2009-2010

Writers Read

Monday, September 14, 2009, 6 p.m.
Michael J. Agovino reads from The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City (HarperCollins, 2008)

Michael Agovino grew up in the Bronx’s Co-op City. His Italian-American father, a buttoned-up union man who moonlighted as a bookmaker and gambler, was dogged in his pursuit of the finer things in life. When the point spreads were on his side, he brought his family to places he only dreamed about. With bad luck came spousal arguments, unpaid bills, and eviction notices. The Bookmaker is both a bold, loving portrait of a family and an intimate look into some of the most turbulent decades of New York City.  The author transcends the personal to illuminate the ways in which class distinctions shaped America in the last half of the twentieth century.

“Mr. Agovino has crafted a sensitive and engrossing memoir of Italian-American life on the lower rungs of New York’s socioeconomic ladder—and a portrait of how the best intentions in urban planning can go awry. All of the characters in The Bookmaker are extraordinarily vivid, thanks in part to the author’s uncanny ear for the accents and cadences of New Yorkers of every stripe, especially, of course, middle-class Italian Americans.”

—The Wall Street Journal

Tuesday, October 6, 2009, 6 p.m.
John Giorno reads from Subduing Demons in America: The Selected Poems of John Giorno, 1962-2008 (Soft Skull Press, 2008)

An innovator of poetry and performance, John Giorno’s career spans fifty years and is intertwined with contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin. He helped pioneer the open exploration and celebration of “queer” sexuality in poetry in the 1960s. Giorno’s anti-war work with Abbie Hoffmann resulted in Spiro Agnew labeling him one of the "Hanoi Hannahs" in the 1970s. His AIDS Treatment Project, begun in 1984, set the bar for direct, compassionate action in the AIDS crisis. Subduing Demons in America is a survey of his revolutionary work as a poet, and as a sexual, spiritual and political radical. Giorno’s poetry uses found materials, montage techniques, and careful exploration of the nature of the mind through meditation. He is fabled for his high-energy performances, honed at rock and art venues around the world. 

“His litanies from the underworld of the mind reverberate in your head and ventriloquize your own thoughts.”                                                                                                                                                                                                           
   —William S. Burroughs

Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 6 p.m.
Salvatore Scibona reads from The End: A Novel (Graywolf Press, 2008)

A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many exquisitely drawn characters we meet in The End, which follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a sullen teenage boy, and a jeweler into the heart of a crime that will affect all their lives. The End, Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel, was a 2008 National Book Award finalist and winner of the 2009 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

“A masterful novel set amid racial upheaval in 1950s America during the flight of second-generation immigrants from their once-necessary ghettos. Full of wisdom, consequence, and grace, Salvatore Scibona’s radiant debut brims with the promise of a remarkable literary career, of which The End is only the beginning.”

—Annie Dillard, author of The Maytrees

Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 6 p.m.
Maria Laurino reads from Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2009)

Few books have discussed feminism through the prism of Italian-American identity. In Old World Daughter, New World Mother, Maria Laurino seeks to reconcile her upbringing in an Italian-American home, where sacrifice was the ideal of motherhood, with her desire to start a family while pursuing a career. Laurino merges the personal and the analytical, combining lived experience, research, and reporting on contemporary work-family issues. With a passionate literary voice, she reveals how she learned from “Old World” and “New World” perspectives, negotiating a “sustainable mix of self and selflessness.”

“Ranging from the tug of old superstitions to the terrors of the glass ceiling, from the fear of freedom to the joys of feeding loved ones, Laurino explores the uncharted land where ethnicity meets gender, and takes us on an eye-opening tour of our own pasts, presents, and futures.”
 —Ellen Feldman, author of Scottsboro