With Rick Moody, Charles Bock, Wesley Stace, Rob Roberge, Marc Weingarten, and more. Featuring music, readings, and signing.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice
(Picador, 2013)

in conversation with
LINDA ASHER

KAREN GREEN

Bough Down
(Siglio, 2013)

Please join us for a special book signing and reception between 7 and 8pm.

Karen Green has created a profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament. In this unusual narrative constructed of crystalline fragments of prose interspersed with miniature collages, Green conjures the urgency and inscrutability of a world shaped by love and loss.

In charting her passage through grief, she summons memories and the machinations of the interior mind with poetic precision, a startling sense of humor, and an acute awareness of contradictory truths and of the volatility of language.

In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world: pages torn from both beloved and obscure books; bits of love letters, medical records, condolences, and paper refuse; old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Made not to illustrate the words but as a parallel process of invocation and erasure, pilfering and remaking, each collage—and the creative act of making it—evinces the reassembling of life.

Karen Green is an artist and writer living in Northern California.
An excerpt from Bough Down is featured in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of BOMB Magazine.

From the dizzyingly precise landscape of combat to the more familiar and no less uncertain terrain of intimate relationships, conflict, and how to navigate it, is a crucial element of effective storytelling. Masha Hamilton, in town briefly from Kabul for this event, discusses craft and the influences behind What Changes Everything, her new novel of Afghanistan and Brooklyn, with Maud Newton, who brings her own experience writing about family, culture and politics to the conversation. Wine and refreshments will be provided by Unbridled Books.

In the tradition of Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, writer and scholar Katherine Angel challenges cliché, convention, and secrecy as she intimately explores sex and desire and their role in her life. Angel will discuss her new book Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, with Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines, a book that uncovers the minor roles to which women have been relegated in literary culture and criticism.

Celebrate the release of writer and editor Peter Wortsman’s translation of Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, with stunning illustrations by contemporary Haitian artists. Wortsman will explore fairy tales and their relevance to contemporary life in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Joan Acocella.