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Lauren Groff, author of the New York Times best selling book, Fates and Furies, is with us to talk about her forthcoming book, Florida. Groff has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize and the LA Times Book Prize.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In her vigorous and moving new book, Lauren Groff brings her electric storytelling and intelligence to a world in which storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional, and psychological nature. Among those navigating it all are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple, a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable, recurring character - a steely and conflicted wife and mother.
The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. Startling, precise, and affecting, Florida is a magnificent achievement. 
Dylan Jones's engrossing, magisterial biography of David Bowie is unlike any Bowie story ever written. Drawn from over 180 interviews with friends, rivals, lovers, and collaborators, some of whom have never before spoken about their relationship with Bowie, this oral history weaves a hypnotic spell as it unfolds the story of a remarkable rise to stardom and an unparalleled artistic path.
Tracing Bowie's life from the English suburbs to London to New York to Los Angeles, Berlin, and beyond, its collective voices describe a man profoundly shaped by his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother Terry; an intuitive artist who could absorb influences through intense relationships and yet drop people cold when they were no longer of use; and a social creature equally comfortable partying with John Lennon and dining with Frank Sinatra.
By turns insightful and deliciously gossipy, David Bowie is as intimate a portrait as may ever be drawn. It sparks with admiration and grievances, lust and envy, as the speakers bring you into studios and bedrooms they shared with Bowie, and onto stages and film sets, opening corners of his mind and experience that transform our understanding of both artist and art. Including illuminating, never-before-seen material from Bowie himself, drawn from a series of Jones's interviews with him across two decades, David Bowie is an epic, unforgettable cocktail-party conversation about a man whose enigmatic shapeshifting and irrepressible creativity produced one of the most sprawling, fascinating lives of our time. 
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and the first undocumented student to graduate from the Univ. of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program. His collection, "Cenzontle" (BOA editions, 2018), won the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize. His chapbook, DULCE, was chosen by Chris Abani as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. His memoir, "Children of the Land," is forthcoming from Harper Collins. Castillo is a cofounder of the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award. He has translated the work of Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman and co-translated Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe with the late C.D. Wright. His work has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, in "New England Review," "Gulf Coast," "Indiana Review," "Southern Humanities Review," and "BuzzFeed," among other publications. He lectures at Cal. State Univ., Sacramento, and teaches summers at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. ~Video by www.Poetry.LA 
Melissa Broder talks with Laia Garcia about Melissa’s new book The Pisces. After penning several wonderful poetry collections, Melissa Broder is turning her attention to the world of fiction.
Lucy has been busy working on her dissertation for the past nine years when her relationship with her boyfriend abruptly blows up and causes her to fall apart. Her sister convinces her to visit her place and dog-sit for the summer to get her away from her problems for a while. Lucy attempts to adjust to the change of scenery, taking in the gorgeous house on Venice Beach, but can’t seem to piece together her broken heart, not even with the help of her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.
Everything changes when Lucy becomes enamored by a swimmer whose handsomeness is almost otherworldly. The two start courting and it looks as though Lucy's life is cheering up, that is until she finds out the guy she's falling for is a merman.
A wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling into obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have. 
Former US Border Patrol agent and award-winning writer, Francisco Cantú is joined by the best-selling author of McMafia, Misha Glenny to celebrate the release of his debut memoir of his time on the Mexican border, The Line Becomes A River.
Francisco Cantú was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012 working at the crossroads of remote drug routes and smuggling corridors. The job was to track people across a vast terrain, through blistering days and frigid nights. He detained the exhausted, the parched, and hauled in the bodies from where they had fallen. But as a third-generation Mexican-American, Francisco found that the line he was duty-bound to defend began to dissolve. Haunted by nightmares even after leaving the patrol, he found himself drawn back by friendship and plunged into a final confrontation with a world he believed he had escaped.
For this unique and timely event Francisco is joined by author, journalist and veteran broadcaster Misha Glenny taking us beyond one man’s experience of these sprawling borderlands to reveal truths about life, wherever it is lived, on either side of any arbitrary line. 
Sven-Eric Liedman—author of a major new Marx biography, “A World to Win:The Life and Works of Karl Marx”—in conversation with Adam Tooze and Clara Mattei.
Filmed at Verso Books in Brooklyn, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx, May 5, 2018.
Sven-Eric Liedman, Professor Emeritus of the History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg, has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years. He is the author of “A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx”: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2711...
Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He is currently at work on a history of the global financial crisis 2008-2018, which will appear in time for the anniversary in September 2018. He has written and reviewed for the Financial Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and others.
Clara Mattei is Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research.
