Tables of Contents September 23rd: Obreht! Alyan! Burnham!
Back from summer break with a powerful September lineup
Readers of Content,
Welcome back: to school, to the early shiver of September shaking off some of summer’s heat, and to another Tables of Contents event on the not-so-distant horizon! Our last reading was a month ago, August 5th at Chelsea Market, where we had a beautiful night reading and eating with Ben Shattuck, Joseph Earl Thomas, and Puloma Ghosh. We ate burst fruit draped in milky stracciatella, smoked duck atop cornmeal and hazelnut cakes, and strangely timely chocolate chocolate-chip muffins, and talked about chaos and stability, cucumbers and pickles, and so much more.
Our next reading lines up with one of our favorite times of year: the Brooklyn Book Festival and its weeklong lead-up of “Bookends” programming. There are so many great literary events planned around the borough during this time, and we’re excited to be part of the lineup with our reading on September 23rd at Insa. We’re so looking forward to spending the night with Tea Obreht (The Morningside), Hala Alyan (The Moon That Turns You Back), and Gabriella Burnham (Wait). These books move through big themes of family, migration, state violence, and identity that seem fitting as we move into what always feels to me like the pleasant seriousness of fall after the (if we’re lucky) rest and release of summer.
Here’s some more info on our authors for September 23rd, and a link to tickets and additional event info (including accessibility info) is below.
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. From 2020 to 2022, she served as the Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos. She currently lives in Wyoming.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Gabriella Burnham is the author of the novels Wait and It Is Wood, It Is Stone, which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Publishers Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Burnham holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph’s College and has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, where she was named a Harris Center Fellow. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. She and her partner have two rescue cats, Galleta and Franz.
Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink. Additional drinks will be available for purchase. Our friends Sammi and Olivia of Cocktails in Color will be mixing up cocktails inspired by the book, so you'll want to make room for a couple! And as always we’ll have books for sale, so come ready to pick up a few copies!
We do have a handful of seats reserved for sliding-scale admission to keep these events as financially accessible as possible. Please let us know if this ticket price is prohibitive for you and we’ll find a way to get you a seat at the table. These sliding scale seats are limited, so please be thoughtful about your resources and needs when making a request.
We can accommodate gluten-free and vegetarian diets with advance notice. If you have other restrictions or aversions you are of course still encouraged to attend, you just may not be able to partake in every course. Please be sure to notify us of any serious allergies in advance and remind us at the event.
Please write us at biscuits@tablesofcontents.org with any and all questions. And take a look below for some recent work from friends that is inspiring us this month. Can't wait to see your faces on September 23rd at Insa!
TOC
On Our Shelves
I’m feeling particularly wowed by my friends these days, maybe it’s the rush of post-Labor-Day creative work that’s been simmering all summer but it feels so inspiring! Sharing some of their recent work here in the hopes it resonates for you too.
One of Little Egg’s amazing servers, Jeana Scotti, is staging her play Oh Honey — in which four mothers meet at a diner on the first Monday of every month — *IN LITTLE EGG* for seven nights in September! It’s honestly a TOC/Little Egg dream come true. Tickets are going fast, really recommend you try to get some.
Raia Was announced a piano version of her album Captain Obvious which we have gotten a sneak peek of (you, too, can hear a track here) and will have on repeat as soon as it fully releases. To share these new, intimate interpretations she’ll be playing a show at Ki Smith gallery on September 24th (set against a backdrop of previously un-displayed Basquiat paintings, nbd). Please, trust us, go!
A new album from Autre Ne Veut announced yesterday, and the accompanying video for the single “Okay”, is lifting and burying us simultaneously, as always. Can’t wait for the full album.
We’ll be tracing our steps in a kind of awe through Jordan Kisner’s gorgeous, intimate, thoughtful piece on Shakers, their two remaining members, the future of the community, and what we all might learn from them, for the next few days at least
Nneka Okona’s piece on remembering Toni Morrison through her food was written directly to and for us I think?
Friend, musician, activist, and educator Sonny Singh has a beautiful, hopeful new album out today that is a collaborative project with the author Valerie Kaur.
Some close friends including my neighbors Sarah Perimeter and Jonah Freelander have been working tirelessly to organize Reform Jews for Justice, calling for ceasefire and building towards a lobby day in DC Sept 23rd & 24th. Check out their work and support or join if it feels right for you.
Of course, you should check out the breadth of other BKBF Bookends programming and visit the Festival Day at Borough Hall on Sunday September 29th! For the second year, I teamed up with the wonderful Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport of BEM to curate the food nonfiction panels for both the virtual and in-person festival days and I’m really excited with the panels we put together. I mean look at these participants: Sohla El-Waylly, Kate Lebo, Khushbu Shah, Tu David Phu, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Crystal Wilkinson, Lola Milholland, and Kiano Moju!
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