Steve Schapiro presents The Fire Next Time
Monday, May 15 at 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
The Strand Bookstore
828 Broadway (& 12th Street)
New York, NY 10003
Join Steve Schapiro, Quincy Troupe and Steven W. Thrasher as they discuss James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, now available in a special illustrated edition from TASCHEN featuring photographs by Steve Schapiro.
First published in 1963, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America’s so-called “Negro problem.” As remarkable for its masterful prose as it is for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is considered one of the most passionate and influential explorations of 1960s race relations, weaving thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the “land of the free.”
Now, James Baldwin’s rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted in a letterpress edition with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders—including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith—and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma March.
Admission is $20. Purchase your ticket online.
Brooklyn Independents Poetry Series: Hanging Loose Press
Monday, May 15 at 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Central Library, Brooklyn Collection
10 Grand Army Plaza
Brooklyn, NY11238
Readings from Justin Jamail, Thomas Devaney & Jiwon Choi
The first issue of Hanging Loose magazine was published in 1966. The name was inspired by the format — mimeographed loose pages in a cover envelope — and that, in turn, was inspired by a very low budget. But the format was also meant to get across a point of view: that poetry is for now, not for the Ages. Hanging loose has published some 220 books and 107 issues — well over 10,000 pages of poetry, prose, and art — of Hanging Loose magazine.
Admission is free.
Claire Dederer & Ada Calhoun
Wednesday, May 17 at 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm
The Strand Bookstore
828 Broadway (& 12th Street)
New York, NY 10003
What happens when a happily married mother of two suddenly finds herself totally despondent and, simultaneously, suffering through an erotic reawakening? Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble: A Midlife Recokning finds her in just this predicament. Tracking between her present as a middle-aged mom in the grip of a unfamiliar hunger and her past as a teenager beset by hypersensitivity and longing, Dederer exposes herself and her life, capturing something universal about what is like to be a woman, a daughter, and a wife.
Claire will be joined in conversation by Ada Calhoun, bestselling author of St. Mark’s is Dead, whose brand-new essay collection delves into the contradictions of marriage and its attendant joys, defeats, and complications. Finding yourself bored with your partner, beset by desire for people you didn’t marry, and fed up with your spouse’s mistakes–it’s the stuff that doesn’t make it into many cliches about marriage. In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, based on one of the most-shared stories from the New York Times‘ Modern Love series, Calhoun turns over the stones that these cliches are built out of and examines what’s underneath.
Admission is $15. Purchase your ticket online.
PLG Fiction Book Group
Wednesday, May 17 at 7:30 pm
Greenlight Bookstore
632 Flatbush Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11225
Led by Greenlight general manager Alexis, the fiction book group in Prospect Lefferts Gardens discusses paperback fiction, reading broadly in contemporary fiction with the occasional diversion into classics. For May, the group discusses Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Admission is free. Purchase the book online for $14.45. Current book group picks are always 15% off at Greenlight, in the store or online.