005 Canada Reads
program, Autumn Rounds, Mr. Blue, Wild Cat, and Spring Tides
(Archipelago). Among his many honors are the 1978 Governor General’s
Award, the 1990 and 2000 Molson Prize for the Arts, and the
Gilles-Corbeil Prize in 2008. He lives in Quebec City.

Shelia Fischman has published more than 125 translations of
contemporary French-Canadian novels including works by Jacques Poulin,
François Gravel, Anne Hébert, Marie-Claire Blais, Michel Tremblay, and
Gaétan Soucy. In 2002, Fischman was named to the Order of Canada in
recognition of the quality of her translations and unparalleled
contribution to Canadian culture. She won the Molson Prize for the
Arts in 2008. She lives in Montreal.

“For decades Poulin has been teaching us that great literature can be
about small things: the language of love and the love of language, the
pleasure of solitude and the grief of loneliness, the value of work
and the importance of play. While each of his novels stands on its
own, together they create a world that is instantly recognizable and
immediately endearing.”
—Alyson Waters