The annual PEN World Voices Festival brings writers from across the globe to New York for a week of readings and conversation. This year, BLP’s own Eduardo Halfon (The Polish Boxer) will participate in two special events. A new addition to the festival is an independent press book fair, where you’ll be able to meet our editorial staff and find great deals on our books. Please join us!

 

Meet Eduardo Halfon at the PEN World Voices Festival

 

✭ Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Classics with Nadeem Aslam, Eduardo Halfon, James Kelman, and Genichiro Takahashi.

Each year, a group of Festival authors are invited by Baruch College’s Great Works program to comment on a classic work of literature or author that influenced their own work. Panelists speak about the great works that affected them, read from their own work or their chosen classic text to illustrate the impact, then engage in discussion with the audience. Moderated by Eva S. Chou.

Thursday, May 2, 4pm (free)
Engelman Recital Hall, 55 Lexington Avenue
Baruch Performing Arts Center

 

✭ Go on a Literary Safari with Michal Ajvaz, Nadeem Aslam, Dror Burstein, Gillian Clarke, Mia Couto, Eduardo Halfon, Natalio Hernandez, Nick Holdstock, Randa Jarrar, Tararith Kho, Jaime Manrique, Margie Orford, Jordi Punti, Noemi Szecsi, Padma Venkatraman, Gerbrand Bakker, James Kelman, and others.

Explorers may discover a bedside reading, a dinner-table discussion, or a poet in the elevator at this event, where each participant is given a map and left to roam the halls of the city’s oldest and largest artist community; the notoriously labyrinthine Westbeth Artists’ Housing. The residents will again open their homes to PEN authors and the public for this intimate annual event, which ends with a reception and champagne toast in the gallery.

Friday, May 3, 6:30pm (tickets required)
55 Bethune Street
Westbeth Center for the Arts

 

Meet Bellevue Literary Press at the PEN World Voices Festival

 

✭ NYU International Houses Mini Festival

PEN reimagines the New York City street festival as an open air indie book fair. Nestled among the cobblestone streets of NYU’s storied Washington Mews, this day-long “festival within the Festival” will feature writers’ workshops in the morning and readings in the afternoon. Browse the tables where literary magazines and independent presses proffer the work of up-and-coming writers, wander the streets and cross borders as the doors to NYU’s International Houses are opened, or stop to take in busking musicians or a puppet show. Together with Le Pain Quotidien, the Mini-Fair will remind you that literature is our daily bread. A must-attend for any lover of literature.

Friday, May 3, Noon – 6pm (free)
On 5th Avenue between 8th and 9th Streets
NYU’s Washington Mews

 

Just released . . .

 

Ghost Moth, a debut novel by Michèle Forbes

During the hot Irish summer of 1969, tensions rise in Belfast where Katherine, a former actress, and George, a firefighter, struggle to keep buried secrets from destroying their marriage . . . [more]

“Readers will revel in the skillful writing . . . complex plot . . . strong characterization . . . lyrical descriptions.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Clever, unpredictable, beautifully written and crafted.”—Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments

✭ Read more about Ghost Moth in the Boston Globe, find out how Irish author Michèle Forbes came to be published by Bellevue Literary Press in the Irish Times, and discover how the author’s background in musical theater influenced her first novel in this exclusive interview.

 

Country of Ash: A Jewish Doctor in Poland 1939-1945, a memoir by Edward Reicher

Country of Ash is the gripping chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. [more]

“Edward Reicher presents events from the perspective of a Jew, a physician, a survivor, a chronicler, a husband but mainly a humanitarian caught in the flux of horrific events that, but for memoirs such as this, would fade with the absolution of time.”—Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Chair Director, Division of Medical Ethics, NYU Langone Medical Center and author of When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust

✭ Read more about Country of Ash in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and in the Passover edition of the Jewish Daily Forward, where Austin Ratner writes about the legacy of the Warsaw Ghetto, the psychology of bigotry, and the parable he found within Edward Reicher’s “stirring” memoir.

 

 Forthcoming . . .

 

Love Among the Particles, stories by Norman Lock (May 2013)

Love Among the Particles is virtuosic story telling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and literary history, Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical and digital ages. [more]

“All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.” —Kate Bernheimer, editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and Fairy Tale Review

✭ Read more about Love Among the Particles in Atlantic magazine’s Spring Book Preview and save the date for a special event, hosted by Vol. 1 Brooklyn, featuring Norman Lock and Matt Bell in conversation.

Thursday, June 13, 7pm (free)
143 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn
Community Bookstore

 

 

Leondardo’s Foot by Carol Ann Rinzler (June 2013)

Leonardo’s Foot stretches back to the fossil record and forward to recent discoveries in evolutionary science to demonstrate that it was our feet rather than our brains that first distinguished us from other species within the animal kingdom. [more]

“Carol Ann Rinzler weaves together material from art, literature, science, and history to broaden our understanding of the human foot. Her book is by turns entertaining, enlightening, and altogether satisfying.” —Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney

✭ We are thrilled to announce that Leonardo’s Foot will be a selection of the Scientific American, History and BOMC2 Book Clubs. In this exclusive interview, Carol Ann Rinzler discusses how she found inspiration in the appendage that Leonardo da Vinci called “a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” 

 

Congratulations . . . 

 

✭ BLP author Bill Hayes (The Anatomist) receives a Guggenheim Fellowship

✭ BLP author Melissa Pritchard (The Odditorium and Palmerino) receives the ASU Faculty Achievement Teaching Award

✭ BLP board member Jan Vilcek, MD, PhD receives the National Medal of Technology and Innovation

 

More to explore . . .

 

✭ In celebration of the Pulitzer Prize and National Poetry Month, Caroline Simpson is crafting “found poetry” from Paul Harding’s Tinkers. Read new poems from previous Pulitzer Prize-winning books each day throughout April at the Pulitzer Remix project.

✭ Tune in to the BLP YouTube Channel for exclusive interviews with Pascale Kramer (The Child), video book reviews, book trailers, and much more to come.

✭ Enroll in the Library Thing Early Reviewers program for a chance to win advance copies of BLP books. Country of Ash, Ghost Moth, and Love Among the Particles are available now through April 29.

✭ Check out our events page to discover when BLP authors will be visiting your community.

✭ Visit us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Goodreads.

 

Help support our mission . . .

 

✭ Help BLP continue to build an engaged audience for exceptional books at the intersection of the arts and sciences by giving today!