December 7, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

KGB, 85 East 4th Street (btw 2nd and 3rd Avenue)

From KGB:

Fiction writer Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia’s M.F.A. program this year and is working on her first novel, girlchild. Against the trappings ofsevere poverty, abuse, alcoholism, and mental and emotional handicaps that mark The Calle – a world where ‘every house has a hitch’ – girlchild’s young narrator, Rory, is not only drawn by the language she uses to tell her storybut also discovers that through language she can examine the politics of memory and underclass representation. Ms. Hassman’s writing has been published in The Portland Review Literary Journal, Paper Street Press,Flamingo, and Tantalum.

Stephanie Anderson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Painted Bride Quarterly and TYPO.  Her chapbook, In the Particular Particular, won the
2006 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook competition.  She grew up in Pennsylvania and currently teaches in Brooklyn and Harlem.

David Gerrard is a fiction writer who has recently completed his first novel, Short Century. Set during the 1960s and the present day, Short Century
each the more he tries to break away.

tells the story of a journalist who sets out to rebel both against his wealthy WASP family and against the nihilistic worldview of a famous professor whom he befriends, but finds himself growing more entangled with

December 5, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

KGB, 85 East 4th Street (btw 2nd and 3rd Avenue)

From KGB:

Trav S.D. reads from No Applause–Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; Leanne Shapton reads and shows slides from Was She Pretty; and Lucy Bledsoe reads from The Ice Cave.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe recounts her adventures in Antarctica where she camped out with geologists studying global warming, biologists studying penguins, and astrophysicists studying the big bang. This book investigates one woman’s 21st century affair with the wildest continent on earth.

December 10, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

KGB, 85 East 4th Street (btw 2nd and 3rd Avenue)

From KGB:

Nell Freudenberger’s collection of stories, Lucky Girls, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 205 she was the recipient of a Whiting Writes Award. She lives in New York City and she reads from her novel:The Dissident

“Nell Freudenberger is awesomely skilled at making characters, setting scenes, and launching in old-fashioned plot suited to the twenty-first century…” Benjamin Kunkel

Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive and Homeland. He teaches at Columbia University. He reads from new work.

Jordi Puntí is a regular contributor to El País in Barcelona. He has published short-story collections such as Pell d’armadill and Animals tristos, and his work has been included in several anthologies of new Spanish writers, such as After Hours, Mar y montaña, and Pequeñas resistencias. He has also translated work by Daniel Pennac, Amélie Nothomb, Marie Darrieussecq, and Paul Auster, among others. He reads new work.

December 1, 2006 / 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm

KGB, 85 East 4th Street (btw 2nd and 3rd Avenue)

From Akashic:

Akashic Books, Seven Stories Press, and the Independent & Small Press Book Fair Present A Pre-Book Fair Fiesta in Manhattan on Friday, Dec. 1, 8pm-11pm at KGB BAR (85 E. 4th St. at 2nd Ave.).

December 8, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Labyrinth Books
536 West 112th Street
New York, NY 10025

From Labyrinth:

Since its founding in 1898, the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) has served as the city’s aesthetic gatekeeper, evaluating all works of art intended for display on city property. And over the years, the commission’s domain has expanded dramatically to include everything from parks and courthouses to trash cans and sidewalks. In The Politics of Urban Beauty, Michele H. Bogart argues that this unprecedented authority has made the commission host to some complex negotiations, involving artists, architects, business leaders, activists, and politicians, about not only the role of art in urban design, but also the shape and meaning of the city and its public spaces.  

Michele H. Bogart is professor of art history at Stony Brook University. She was vice president of the Art Commission of the City of New York from 1999 to 2003 and is a member of an advisory group to the commission. She also is the author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890 - 1930 and Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, both published by the University of Chicago Press .

December 5, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Labyrinth Books
536 West 112th Street
New York, NY 10025

From Labyrinth:

Can love really be considered another form of technology? Dominic Pettman says it canalthough not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the “human” in the information age. 

Dominic Pettman is Visiting Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the New School . He is the author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion and Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (with Justin Clemens).

December 4, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Labyrinth Books
536 West 112th Street
New York, NY 10025

From Labyrinth:

Revolutions, social movements, religious and ethnic conflict, nationalism and civil rights, and transnational movements: these forms of contentious politics combine in Charles Tilly’s and Sidney Tarrow’s Contentious Politics . The book presents a set of analytical tools and procedures for study, comparison, and explanation of these very different sorts of contention. Drawing on many historical and contemporary cases, the book shows that similar principles describe and explain a wide variety of struggles as well as many more routine forms of politics. Tilly and Tarrow have written the book to introduce readers to an exciting new program of political and sociological analysis.

Charles Tilly is Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University and is the author most recently of Why? (Princeton University Press, 2006), which was reviewed by Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker.

Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and Professor of Sociology at Cornell. His latest books are The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and (with Donatella della Porta, eds.) Transnational Protest And Global Activism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

December 1, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Labyrinth Books
536 West 112th Street
New York, NY 10025

From Labyrinth:

About Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies:

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body.

About Strange Harvest:

Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors.

Lesley A. Sharp is professor of anthropology at Barnard College and associate professor of anthropology and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.

December 5, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

McNally Robinson Booksellers, 52 Prince St, New York, NY

From McNally Robinson:

With Bridgett Davis, Martha Southgate and Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Bridgett Davis, Martha Southgate, and Eisa Nefertari Ulen each write within a powerful tradition of black women in literature. Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left, about a daughter coming to terms with her mother’s work in 1970s Blaxploitation films. Eisa Nefertari Ulen has written Crystelle Mourning, telling the story of a woman returning from her successful life in New York to her childhood home in West Philadelphia. Independent filmmaker Bridgett Davis’ most recent book is Shifting Through Neutral, a novel of fathers and daughters, mothers and lovers, Stevie Wonder and General Motors. Join us as these three authors meet in a panel discussion to talk about their history and heritage, the women writers who have influenced them, and the traditional themes in their own work.

December 4, 2006 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

McNally Robinson Booksellers, 52 Prince St, New York, NY

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

From McNally Robinson:

The fourth and final book in our ongoing series of discussions of contemporary Latin American literature is The Hour of the Star, an enigmatic short novel from one of Brazil’s greatest authors. Lispector’s intellectual bohemian narrator is fascinated and repelled by his subject, a girl living in the ignorance of poverty, and both move inexorably toward a kind of redemption, or destruction. Please join us downstairs at the bookstore for what is always a lively discussion.