Tables of Contents August 5th: Ghosh! Shattuck! Thomas!

August in the city!

Readers of Content,

We had a wonderful sold-out reading last night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, even in the wake of the infamous CrowdStrike tech failure doing its best to derail us! In a ripple effect from the outages related to that company’s software update, author Jennifer Croft’s flight was cancelled last-minute and she was unable to join us for the reading. We were so lucky that our friend Jenny Xie was able to jump in on short notice and read from her beautiful debut novel Holding Pattern.

It was also a scramble in the kitchen to swap out our planned dish for Jennifer (“inky cap” mushrooms with black garlic puree) and find a dish from Jenny’s book. Luckily, a scene featuring an overturned cauliflower truck and the saving power of Spam basically wrote itself, and we were even able to repurpose the black garlic puree from Jennifer’s dish as swipes of swerving tire marks on the platter of scattered florets.

After all of yesterday’s excitement we’re careening right into another TOC reading JUST TWO WEEKS AWAY! We’re heading back to the Chelsea Market Maker's Studio for our next reading on Monday, August 5th, welcoming an amazing lineup featuring Puloma Ghosh (Mouth), Ben Shattuck (The History of Sound), and Joseph Earl Thomas (God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer).

We’ll be taking a bit of a summer break after the reading on August 5th. We’re not skipping an entire month, but our following reading will be after about a 6-week gap (September 23rd, mark your calendars), so if you want to catch one more TOC reading before summer starts to fade this will be your chance!

Here’s some more info on our authors for August 5th, and a link to tickets and additional event info (including accessibility info) is below.

Puloma Ghosh is the author of the short story collection, Mouth. Her work has appeared in One Story, Craft, Cutleaf, BOTM’s VOLUME Ø, and Cake Zine. She has received fellowships from Tin House and Bennington College. She lives in Chicago.

Ben Shattuck, a former Teaching-Writing Fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a recipient of the PEN America Short Story Prize and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Shattuck's first book, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, was a New Yorker magazine Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, and a New England Indie Bestseller. His book of short stories, The History of Sound, was published this month by Viking. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793. He is also the founder and director of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers' Residency.

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir, long-listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he is earning a PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania. He is also a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink. Additional drinks will be available for purchase (you can select a ticket with an extra drink or a standard ticket including a single drink at checkout). 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 the good folks at Posman Books will be with us selling books, 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.

Find more information on physical accessibility of Chelsea Market here and please write us at biscuits@tablesofcontents.org with any and all questions.

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.

Can't wait to see your faces on August 5th at Chelsea Market!

TOC

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On Our Shelves

• We had such an amazing time attending a little NYC Literary Events curators’ meetup at Pete’s Candy Store the other night, coordinated by Brian Gresko who runs the Pete’s Reading Series and TOC Alum Tyler Wetherall who writes the Reading The City newsletter. Got to be introduced to so many great series and meet the folks behind some of our favorites. Check these folks our for other literary programming in NY: Ditmas Lit; Literary Saloon; Craft and Release; Brooklyn Books and Booze; Franklin Park Reading Series

• Despite the complicated feelings we all have about it, we’re so proud to see several TOC alums on the NYT list of the best books of the 21st Century including Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby), Hernan Diaz (Trust), and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings). Imagine we’ll see a lot more familiar faces on the 2050 version! We also enjoyed, as usual, Lincoln Michel’s reflection on the literary discourse du jour.

• Two beloved TOC Alums, Sarah Gerard and Leslie Jamison, are in conversation at The Strand tomorrow July 25th. Go soak in their brilliance as they discuss Sarah’s new book Carrie Carolyn Coco.

• Next Wednesday July 31st, Queer Aperitivo returns to Little Egg for its third monthly installment. If spritzes, olives, chips, and salumi-laden focaccia sandwiches in a sea of beautiful queer energy feels like summer to you, well you should definitely drop in. A portion of drink sales go to food security work in NYC and Oaxacan mutual aid & reforestation efforts.

• The Little Nights creative events series, run by our own Josh Krigman, is accepting applications for its next “Little Nights’ Big Weekend” creative retreat, being held September 27-29 in Highland, NY. Applications are open until the end of July, apply here!