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.