WEDNESDAY
Vulture Insider’s Book Club with Rebecca Traister
April 6 at 7:30 p.m, at The Strand, 828 Broadway
New York magazine’s own Rebecca Traister recently published All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, a knock-out investigation into the history of single-woman-dom and its implications in today’s society. As the age of marriage climbs (today only 20 percent of Americans tie the knot before age 29) women are gaining more power and more options than ever before. Traister, who also frequently writes about feminism and culture for Vulture, will speak with Vulture’s book editor, Boris Kachka.
Book launch: Molly Prentiss presents Tuesday Nights in 1980
April 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Greenlight Books, 686 Fulton Street.
A free-wheeling art scene pulsating with energy– but commercialization looms menacingly around the corner? No, this isn’t Bushwick. Molly Prentiss’ debut novel takes you to the SoHo art world of 1980, where an art critic with synesthesia (a condition where your senses, like sight and smell, cross paths) and an Argentinian painter get tangled up with their muse in an improbable but thrilling series of events. Prentiss will discuss her book with Alison Callahan, her editor at Scout Press, and Claudia Ballard, her agent at William Morris Endeavor.
FRIDAY
Larry Kramer in Conversation with Bill Goldstein
April 8 at 7 p.m, at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby Street
Imagine American history told through an LGBT lens. Larry Kramer, a playwright, author and long time public health and gay rights advocate, has done just that with his new “magisterial” series of novels, The American People. The first volume, Search For My Heart, runs up to the 1950s and includes prehistoric monkeys spreading strange viruses; a sexually-curious Native American shaman; and early settler same-sex couples living in harmony. Even the founding fathers’ relationships and intimacies are revisited, as is John Wilkes Boothe’s motivation for assassinating Lincoln. Kramer will be joined by Bill Goldstein, book critic for NBC’s “Weekend Today in New York.”
SATURDAY
Kerouac Vigo International Festival
April 9 at 12:30 p.m, at Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery
The Beat Generation lives on! The Kerouac Vigo Festival brings poets from Vigo, Spain, to collaborate with American poets in honor of great Beats like Jack Kerouc, Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs. The festival is a poetic mix of video, music and other performance, and includes poets such as Vanesa Álvarez, Aurora Arteaga, Nikhil Melnechuk, Fernando Velez de Montesdeoca, Alexandra Tartarsky, Steven Licardi, Hugo Clemente and Marcos de la Fuente.