(Photo: Mellow Pages Library Facebook)
On Tuesday, Matt Nelson and Jacob Perkins, founders of Bushwick independent library and reading room Mellow Pages, announced on Facebook that their literary hangout, in its current form at least, will cease to exist at the end of the month. They’re making like many writers before them and saying later gator to New York City.
(Photo: Nicole Disser)
Matt Winn, the owner of Molasses Books, describes his business as “just a small used book shop that happens to have a bar at the far wall,” which is maybe too modest a description for one of Brooklyn’s literary hubs. After two years of running the shop successfully, Winn says he’s finally in a position to do something he’s always wanted to do: start his own press.
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This week: everything you generally avoid talking about gets talked about.
Monday, Sept. 15
Hot, Wet and Shaking: Talking About Sex with Kaleigh Trace
Kaleigh Trace is a disabled, queer, feminist sex educator with a mission: to promote “safe, shame-free and consensual sex people of all abilities, ethnicities, races, orientations, and gender identities.” Among other things, she co-wrote and appeared in the above music video in response to Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” More →
Natalie Eilbert is aBrooklyn-based poet, whose work has appeared in Tin House and Guernica, among other publications. She’s just finished her first chapbook,Conversations with the Stone Wife, and will be reading selections to celebrate the debut. If you’re not an aspiring poet and have no idea what a “chapbook” is, the word refers to a small selection of poetry, often saddle-stitched into a manuscript, making it more amenable to a small print-run. Chapbooks frequently focus on one theme, circling around a central image. In Eilbert’s case, that image is supplied by the Venus of Willendorf, a nubile late-Paleolithic statuette found in Austria over a century ago. The poet uses the fleshy figurine as a starting point for meditations on body dysmorphia and the history of food issues, producing poems that are “artifacts of neuroses.” Read an extract here. Eilbert will be ably supported by Morgan Parker, Monica McClure and May-Lan Tan.
This week’s talks and readings: some heavy stuff, ending in laughs.
Wednesday, July 30
The Gatekeepers Screening
When The Gatekeepers was first released in 2012, NY Times film critic A.O. Scott recognized the Israeli documentary’s import. “It is hard,” he wrote, “to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.” Several years later, as the war in Gaza stretches into its third week with no signs of abating, that urgency has if anything only become more pronounced. More →
From zines to graphic novels, poetry to ethical treatises on torture, this week’s talks and readings have you covered.
Friday, July 25
Pete’s Mini Zine Fest 2014
If you love zines and alcoholic beverages and eclectic chit-chat, then this is the event for you. This weekend, Pete’s Candy Store will yet again be hosting “the longest running zine fest in Brooklyn.” On Friday, the Fest kicks off with a reading to celebrate the latest issue of We’ll Never Have Paris, a zine of nonfiction memoir that’s been around since 2007. Curator and editor Andria Alefhi will be reading from the issue, as will other contributors. The festival proper will be held on Saturday, bringing together an array of zinesters, comic artists, publishers, and “amazing delicious snacks.”
7-8:30pm (also Saturday, 2pm-7pm), Pete’s Candy Store (709 Lorimer St, Brooklyn), FREE.
Who ever said that writing, at its best, is a lonely life? We’ve got your weekly round-up of bibliovents that prove once in a while writers do actually jerk themselves away from their laptops to good effect. On the books this week are a wide variety of events, from a reading where you can get tattooed while soaking up some Alt-Lit vibes, to a panel discussion of the King of Pop led by his brave biographer.
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