Don't miss out on this special Labor Day surprise. The internationally revered Kennedy shares with us her comedic repertoire. “Her stand-up is startlingly good. She works the audience and makes the most of her cleverness with words, her knack for seeing things freshly. She has a great riff about people scraping moss off each other every morning in Scotland, but the audience seems most to enjoy the material about pubic hair." - The Guardian
She's assertive, well-timed, and she will be at McNally Jackson Books for one night only.
News of Note
Staff Picks
Prater Violet
Written by David
By Christopher Isherwood (UMinn Press, $15.95)
What I like best about Christopher Isherwood is his remarkable ability to convey the humor of his characters. Some of them, in fact, are so hilariously life-like that I've often suspected that they're not wholesale fabrications. I would bet anything, for instance, that Friedrich Bergmann, the absurd, Austrian film director of Prater Violet, is almost wholly based on some real-life person that Christopher chanced to meet. He just seems too much of a character not to be real.
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
Written by Adjua
By Charles Bukowski (City Lights, $14.95)
Foul and hypnotic, this sirenic black hole of a book offers a voice so harrowingly believable you quickly find you've already read far more than you ought, and that you must hurl the book across the room lest its spell of despair ruin your life for good. Safe now, but forever changed, you quietly ask yourself how Bukowski dared write such souls that seethe and rot and fester. Then, perhaps even more quietly, you thank him for it and pick the thing up again.
Parisians
Written by David
By Graham Robb (W.W. Norton, $28.95)
I almost can't believe how great this book is. Graham Robb has given us an astoundingly creative history of Paris. It's as entertaining and interesting as it is unique and informative. One can only hope that sometime down the line he finds his way towards writing other cities' histories too.
What I like best about Christopher Isherwood is his remarkable ability to convey the humor of his characters. Some of them, in fact, are so hilariously life-like that I've often suspected that they're not wholesale fabrications. I would bet anything, for instance, that Friedrich Bergmann, the absurd, Austrian film director of Prater Violet, is almost wholly based on some real-life person that Christopher chanced to meet. He just seems too much of a character not to be real.
Foul and hypnotic, this sirenic black hole of a book offers a voice so harrowingly believable you quickly find you've already read far more than you ought, and that you must hurl the book across the room lest its spell of despair ruin your life for good. Safe now, but forever changed, you quietly ask yourself how Bukowski dared write such souls that seethe and rot and fester. Then, perhaps even more quietly, you thank him for it and pick the thing up again.
I almost can't believe how great this book is. Graham Robb has given us an astoundingly creative history of Paris. It's as entertaining and interesting as it is unique and informative. One can only hope that sometime down the line he finds his way towards writing other cities' histories too.