Join us at Book Culture on 112th as Alexander Hertel-Fernandez discusses his new book Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers Into Lobbyists on Monday, March 19th at 7pm. Alexander will be joined in conversation by Jacob S. Hacker.

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy-sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades. The book also assesses the effect of employer mobilization on the political process more broadly, including its consequences for electoral contests, policy debates, and political representation.

Hertel-Fernandez shows that while employer political recruitment has some benefits for American democracy-for instance, getting more workers to the polls-it also has troubling implications for our democratic system. Workers face considerable pressure to respond to their managers' political requests because of the economic power employers possess over workers. In spite of these worrisome patterns, Hertel-Fernandez found that corporate managers view the mobilization of their own workers as an important strategy for influencing politics. As he shows, companies consider mobilization of their workers to be even more effective at changing public policy than making campaign contributions or buying electoral ads.

Hertel-Fernandez closes with an array of solutions that could protect workers from employer political coercion and could also win the support of majorities of Americans. By carefully examining a growing yet underappreciated political practice, Politics at Work contributes to our understanding of the changing workplace, as well as the increasing power of corporations in American politics. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between inequality, public policy, and American democracy.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. A specialist on American politics and corporate power, his work has appeared in the American Prospect, MSNBC, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Salon, NPR, Talking Points Memo, Vox, and the Washington Post.

Mallory Ortberg has established her knack for twisting children’s tales in her popular online series Children's Stories Made Horrific, and now she’s continue her journey into the macabre with her new collection of stories. Her book The Merry Spinster will forever change how one looks at classic fairy tales.

Ortberg has established herself for dissecting the comforting stories of our childhood and transforming them into nightmarish works of terror. Using her wit and humor she takes delightfully unsettling twists on fiction while remaining faithful to the source material.

Join us as Mallory sits down with Alexander Chee to share her first collection!

Join us for the Bryant Park Reading Room Winter Poetry Series. Poetry readings are on the third Tuesday of each month through April. This month is presented in partnership with Wesleyan University Press. Contemporary award-winning poets present their most recent work for the pleasure of listening to outstanding literary accomplishment. Kinokuniya Bookstore provides the warm, library-like environment, with shelves stuffed with books (available for purchase of course) where you'll meet with other aficionados of poetry. The bookstore sits opposite Bryant Park.

Featuring poets: Shane McCrae, Sarah Blake, Kerri Webster, Gina Athena Ulysse, and Miranda Field

For the first time in a generation, socialism looks like a political ideology with a future in the United States. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara and The Nation senior editor Sarah Leonard join Politically Re-Active host Hari Kondabolu to discuss socialism’s resurgent appeal in an age of rising inequality and its prospects for becoming a viable force in American politics.

A riveting classic of European literature, this superb collection of fiction and reportage is set in Italy's most vibrant and turbulent metropolis—Naples—in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. These writings helped inspire Elena Ferrante's best-selling novels and she has expressed deep admiration for the author of this volume, originally edited in Italian by Italo Calvino. Goyaesque in its depiction of the widespread suffering and brutal desperation that plagued the city, it comprises a mix of masterful storytelling and piercing journalism. This book, with its unforgettable portrait of Naples high and low, is also a stunning literary companion to the great neorealist films of the era by directors such as Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Neapolitan Chronicles is exquisitely rendered in English by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, two of the leading translators working from Italian today. Included in the collection is "A Pair of Eyeglasses," one of the most widely praised Italian short stories of the last century.

Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) is one of the most celebrated and original Italian writers of the 20th century. Neapolitan Chronicles brought her widespread acclaim in her native country when it was first published in 1953 and won the prestigious Premio Viareggio.

In "The Gourmands' Way," Justin Spring chronicles the lives of Americans in mid-century Paris — including Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, A. J. Liebling, and Alice B. Toklas-who changed the way we think about food, cooking, and wine. Spring, a former fellow at the GC's Leon Levy Center for Biography and a National Book Award finalist, speaks with Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times about his new book. "Erudite…entertaining and eminently readable"-The Wall Street Journal

Presented with the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Free; registration required.

Launch of the fiftieth anniversary–edition of A Killing for Christ, where Pete Hamill will be joined in conversation by The New York Times’ Sam Roberts.

Pete Hamill is a veteran New York journalist and novelist. He’s the author of 23 books, including “Downtown: My Manhattan”, “Diego Rivera” and “A Drinking Life”. His eleven novels include “Snow in August” and “Forever”, both of which were New York Times bestsellers, along with three collections of short stories.

As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote, “Freedom of expression is…the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.” Two titans in this fight, Ira Glasser, head of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, and Norman Siegel, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1985 to 2000, reflect on the history and ongoing struggle, and reminisce about their shared Brooklyn roots. Moderated by Jarrett Murphy, executive editor and publisher of City Limits.

From one of continental philosophy's most distinctive voices comes a creative contribution to spatial studies, environmental philosophy, and phenomenology. Edward S. Casey identifies how important edges are to us, not only in terms of how we perceive our world, but in our cognitive, artistic, and sociopolitical attentions to it. We live in a world that is constantly on edge, yet edges as such are rarely explored. Casey systematically describes the major and minor edges that configure the human and other-than-human realms, including our everyday experience. He also explores edges in high- stakes situations, such as those that emerge in natural disasters, moments of political and economic upheaval, and encroaching climate change. Casey's work enables a more lucid understanding of the edge-world that is a necessary part of living in a shared global environment.

Edward S. Casey is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. He is author of several books, including Getting Back into Place, Imagining, and Remembering. The World on Edge is a sequel to his book The World at a Glance.

Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is the Director of Studies at Why There Are Words Press and curator of the New York City branch of the national Why There Are Words Reading Series. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com for more.

Carol Moldaw is an award-winning author of one novel and six books of poetry, including her most recent collection Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, March 2018). The recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, as well as other honors, Moldaw received her M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. She has taught in many writing programs and conferences, and in the spring of 2011 served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Currently Moldaw teaches privately and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and daughter.

Ben Purkert’s debut poetry collection For the Love of Endings was published by Four Way Books in March 2018. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers New Brunswick. His poems and essays have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow.

Valerie Wallace’s debut poetry collection House of McQueen, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize, selected by Vievee Francis, was published by Four Way Books in March 2018. She is also the author of the chapbook The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping (dancing girl press 2011). Her work was chosen by Margaret Atwood for the 2012 Atty Award, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Award in Poetry. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Associate Director, Communications for the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago and teaches courses and workshops throughout the Chicago area. valeriewallace.net.

"This collection, enough / enough, focuses on survivors identifying as trans and non-binary seeking safety in impossible-seeming places. We are often not believed as men, women, or somewhere in-between—survivors are rarely believed in their stories, boundaries, and ability to say yes and no. In this collection of letters written to body parts, enough / enough is the coming together for those of us who have been fragmented. This is for those of us who have found power in re-shaping our bodies, families, homes, and creating new definitions of what wholeness means." - Lexie Bean

Since 1950, the National Book Awards has celebrated the best of American literature, honoring such authors as Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner and Alice Walker. Led by Lisa Lucas, National Book Award finalists Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies) and Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties) hand-pick and introduce stories from some of the honored short story collections that have inspired or influenced their own work. The evening will include performances by actors including Cristin Milioti (Fargo) and stories from the 2016 Rea Award winner Jim Shepard, as well as Jean Stafford, Joan Silber, and more!

Debut author Tadzio Koelb presents his vivid and brutal novel about a woman who carves out her share of the American Dream by living as a man. Trenton, New Jersey, 1946: a woman made strong by wartime factory work kills her husband in a domestic brawl and assumes his identity. Twenty-five years later, as the certainties of American triumphalism are a distant, bitter memory, the family life Abe Kunstler has so carefully constructed is crumbling under the intolerable pressures of his long ruse. Desperate to hold on to what he has left, Abe searches for solutions in the dying city. Written in brilliantly stylized prose, Trenton Makes is a provocative and incisive exploration of the nature of identity, the cult of masculinity, and a disturbing portrait of desperation. Koelb discusses his work with fellow author Jon Michaud.

Bob Herbert has written extensively about racism and politics for The New York Times and other media. Join him for a screening of this documentary where in both poignant and personal terms, he describes the uphill struggle of black families reaching for economic equality in the face of redlining, employment discrimination and other historical inequalities. Talkback follows.

"Elizabeth Flock takes us on an intimate cruise on the shifting sea of the heart, in the best book set in Bombay that I've read in years. Flock's total access to her characters, and her highly sympathetic and nonjudgmental gaze, prove that love and literature know no borders. Easily the most intimate account of India that I've read, and of value to anybody that believes in love and marriage."—Suketu Mehta

Nafkote Tamirat, hailed as a “blazing new talent” by Victor LaValle, presents her debut novel The Parking Lot Attendant, a mesmerizing coming-of-age story of fatherhood, national identity, and what it means to be an immigrant in America today. On an undisclosed island resides an unnamed narrator and her father, the two newest members of a commune built on utopian principles, whose foundations are not as harmonious as they initially seem. Flash back to Boston’s tightly-knit Ethiopian community – and the arrival on the scene of a charismatic hustler out to change the world. The Parking Lot Attendant explores how who we love, the choices we make, and the places we're from combine to make us who we are. Tamirat presents her highly anticipated debut novel at Greenlight in conversation with Sam Graham-Felsen, author of Green.