Tables of Contents February 5th: Fruchter! Nolan! Zarin!
Plus: Hi from Substack!
Readers of Content,
Hope your 2024s are off to a hopeful start! It’s felt good to turn the page on a new year, despite all the challenges that continue to demand our attention, most notably the anxiety-inducing election year ahead and the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Palestinians and destruction of Gaza. Still, we look forward to gathering around food and literature as both a respite and a catalyst for imagining different stories and different worlds ahead.
First, in case you noticed the new threads: we’ve moved the Tables of Contents newsletter from Mailchimp to Substack! We’ve been back and forth about this for a minute, but finally decided to make the leap. The nice news is that I believe very little will change for everyone receiving this. We’ll be sending out our monthly reading series announcements that should land in your inbox just the same as before. The thing that will change is our ability to eventually use this newsletter to support some new work we want to do — including a more robust newsletter with interviews, recipes, and recommendations — through a paid subscription and a membership situation that we’ll share more on soon!
Okay, back to the main course: we’re kicking off our 2024 reading series at Insa on Monday February 5th! So excited to welcome an amazing opening lineup, featuring Temim Fruchter (City of Laughter), Megan Nolan (Ordinary Human Failings), and Cynthia Zarin (Inverno). Here’s some more info on these authors, and a link to tickets and additional event info (including accessibility info) is below:
Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, White Review, Guardian and Frieze amongst others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Temim Fruchter is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, loves saturated color, and believes in queer possibility. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, City of Laughter, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in winter 2024.
Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Orbit and The Ada Poems, as well as five books for children and two essay collections, Two Cities and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for Poetry, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, she teaches at Yale University and lives in New York City.
Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink (beer, wine, or NA) from the Insa bar; additional drinks will be available for purchase. Our friends at Center for Fiction will be with us selling books, so come ready to pick up some copies!
One other little change on the tickets front: we’re trying out a switch from Eventbrite to The Third Place, a community restaurant-focused platform that offers more manageable ticketing fees as well as other tools aligned with our hope for growth this year. Eventbrite’s fees have risen in the past year, and moving to The Third Place will both reduce the all-in ticket price by about $4 per ticket and let us keep a higher percentage of sales.
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’re so grateful for the community we’ve built and all the love and support we receive from you, and are excited to take some exciting steps towards growing the TOC table in 2024!
Can't wait to see your faces on February 5th at Insa,
Evan
On Our Shelves
TOC Alum Hala Alyan’s must-read piece in Time on changing your mind
Jasper Diamond Nathaniel’s newsletter and Instagram stories sharing dispatches on the less-covered but plenty brutal situation in the West Bank
We’re celebrating new releases from TOC alums this month including Marie Helene Bertino’s celestial Beautyland and Sloane Crosley’s Grief is for People (and will have Marie back for a TOC reading later this spring!)
This piece by Korsha Wilson on Crystal Wilkinson’s new book Praisesongs for the Kitchen Ghosts which we now can’t wait to read
Our friend Jordan Kisner’s difficult but important piece on the mental health crisis at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the NYT Magazine in the wake of multiple student suicides
This article on the casual cruelty of Border Security TV by Jacinta Mulder in Vittles
For our Manhattan composting friends: join this meeting with GrowNYC on the future of their community composting programs on 1/27
Not *exactly* a Tables of Contents event, but our sister restaurant Little Egg is hosting TOC alum Daniel Poppick alongside Tracy Fuad for an intimate poetry reading on February 13th at 7pm. It’ll be a reading from Tracy and Dan’s new work with some drinks served by Little Egg and books for sale. Maybe a little snack, too? No RSVP, just come by!
*We’re hoping this email still gets to you, but if you can’t find the newsletter after this platform swap please check your spam folder and mark this address as ‘not spam.’ If the newsletter isn’t in your spam folder, check the Promotions tab. Thank you!
