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 21 @ 7:30pm

Modernist Book Club discusses Murphy by Samuel Beckett

About the book:

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Thus, Beckett’s Murphy begins, and the tone is set. A strange, bleak, humorous novel, published in 1938, Murphy’s dilemma is that of achieving his desire to simply desire nothing, and naturally, this search goes nowhere. Perhaps not as powerful as some of Beckett’s later and more famous works, Murphy nonetheless offers hints of Beckett’s themes and concerns to come.  — Powells.com review

About the book club:

The Modernist Book Club is a lively group of people who delight in a “modern” book and await the opportunity to discuss it in an informal setting at the back of the store, near the garden. Sometimes 8, other times 18, hardy readers gather to discuss the latest selection. Newcomers and drop-ins are always welcome! No reservations necessary.

*note that the meeting will be on Monday, due to the holiday

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.

Monday November 23 @ 7:30pm

The Modernist Book Club discusses The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares with a special guest: the editor of the NYRB Classics series, Edwin Frank

About the book:

“Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw.  This fantastic exploration of virtual realities also bears comparison with the sharpest work of Philip K. Dick.  It is both a story of suspense and a bizarre romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.” –Publisher review

About the book club:

The Modernist Book Club is a lively group of people who delight in a “modern” book and await the opportunity to discuss it in an informal setting at the back of the store, near the garden. Sometimes 8, other times 18, hardy readers gather to discuss the latest selection. Newcomers and drop-ins are always welcome! No reservations necessary.

About the celebrity guest lecturer:

Edwin Frank was born in Boulder, Colorado and studied at Harvard College and Columbia University. He is the author of two small books of poetry, The Further Adventures of Pinocchio andStack, and has been the editor of the NYRB Classics series since its beginning ten years ago.

*Note: The Modernist Book Club ordinarily meets on Wednesday evenings, but rescheduled to Monday Nov. 23^rd due to Thanksgiving.