For our one-hundredth(!) podcast episode, we’re releasing a very special conversation recorded at our first offsite book launch of 2022 celebrating the second volume of Moon Witch, Spider King, award-winning author Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, his “African Game of Thrones”. In the NYT-bestselling first volume, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who...

For our first foray into livestreamed events and our first event held in-store since March 2020, Greenlight welcomed our Brooklyn neighbor Andrew Lipstein for the launch of his much-anticipated debut novel, Last Resort—which features a scene set in our own Fort Greene store! In a thrilling, metafictional story of fame, fortune, and impossible choices, Lipstein blurs the lines of fact and fiction and raises “thorny dilemmas about art, ethics, and what being a writer really means.” (Kirkus...

Greenlight welcomed author, scholar, and activist Grace Lavery to our (virtual) stage for the launch of Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis—a “memoir” like nothing you’ve ever read before. Part literary theory, part musical theater parody, part feminist sci-fi reboot, Please Miss was hailed by author Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby) as a “can’t-look-away performance of wit, language, irreverence, and delight”, and by Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House) as “the queer...

When Rachel Krantz met and fell for Adam, he told her that he was looking for a committed partnership—just one that did not include exclusivity. In her nonfiction debut, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy, Krantz explores these questions with an unflinching eye and page-turning storytelling, tracing her search to understand what non-monogamy would do to her heart, her mind, and her life through interviews with scientists, psychologists, and people living and...

Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) graced our virtual stage from London for the U.S. launch of her new memoir Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. Manifesto offers readers an intimate and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought bring her creative work into the world over 40+ years of centering the stories and histories of Black Britons. In conversation with bestselling author Rumaan Alam (Leave the World...

Acclaimed authors, Greenlight neighbors, and longtime friends Colette Brooks and Jennifer Egan (Manhattan Beach) joined us for a virtual conversation and launch for Colette’s newest book of nonfiction, Trapped in the Present Tense. In a lyrical and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essays, Brooks explores the mechanics and malleability of the collective American memory. Revisiting some of the more forgotten aspects of recent events in the American story to explain our challenging...

Leanne Brown’s wildly popular and NYT bestselling cookbook Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day showed us that kitchen skill and resourcefulness—not budget—are the keys to great food. Brown returned (virtually) to Greenlight for the launch of her new cookbook, Good Enough: A Cookbook: Embracing the Joys of Imperfection and Practicing Self-Care in the Kitchen. Good Enough champions a different yet complementary approach to food and cooking through the lens of self-care, mental health, and the...

For Greenlight’s first poetry event of 2022, we welcomed Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka and acclaimed poet and fiction writer Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart) to share, discuss, and celebrate Oka’s third collection, Fire Is Not a Country. Oka’s poems track how the energies of migration, exploitation, patriarchal violation, and political repression shape and spar with familial love and obligation. Jenny read as well—sweet and cutting poems from her collection My Baby First Birthday—and...

Acclaimed YA author Leah Konen’s second novel for adults, The Perfect Escape, is a pacey, suspenseful, unforgettable thriller about a girls’ weekend in the Catskills turned deadly. For Greenlight’s first virtual author event of 2022, Konen joined us for a scintillating book launch and conversation with bestselling author and NYT journalist Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here) that explored the craft of mystery, pregnancy and the writing process, and the question of writing mystery as a “plotter”...

In Greenlight’s longstanding tradition of celebrating the debuts of new literary voices, Cara Blue Adams graces our (virtual) stage to present her first story collection, You Never Get It Back—winner of the 2021 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. In these poised and perceptive linked stories set in rural New England and across the country—including Maine, Virginia, and New Mexico—the power of place shines through the journey of a young woman in search of vocation and belonging, grappling with...

Whiting Award-winning author Amy Leach graces Greenlight’s virtual stage  to present The Everybody Ensemble, her newest collection of short, gloriously inventive essays that invite us to see and celebrate anew the “clattering, sometimes discordant but always welcoming chorus of glorious pandemonium” that is our world. In a discussion covering dragonflies, petunias, and encounters with beavers alongside questions of honesty and precision in writing and the comparative merits of research vs....

In The Case for Rage, philosopher Myisha Cherry turns popular prejudices about anger on their head and argues for anger’s utility—and importance—in the fight against injustice. Anger has a bad reputation; s a “negative emotion”, it’s seen by many as counterproductive, distracting, and destructive. But Cherry argues that in fact the transformative and liberatory power of anger—what she terms “Lordean rage”—is crucial to the anti-racist struggle and challenging the status quo. Cherry joined us...

Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Grafton Tanner joins us (virtually) alongside Roisin Kiberd (The Disconnect) to present his newest book about nostalgia, that most ubiquitous and enigmatic of affects, in a conversation that traversed...

In the lengthening shadow of an exceptional year, Greenlight welcomed to its virtu Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, an Oakland-based national research and policy center that studies public goods and services, to discuss his new book co-authored with Allen Mikaelian, The Privatization of Everything. Hailed by Naomi Klein as “an essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons,” Cohen and Mikaelian discuss what happens...

For phenomenal local writer, theatermaker, and educator Diane Exavier’s début collection, The Math of Saint Felix, Greenlight’s own Poetry Salon host Angel Nafis held court with Exavier and fellow poets Carlos Sirah and Shayla Lawz for a powerful, multivocal evening of reading, reverie, and irreverence. Exavier's book-length lyric is an attempt to do the math of a woman, a family, a country, and a diaspora, plotting how the sum of one life reveals permutations of many— daughters, sisters,...

To commemorate the 2021 edition of the Best American Poetry anthology, Greenlight invited editor and former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, series editor David Lehman, and contributing poets Chen Chen, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Nancy Miller Gomez, and Dora Malech for a reverent evening. Selected by Smith, this year’s exceptional collection explores and reckons with the difficult emotions exposed by a year of collective upheaval and incalculable loss in a panoply of themes, voices, and styles. We...

Celebrated local writer and performer Nelson Simon graced Greenlight's (virtual) stage to share his new book, Soul of the Hurricane, the unlikely and harrowing true account of his experience sailing into Hurricane Grace, the southern end of the “Perfect Storm.” It was October 1991, and Simon didn’t exactly want to sign up as a last-minute crew member transporting a Norwegian schooner from Brooklyn to Bermuda. But one thing led to another, and there he was. What began with an unexpected...

For the better part of a decade, Uli Beutter Cohen rode the subway through New York City’s underground to observe society through the lens of our most creative thinkers: readers of books. Greenlight welcomed the acclaimed creator of Subway Book Review to our (virtual) stage to launch her new book Between the Lines, a timely collection of beloved and never-before-published stories that reflect who we are and where we are going in the form of over 170 interviews. In an ebullient, lively...

New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed music journalist Kelefa Sanneh joined Greenlight virtually to launch Major Labels, his debut book of nonfiction and a deeply researched, expansive study of popular music over the past fifty years, refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop. Interviewed by Zoe Chace of This American Life, Sanneh discussed the status, politics, and stakes of musical genres in an age...

In his memoir Never Silent, Peter Staley shares the untold story of his journey from closeted Wall Street bond trader to one of the leading AIDS and LGBTQ rights activists of his generation. Infusing personal chronicle with what Tony Kushner (Angels in America) praises as an “incisive, precise, and revelatory insider’s history of ACT UP” and “an electrifying primer for anyone who’s thinking/worrying/wondering about how to change/save the world,” Staley’s firsthand experience at the frontlines...

PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of literati darlings Call Me Zebra and Fra Keeler took to Greenlight’s virtual stage to launch her third novel, Savage Tongues—a personal and political exploration of desire, power, domination, and human connection that’s equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Clarice Lispector, tracing a young woman’s search for healing in the fall-out of an affair with a much older man. Joined by the inimitable poet Eileen Myles, Oloomi discussed...

Episode QS79: Caoilinn Hughes + Diane Cook (December 23, 2021) (Recorded September 30, 2021) Award-winning authors Caoilinn Hughes and Diane Cook took to the Greenlight virtual stage to discuss their recent novels, The Wild Laughter (winner of the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award 2021) and The New Wilderness (shortlisted for the 2020 Man Booker Prize). Along with exploring shared themes of legacy, climate change, “generational robbery”, and the ever-changing challenges of parenting,...

Mina Stone, author of the cult-favorite Cooking for Artists, joined Greenlight (virtually!) to launch her stunning new cookbook, Lemon, Love & Olive Oil—featuring 80 Mediterranean-style recipes rooted in the traditions passed to her by preceding generations. Stone learned to cook from her Yiayia, who taught her that food doesn’t have to be complicated to be delicious—and that almost any dish can be improved with judicious amounts of lemon, olive oil, and salt. Stone’s friend,...

In a heartrending and deeply moving evening, two Asian-American literary luminaries, Qian Julie Wang and Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown) welcomed Wang’s incandescent debut, Beautiful Country--an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light. Wang and Yu discussed the emotional journey that led her to write this searing memoir and the hard-won process by which she realized it; the...

Jai Chakrabarti graced our virtual stage to launch his debut novel, A Play for the End of the World--an unforgettable love story set in early 1970's New York and rural India, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present. Chakrabarti, joined in conversation by Brigid Hughes of A Public Space (where he was previously a writing fellow!), discussed the entwining of place and personhood, how...