World-Famous Monstrologist Johan Olander presents his Field Guide to Monsters

In this delightfully gruesome collection, renowned monstrologist Johan Olander guides you through the world between reality and fantasy, where the creatures of your worst nightmares appear—even in your sock drawer!
With this essential field guide, you’ll: learn about monster habitats, life cycles, and how to avoid the most dangerous creatures see historical evidence of monster sightings (from claw prints to cave carvings) read about chilling monster encounters find out how you can become a monstrologist, too A Field Guide to Monsters profiles more than twenty-five previously undocumented monsters.

Find out more at www.monstrology.com.

Submerged: Tales from the Basin is an anthology of literature, memoir, and art created by more than thirty women to benefit those who survived Hurricane Katrina. The title refers to a fear many of us had as young children, of having our heads submerged under water while our mothers washed our hair. The stories, essays, poems, and art of Submerged are an exploration of each contributor’s relationship with her hair, in most cases emotional, often humorous, and consistently generated from youth. An African American writer discusses having her hair ironed straight in the 1960s, with her mother trying hard to keep her from looking like a Black Panther. A Southern writer laments her childhood braid lying in a box in perpetual youth while she, herself, ages. A young woman watches her aging grandmother go bald. A lonely widow rediscovers intimacy from the remote touch of her wax technician. A New Orleans performance group talks about Hurricane Katrina, gender stereotypes, and hair as stage craft. Artist Lorien Jordan has created a series of drawings in response to these essays, memoirs, and poems. A percentage of the book’s proceeds will help support charities based in New Orleans that work with ongoing relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Read its feature on Daily Candy Everywhere.

At our reading, we’ll have several of the authors, poets and performers for a truly magical evening! We hope to see you there.

Please join us  to discuss Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938). We will be reading from the 2000 Anchor Books Edition. We have already ordered the book and it is available for immediate purchase. Go to our specially reserved section near the front desk to find your copy.

The back cover of the Anchor Edition:  
“Elizabeth Bowen is widely considered to be one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. While her novels masquerade as witty comedies of manners, set in the lavish country houses of the Anglo-Irish or in elegant London homes, they mine the depths of private tragedy with a subtle ferocity and psychological complexity reminiscent of Henry James. The Death of the Heart, a story of adolescent love and the betrayal of innocence, is perhaps Bowen’s best-known book. When sixteen-year-old Portia, recently orphaned, arrives in London and falls for an attractive cad – a seemingly carefree young man who is as much an outsider in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of 1930s drawing rooms as she is – their collision threatens to shatter the carefully built illusions of everyone around them. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sharp sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.”
 
I encourage you to look at this new website to to check out the new blog feature that we may use to continue old discussions or even to raise new questions and issues for the next book. Consider using this feature for The Death of the Heart.
 
The best to you and I look forward to seeing you on the 22nd,
 
Ken Estey

Published to rave reviews, Peter Godwin’s new book is a brilliant memoir about a son’s return to Africa to uncover the secrets of his family and his home. Bearing witness to Zimbabwe‘s dramatic spiral downwards, Godwin discovers why Africa was his father’s sanctuary from another identity and why his family chose to stay amidst the chaos.

Read about the book in the Guardian and the New York Times. Read an interview with Mr. Godwin here.

Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.

A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to construct a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.

For more information, go here.

This event will be held at Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture: 53 Prospect Park West at 2nd Street.

Community Forum Night

Wednesday, October 15^h @ 7:00 p.m.

The Community Meets to Discuss:

  Bad Traffic

Neighborhood Streets are Split between Use:

Thorough-fares for Traffic, or Part of the Residential Landscape? 

The forum will address:

Given that we recognize the multiple uses of our streets, what is necessary, and what simply isn’t working?  What abuses are happening, and

What Existing Controls could be Activated to Counteract?

What New Ideas might be Effective, and

How do we Move Forward Together to Make Change?

Judging from response to the first forum, the neighborhood seems to be eager to address the question of who controls the streets:  Should thoroughfares which are relatively quiet and one-way therefore be devoted to traffic trying to move quickly, or should those same streets’ residential character dominate?  Given numerous recent tragedies, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that current double-use is not working well.  Of particular concern at the moment is Eighth Avenue , so we could well focus on this problem, but with the understanding that Eighth Avenue is an example of the larger problem. 

We are reaching out to representatives from the Department of Transportation (DOT) to attend, as well as locally resident Traffic and Urban Planning specialists.  Once again, Craig Hammerman will be on hand to guide us through who to appeal to for change, and how.

As ever, the point of this Forum is to draw together all parts of our Community – residents, merchants, landlords, electeds, non-profits, activists, and . . . . you!  We aim to engage in productive discussion addressing issues of mutual concern, and to thus begin finding actual solutions.  We believe that by coming together we can help each other and our neighborhood – Which is to say, our Home.  What have you got to lose?  Please come out, and join the discussion.  Who knows?  We could even make Something happen.

If you didn’t know:

The third Wednesday of every month is declared Community Forum Night at Community Bookstore.  Each month the store will host a meeting to allow the community to come together and explore some question or issue pertinent to our shared life in the neighborhood.  The topic of each meeting will be announced ahead of time, and we will try to find someone particularly knowledgeable to moderate the meeting, beginning with a brief summary of the issue and then being available to answer questions, serve as a font of information, and generally steer the discussion.  We welcome your suggestions and requests for topics you’d like to discuss!  Email cat_bohne@yahoo. com with any ideas!

Park Slope resident and poet Gary Glazner performs poems and speaks about using poetry with people living with dementia. Glazner is the founder and director of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, (APP). The National Endowment for the Arts listed the APP as a “best practice” for their Arts and Aging initiative.  NBC’s “Today” show, NPR’s “All Things Considered” and Voice of America have featured segments on Glazner’s work. He is the author of “How to Make a Living as a Poet,” on Soft Skull Press and the editor of “Sparking Memories: The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project Anthlogy.” Glazner is the Managing Director of the Bowery Poetry Club.

These slyly simple stories of the unforgiving South African Transvaal reveal a little-described  (and rarely romanticized) world of Afrikaner life in the late 19th Century.  Like our own Mark Twain, Herman Charles Bosman wields a laughing intolerance of foolishness and prejudice, a dazzling use of wit and clear-sighted judgment.  Spun by the local storyteller Oom Schalk Lourens, these moving and satirical glimpses of lethargic herdsmen, ambitious concertina players, legendary leopards and mambas, and love-stricken dreamers lay bare immense emotions, contradictions and mysteries within the smallest and most unadorned talk of the Groot Marico District.

 You’ve fallen in love with her quirky stories on the fringe of reality for adults, now come and enjoy (and bring your favorite teenager!) Kelly Link’s first collection of stories for a young adult audience.

Through the lens of Link’s vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning “The Faery Handbag,” in which a teenager’s grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of “The Surfer,” whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, Link’s stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Her fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!