The Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch is located at 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.
Tickets or RSVPs are typically required for admission to all Brooklyn Public Library; some tickets include a copy of the book, distributed at the event. Click the "Buy Tickets" button below each event to reserve your seat through EventBrite. You can also use the "Add to Cart" buttons at the bottom of this page to purchase a book without attending an event; include any signing requests in the Order Comments field at checkout.
Mitchell S. Jackson's award-winning first book, The Residue Years, was celebrated as "a powerful debut that takes a raw, hard look at poverty" (Roxane Gay, New York Times Book Review), and the marker of "a fresh new voice in fiction" (O, The Oprah Magazine). With his new book, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, Jackson turns his distinctive and compelling voice to nonfiction, telling the story of his own family and his tumultuous youth in Portland, Oregon. Part self-reflection and part social critique, Survival Math illuminates the systemic forces of race and class that have shaped the lives of countless disenfranchised Americans, in a a candid, lyrical, and thrillingly alive portrait of a family and a community. Jacksonpresents his book in conversation with acclaimed jazz vocalist, bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding, followed by a book signing.
Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking full-issue feature "When We Almost Stopped Climate Change" in the New York Times Magazine – which has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and John Hersey's Hiroshima and has been optioned for film – gave an account of the moment the US came tantalizingly close to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all, before the fossil fuels industry and the Republican Party fully committed to anti-scientific denialism. In his new book Losing Earth, Rich provides more of the context for what did—and didn't—happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us in 2019. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late. Rich presents his book in conversation with New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, followed by a book signing.
Michael Ondaatje -- the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient -- launches the paperback edition of his mesmerizing new novel Warlight, a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement. The Washington Post calls the novel "a quiet new masterpiece from Michael Ondaatje…An elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale," and Hermione Lee writes that Ondaatje "casts a magical spell, as he takes you into his half-lit world of war and love, death and loss, and the dark waterways of the past." Ondaatje presents his book with a reading and conversation, followed by a book signing. Preorder a copy of Warlight through Greenlight to guarantee a place in the signing line.
Only books purchased from Greenlight as preorders or onsite on the night of the event can be signed at the event.