Astoria Bookshop

Briallen Hopper in conversation with Joanna Scutts on Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

Monday March 25 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

On March 25, join Briallen Hopper, author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions, in conversation with Joanna Scutts, author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Hard to Love has been described by Literary Hub as a "compelling, smart collection of essays on relationships of many kinds—hoarding, dependence, female friendship, marriage or lack thereof—from a widely published literary scholar."

Hard to Love is about self-reliance, unbreakable female friendships,
being single, dealing with difficult roommates, our relationship to our
siblings as adults, tricky relationships with our parents, and even
Hopper’s quest to become a mother via sperm donor (it’s Moby-Dick
like you've never seen it). Hopper values each of these complicated
and underappreciated relationships, and reminds us that we can all
be surrounded by love, even if we’re romantically unattached.

Hopper has a talent for probing at our deepest emotions, picking
apart what it means to love friends, jobs, even inanimate objects.
Each essay draws from Hopper’s personal experience and manages
to be both funny and wise, peppered with references to highbrow and
lowbrow culture. Insights into the work of Joan Didion and Flannery
O’Connor sit next to commentary on Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s
Sisters and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. As Publishers Weekly
says: “A literature scholar, Hopper cultivates a voice that is
sophisticated and analytical, but also earnest and eager.”

Briallen Hopper's essays, reviews, op-eds, profiles, listicles, and sermons have appeared in Avidly, HuffPost, Longreads, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine/The Cut, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Tacoma, got a PhD in American literature from Princeton, and attended divinity school and taught writing at Yale. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY, and lives in Jackson Heights.

Joanna Scutts is a literary critic, cultural historian, and the author of The Extra Woman, the story of the 1930s lifestyle guru Marjorie Hillis and the lives of single women in midcentury America. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Guardian US, among many other venues. She was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated the multimedia interactive installation “Women’s Voices” and the gallery show “Hotbed” for the Center for Women’s History.

Book launch! Jenn Marie Thorne on Night Music

Thursday March 28 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us on March 28th for the launch of Jenn Marie Thorne's latest young adult novel, Night Music, as well as live music from local Astoria harpist/singer Tracey Horst.

Ruby has always been Ruby Chertok: future classical pianist and daughter of renowned composer Martin Chertok. But after her horrendous audition for the prestigious music school where her father is on faculty, it’s clear that music has publicly dumped her. Now Ruby is suddenly just…Ruby. And who is that again? All she knows is that she wants away from the world of classical music for good.

Oscar is a wunderkind, a musical genius. Just ask any of the 1.8 million people who’ve watched him conduct on YouTube—or hey, just ask Oscar. But while he might be the type who’d name himself when asked about his favorite composer and somehow make you love him more for it, Oscar is not the type to jeopardize his chance to study under the great Martin Chertok—not for a crush. He’s all too aware of how the ultra-privileged world of classical music might interpret a black guy like him falling for his benefactor’s white daughter.

But as the New York City summer heats up, so does the spark between Ruby and Oscar. Soon their connection crackles with the same alive, uncontainable energy as the city itself. Can two people still figuring themselves out figure out how to be together? Or will the world make the choice for them?

Jenn Marie Thorne graduated from NYU-Tisch with a BFA in drama and quickly realized she was having more fun writing plays, short films, and superhero webisodes than actually performing in them. She lives and writes in the UK with her husband, two sons, and hound dog Molly. She is the author of The Wrong Side of Right, The Inside Out, and Night Music.

Tracey Horst is an Astoria-based harpist/singer. She performs classical music, as well as her own arrangements of rock and original pieces. Featured in the Huffington Post as an Astoria Character, she has played at LIC Bar, Letlove Inn, Gold Sounds, and special events throughout the area. More info can be found on her website at www.traceyhorst.com

Carol LaHines in Conversation with Rick Moody on Someday Everything Will All Make Sense

Tuesday April 09 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us April 9th for Carol LaHines, author of Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, in conversation with Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America.

Someday Everything Will All Make Sense is a humorous and moving exploration of loss and bereavement, narrated by Luther van der Loon, a harpsichord virtuoso and professor of medieval music at a New York university. When Luther’s mother chokes on a wonton from Seven Happiness Chinese take-out, his attempts to dislodge the foreign body airway obstruction (FBAO) prove futile, and his mother dies en route to the hospital. At 45 years of age, Luther is finally, irreparably, alone. His passage through the stages of grief is not straightforward. He obsesses over burial practices, rails against M & Sons Chapel and the funerary industry, and institutes a personal injury suit against Seven Happiness and its owner Bernice Wong, whose “sloppy methods” he blames for his mother’s death. Eventually, Luther learns to come to terms with his loss. Luther detests modern music and the equal temperament, the tuning convention whereby the octave was artificially divided into twelve equidistant steps. He believes, like Kepler and the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, that music is constructed according to the divine Pythagorean ratios. The novel speaks to the absurdity of the legal system as a means of redressing our grievances, as well as to the universality of the loss suffered by the protagonist.

"An original and very funny novel about a man's obsessive longing and guilt after his mother accidentally chokes on wonton soup. We follow the endearing protagonist through a period of mourning, cleverly interwoven with musical theory and an attempt to sue the Chinese take out restaurant, all brought to a hilarious finale with a last symposium on medieval music."
--Sheila Kohler, author of Once We Were Sisters, Cracks, Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and many other novels

Carol LaHines’ novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, a finalist for the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel and other accolades, is forthcoming in February 2019 from Adelaide Books. Her fiction has appeared in many literary journals including Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Nebraska Review, North Atlantic Review, Sycamore Review, Permafrost, redivider, Literary Orphans, Brain Child Magazine and Literal Latte. She is a graduate of New York University, Gallatin Division, and a long-time participant in the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute.

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia Universities. His works includes Hotels of North America, The Four Fingers of Death, Purple America, The Ice Storm, Garden State, as well as an award-winning memoir and multiple collections of short fiction. Moody is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Moody lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Hanif Abdurraqib on Go Ahead in the Rain

Monday May 06 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us on May 6th for an evening with Hanif Abdurraqib and his essay collection, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.

How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from You . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.

Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he’s remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe’s 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg’s death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that—like the low end, the bass—are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has multiple forthcoming books including a biography on A Tribe Called Quest titled Go Ahead In The Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), the new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don't Dance No Mo' (Random House, 2020).

*Due to expected high attendance, priority admission will be given to customers who purchase (or who have already purchased) Go Ahead In the Rain from us. We hope to accommodate as many other attendees as possible.