July 19

July 19, 2019: Chris Babu The Initiation NOW THE REAL TEST BEGINS Drayden and his friends thought nothing could be harder than the Initiation. Little did they know it had only been a warmup for the challenge that lay ahead. With New America’s situation dire, Drayden and the pledges venture out into the unexplored world outside the walls, escorted by a team of elite Guardians. The group seeks to contact another civilization in what remains of Boston, but Drayden has secret goals of his own. Dangers abound in the outside world, including Aeru, the deadly superbug that wiped out humanity. While they battle the elements of a desolate landscape, a power struggle emerges within their ranks. The Guardians seem to be carrying out a covert mission themselves, and the quest turns everything they thought they knew about New America upside down. “An invigorating dystopian sequel…” — Kirkus Reviews ““After taking the 2/3 train from 72nd street to his job on Wall Street for 12 years, it’s little surprise that former bond trader Chris Babu chose to set his YA novel, “The Initiation” (Permuted Press) in the empty train tunnels of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan (“New America”). The trains — and their delays — provided ample inspiration” — NY Post For nineteen years, Chris Babu worked as a bond trader on Wall Street, riding the subway to and from work every day. He traded mortgage-backed securities for Bank of America and then Deutsche Bank, where he eventually ran the MBS trading desk. Now Chris writes full-time, always with his trusted assistant Buddy, a 130-pound Great Dane, who can usually be found on his lap. They split their time between New York City and the east end of Long Island.  

July 26

July 26, 2019: Laurence Maslon From Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America “…an ideal companion for all fans of American musical theater and popular music.” The music of Broadway is one of America's most unique and popular calling cards. In Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America, author Laurence Maslon tells the story of how the most beloved songs of the American Musical Theater made their way from the Theater District to living rooms across the country. Featuring new interviews with Stephen Schwartz, Chita Rivera, Steve Lawrence, and prominent record producers and music critics, the story of this commercial and emotional phenomenon is told here in full--from the imprimatur of sheet music from Broadway in the early 20th century to the renaissance of Broadway music in the digital age, folding in the immense impact of show music on American culture and in the context of the recording industry, popular tastes, and our shared national identity. A book which connects cherished cultural artifacts to the emotional narratives at the core of American popular music, Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America is an ideal companion for all fans of American musical theater and popular music. Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program, with an affiliation in the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. He is the host and producer of the weekly radio series, Broadway to Main Street, broadcast on the NPR-affiliate station WPPB-FM. He edited the two-volume set American Musicals (1927-1969) containing sixteen classic Broadway librettos, published by the Library of America in 2014 to national acclaim. He is also the author of the companion book to the recent PBS documentary series, Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle and cowrote the series with producer/director Michael Kantor. Among his other books are Some Like It Hot: The Official 50th Anniversary Companion (HarperCollins) and The South Pacific Companion and The Sound of Music Companion (Simon and Schuster; revised edition, 2015).    

August 2

August 2, 2019: Helen Harrison An Accidental Corpse From the Director of the Pollock-Krasner House in East Hampton comes an intriguing Jackson Pollock whodunit. Accidents happen. But was this murder? On the night of August 11, 1956, in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs, Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, killing himself. Pollock, the world-renowned abstract painter and notorious alcoholic, also killed his 24-year old passenger Edith Metzger in the crash…or did he? Metzger's autopsy reveals that she was already dead before the crash. Murdered? Perhaps. This shocking disclosure draws vacationing Detective Juanita Diaz and her husband, Captain Brian Fitzgerald of the NYPD, into a homicide investigation that implicates famous members of East Hampton's art community, including Pollock himself. “Edifying and juicy.” — Newsday "[A] refreshingly original reinvention of artistic history.” — Kirkus Helen A. Harrison is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and an authority on 20th century American art. She is the author of Hamptons Bohemia and Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollack. She lives in Sag Harbor, New York.  

August 9

August 9, 2019: Richard Zoglin Elvis in Vegas The story of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years. His career had gone sour—bad movies, and mediocre pop songs that no longer made the charts. He’d been dismissed by most critics as over the hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews, “Suspicious Minds” gave him his first number-one hit in seven years, and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 600 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed too. The intimate night-club-style shows of the Rat Pack, who made Vegas the nation’s premier live-entertainment center in the 1950s and ‘60s, catered largely to well-heeled older gamblers. Elvis brought a new kind of experience: an over-the-top, rock-concert-like extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. In doing so, he opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock performers, and brought a new audience to Vegas—a mass audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success to this day. A classic comeback tale set against the backdrop of Las Vegas’s golden age, Richard Zoglin’s Elvis in Vegas is a feel-good story for the ages. Richard Zoglin is a contributing editor and theater critic for Time magazine. He is the author of Hope: Entertainer of the Century, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, and Elvis in Vegas. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Zoglin currently lives in New York City.    

August 16

August 16, 2019: Chris Pavone The Paris Diversion From the New York Times bestselling author of The Expats.  Kate Moore is back in a pulse-pounding thriller to discover that a massive terror attack across Paris is not what it seems – and that it involves her family. American expat Kate Moore drops her kids at the international school, makes her shopping rounds, and meets her husband Dexter at their regular café: a leisurely start to a normal day, St-Germain-des-Prés. Across the Seine, tech CEO Hunter Forsyth stands on his balcony, perplexed that his police escort just departed, and frustrated that his cell service has cut out; Hunter has important calls to make, not all of them technically legal. And on the nearby rue de Rivoli, Mahmoud Khalid climbs out of an electrician’s van, and elbows his way into the crowded courtyard of the world’s largest museum, in the epicenter of Western civilization.  He sets down his metal briefcase, and removes his windbreaker. That’s when people start to scream. Everyone has big plans for the day. Dexter is going to make a small fortune, finally digging himself out of a deep financial hole, via an extremely risky investment.  Hunter is going to make a huge fortune, with a major corporate acquisition that will send his company’s stock soaring.  Kate has less ambitious plans: preparations for tonight’s dinner party—one of those homemaker obligations she still hasn’t embraced, even after a half-decade of this life—and an uneventful workday at the Paris Substation, the clandestine cadre of operatives that she’s been running, not entirely successfully, increasingly convinced that every day could be the last of her career.  But every day is also a fresh chance to prove her own relevance, never more so than during today’s momentous events. And Mahmoud? He is planning to die today. And he won’t be the only one. “Thriller writing at its absolute best…The Paris Diversion does far more than divert; it grips us from the very beginning and doesn’t let go.” — Jeffery Deaver Chris Pavone grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell, and was an editor at book-publishing houses in New York for fifteen years. His 2012 debut, The Expats, described by the Sunday Times as 'a captivating, sophisticated thriller' won both the Edgar and Anthony Awards for best first novel and was a Sunday Times bestseller. It was followed in 2014 by the New York Times bestseller The Accident and The Travelers, a Sunday Times Thriller of the Month in 2016.