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Grove Press, 2020

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Jennifer kurdyla, more online by jennifer kurdyla.

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Writers & Lovers

By lily king, reviewed by jennifer kurdyla.

I read Lily King’s latest novel, a late coming-of-age story about a young woman who, as the title suggests, weaves and bobs through the emotional and psychological blows of writing and loving, in late January 2020. At the time, I had a lot on my plate, and the idea of one more assignment was not something I relished.

For a few dark, deep-winter mornings, I dutifully packed the slender book in my bag, pulling it out on my standing-room-only predawn commute into New York City. I balanced the paperback galley in one hand and my travel mug in the other, my reading arm looped around the pole for an optimal stance as the train jolted from Church Avenue to Parkside all the way up to Broadway-Lafayette or Grand Central.

As I read, the late-nineties world of Writers & Lovers— where women waited by the landline for their crushes to call them and manuscripts had to be typeset and mailed at the post office—was a welcome escape from my own. Things were simpler for the novel’s heroine, Casey Peabody, a thirty-something aspiring writer with the kind of baggage that would, in another novel, make her almost cliché. Her mother has died, her boyfriend has dumped her, and she is in love with two very different men: a widowed literary rock star with two precious little boys and one of the rock star’s students, a goofball who offers kisses that “melt your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.”

Casey tells us her story in a desperate first person that results in the kind of sentences one might scoff at in a book about writers: “I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.” We know, Casey, because all of us who have ever tried to write anything—an Instagram post or a novel—know that feeling. But in the context of the whole package, Casey’s story is anything but scoffable; her point of view, her struggles, and her ambitions come off as delightfully sincere. I often thought while reading, maybe I could write like this someday— in order to mollify the bad things that feel even worse when I don’t write—or that I could at least give myself the pleasure of dipping into more books that make me feel like this.

By the time I finally found time to sit down and write about Writers & Lovers , it was late March and for seventeen days (but who’s counting?), I, along with most of the world, had been filling the days with calls, classes, and meetings over Zoom and FaceTime, trying to stay connected with the people I might not see in real life for some time to come. There was more time for being alone with myself, as Casey is for most of the book, more time for writing, and more time for reading, especially books like this.

Now the nostalgic tug I felt while dipping in and out of King’s masterfully crafted sentences and this deeply human heroine’s mind was a balm for a different kind of wound. Instead of spiriting me away from the hustle of modern life, it was helping me feel connected on a more profound level to the vulnerabilities we all share: the desire to be seen, heard, touched; the desire to not be alone.

On the surface, there’s nothing exactly special about King’s fifth novel. Her last novel, Euphoria , was a dazzling take on the anthropologists Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Reo Fortune. The exotic setting and intriguing characters of that story were quite literally escapist. By contrast, there is a pedestrian quality to Writers & Lovers.

Motherless and boyfriendless Casey lives in a rundown basement apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She can’t pay her bills or student loans with the money she earns waiting tables at a chichi Harvard Square restaurant and walking her landlord’s dog. If you passed her on the street, you probably wouldn’t even notice her; she’s just another meandering youth. When she looks in the mirror, she thinks to herself,

I look beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them.

As she bikes along the Charles River on the way to the restaurant, Casey pauses in front of a flock of geese, thinking,

I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be right again, and I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for.

But for all this self-indulgent moping, it’s hard not to be on Casey’s side during this period of rotten luck in just about every life department. The meta qualities of this novel about writing are what redeem her, as well as the man-boys she alternately desires and repels. All three members of this love triangle are wordsmiths, each highly self-aware with a healthy dose of social awkwardness. Despite the many times I shouted, “Dump that jerk! You can do better,” both Silas and Oscar are endearing to a fault. Silas, the younger commitment-phobe, is just the kind of guy you’d (okay, I’d) swoon over in a college poetry seminar, with floppy hair and a floppy spine and dog-eared paperbacks of books stained with coffee. How romantic it is to sit with them over takeout food in the cool New England night.

All of Silas’s insecurity is compensated for by Oscar’s bravado. Although he’s another writer with a heart scarred by death, he’s logistically stable—house, kids, income, life experience. When he jokes with Casey about how their stroll through an arboretum has to be a date and not just a friendly get-together, we know he’s playing. The confidence underlying his every move—such as the formal invitation to dinner with the kids, where they eat things like mac ’n cheese and tell stories about their dead mother’s mean nurse—is alluring, even if he’s calculating the whole thing. When her landlord threatens to evict her after a few weeks of dating, he even invites her to live with him, and she considers it.

In a sense, Casey has the perfect setup. Her two beaux complement each other perfectly, and yet her inability to carry on with both is what makes her story exactly right. She realizes that her reliance on these men for a Jerry Maguire-esque “you complete me” feeling is unsustainable and undesirable. She has too much work to do alone before she can be a true and equal partner to anyone else.

But the most victorious moments of the book have little to do with the quasi-marriage plot. The pace quickens in the last third when Casey lands an enthusiastic young agent who sells her novel, she gets a job as a high school English teacher, and she’s cleared of a false-alarm cancer diagnosis. All these triumphs line up, one after the next, a few pages after she has given up pursuit of the man-boys. It’s an important shift in how she, and we, understand what being alone feels like.

Anyone who’s written anything knows the emptiness that comes from getting to the end. When Casey finishes her novel and tries to write something new, she tells us, “It’s bad and I stop after a few sentences.”

Even though I didn’t feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.

Each time I’ve read Writers & Lovers— first in a world where I felt almost too connected and then one where I physically ached for the people I took for granted—I was reminded of the power stories have in keeping us together. It’s writing like King’s that makes these days and nights of solitude feel okay. We may be geese flying solo, but as Casey reflects in the final pages, “Some Canada geese may travel as far as Jalisco, Mexico.” Others “will stay where they are for the winter. They’re already home.”

Published on April 28, 2020

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman on the Road to Happiness

By John Williams

• March 10, 2020
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Everyone wants to be happy, but what serious reader wants to read about happiness? The French author Henry de Montherlant said that “happiness writes in white ink on a white page.” It can’t be captured; not with dignity, anyway. Happy art so often equals kitsch. The poet Edward Hirsch, in response to Montherlant’s edict, once wrote: “I don’t believe that only sorrow/and misery can be written.”

The novelist Lily King must be in Hirsch’s camp. Her new book, “Writers & Lovers,” set in 1997, begins in mourning and frustration, but it more or less persuasively opens out to genuine, even giddy, hope.

Its narrator, Casey Peabody, is a 31-year-old who bikes three miles to and from work as a waitress in Harvard Square. She lives in a small room — a former potting shed that still smells like “loam and rotting leaves” — attached to the garage of a friend of her brother’s. In opening lines that are both breezy and potent, Casey says: “I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex.”

So, problems with cash flow and love life. The two other most salient facts about Casey, she soon reveals, are that she is an aspiring writer and that her mother has recently died. Years earlier, including time spent in an M.F.A. program, Casey had a cohort of wannabe writer friends, but they’ve all abandoned the craft, except for one woman who has been “working on a novel set during World War II for as long as I’ve known her.”

Casey hasn’t told her co-workers at the restaurant about her loss. “I don’t want to be the girl whose mother just died,” she says. Referring to herself as a girl might simply be King’s nod to her character’s insecurity, but it also reflects the fact that Casey sometimes reads much younger than even an unsettled 31.

Her mother died suddenly during a trip to Chile with friends. Her father, who pressured Casey when younger to pursue a promising career in golf, once lost a teaching and coaching job because he was peeping into the girls’ locker room along with some male students. The one time we see him reappear in Casey’s life, he acts the part of a two-dimensional villain.

In a delightful, very brief section on famous writers’ relationships to their dead mothers, Casey tells us that when Edith Wharton’s mother, who had discouraged her daughter’s writing (and even reading), died, Wharton “sent her husband to the funeral. She stayed home to write.” Men are included in that section (Proust, D. H. Lawrence), but that Wharton tidbit chimes loudest with King’s project here.

On her bike, Casey passes a woman running, “sweatshirt hood up, fists clenched. We catch eyes just before she passes. Help, we seem to be saying to each other.” King’s novel is help of a sort, an unmistakable broadside against fiction’s love affair with macho strivers, even — or especially — when layers of lyricism and tenderness coat their machismo.

“Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous,” Casey says, “believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule.” Of a prospective date who’s got writer’s block, she says: “I can’t go out with a guy who’s written 11½ pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”

The nonwriters are even worse. A chef at work obscenely berates her. A customer squeezes her waist while he tells her how to do her job. “How’s the novel ?” her landlord asks. Casey thinks: “He says it like I made the word up myself.”

“Writers & Lovers” marks a return for King to contemporary life after her novel “Euphoria,” in which she imagined the anthropologist Margaret Mead in a romantic triangle during a 1933 field trip to New Guinea. The New York Times Book Review named that novel one of the 10 Best Books of 2014.

One might guess this new novel was deeply autobiographical even if King hadn’t said as much. Her own mother died unexpectedly not long after “Euphoria” was published, and this was her third attempt at a novel since then. The emotional force of “Writers & Lovers” is considerable, but it takes some time to land. As sometimes counterintuitively happens in autobiographical fiction, there’s a strange unconvincingness that hovers over stretches of this book. One wonders if not having to strenuously imagine this time and these circumstances means that some of the supporting characters and scenery feel more stock than a writer of King’s talent intends. She spends a bit too much time early on establishing the scene of the restaurant, with characters who feel like supporting players in a TV show. A reader could be forgiven for feeling a bit unchallenged and uninvested after 50 pages. But sticking with this novel offers rewards, and by the time Casey is shuttling between her romantic experiences with two very different men (not unlike Mead in “Euphoria”; the triangle is a shape that suits this author), King’s straightforward prose and deep feeling have hit their stride.

Those two men are Oscar and Silas. Oscar is an acclaimed novelist, the father of two young boys. Silas is a charming, struggling writer — closer to Casey’s age and living a tenuous, yearning life much like her own. Her time with each of them, and her weighing of their qualities, is closely and well observed.

Things really fall into place for Casey as the novel draws to a close — in a pretty heavy-handed avalanche, actually. But King is too smart to send a character riding off into the sunset. She simply leaves Casey in a very promising place, no more or less precarious than she had been when things were bad and could turn good. She leaves her savoring the newly secure things in her life that “might just last.”

Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt .

Writers & Lovers By Lily King 324 pages. Grove Press. $27.

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clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

Lily King’s ‘Writers & Lovers’ delivers pure joy

Please don’t do this. Don’t write a novel about trying to write a novel. It’s cliche and insular and lazy. Just don’t do it.

Unless it’s this novel — this wonderful, witty, heartfelt novel by Lily King titled “ Writers & Lovers .”

I’ve followed King’s career since her debut two decades ago, when she published “ The Pleasing Hour ” about an American au pair in Paris. With “ The English Teacher ” (2005) and especially “ Father of the Rain ” (2010), she established a reputation for writing insightful, emotionally piercing stories. But she never attracted the audience she deserved until she left the confines of domestic fiction and published “ Euphoria ” (2014), a wry historical novel about Margaret Mead in New Guinea.

That change must have felt to her like a risk, but it was not nearly as reckless as what she’s up to now. “Writers & Lovers” is a funny novel about grief, and, worse, it’s dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness. According to the penal code of literary fiction, that’s a violation of Section 364, Prohibiting Unlawful Departure from Ambiguity and Despair.

Run, Lily, run!

The narrator of “Writers & Lovers” is Casey, a 31-year-old woman clinging to her dream of a creative life after all her MFA friends have settled down, married up and sold out. One by one, they’ve succumbed to law or engineering school. A promising writer she used to room with has become a real estate agent, but she tries to convince Casey that she still uses “her imagination when she walked through the houses and invented a new life for her clients.” Rest in peace, dear friend.

‘Euphoria,’ a novel based on Margaret Mead, by Lily King

When the novel opens in the 1990s, Casey is living alone in a converted potting shed in Cambridge, Mass. She wants to be a writer — she is a writer! — but most days the manuscript she’s toiling over feels clogged and doomed. The phrase “I am wasting my life” thumps through her body like a heartbeat. She works as a waitress at an upscale restaurant owned by a Harvard social club to cover her rent and payments on $73,000 of student debt. “All I can do now is manage it, pay the minimums until — and this is the thing — until what? Until when?” she asks. “There’s no answer. That’s part of my looming blank specter.”

This is a bracingly realistic vision of the economic hopelessness that so many young people are trapped in: serving extraordinary wealth but entirely separate from it. Casey has spent six years on her novel, barely supporting herself with an exhausting restaurant job that gives her horrible hours and no benefits. And like far too many artists, she’s ignoring a conspiracy of frightening bodily ailments because she can’t afford health insurance.

Giving up now would be sensible but demoralizing, an admission that all her past struggles were for nothing. Her landlord greets her one morning by noting, “I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say,” but that’s no more discouraging than her own internal doubts. Sitting at her desk later that day, she confesses, “I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”

Feeling even worse is a constant threat. Her last boyfriend, Luke, was a poet who worried that “the Devil” might be behind their relationship while he wrote about bees and dead children. Now Casey’s alone again, trudging through a perpetual state of shock at the sudden loss of her mother. Her sorrow sends her into fits of crying, which the manager at the restaurant finds annoying.

I know: I’m doing a horrible job of making this novel sound funny or romantic. But this is the grim terrain that King lays out at the opening of “Writers & Lovers.” And it’s what makes the arc of this story so enchanting. All of these tragedies and obstacles are drawn with stark realism and deep emotional resonance. But even during the early pages, we can sense Casey’s spirit crouching in determined resistance:

“I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning,” she says. “I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex. Or Luke. Or death. Which means not thinking about my mother, who died on vacation last winter. There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write.”

As in her previous novels, King explores the dimensions of mourning with aching honesty, but in “Writers & Lovers” she’s leavened that sorrow with an irreducible sense of humor. Her heroine experiences life in the weirdly bifurcated way that writers often do: feeling the pain while also harvesting it for comedy. As Casey endures the humiliations of poverty and the mistreatment of various suitors, her own wry commentary on life as a young woman in modern America is the only compensation that gets her through.

Now on her fifth novel, King has a lifetime of experience with the pressures and absurdities of being an aspiring writer — and a successful one. She’s also in a position to cast a knowing, satiric eye across the whole enterprise of fiction workshops, graduate seminars, bookstore readings and publishing parties. Casey endures the condescension of insecure, egotistical men who “wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.” Such acerbic insights ensure that “Writers & Lovers” isn’t just a novel for other writers. It explores a culture determined to shame young women’s sexuality, hobble their motivation and mock their ambition.

With Casey, King has created an irresistible heroine — equally vulnerable and tenacious — and we’re immediately invested in her search for comfort, for love, for success: a triple prize that seems entirely impossible. But as the story progresses, the desolation of pining for a partner flips into the chaos of balancing two fellow writers vying for her affections. That artistic anxiety and romantic strategy introduces a new set of pressures.

Jane Austen said, “Man has the advantage of choice; woman only the power of refusal,” but Casey is determined to hold out for a plot on her own terms. The result is an absolute delight, the kind of happiness that sometimes slingshots out of despair with such force you can’t help but cheer, amazed.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

On March 30 at 7 p.m., Lily King will be at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C.

Read more books coverage by Ron Charles:

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Writers & Lovers

By Lily King

Grove. 324 pp. $27

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WRITERS & LOVERS

by Lily King ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020

Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult...

A Boston-area waitress manages debt, grief, medical troubles, and romantic complications as she finishes her novel.

“There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write in the morning,” Casey explains at the opening of King’s ( Euphoria , 2014, etc.) latest. The top three are her mother’s recent death, her crushing student loans, and the married poet she recently had a steaming-hot affair with at a writer’s colony. But having seen all but one of her writer friends give up on the dream, 31-year-old Casey is determined to stick it out. After those morning hours at her desk in her teensy garage apartment, she rides her banana bike to work at a restaurant in Harvard Square—a setting the author evokes in delicious detail, recalling Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter , though with a lighter touch. Casey has no sooner resolved to forget the infidel poet than a few more writers show up on her romantic radar. She rejects a guy at a party who reveals he’s only written 11 1/2 pages in three years—“That kind of thing is contagious”—to find herself torn between a widowed novelist with two young sons and a guy with an irresistible broken tooth from the novelist's workshop. Casey was one of the top two golfers in the country when she was 14, and the mystery of why she gave up the sport altogether is entangled with the mystery of her estrangement from her father, the latter theme familiar from King’s earlier work. In fact, with its young protagonist, its love triangle, and its focus on literary ambition, this charmingly written coming-of-age story would be an impressive debut novel. But after the originality and impact of Euphoria , it might feel a bit slight.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8021-4853-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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15 questions to consider as you finish 'Writers & Lovers' by Lily King

Jenna Bush Hager's Read With Jenna book club pick for March, "Writers & Lovers" by Lily King , covered a range of themes including grief, love and following one's passion. The story is about Casey Peabody, an aspiring writer who finds herself reevaluating her priorities and career ambitions after the death of her mother leaves her feeling lost and alone. As she navigates a difficult moment in her career, Casey also finds herself reevaluating priorities in her love life as she navigates a love triangle. Through trial and error, she sorts through what kind of romantic partner will add to her life and support her ambition.

“Writers & Lovers” by Lily King

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December 20, 2023 • If you've found yourself reading the same picture book over and over (and over and over) to a small but determined audience we see you and salute you! Is it time to add a few new titles to the mix?

A buffet of 2023 cookbooks for the food lovers on your list

December 16, 2023 • There are a lot of cooks at NPR. Every time we ask our staff for recommendations for our annual, year-end books guide, we get back a veritable smorgasbord of cookbook offerings.

12 books that NPR critics and staff were excited to share with you in 2023

December 5, 2023 • Every year we ask NPR staff and book critics to share their favorite titles in our annual Books We Love guide. Behind the scenes, it's fun to spot trends and see what gets nominated again and again.

Join NYPL and the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure for a Chance to Win Prizes!

This summer, The New York Public Library is partnering with the National Book Foundation (NBF) to offer adult readers the chance to participate in a special Summer Reading Adventure. 

How To Get Involved

• Visit a participating branch to pick up a Summer Reading Adventure activity card, download one in  English ,  español (Spanish), or  中文 (Chinese), or visit  nationalbook.org/adventure to fill out your Summer Reading Adventure card online.  
• Check off the activities on the card as you complete them. You don't have to do all of them to receive discount codes for Bookshop.org and Libro.fm, be entered to win books, hats, ice cream, reusable water bottles, and more, and get your own National Book Foundation tote bag at a participating branch (see below)—while supplies last!  
• Complete  all the activities on the card to be entered into a drawing to win the grand prize: airfare, hotel, and two tickets to the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony in NYC on Wednesday, November 20, 2024!  
• Once you have filled out the card in full, including your contact details, return it to one of the participating branches below or mail it to: National Book Foundation, 90 Broad Street, Suite 604, New York, NY 10004. Alternatively, visit  nationalbook.org/adventure to complete the form online.  All Summer Reading Adventures must be submitted online or postmarked by August 31, 2024, to be eligible for prizes.

Please Note:  For the grand prize, participants must complete all activities, answer the bonus question, and be 18 years or older. Prize drawings are administered by the National Book Foundation; check out the  National Book Foundation website for any prize-related questions. 

Summer Reading Adventure cards and tote bag prizes are available at the branches listed below while supplies last.  Limit one card and one tote bag per person.

• Bronx Library Center
• Kingsbridge
• High Bridge Library
• Morris Park
• Bloomingdale
• Chatham Square
• Hamilton Grange
• Jefferson Market
• New Amsterdam
• Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)

Staten Island

• St. George Library Center

Looking for Inspiration for Your Summer Reading Adventure?

Look no further! NYPL has many free programs, resources, and opportunities to help you check off the activities on your Summer Reading Adventure card.  Don't have a library card yet?  Get one today!

Summer at the Library

• Explore Summer at the Library. Discover free programs for kids and teens, events and activities for adults, reading recommendations, exhibitions, and much more. Plus, use your library card to book free passes at 90+ museums, gardens, and more across NYC. 

Listen to an Audiobook

• Looking for a Great Listen? Try a 2024 Audie Award Winner
• New to downloadable materials? Get started now with e-books and e-audiobooks.

Reread a Favorite Childhood Book

• Take a look at our  125 Kids Books We Love to see if your favorites made the list!

Book-to-Screen Adaptations

• Check out our most recent list of 20 book-to-screen adaptations to put on your radar .
• Explore our list of 15 book-to-film adaptations not to miss from fall 2023 .

Connect with Fellow Book Lovers

• Check out NYPL’s program offerings to find a local book discussion!

Ask for a Recommendation

• Visit your local library and ask a staff member for a recommended read!
• Explore our all-new Summer Staff Picks for fresh recommendations for all ages, handpicked by our expert librarians.
• Check out NYPL Recommendations for more!

Attend a Literary Event—Virtual or In-Person

• Find an author talk at a branch near you!
• Looking to watch in your own time? Check out LIVE from NYPL's extensive archive of free public programs featuring prominent writers, artists, and thinkers.

Read a Book in a Genre That's New to You

• Browse NYPL's list of the Best Books of 2023 by genre.
• Check out our favorite poetry books of 2024 so far .

Interview with a Living Writer

Tune into an episode of  Library Talks , featuring recorded conversations by your favorite writers—and discover new authors to enjoy!

Pilgrimage to a Literary Site

• Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe’s last home is next door to a Library branch? On your next visit to  Bronx Library Center , stop by the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, the historic farmhouse where Poe wrote some of his most famous works, including the poem “Annabel Lee.” To learn more, read  Edgar Allan Poe in the Bronx .
• Visit the home of author and activist Audre Lorde, who lived and wrote on Staten Island from 1972 to 1987. For extra points, drop by the neighboring  Stapleton Library , a short fifteen minute walk away! 
• Spend a day at NYPL's flagship  Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and pay a visit to our permanent  Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library's Treasures to discover some of the most extraordinary items in our collections.

Good luck and bon voyage on your Summer Reading Adventure!

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Get to know best-selling author Tommy Orange, coming soon to Salisbury University

National best-selling author Tommy Orange is headed to Salisbury, and he wants to meet you.

Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) is set to make a special appearance at Salisbury University on Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. for a public conversation with Isabel Quintana Wulf of the English Department, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

There There  was chosen as the 2023 One Maryland One Book by a selection committee of 20 Marylanders, including teachers, scholars, librarians, writers, booksellers and community workers, representing 10 counties and Baltimore City.

According to Maryland Humanities, released in 2018,  There There  tells the interconnected stories of a cast of 12 Native characters from across generational lines, as they converge toward the Big Oakland Powwow.

SALISBURY: How Salisbury University has stepped up security after off-campus shooting of 3 students

“ There There  provides us an opportunity to connect with several Native American lives that feel immediate and relevant to the world today,” Executive Director of Maryland Humanities Lindsey Baker said in a news release.

“These characters are deeply rooted in their rich, often traumatic histories, yet are instantly recognizable to any reader. Tommy Orange shares with us their triumphs and their struggles, creating fully-rounded characters and journeys to follow," Baker added.

From Oakland roots, a sports lover becomes 'major fiction reader'

Tommy Orange was never a big reader.

"I wasn't really interested in books," he said. "My connection to our local public library was reading during the summer in order to get Oakland Athletics tickets. I was much more into sports."

As a child growing up in Oakland, Calif., there were no readers or academics in Orange's family. He was rarely, if ever, encouraged by those around him to pick up a book. Reading was not a major focus within his household, and college was not spoken of.

Then, after later graduating from community college with a degree in sound engineering — where Orange admitted to reading books, although only to pass tests — he found a job at a used bookstore.

It was there that he developed an intense passion for reading that has since continued to bloom.

EDUCATION: Two Lower Shore educators are Maryland Teacher of Year finalists. Get to know them here.

"I was very much, in my early 20s, searching for meaning," he said.

One day, during a shift, Orange was asked to move the entire fiction section from the back of the store to the front of the store. At the time, there weren't very many customers floating in and out of the bookstore. So, what better way to pass the time shelving books than with reading.

"I had a lot of time to read while I was moving the books," Orange said. "I didn't really know what fiction was, but it was during that period of my life that I first became a major fiction reader. I became obsessed. And that, soon, turned into wanting to write."

From experimental fiction to writing from 'experience of Native person'

Orange then spent the next 10 years — amidst his time in the MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts — reading and writing as much as he possibly could. The young man believed he had some serious catching up to do.

"I was privately honing my skills as a writer," he said. "A lot of writers know (of their passion) early on and develop in their younger years, so I felt like I was catching up."

Orange, who gravitated toward authors such as Frank Kafka, began by writing experimental fiction.

"I very much had the experience of a Native person. And as soon as I started introducing elements from my own life, it automatically brought over the Native elements," he shared.

"As a Native person, I'll always be writing through the filter that is me. But I'm also a mixed-race person, and identity will always be a big thing for me," he added.

Orange's father is Cheyenne, and mother is White.

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There There vaults author into New York Times Book Review's 10 best of year

Orange later went on to publish his debut novel, There There , in 2018. The novel highlights what he calls the urban Indian experience, something he is rather familiar with.

In fact, there are certain autobiographical elements threaded throughout much of There There , as well as across all of the 12 different characters, that reflect Orange's early life in Oakland.

There There was recognized as one of  The New York Times Book Review’s  10 Best Books of the Year, and has since won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award's "John Leonard Prize," and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

"It is sort of a tragic book, but I did try to weave in hope," he said.

The urban Indian experience — although an important part of Native American culture — is often overlooked. In 1952, the U.S. federal government created the Urban Relocation Program, which encouraged reservation dwellers to move into big cities, which held the promise of a better life.

Orange believes that, to this day, many students are not taught past a certain time period in regard to Native American culture. As a result, the relocation of generations of Native people to cities can easily be left unnoticed and unrecognized.

"It's largely intertribal in a lot of ways," Orange said of the urban Indian experience. "Because there's no tribal homeland or tribal center, you have all of these different tribes coming together. It's a rich and long history of Native people living in the city."

"The diversity of who we are is not known very well," he added. "People want to say if you're in a headdress, or you have long hair and its braided, or you're wearing native jewelry, those are things to look for to authenticate you. But we look a lot of different ways."

After There There, upcoming novel inspired by Baltimore

There isn't one particular lesson or piece of information Orange wants his readers to be left with after they set down There There . All he wishes for is for his readers to become changed individuals.

"For a novel, I don't necessarily want to have it be transactional; the reader comes away with this or that," he said. "I hope they have a good reading experience. I hope they're different than before they opened the book. But how people change with novels is a lot more subtle."

When Orange initially finished writing There There , there was no second book on the horizon. But now, fans of Orange can look forward to his next book, a sequel of sorts, he said, which looks at the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.

The premise of the novel, titled Wandering Stars and set to release in March 2024, came to Orange when he was in Baltimore, Md. Baltimore, he said, reminds him of home. It's an indescribable feeling, he shared.

Orange teased he is also working on his third book, which will focus on "pretendians" — individuals who falsely claim Indigenous identity and ancestry, often for their own personal gain.

"I'm excited. This one's coming out a lot faster," he shared of the novel, which currently has a working title. "I'm hoping to finish a full draft by December."

SALISBURY: Get to know D'Shawn Doughty, Salisbury's new appointed City Council member

Olivia Minzola covers communities on the Lower Shore. Contact her with tips and story ideas at  [email protected] .

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• Arts & Entertainment

Fear you’ll never hear your favorite band live? These Maine tribute shows might do the trick

See homages to David Bowie, Prince, The Cure and The Rolling Stones in Portland this week, and other shows coming this summer.

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If you’ve never seen a tribute act perform the songs of artists that are either too big to play in Maine or who have passed away, there’s a way to do a whole bunch of that this week in Portland.

There are also tribute shows happening in venues around the state all summer long.

A Strange Day is the Portland-based tribute to The Cure. Photo by Seth D. Warner

Let’s start with Portland-based A Strange Day, a tribute to British alternative act The Cure, fronted by singer and guitarist Seth Warner.

The band will perform The Cure’s second album, “Seventeen Seconds,” in its entirety, along with some hits and other cuts at Portland House of Music on Thursday.

The album was released on April 18, 1980. Lead singer and guitarist Robert Smith turned 21 three days later. The single  “A Forest” marked the band’s debut on the U.K. Singles Chart, where it reached the No. 31 spot. The song remains a setlist staple at The Cure’s live performances.

Warner said he put himself in the shoes of Cure fans when deciding what album to cover. “What I would like to hear from a Cure band is a dive into the specific eras that surrounded each record, and ‘Seventeen Seconds’ set the tone for the more introspective and gloomy textures and themes.” Advertisement

As for Warner’s favorite “Seventeen Seconds” tracks, he said, “I really like ‘At Night’ for its dynamic potential, and the edgy and angsty ‘M.'”

The band took its name from the track “A Strange Day” from The Cure’s 1982 album “Pornography.”

Along with Warner, the band is Pete Dugas (keys), Andrew Hodgkins (drums), Matt Kennedy (synth/sax), Kevin O’Reilly (bass), Casey Urich (trumpet) and Corey Urich.

Angel Butts, a copy editor living in Westbrook, has seen The Cure more than 100 times on three continents and at least 10 countries, including Latvia and Colombia. “They’re like breathing to me. They have this massive catalog and it spans every possible mood, I don’t know of another band with a palette like that. “Seventeen Seconds” is among her favorite of the band’s 13 studio albums.

Butts has seen The Cure play the “Seventeen Seconds” album all the way through three times. “One of those shows stands as the best show I’ve ever seen in my life. The Cure: Reflections, Nov. 27, 2011 at the  Beacon Theatre in New York City.”

Butts said she and her 13-year-old daughter will be attending the A Strange Day show. “I think she’s more excited than I am.” Advertisement

A Strange Day  8:30 p.m. Thursday. Portland House of Music, 25 Temple St., Portland, $12 in advance, $15 day of show, 21-plus. portlandhouseofmusic.com

Another British act that will likely never perform in Maine is The Rolling Stones. With more than 30 albums, the band achieved legendary status decades ago. Singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards are both 80, and the band is currently on tour and will be at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, on Thursday.

There are still tickets left for that show, but you can save yourself hours of traffic jams and a lot of more by instead heading to Aura on Saturday to see Satisfaction: The International Rolling Stones tribute show. Or maybe you’ll see the real deal and then keep the party going here in Maine.

Satisfaction has been slinging Stones hits for over two decades and has played more than 4,000 shows. Chris LeGrand’s take on Mick Jagger is pretty convincing, and he and the band will surely be pleased to meet you.

Satisfaction: The International Rolling Stones Tribute Show 9 p.m. Saturday. Aura, 121 Center St., Portland, $15, $25.50, 18-plus. auramaine.com

The Prince/Bowie tribute act performing live. Photo by Tammie Birdwell

David Bowie and Prince died within five months of each other in 2016, at the ages of 69 and 57, respectively, and their losses were felt by millions of fans around the world. Advertisement

With contributions that are impossible to quantify, both artists left behind a legacy of music that lives on through radio play, home listening and tribute shows.

Boston-based musician Eric Gould loves both artists and is the bandleader of a Prince/Bowie tribute coming to Portland on Saturday. The band is a revolving lineup of players from all over the country.

Gould plays bass and designs the setlists. For this show, the musicians are Cal Kehoe (guitar, vocals), Adrian Tramontano (drums), Sammi Garrett (percussion, vocals), Josh Schwartz (baritone sax, vocals), Rob Somerville (tenor saxophone), Rob Volo (trombone) and Kiran Edwards (keys).

Gould said that, to him, Prince embodies soul, creative arrangement and precision. “His music has the best energy and makes you feel on top of the universe.”

He described Bowie as having a voice and character that is completely unique.

“It is powerful and epic and decadent,” said Gould, who has made a career out of finding unique connections through the songbooks of artists. “It is such a treat to present music people know and love in a way that is fresh to the ears. This combination brings so much joy to everyone on and off stage.” Advertisement

Prince/Bowie 8 p.m. Saturday. Portland House of Music, 25 Temple St., Portland, $25, 21-plus. portlandhouseofmusic.com

Other upcoming tribute shows

The Peacheaters: An Allman Brothers Band Experience, Friday. Jonathan’s, Ogunquit, $31 to $72.50. jonathansogunquit.com

Sweet Baby James: James Taylor Tribute, Saturday. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $30 to $45. vinhillmusic.com

Studio Two: The Early Beatles Tribute, June 9. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $30, $35. vinhillmusic.com

Magic Bus: A Tribute to The Who, June 14. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $30. vinhillmusic.com Advertisement

The The Band Band, June 21. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $45, $55. vinhillmusic.com

Bruce In The USA, June 21. Aura, Portland, $20 to $39.50. auramaine.com

Elvis Tribute Show, June 22, July 20. Jonathan’s, Ogunquit, $29 to $70. jonathansogunquit.com

Higher Ground: A Tribute to Stevie Wonder, July 20. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $40. vinhillmusic.com

Studio Two: The Early Beatles Tribute, July 6. Jonathan’s, Ogunquit, $41.50 to $82.50. jonathansogunquit.com

Johnny Cash Tribute Show, July 7, Aug. 10.  Jonathan’s, Ogunquit, $29 to $70. jonathansogunquit.com Advertisement

Rose Alley: A Tribute to Jerry Garcia, June 28. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $23. vinhillmusic.com

Runnin’ Down A Dream: The Tom Petty Tribute Band, July 13, Nov. 14. Jonathan’s, Ogunquit, $35 to $76. jonathansogunquit.com

The Elton John Experience, July 21. Jonathan’s, Ogunquit, $29 to $79. jonathansogunquit.com

Zach Nugent’s Dead Set, Aug. 1. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $25. vinhillmusic.com

The Stray Horses, Aug. 8. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $25. vinhillmusic.com

Wake Up Mama: The Allman Brothers Tribute Band, Aug. 24. Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, Arundel, $25. vinhillmusic.com

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Sen. Susan Collins decries Trump’s conviction

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Writers & Lovers: Lily King Paperback – February 4, 2021

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The New York Times Bestseller ‘Captivating, potent, incisive, and wise ’ – Madeline Miller, author of Circe ‘Extremely funny’ – Sunday Times Recently out of a devastating love affair and mourning the loss of her beloved mum, Casey is lost. The novel she has been writing for six years isn’t going anywhere, her debt is soaring, and at thirty-one, with all her friends getting married and having kids, she feels too old for things to be this way. Then she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar – older, fascinating, troubled – walks into her life, his two boys in tow. Suddenly Casey finds herself at the point of a love triangle, torn between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures. And she’s still got to write that book . . . ‘Suffused with hopefulness and kindness’ – Ann Patchett ‘Exquisite’ – Sunday Telegraph ‘Funny and immensely clever’ – Tessa Hadley ‘Beautiful . . . Reading the book feels like waiting for clouds to break – a kind of gorgeous agony’ – Guardian ‘I loved this book’ – Curtis Sittenfeld

• Print length 324 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Picador
• Publication date February 4, 2021
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 5.08 x 1.22 x 7.72 inches
• ISBN-10 1529033136
• ISBN-13 978-1529033137
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; Main Market edition (February 4, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 324 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1529033136
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1529033137
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.22 x 7.72 inches
• #10,675 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #20,340 in Contemporary Women Fiction
• #44,679 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in this country and abroad.

Lily’s first novel, The Pleasing Hour (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain (2010), was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of both the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine Fiction Award. Lily's new novel, Euphoria, was released in June 2014. It has drawn significant acclaim so far, being named an Amazon Book of the Month, on the Indie Next List, and hitting numerous summer reading lists from The Boston Globe to O Magazine and USA Today. Reviewed on the cover of The New York Times, Emily Eakin called Euphoria, “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.”

Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies.

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International Booker Prize 2024: Jenny Erpenbeck becomes first German writer to win £50,000 award

Author shares prize for kairos, her novel about lovers in 1980s east berlin, with its translator, michael hofmann.

Erpenbeck’s novel follows a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in 1980s east Berlin. Photograph: Craig Stennett/Getty

Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann, has won the 2024 International Booker Prize . Erpenbeck is the first German writer, and Hofmann the first male translator, to win the award. They will share the £50,000 (€58,500) prize. The book’s victory, from a record 149 entries, was announced by Eleanor Wachtel, chair of this year’s judges, at a ceremony at Tate Modern, in London, on Tuesday evening.

Erpenbeck’s novel follows a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in 1980s East Berlin. It intertwines the personal and the political as the lovers seemingly embody the communist state’s crushed idealism, both holding on to the past long after they know they should move on.

Kairos is a “wonderful circumstantial story in which 10 years pre- and post-Mauerfall come into play”, Hofmann said, referring to the period on either side of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. “The book seems to me like a coin, which has a personal story – heads, as it were – on one side, and tails, the emblem of the state, on the other. It keeps being spun into the air, and it comes down heads, it comes down tails.”

[  Jenny Erpenbeck: ‘The Berlin Wall was there, but I didn’t feel as if I was in a cell. I also felt free’  ]

Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin in 1967, six years after the construction of the Berlin Wall began, said, “The fall of the wall is an idea of breaking free. And what interested me is that breaking free is not the only thing that can be told in such a story. There are years before and years after. It’s also about what follows the happy end.”

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Wachtel described Kairos as luminous prose that is “both beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political”: “Erpenbeck invites you to make the connection between these generation-defining political developments and a devastating, even brutal love affair, questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Like the GDR” – or German Democratic Republic, the official name of East Germany during its 41-year existence – “it starts with optimism and trust, then unravels.”

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The winner was chosen from a shortlist of six books that also included Not a River , written by Selva Almada and translated by Annie McDermott; The Details, written by Ia Genberg and translated by Kira Josefsson; Mater 2-10 , written by Hwang Sok-yong and translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae; What I’d Rather Not Think About, written by Jente Posthuma and translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey; and Crooked Plow , written by Itamar Vieira jnr and translated by Johnny Loren. All entries had to be published in Britain or Ireland between May 1st, 2023, and April 30th, 2024.

Wechtel’s fellow judges were the award-winning poet Natalie Diaz, the Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera, the visual artist William Kentridge and the writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.

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Ellen O’Donoghue

Ellen O'Donoghue is an Irish Times journalist

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