Astoria Bookshop

Lyndsay Faye in conversation with Katrina Carrasco on The Paragon Hotel

Thursday January 24 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us on Thursday, January 24th at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Lyndsay Faye’s newest novel, The Paragon Hotel. In Lyndsay Faye’s intricate new book, a gutsy gun moll flees Prohibition-era Harlem for Oregon’s elegant Paragon Hotel, where the exclusively black residents and a chilling missing child crisis unlock new worlds she couldn’t have imagined. Lyndsay will be joined by Katrina Carrasco, author of The Best Bad Things.

From the critically-acclaimed author of Jane Steele and The Gods of Gotham trilogy comes The Paragon Hotel, a “riveting multilevel thriller” (Kirkus) with up-to-the-moment parallels to what is happening in America today. Inventive and meticulously crafted, The Paragon Hotel brilliantly captures mob-controlled Harlem in the early twentieth century (“A world in which the monsters were the monarchs”), as well as the terror of being black in segregated, racist Portland, circa 1921. In Lyndsay Faye’s capable hands, the book’s indelible characters and startling historical detail recreate a bygone era completely relevant to today’s social issues. The result is a mesmerizing tale reaffirming Faye’s reputation as a master storyteller.

“...a ravishing novel that rings with nervy elegance and simmers with gnawing tension....This historical novel, which carries strong reverberations of present-day social and cultural upheavals, contains a message from a century ago that's useful to our own time: ‘We need to do better at solving things.’ A riveting multilevel thriller of race, sex, and mob violence that throbs with menace as it hums with wit.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“From the opening scene, this novel had me in its grip. Faye delivers a riveting story filled with unforgettable characters and stunning prose, while never flinching from the painful truths surrounding America’s legacy of racial injustice. A remarkable, significant novel.”

—Fiona Davis, New York Times-bestselling author of The Masterpiece

Multi-Edgar nominee Lyndsay Faye is the author of five critically acclaimed books, most recently Jane Steele. A true New Yorker in the sense that she was born elsewhere, Faye lives in New York City with her husband, Gabriel.

Katrina Carrasco holds an MFA in fiction from Portland State University, where she received the Tom and Phyllis Burnam Graduate Fiction Scholarship and the Tom Doulis Graduate Fiction Writing Award. Her work has appeared in Witness magazine, Post Road Magazine, Quaint Magazine, and other journals. The Best Bad Things is her first novel.

Book Launch! Local author Mary Adkins's "When You Read This"

Tuesday February 05 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us on Tuesday, February 5th at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Mary Adkins’s lively epistolary debut novel, When You Read This! A Romantic Comedy for the digital age and the ties that behind us.

For four years, Iris Massey worked side by side with PR maven Smith Simonyi, helping clients perfect their brands. But Iris has died, taken by terminal illness at only thirty-three. Adrift without his friend and colleague, Smith is surprised to discover that in her last six months, Iris created a blog filled with sharp and often funny musings on the end of a life not quite fulfilled. She also made one final request: for Smith to get her posts published as a book. With the help of his charmingly eager, if overbearingly forthright, new intern Carl, Smith tackles the task of fulfilling Iris’s last wish.

Before he can do so, though, he must get the approval of Iris’ big sister Jade, an haute cuisine chef who’s been knocked sideways by her loss. Each carrying their own baggage, Smith and Jade end up on a collision course with their own unresolved pasts and with each other.

Told in a series of e-mails, blog posts, online therapy submissions, text messages, legal correspondence, home-rental bookings, and other snippets of our virtual lives, When You Read This is a deft, captivating romantic comedy—funny, tragic, surprising, and bittersweet—that candidly reveals how we find new beginnings after loss.

“I loved every word of this sweet little gem of a book. It was a quick, humorous—but ultimately touching—read that I couldn’t put down!”

-Meg Cabot

“A touching, funny, and life-affirming tale.” -Publishers Weekly

“As with Maria Semple’s mixed-media masterwork Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Adkins’s debut novel is so much more than its clever style. I read it briskly with a permanent smile on my face, even when the tears were falling. Like a quasar, WHEN YOU READ THIS feels miraculous and leaves a lasting impression long after its final moment.” -Val Emmich, author of The Reminders and Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel

Mary Adkins is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and The Atlantic. A native of the American South and a graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School, she lives in New York City with her family. She also teaches storytelling for The Moth.

Amy Feltman in Conversation with Kerry Cullen on Willa & Hesper

Friday February 08 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us on Friday, February 8th for a discussion on Willa & Hesper with local debut author Amy Feltman. For fans of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell and The Futures by Anna Pitoniak, a soul-piercing story that explores the intertwining of past and present, queerness, and coming of age in uncertain times. Told from alternating perspectives, and ending in the shadow of Trump's presidency, Willa & Hesper is a deeply moving, cerebral, and timely debut. Amy will be joined in conversation with Kerry Cullen.

Willa's darkness enters Hesper's light late one night in Brooklyn. Theirs is a whirlwind romance until Willa starts to know Hesper too well, to crawl into her hidden spaces, and Hesper shuts her out. She runs, following her fractured family back to her grandfather's hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia, looking for the origin story that he is no longer able to tell. But once in Tbilisi, cracks appear in her grandfather's history-and a massive flood is heading toward Georgia, threatening any hope for repair.

Meanwhile, heartbroken Willa is so desperate to leave New York that she joins a group trip for Jewish twentysomethings to visit Holocaust sites in Germany and Poland, hoping to override her emotional state. When it proves to be more fraught than home, she must come to terms with her past-the ancestral past, her romantic past, and the past that can lead her forward.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR WILLA & HESPER

“[G]entle and sweeping…From Willa and Hesper, readers may see how relationships between twentysomethings, even when brief, have the potential to inspire unimaginable self-discovery. Set immediately before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Feltman’s novel is as titillating and tense as the experience of young adult love.”

– BOOKLIST

“Willa & Hesper is a novel with a beating heart, a love story that is also an intricate love affair with time, history, religion and inheritance. In fresh and captivating prose, and spanning three vibrantly-rendered countries, Amy Feltman's debut enthralled me.”

—CHLOE BENJAMIN, bestselling author of The Immortalists

Kerry Cullen’s fiction has been published in The Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, One Teen Story, and more. She is an assistant editor at Henry Holt, she earned her MFA at Columbia University, and she lives in New York. She is currently writing a novel about queer teens and Christian rock.

Amy Feltman graduated with an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University in 2016, and now works at Poets & Writers Magazine. An excerpt from "Willa and Hesper" appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, and her writing has also appeared in The Believer logger, The Toast, The Millions, The Rumpus, Lilith Magazine, Slice Magazine, and elsewhere. Her short story, "Speculoos," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016 and was long-listed for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. She lives with her partner in Astoria, NY.

BOOK LAUNCH! Blake J. Harris on The History of the Future

Tuesday February 19 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Join us on Tuesday, February 18th for the launch of local author Blake J. Harris’s new book The History of the Future! Harris is the author of the bestseller Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation, which both NPR and Slate named a Best Book of the Year (2014).

Long regarded as a mix of science fiction and lore, virtual reality was finding obscure footing in enthusiastic web forums, science laboratories, and hushed military experiments. At the helm of this futuristic endeavor was an unlikely hero—young entrepreneur Palmer Luckey. With an intense interest in virtual reality and disappointment in the VR options that existed, Palmer went from a rebellious teenager living alone in a camper trailer to the developer of impressive prototypes to the founder of Oculus VR.

With the help of a videogame legend, a serial entrepreneur and many other colorful characters, Luckey’s scrappy startup kickstarts a revolution and sets out to bring VR to the masses. As with most underdog stories, things didn’t quite go according to plan. The History of the Future is the unbelievable story of the ultimate entrepreneurial journey: a tale of battles won and lost, lessons learned and never-ending twists and turns—including an unlikely multi-billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, which shakes up the landscape in Silicon Valley and gives Oculus the chance to forever change our reality.

Drawing on over a hundred interviews with the key players driving this revolution, The History of the Future weaves together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns and human drama of trying to change the world.

Praise for Console Wars:

“Fast, fluid, and startlingly accessible.” -Entertainment Weekly

“A fast-paced page-turner...it’s exciting to finally get a no-holds-barred account of a history that has largely been kept secret from the public eye.” -Wired

“It’s far and away one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.” -Forbes

“Like the pixels that together create a larger picture, Harris presents the various elements of the business in vivid color...remarkably detailed and fast paced.” -Booklist

“A must-read. Period.” -IGN

Blake J. Harris is the bestselling author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation, which is currently being adapted into a feature film by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Scott Rudin. He has written for ESPN, IGN, Fast Company, the Huffington Post, /Film, and The AV Club. He is also a regular guest on Paul Scheer’s How Did This Get Made? podcast, where every week he interviews some the biggest names responsible for some of the worst movies ever made. Harris lives in New York with his wife.