July 14

July 14, 2023:  Chris Pavone

Two Nights in Lisbon

An instant New York Times and national bestseller, Two Nights in Lisbon is a tautly wound and expertly crafted, riveting thriller about a woman under pressure, and how far she will go when everything is on the line.

CHRIS PAVONE is author of five international thrillers, beginning with the THE EXPATS in 2012 and most recently the instant bestseller TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON. His novels have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and IndieNext; have won both the Edgar and Anthony awards, and have been shortlisted for the Strand, Macavity, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize; are in development for film and television; and have been translated into two dozen languages. He has written for outlets including the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Telegraph, and Salon; has appeared on Face the Nation, Good Day New York, All Things Considered, and the BBC; and has been profiled on the arts’ front page of the New York Times. He is a member of PEN, the Authors Guild, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America, for which he has served as an Edgars judge. Chris grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Midwood High School and Cornell University, and worked in publishing for nearly two decades at Dell Magazines, Doubleday, the Lyons Press, Regan/HarperCollins, Clarkson Potter, and Artisan/Workman, in positions ranging from copy editor and managing editor to executive editor and deputy publisher; he also wrote a (mostly blank) book about wine, and ghost-wrote a couple of nonfiction books. Then his wife got a job in Luxembourg, and the family moved abroad, where Chris raised their twin boys and started writing THE EXPATS. They now live again in New York City and on the North Fork of Long Island with an Australian Labradoodle named Wally.

July 21

July 21, 2023: Lewis M. Simons

To Tell the Truth: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Lewis M. Simons’s riveting memoir recollects his 50 years as a foreign correspondent, one whose powerful stories contributed to transforming Asia from Vietnam War-era basket case to a global boomtown that today rivals the United States.

Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis M. Simons began his career as a foreign correspondent in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. He saw the war through to the end, covering the fall in quick succession of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Since then, Simons has reported on war, civil unrest, politics and economics from throughout Southeast Asia; India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh; Iraq and Iran; China, Japan, North Korea and South Korea, as well as the former Soviet Union. He was a staff correspondent for The Associated Press, the Washington Post, Time, and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Simons won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, in 1986, for exposing the billions that the Marcos family looted from the Philippines. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism named the series one of 50 Great Stories of the Century. Simons was twice more a Pulitzer finalist and has received numerous other journalism awards, including the George Polk, and was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Simons' op-ed and analytical articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Atlantic and Smithsonian magazines. He has contributed frequently to National Geographic and his work is published in USA Today, where he is a member of its Board of Contributors, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Daily Kos. He has appeared on ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, BBC and CBC. Lewis is co-author with Senator Christopher S. Bond of The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam. He also is author of Worth Dying For and a contributing author of half a dozen books on war and international affairs. A former U.S. Marine, he is a graduate of New York University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is married to fellow journalist Carol Simons. They have three adult children and reside in Washington, DC.

July 28

July 28, 2023:  Susan Isaacs

Bad, Bad Seymour Brown: a Corie Geller Novel  

New York Times bestselling author Susan Isaacs returns to a pair of her readers’ favorite characters, former FBI agent Corie Geller and her retired cop dad, who must solve one of the NYPD’s coldest homicide cases—before the crime’s sole survivor is killed.

Susan Isaacs is the author of fifteen novels, including Compromising Positions, Shining Through, After All These Years, and As Husbands Go. The second in the Corie Geller novels, Bad, Bad, Seymour Brown, will be published May 2023.

August 4

August 4, 2023: Adam Gopnik

The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery  

Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, one of our most beloved writers and a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more, investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn—and master—a new skill?

A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986, Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. He received his BA. in Art History from McGill University, before completing his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first essay in The New Yorker, "Quattrocento Baseball" appeared in May of 1986 and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995. That year, he left New York to live and write in Paris, where he wrote the magazine’s “Paris Journal” for the next five years. His expanded collection of his essays from Paris, Paris To the Moon, appeared in 2000, and was called by the New York Times “the finest book on France in recent years.” While in Paris, he began work on an adventure novel, The King In The Window, which was published in 2005, and which the Journal of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “a spectacularly fine children’s novel…children’s literature of the highest order, which means literature of the highest order.” He still often writes from Paris for the New Yorker, has edited the anthology Americans In Paris for the Library of America, and has written a number of introductions to new editions of works by Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, Victor Hugo and Alain-Fournier.

August 11

August 11, 2023: Jennifer Breheny Wallace in conversation with Ina Garten

Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It  

Award-winning journalist Jennifer Wallace’s definitive book, covers parenting and lifestyle trends, on the rise of “toxic achievement culture” overtaking our kids' and parents' lives, Never Enough offers an urgent, humane view of the crisis plaguing today’s teens and a practical framework for how to help.

Jennifer Wallace is an award-winning journalist and author of the book Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It. She is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and appears on national television to discuss her articles and relevant topics in the news. After graduating from Harvard College, Wallace began her journalism career at CBS “60 Minutes,” where she was part of a team that won The Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism. She is a Journalism Fellow at the The Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Jennifer serves on the board of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City, where she lives with her husband and their three children.