Tuesday September 29 @ 7pm

Amy Sohn

Prospect Park West

A novel so “dishy, sexy, smart, and provocative” that even Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada) blushed while reading it.  Join us for the only stop on the tour to take place in the neighborhood that inspired the book!

Brooklyn’s famed Park Slope neighborhood has it all: sprawling, majestic Prospect Park; acclaimed public schools; historic brownstones; and progressive values. Among bohemian bourgeois breeders, claiming a stake in Park Slope has become a competitive sport. In the park, at the coffee shops, and the playgrounds of the neighborhood, four women’s lives come together during one long, hot Brooklyn summer. Melora Leigh, a two-time Oscar-winning actress, frustrated with her career and the pressures of raising her adoptive toddler, feels the seductive pull of kleptomania; Rebecca Rose, missing the robust sex life of her pre-motherhood days, begins a dangerous flirtation with a handsome neighborhood celebrity; Lizzie O’Donnell, a former lesbian (or “hasbian”), wonders why she is still drawn to women in spite of her sexy husband and adorable child; and Karen Bryan Shapiro finds herself split between two powerful obsessions: her four-year-old son’s well-being, and snagging the ultimate three-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained, P.S. 321-zoned co-op building. As the women’s paths intertwine (and sometimes collide), each must struggle to keep her man, her sanity … and her play dates.

From the perennially hot author and columnist Amy Sohn comes a smart, sexy, satirical peek into the bedrooms and hearts of Prospect Park West.

“In Prospect Park West, we follow four Brooklyn moms as they deal with obsessions, neuroses, sexual confusion, and oh yes, children. This novel is Amy Sohn at her best.”

- Gigi Levangie Grazer, New York Times bestselling author of The Starter Wife and Queen Takes King

“Hilarious and juicy, with Tom Wolfe-like depictions of America today. It will appeal to everyone: hipsters, non-hipsters, men, women, Brooklynites, non-Brooklynites, straight people, gay people, and hasbians (i.e. former lesbians – one of the many words I learned in Sohn’s book).”

- A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All

Amy Sohn’s previous novels are My Old Man and Run Catch Kiss.  She has written for New York Magazine, The New York TImes, The Nation, and Harper’s Bazaar.  She has also written pilots for ABC, Fox, HBO, and Lifetime.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Read the New York Times review here.

Go to www.amysohn.com for more information about Amy and her books.

David Baker has published several volumes of poetry, including Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton, 2009), Treatise on Touch: Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2007), Midwest Eclogue (W. W. Norton, 2005), Changeable Thunder (University of Arkansas, 2001), The Truth about Small Towns (1998), After the Reunion (1994), Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991), Haunts (1985), and Laws of the Land (1981). Baker is also the author of three books of criticism: Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf, 2007), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (University of Arkansas, 2000), and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996). Among Baker’s awards are fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. He is currently a Professor of English and the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University, a faculty member in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College, and Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Thomas Glave is the author of the fiction collections Whose Song? and Other Stories and The Torturer’s Wife, and the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award). He is the editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (winner of a 2008 Lambda Literary Award). A founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), Glave was 2008-09 Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. He is Professor of English at SUNY Binghamton.

Yolele! Recipes from the Heart of Senegal

Pierre Tham, Owner of Le Grand Dakar in Clinton Hill

Tuesday September 15 at 7pm

Yolele is:

1) A Fulani word meaning “let the good times roll”

2) A finalist for the coveted Julia Child award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Its 75 Senegalese recipes include favorite street foods as well as African foods that became staples of American Southern cuisine.

Join us for a reading with the chef responsible for this one-of-a-kind collection.

Free event. Free wine and cheese, too.

For more information, go here

Also, go here to listen to Splendid Table’s podcast with Tham. .

Please join us as we read and discuss this quietly beautiful novel.

From the publisher’s website:

A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic chronicle of the Chukchi people, and a politically and emotionally charged Arctic adventure story. It is the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. It is the story of one native Siberian community that adopts a wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. Over time, John comes to know his new companions as real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. Tragedy strikes, and wounds are healed with compassion and honesty as tensions rise and fall. Rytkheu’s empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world.

For more information, go to www.archipelagobooks.org.

Tuesday, September 8 @7pm

Harvey Dinnerstein

Underground Together: The Art And Life of Harvey Dinnerstein

Harvey Dinnerstein is a Brooklyn-born figurative artist and educator.  He attended the Art Students League of New York in the 40s and 50s, and in the early 1950s he was one of a group of Tyler School of Art students who boldly resisted Abstract Expressionism in favor of pursuing figurative art.  In response to the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, he traveled to the American south to document the Civil Rights movement in paintings.  His work continues to take inspiration from what he calls “the powerful visual language of this cultural legacy” in images that “combine aspects of naturalism, or incidental observation, with classical elements of form and structure.”

Dinnerstein has taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, The National Academy of Design (where he was elected to membership in 1974), and the Art Students League.  In 1998 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts.  His work has been exhibited nationwide, and is a part of the permanent collections of the Butler Institute of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the National Academy of Design, the National Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Prior to Underground Together, his life and work was celebrated in book form in the 1978 volume Harvey Dinnerstein: An Artist at Work (Watson-Guptill).  Underground Together contains over 200 color paintings and essays by gallerists Raman Frey and Wendi Norris, author Pete Hamill, and art historian Gabriel Weisberg.

Locally, Dinnerstein is known as the patriarch of “the first family of Park Slope creativity”– in the words of Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn blogger Louise Crawford– and a 2006 recipient of OTBKB’s Park Slope 100 award.

How might the Civil War have ended differently? And what might that have meant for subsequent decades of North American history? In a work of extraordinary literary artisanship, Perry Lentz conceives the riveting tale of a Confederate provocateur in 1863 Manhattan who changes the course and outcome of the War Between the States.

“Lentz, originally from Alabama, gives us an alternate history where the South does not lose the Civil War… In Lentz’s tale, the big historical “what if” is the Manhattan Draft Riots, which is a real series of historical events which took place in New York City in the summer of 1863… A jagged, seething work that truly lives up to its beastly nickname, not least of all because it is such a brutal mirror of the American action-oriented character.  ”  –Mount Vernon News

See www.xoxoxpress.com for more information.