Welcome to our newest literary feature, Live From the Franklin Park Reading Series. Our first installment of video from this series, which runs the first Monday of the month at Franklin Park in Crown Heights, features storyteller Jake Goldman, and the (very) amusing tale of how he used his screenplay writing degree (read: useless) working for a (ahem) new media company here in New York. Mr. Goldman is co-host of True Tales of College, a monthly storytelling series that was highlighted in the New York Times. We’ll feature one local reading from this series per week, so get excited, and join us live the second Monday of the month for a comforting beverage and some great stories.
Category: Reading
Good news for all those who love things tartan, or things poetic, or things containing sheep’s heart, liver and lungs minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and simmered in the animal’s stomach several hours: it’s Burns’ Day!
The Best Book (McSweeney’s, $24.95) takes everything you want from a book and combines it with everything everyone else wants, producing quite simply the single best book of all time.
Well can you believe it, folks, it’s December already. And with Black Friday and Cyber Monday and One Last Chance at Free Shipping Tuesday, it’s already Why Haven’t You Done All Your Shopping By Now Wednesday. So before it’s too late (I’m Already Sick of Hearing About Gifts and It’s Only Thursday), let’s go shopping! (Yay!) For books! (Grumble, grumble…)
Welcome to the first installment of Undusted, a series that will feature interesting but long-neglected or even forgotten pieces of writing that deserve another look. It’s writing that has aged well, even if no one has perused the curves of its S’s in a while. Like the rest of the BtheB literary posts that will constitute the section known as The Read, Undusted items may or may not have anything to do with Brooklyn.*
At any rate, the following interview with Mark Twain appeared in the New York World Sunday Magazine on November 26, 1905, and describes what Mr. Twain, aka Mr. Clemens, was thankful for on this American holiday. Click through to read it in its entirety.
Last night Amy Sohn crossed Brooklyn’s psychic divider – Flatbush Avenue – into Crown Heights. At Franklin Park’s Reading Series, the Park Slope maven read from her book Prospect Park West, which has caused a stir among the swanky slope set.
After reading a passage from her novel that takes place at Southpaw – whose investors also own Franklin Park – she read a passage that references a character’s fixation on Roman Polanski, which was written and released before the 76 year-old director was jailed recently on a 30 year old charge of statutory rape. Sohn made sure the crowd knew she doesn’t share that fixation with her character. Watch the video after the jump.
The unofficial present-day Bard of Brooklyn stopped by Greenlight Bookstore last night to christen the borough’s newest independent bookshop. Jonathan Lethem, author of such notable Brooklyn titles as Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, read a portion of his new Manhattan-based novel, Chronic City, to a packed house as latecomers squeezed through the door like rush-hour riders on the 4 train. Watch our exclusive video from the event after the jump.
The new HBO series Bored To Death, based on the life of Brooklyn author Jonathan Ames, has a lot to offer in contrasts between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“Great reporting and great journalism have always been the exception to the rule,” Carl Bernstein said after a screening of All The President’s Men at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday night. For more of the discussion, click through to watch a short video clip.
The description for the Independent Media Voices panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival was slightly more in depth than the subsequent discussion between Amy Goodman (host, Democracy Now!), Pamela Newkirk (author of Letters From Black America), and Richard Nash (publisher, Soft Skull Press), moderated by Dennis Loy Johnson (publisher, Melville House Press). Though the speakers were a little bit disjointed after a last minute change that replaced zine guru Jessica Hopper with Mr. Nash, Ms. Goodman stayed on her point that the corporate media is in bed with war profiteers. Video after the jump.