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
The Conservationist
Written by Sohaila
by Nadine Gordimer (Penguin, $15.00)
Yow, this one will make you realize why she won the Nobel Prize. A skillful and compassionate dissection of apartheid through one mostly unsympathetic landowner farmer in South Africa. Such is Gordimer's prodigious talent that by the end you can see, smell and feel the landscape of veldt and vlei, and find it in your heart to be sorry for a man who stands for everything wrong in his time.
Unforgiving Years
Written by Dustin
by Victor Serge (NYRB Classics, $15.95)
Serge's prose takes a moment to get used to, it's so full of roiling turmoil, drifting clots of yearning rising slowly in the dark mix. This novel, Serge's last, is the story, broken into four parts, four places and times, of the inhuman wreckage our ideology made of the century newly past. There are tastes of Greene here, Heller and Fuentes, but they are muddied and bitter and perhaps more masterful for it.
The Line of Beauty
Written by David
by Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury Publishing, $14.95)
A beautiful and nearly perfectly written novel. Hollinghurst's craftsmanship and use of language is masterly and almost unbelievably skilled. This book won the Booker Prize in 2004, and if you didn't read it then, you should really consider doing so now. It stands so far apart from the ordinary that whether it's destined for tenure in literature's canon is irrelevant -- it's a classic in spirit.
Yow, this one will make you realize why she won the Nobel Prize. A skillful and compassionate dissection of apartheid through one mostly unsympathetic landowner farmer in South Africa. Such is Gordimer's prodigious talent that by the end you can see, smell and feel the landscape of veldt and vlei, and find it in your heart to be sorry for a man who stands for everything wrong in his time.
Serge's prose takes a moment to get used to, it's so full of roiling turmoil, drifting clots of yearning rising slowly in the dark mix. This novel, Serge's last, is the story, broken into four parts, four places and times, of the inhuman wreckage our ideology made of the century newly past. There are tastes of Greene here, Heller and Fuentes, but they are muddied and bitter and perhaps more masterful for it.
A beautiful and nearly perfectly written novel. Hollinghurst's craftsmanship and use of language is masterly and almost unbelievably skilled. This book won the Booker Prize in 2004, and if you didn't read it then, you should really consider doing so now. It stands so far apart from the ordinary that whether it's destined for tenure in literature's canon is irrelevant -- it's a classic in spirit.