This Week's Literary Events

If you have some extra time this week, you might want to check out some of these readings. Remember, you're required to go to two readings during the semester and write a short review of each on this blog, so this is a good opportunity to get one or both of those done. If you're planning to go to any of these, feel free to leave a comment, and perhaps a few of you can go together.

Reading: Jeffrey W. Rubin & Emma Sokoloff-Rubin “Sustaining Activism” 
Sunday, March 3rd @ 7PM – Blustockings Books (172 Allen St.). Free
In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women and transform women’s roles in their homes and communities. Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship. In “Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration,” Jeffrey W. Rubin, Professor of History at Boston University, and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, Howland Research Fellow in Buenos Aires, tell the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable movement. As a father-daughter team, they describe the challenges of ethnographic research and the way their collaboration gave them a unique window into a fiery struggle for equality.  

Monday, March 4th @ 7PM – Blustockings Books (172 Allen St.). Free 
Reading: Sari Botton “Get Out of My Crotch”
with Elissa Bassist, Betty MacDonald & Mira Ptacin In “Get Out of My Crotch: 21 Writers Respond to the War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health,” a group of fearless essayists examine reproductive rights, access to health care, violence against women, and the rise of rape apologists in twenty-first century United States. Illuminating intersections of gender, class, and race, these stories speak to the challenges women routinely face, attempts to undermine their rights, and the deliberate, systemic erosion of their agency and their existence as equals. Join editor Sari Botton and contributors to the anthology as they revisit what’s at stake, what could still be lost, and why we must continually fight for equality and freedom for all.

The Moth StorySLAM! 
Monday, March 4, 8pm, The Bell House (149 7th St, Brooklyn). $8 
Ten stories. Three teams of judges. One winner. The outrageously popular (deservedly so) spontaneous storytelling series pits local raconteurs against one another, challenging them to come up with an impressive work based on a specific theme.

Sam Lipsyte Reading 
Tuesday, March 5, 7pm - BookCourt (163 Court Street, Brooklyn). Free. 
Lipsyte's acidic and pitch-black satires keep getting better—The Ask, about a middle-aged failure called Milo, was one of the best books of 2010. His new collection, The Fun Parts, contains many of the short stories he's published in The New Yorker.

Rita Moreno in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda
Tuesday, March 5, 7pm - Barnes & Noble on 86th St & Lexington Ave. Free
The musical theater and film star, who has won an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony and an Oscar, tells her life story in Rita Moreno.  


Tuesday, March 5th @ 7PM – Blustockings Books (172 Allen St.). Free Reading: Lillian Faderman “My Mother’s Wars” Join acclaimed writer Lillian Faderman for the release of her newest book, “My Mother’s Wars,” tracing the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for New York in 1914 with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world. In this work of reconstructed memoir, Faderman delves into her mother’s past and offers an extraordinary lens onto the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path. Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of ethnic and lesbian history, and the author of many books, including “To Believe in Women,” “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” “Surpassing the Love of Men,” and “I Begin My Life All Over.”

Wednesday, March 6th @ 7PM – Blustockings Books (172 Allen St.). Free 
Reading: “The Feminist Porn Book”
with Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu & Mireille Miller-Young We all know that everyone watches porn, even (or especially) feminists. But porn has long been branded anti-feminist, and some have even made a crusade out of trying to save women (and men) from it. “The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure” tackles the issues from the inside out, wrestling with these central questions: Can porn be feminist? Do feminists make porn differently? How do feminists reconcile being aroused by sexist images? How can we discuss the pervasiveness of porn in the classroom? And how can we use porn to further the goals of feminism? Join Taormino, Penley, Shimizu, and Miller-Young as they discuss putting female desire in focus for the biggest entertainment industry in the world.

 Thursday, March 7th @ 7PM – Blustockings Books (172 Allen St.). Free 
Reading: David McConnell “American Honor Killings”
In “American Honor Killings: Desire & Rage Among Men,” David McConnell explores the roots of hatred and male sexual violence by examining a series of murders of gay men that are among the most notorious crimes of our era. Through jailhouse interviews and painstaking research, McConnell creates shockingly intimate portraits of the killers’ inner lives. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events – grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity – and together form a secret American history of rage and desire. David McConnell is the author of the acclaimed novels “The Silver Hearted” and “Firebrat.” He is the former cochair of the Lambda Literary Foundation, and lives in New York City.  

Friday, March 8th @ 7PM – Blustockings Books (172 Allen St.). Free 
Reading: Adriana Páramo “Looking for Esperanza”
Inspired by a story about an immigrant mother who walked the desert from Mexico to the USA with the dead body of her baby strapped to her own, Adriana Páramo immersed herself in the underground world of undocumented women toiling in the Florida fields. This fieldwork and the anonymous voices of the women she encountered while looking for the mother in the story are captured in “Looking for Esperanza: The Story of a Mother, a Child Lost, and Why They Matter to Us,” winner of the 2011 Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction. Join cultural anthropologist Páramo for a discussion on the process of gathering information and transforming anthropological field work into a work of creative nonfiction, and using creative nonfiction as a vehicle of social activism.