Daphne Beal & Matthew Quick @ The Merc (10/1)

The Beatrice.com reading series at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction continues Wednesday, October 1, with two more debut novelists—and though their stories are very different (one’s set in Nepal and Bombay, the other during football season in Philadelphia), they share a common theme in their explorations of how difficult it can be to really know the people closest to you.

Daphne Beal (In the Land of No Right Angles) was on the editorial staff of the New Yorker and educated at Brown and NYU. Matthew Quick (The Silver Linings Playbook) earned his creative writing MFA through Goddard College.

This should be a fun evening, and possibly the last Beatrice @ The Merc reading that will be held at the library’s original midtown location (17 E 47th St.), so I hope you’ll come join us at 7 p.m. Wine and light refreshments will be served after the reading, and books will be available for you to buy and Daphne and Matthew to sign.

29 September 2008 | events |

Three International Literary Sensations in One Hour-long Interview

clockwise from top left: Peixoto, Grimbert, and Agualusa

In addition to the official season premiere of “Beatrice @ the Merc” later this month, I’ve been invited to host another literary event at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. On Sept. 16, I’ll be leading a discussion with three internationally acclaimed authors—José Eduardo Agualusa (The Book of Chameleons), José Peixeto (The Implacable Order of Things), and Philippe Grimbert (Memory)—about the ways that history and memory come into play in their fiction. I’m digging into the reading now—and looking forward to planning out some interesting questions for our hour-long conversation.

So that’s the Mercantile Library (17 East 47th St.), at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, September 16. I hope to see you there!

(UPDATE: This event is now co-sponsored by Words without Borders, an online magazine for literature in translation that undertakes to promote international communication through publication of the world’s best writing. Its monthly publications include fiction, nonfiction, poetry and contextual essays, all available for free online.)

3 September 2008 | events |