Lethem and Davis will team up to discuss the New York Review of Book’s re-release of Davis’s 1971 novel: a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption via real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Through the purchase and renovation of a rotting Brownstone mansion in  Brooklyn,  failed   writer (and general flop) Lowell Lake attempts to make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his pathetic life, and he will even murder to do it.

“[Davis] has an unerring sense of timing, of taste, of restraint. He has written some truly marvelous passages about New York. He has an absolute eye for the telling detail… An author who is clearly capable, funny at the proper times, both brutally and cheerfully perceptive.” The New York Times

This promises to be quite a night!  One, we’re always delighted to help promote the inimitable NYRB Classics series; two, we’re eager to see what Lethem and Davis will have to say (about the novel, each other (Davis is the father of Lethem’s childhood best pal), or Brooklyn’s recent/current/future gentrification); and three, this will be the inaugural reading in our newly-renovated back room! That’s right, the last vestigial bits of the café are outta here. The new, smaller kitchen will be devoted largely to keeping a large, free-to-friends-and-customers pot of coffee going, and will free up significant square footage for books and bottoms (more space for chairs at readings, that is).  Oh, and of course we’ll also be using the kitchen to put together the plates of free nibbles we have at every reading (typically cheese from Blue Apron and wine from Shawn’s Wine and Spirits). Hope to see you on the 31st! 

“[Jen Bervin's] Nets has the strange feel of verbal topography: the original sonnet text is a sort of plain that single, select words soar up from like jagged spires.” — Paul Collins, The Believer

The second of James’s three late masterpieces, was, in its author’s opinion, “the best, all round, of my productions.” Join us for casual conversation and maybe a glass of wine as we take on late James.

RED the Book is a collection of personal (sometimes very personal) essays by the next generation of writers — teenage girls — on what fires up their lives today.

“The honesty and beauty of the heartbreaking, hilarious, and often harrowing stories collected in Red are enough to give you hope for all the young women who wrote these marvelous pieces, and for literature, and for us all.”
– Francine Prose, author of the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer

“It’s high time people stopped writing, talking, and worrying about teenage girls and just let those girls speak for themselves. This book gives voice to many talented young essayists, who — either because of their sufferings, their great wit, their sensitivity, their triumph, or some combination of all of those things — richly deserve to be heard. My suspicion (my hope!) is to hear from them again and again, far into the future.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the New York Times bestseller Eat, Pray, Love

UPDATE!!!: Confirmed readers so far: CINDY MORAND, OLIVE PANTER, MAYA POPA

Bring your needles and yarn and stop on by for an evening of social craftiness. Good times to be had. We have experienced knitters on hand to help out beginners, and new faces are always welcome!

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful, entertaining, and surprisingly true story of how in the summer of 1835 a series of articles in the Sun, the first of the city’s “penny papers,” convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Six articles, purporting to reveal the lunar discoveries made by a world-famous British astronomer, described the life found on the moon-including unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and, strangest of all, four-foot-tall flying man-bats. The series quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era. And the Sun, a brash working-class upstart less than two years old, had become the most widely read newspaper in the world. Told in richly novelistic detail, The Sun and the Moon brings the raucous world of 1830s New York City vividly to life-the noise, the excitement, the sense that almost anything was possible. The book overflows with larger-than-life characters, including Richard Adams Locke, author of the moon series (who never intended it to be a hoax at all); a fledgling showman named P.T. Barnum, who had just brought his own hoax to New York; and the young writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was convinced that the moon series was a plagiarism of his own work. An exhilarating narrative history of a city on the cusp of greatness and a nation newly united by affordable newspapers, The Sun and the Moon may just be the strangest true story you’ve ever read.

Matthew Goodman’s nonfiction writing has appeared in The Forward, The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Brill’s Content, and The Utne Reader. He is the author of Jewish Food: The World at Table. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.