Book Culture Blog

Earlier this month Michael Eskin did an event at Book Culture for his new book, Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grunbein, Brodsky. He was introduced by Haun Saussy, Yale professor of comparative literature and editor of the Stanford University Press series that published Poetic Affairs. (Pictured here: Eskin, at left, and Saussy) After the event, Michael Eskin answered a few questions for us:

What books are you currently reading?

I have been reading many books on the very question of reading literature lately in connection with a project I am working on. I have also been reading a range of books on contemporary culture and intercultural prejudice, as well as research in social physics. I have also just reread Albert Camus’ L’étranger.

Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to the publication of?

I am working on a couple of projects at the moment. In particular, I look forward to a volume that I am currently editing comprising selected prose by D. Grünbein.

Do you have standard titles or writers you like to recommend, either within or outside of your field?

The list would be too long - obviously. But here are some of the author’s that have profoundly touched me in recent years: J. M. Coetzee, J. Brodsky, A. Paton, E. Stein, W. H. Auden, and A. Badiou - and, most importantly, Kathrin Stengel’s book: November Rose: A Speech on Death.

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If you have not been in the store recently, or do not subscribe to our email newsletter, you might not know about these recent developments:

Remainders Are Now Online:
Our famous remainder tables and staircase offerings are now available worldwide through our website! Our in-stock remainders include over 1,000 academic and trade titles at heavily discounted prices!

New Discounted Titles:
We’ve introduced Book Culture Spotlight Titles — a group of selected bestsellers, staff recommendations and buyer’s picks available at 20% off.

French and German Books Online:
Bestsellers, new releases and children’s books in both French and German are now available online. Scroll down on our home page to links for books in all these foreign language categories.

Signed Copies:
We have a number of signed copies of select new releases in the store right now, including Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins, David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, and Michael Paul Mason’s Head Cases.

Last night we hosted a reading with writer and journalist Michael Paul Mason, author of Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and its Aftermath. Mason shared moving tales, including audio clips of interviews from his visit to Balad Air Base in Iraq, where he had a first hand look at the harsh realities facing brain injury victims.

After the presentation, we had a few moments to ask him some questions:

What books are you currently reading?

Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, and just yesterday I bought Maps and Legends.

Is there anything that you are particularly looking forward to the publication of?

I have a galley copy of Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, which comes out next month. Also, Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned Rock Operas, by Sarah Brown (forthcoming by Crown in August 2008.)

Do you have standard titles or writers you like to recommend?

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick and The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman.

Have you ever been to Book Culture before?

No, this is my first visit. Thanks for hosting me.

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Mason will also appear at this weekend’s New York Roundtable Writer’s Conference and be on Leonard Lopate this coming Monday, April 14th. A review of Head Cases appears in this week’s NYT Sunday Book Review. An earlier NYT review appears here and you can learn more about the author and his work here.

We kick off our April events schedule TONIGHT! with a trio of award winning poets reading from their latest collections. Anna Rabinowitz, Karen Garthe and Craig Morgan Teicher will join us as we celebrate the start of National Poetry Month.

Next week Book Culture will welcome another trio, each author on his own night, three in a row: Michael Eskin (Poetic Affairs) on April 8, Michael Paul Mason (Head Cases) on April 9 and David Hajdu (The 10-Cent Plague) on April 10.

We are also excited to announce new events for children! Nina Jaffe will begin her Children’s Sunday Storytelling Series with a reading of The Way Meat Loves Salt on April 13 at 2 pm. The following weekend, author and illustrator Mingmei Yip will host a Saturday morning storytelling (Chinese Children’s Favorite Stories) on April 19 at 10:30 am.

Other authors appearing at the store during the second half of the month include: Matthew Connelly (Fatal Misconception), Brian Larkin (Signal and Noise), Marion Kaplan (Dominican Haven), Wallace Broecker (Fixing Climate) and Frank Donoghue (The Last Professors).

Our events program is on a brief hiatus this week — a spring break breather. We’ll be back with updated programming news next week. In the meantime, here are photos from some other events that took place recently at Book Culture:

Columbia professor John Fabian Witt (left) and Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett discussed Professor Burnett’s new book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature.

Columbia Professor Joseph Slaughter (second from left), participated in a panel discussion about his book, Human Rights Inc., with Fordham University Press moderator Helen Tartar (far left) and respondents Roger Berkowitz (Bard) and Marianne Hirsch (Columbia).

Joie Jager-Hyman answered audience questions about the college admission process during an event for her new book Fat Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize.

Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen discussed his latest book, Conversations with Michael Eigen.

We were honored to have philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah speak at our store this week about his new book, Experiments in Ethics. We didn’t have a lot of time to chat with him after the event, but he took a few moments to tell us what he has been reading lately:

I am currently re-reading God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. Recently I have also enjoyed Hobbes and Republican Liberty (February 2008, Cambridge University Press), and also The Rest is Noise. As far as forthcoming titles that I’m looking forward to reading — whatever Amartya Sen publishes next, whatever it is!

Some thoughts from Book Culture’s owner, Chris Doeblin, on sales tax and the greenness of local business:

Governor Spitzer has proposed a plan (the Internet Sales Tax provision) that will require out-of-state online companies to collect New York State sales tax on goods they send to addresses in New York. One estimate suggests the state could be losing out on $50 million a year. Independent business organizations have been bringing the issue to Albany for years, but our current budget hardship is certainly the door opener here. It’s our issue because books are the first big item sold on the Internet and the mainstay of Amazon.

The latest twist is Amazon’s reply to the plan. They have sent Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, to Albany to battle the plan. Personally, I have had enough of giant corporations molding public policy with elite executives walking into our halls of governance and justice. I prefer to have public policy support independents, small business, diversity of ownership and taxation fairness.

Many excellent articles have reported on this news. I direct you to Saul Hansell’s article in the New York Times on February 13. And I ask you to write to Governor Spitzer and support us by backing his plan to require companies such as Amazon to collect sales tax. The sales tax that we collect for ourselves makes us part of our communities. On the one hand, no one wants to be taxed – but let’s face it— we all want all the social benefits that our taxes provide us with.

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Here’s a Friday afternoon treat from our bookshelf to yours. With the last of rush deconstruction well underway, we’ve finally had a chance to update our staff picks reading shelf. Maybe you’ll find something of interest among the titles that our booksellers are currently recommending:

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison: “This is an intense read about a child living in poverty and struggling with sexual abuse. While superficially a novel, it is really a memoir of the author’s childhood.” - Robert

The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg: “Instead of simply enumerating failures, Weisberg digs into family history (through blood ties and chosen family to ask, how did he (and we) get here?” - Adam

Dead Souls, by Nickoli Gogol: “Great translation, nicely captures Gogol’s wit.” - Nathan

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A nice crowd turned out at Book Culture on a wet slushy Friday night to hear George Makari’s presentation about his new book, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis.

Dr. Makari talked about how the book came to be and explained its structure and scope. He then read a portion of the introduction and opened it up for Q&A from the audience, who posed questions about Freud’s legacy and teachings, why Vienna plays such a prominent role in the history of psychoanalysis and how certain photos were chosen for the front cover of the book.

Before the event we had some time to sit and chat about books with Dr. Makari. Here is what he shared with us:

What books are you currently reading?

Celine’s Journey to the End of Night and Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner.

Is there anything you are particularly looking forward to the publication of?

Yes, the Rhode Island poet and 2008 Frost Medal recipient Michael S. Harper has a new collection coming out in the fall, Use Trouble.

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Last night’s Meena Alexander poetry reading began with a gracious introduction from award-winning poet Jean Valentine (proudly sporting her Obama button!) in which she called Meena’s work “sensual and brave.” Meena read a selection of poems from her new collection, Quickly Changing River, including some of the poems that Jean said she most enjoyed — Raw Meditation on Money and Cutting Hair. Some of the other poems shared during the reading were Cosmopolitan, Old Ivory, Reading Leopardi and Acqua Alta. Before the event we had a few moments to chat with Meena. Here’s what we learned:

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