March 20, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Barnes & Noble Booksellers
Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center
1972 Broadway
New York, NY

The author of Girl with a Pearl Earring returns with another engrossing, realistic historical novel, this one set in the final decade of the 18th century. Burning Bright follows Thomas Kellaway and his family as they migrate from rural Dorset to London, where Thomas has found work as a circus carpenter and builder. The novel foregrounds the experiences of Kellaway’s son Jem and his pretty sister Maisie as they adjust with varying degrees of success to urban life and the vicissitudes of adulthood. As in her previous novels, Chevalier mixes historical characters and her own creations; among the real people vividly portrayed here are circus pioneer Philip Astley and radical poet/engraver William Blake.

March 20, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Barnes & Noble Booksellers
Astor Place
Astor Place
4 Astor Place
New York, NY

Peter Ho Davies was born in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents. He has degrees in Physics and English, and was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He has worked in Malaysia, Singapore, and the USA, and was also, for a time, UK business manager for Varsity.

March 21, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Barnes & Noble Booksellers
Union Square
Union Square
33 East 17th Street
New York, NY

From the incomparable Jonathan Lethem, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art

Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. Most of the time, the work is excruciatingly tedious. But one frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminations and opaque self-reflections. In blatant defiance of the rules, Lucinda and the Complainer arrange a face-to-face meeting—and fall desperately in love.

April 2, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

Iran’s nuclear ambitions have thrust this increasingly powerful country into the international spotlight, attracting media attention to a degree not seen since the late 1970s, when a popular revolutionary movement toppled its pro-U.S. monarchy. Yet most people’s knowledge of Iran stops short at the 1979 hostage crisis and the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. In this brilliant and lucid new historical narrative, a preeminent scholar of modern Iran fills a crucial gap in our understanding of the nation that has emerged as the United States’ prime antagonist.

Hamid Dabashi, an internationally renowned cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history and Islamic culture, traces the full sweep of that country’s history over the past two centuries with unprecedented analysis of key events, cultural trends, and political developments, up to the collapse of the reform movement and the emergence of the new and combative presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

An academically acclaimed and globally celebrated cultural critic, Hamid  Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative  Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of highly  acclaimed books and articles on Iran, medieval and modern Islam, comparative  literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art, among them: Theology of  Discontent ; Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future ; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran and an edited volume, Dreams  of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema . He lives in New York City.

March 30, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

While some people study globalization, others live their lives as global experiments. This book brings together people who do both. The authors or subjects of these studies are of diverse national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. What they have in common is a connection to Morocco. It is from this shared space that they draw on personal stories, fieldwork, and literary and linguistic analysis to provide a critical, socially reflexive response to the conceptions of culture, identity, and mobility that animate debates on migration and cosmopolitanism. On the trail of the Bedouin or Europe’s new nomads and of Zaccarias Moussaoui Places We Share explores the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, and how physically moving can be a way of escaping the stigma of being an immigrant. Reading Rushdie, listening to Moroccan women converse in the UAE, or examining how the experience of serial migration can shape comparative ethnography we become more aware of how moving pushes us up against the limits of global experience. These limits must be recognized. They can be positively embraced to develop new ways of conceiving of ourselves, the world and our connections to others.

List of Contributors
Leila Abouhouraira, Fatima Badry, Shana Cohen, Evelyn A. Early, Nabiha Jerad, Smain Laacher, Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, Nick Mai, Justin McGuinness, Susan Ossman, Nadia Tazi, and Susan Terrio.

About the Author
Susan Ossman is senior lecturer at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.

March 28, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

Join Labyrinth Books, New York for an evening with Diane Coyle, author of The Soulful Science. A reception and book signing will follow.

To many, Thomas Carlyle’s put-down of economics as “the dismal science” is as fitting now as it was 150 years ago. But Diane Coyle argues that economics today is more soulful than dismal, a more practical and human science than ever before. Building on the popularity of books such as Freakonomics that have applied economic thinking to the paradoxes of everyday life, The Soulful Science describes the remarkable creative renaissance in how economics is addressing the most fundamental questions–and how it is starting to help solve problems such as poverty and global warming. A lively and entertaining tour of the most exciting new economic thinking about big-picture problems, The Soulful Science uncovers the hidden humanization of economics over the past two decades.

Coyle shows how better data, increased computing power, and techniques such as game theory have transformed economic theory and practice in recent years, enabling economists to make huge strides in understanding real human behavior. Using insights from psychology, evolution, and complexity, economists are revolutionizing efforts to solve the world’s most serious problems by giving policymakers a new and vastly more accurate picture of human society than ever before. They are also building our capacity to understand how what we do today shapes what the world will look like tomorrow. And the consequences of these developments for human life, for governments, and for businesses are only now starting to be realized–in areas such as resource auctions, pollution-credit trading, and monetary policy.

The Soulful Science tells us how economics got its soul back–and how it just might help save the planet’s.

Diane Coyle is a writer and Harvard economics Ph.D. whose books include Sex, Drugs and Economics: An Unconventional Introduction to Economics and The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy . A member of the UK Competition Commission and a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, she also runs an economic consulting firm, Enlightenment Economics. A former economics editor of the Independent newspaper, she lives in London.

March 27, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq — Unchecked and Unbalanced
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 7PM — Labyrinth Books New York (NY)

Join Labyrinth Books, New York for an evening with Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq, authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced. A reception and book signing will follow.

Thirty years after the Church Committee unearthed COINTELPRO and other instances of illicit executive behavior on the domestic and international fronts, the Bush administration has elevated the flaws identified by the committee into first principles of government.

Through a constellation of non-public laws and opaque, unaccountable institutions, the current administration has created a secret presidency run by classified presidential decisions and orders about national security. A hyperactive Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice is intent on eliminating checks on presidential power and testing that power’s limits.

With a partisan Congress predictably reluctant to censure a politically aligned president, it is all the more important for citizens themselves to demand disclosure, oversight, and restraint of sweeping claims of executive power. This book is the first step.

Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. is senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He was chief counsel to the Church Committee. Aziz Z. Huq is associate counsel at the Brennan Center and previously clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court. They both live in New York City.

March 26, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

Join Labyrinth Books, New York for an evening with Alice Crary, author of Beyond Moral Judgment. A reception and book signing will follow.

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary’s book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, “good,” “wrong,” “selfish,” “courageous”) and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments.

Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person’s modes of speech.

Alice Crary is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research.

March 22, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

Join Labyrinth Books New York for a reading with Carolin Emcke, author of Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter. A book signing and reception will follow.

Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time–in Iraq , Lebanon , Afghanistan , and New York City on September 11th, among many other places. Originally addressing only a small group of friends, Carolin Emcke started the first letter after returning from Kosovo, where she saw the aftermath of ethnic cleansing in 1999. She began writing to overcome her speechlessness about the horrors of war and her own sense of failure as a reporter. Eventually, writing a letter became a ritual Emcke performed following her return from each nightmare she experienced. First published in 2004 to great acclaim, Echoes of Violence in 2005 was named German political book of the year and was a finalist for the international Lettre-Ulysses award for the art of reportage.

Combining narrative with philosophic reflection, Emcke describes wars and human rights abuses around the world–the suffering of civilians caught between warring factions in Colombia , the heartbreaking plight of homeless orphans in Romania , and the near-slavery of garment workers in Nicaragua . Freed in the letters from journalistic conventions that would obscure her presence as a witness, Emcke probes the abyss of violence and explores the scars it leaves on landscapes external and internal.

Carolin Emcke is a journalist, political theorist, and writer. She has a doctorate in philosophy and has been a visiting lecturer in political theory at Yale. As a staff writer for the foreign news desk of Der Spiegel , she has written about war crimes and human rights violations around the world. In 2006 she was awarded the Ernst Bloch Förderpreis, a German award given to scholars and philosophers of extraordinary promise. She lives in Berlin .

March 21, 2007 / 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

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

From Labyrinth:

Join Labyrinth Books, New York for a reading with Michael Eigen author of Feeling Matters. A reception and book signing will follow.

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing. Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other’s feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don’t exist.

A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere. We see in the depths of private lives forces that get magnified in the larger world, and in our secret beings we find magnified hints of forces that go undetected in the social sphere. Social reform is not enough without working on oneself. Feelings matter in private life and in the public sphere. Failure to do justice to living experience, in families, business or governance, is to fail to do justice to life.