Posted on Mar 6, 2014
I didn’t know Susan Sontag well. We were acquaintances who talked at a few dinners in New York over the years. Although her conversational style veered toward pronouncement, which sometimes left her interlocutor (me) in the odd position of searching for a way back to dialogue, I liked her, and... More

Like many people, I encountered Roddy Doyle through the Barrytown trilogy – The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van – three terrific novels, and later movies, set in the same fictional working class neighborhood of Dublin, novels that do things with dialogue I hadn’t thought possible. His newest, The Guts, revisits Jimmy Rabbitte – founder... More

YA author Lauren Oliver talks with Lev Grossman, book reviewer for TIME magazine, about her latest novel, Panic. In this gritty, spellbinding novel, Oliver delivers a gripping narrative of friendship, courage, survival and hope. More

Best known for her memoir Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book is a novel, The Signature of All Things. According to her official website, she lives on the Delaware River, in Frenchtown, New Jersey, information I take as an invitation to drop in. But I’ll call first, so there’s food in the house. And... More

Posted on Feb 24, 2014
Karl Kirchwey introduces Grace Schulman, who introduces Debora Greger. (Your pardon, Ms. Greger, but my subject reads after you do.) Greger reads, Schulman speaks again, and then comes the voice of Amy Clampitt—about an octave higher, and with all the gravity of milkweed. More

Posted on Feb 20, 2014
Ah, the fabled Sixties and Seventies! Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs! The glorious advent of Howling! Of Getting Stoned! The proliferation of Ginsbergian Exclamation Points! More

Posted on Feb 14, 2014
Leonard Cohen took the stage of the 92nd Street Y on February 14, 1966, as if he had been born to live there. He was preceded on the platform by his old friend and running-mate, the bon vivant Montreal poet Irving Layton, and both of them were introduced by the... More

Elif Batuman and Gary Shteyngart take the stage together in one sensational night. Join us as they read from their new books. They were introduced by Lorin Stein and Sloane Crosley. They also signed our guest book, as we have all our literary guests do. You should see the names in there! More

Philip Seymour Hoffman shares a humorous story about his rehearsals for True West in an introduction for a Sam Shepard reading. More

Posted on Jan 31, 2014
I first discovered Haruki Murakami in 1994, when I was in high school. In those days, there was no internet, and people often learned about new writers by going to bookstores. I lived in New Jersey, with no bookstore in walking distance and no public transport. But every Saturday, before... More

Isabel Allende’s new novel is a thriller called Ripper. Her fiction “confounds expectations,” wrote the Times Literary Supplement. “We make our way at an impetuous pace through an extravagantly imagined world.” Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel is The Signature of All Things. Her “prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that... More