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Book Parties

By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 11/27/12 6:45pm

Book Parties

Evan Cornog and Victor Navasky. (Photo credit: Brendan Fitzgerald)

Columbia University Press Celebrates The Art of Making Magazines

If you came to New York expecting book parties to be tame, dignified affairs held in dusty university clubs, where distinguished older gentlemen talk about editors of yore over cocktails and lamb chops, well, your expectations would have been met Monday night at the Columbia University Press launch of The Art of Making Magazines.

The anthology was culled from 10-plus years of lectures by notable magazine editors by Victor Navasky, editor emeritus of The Nation and the director of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism magazine program, and Evan Cornog, the dean of Hofstra University’s School of Communications. Read More

By Drew Grant 4/06/12 3:59pm

Book Parties

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Daniel Cappello’s The Ivy League: The Book Party That Threw Itself

(Candace Beinecke and Daniel Cappello)

It’s not every book party where you end up in a 5th Avenue estate, listening to a Columbia a capella group sing doo-wop classics.

But such a scene was fitting for Quest Magazine‘s Daniel Cappello, who was signing copies of his beautiful clothbound coffee table book, The Ivy League (Assouline), in the parlor of Candace and Rick Beinecke. Read More

By Emily Witt 11/04/11 6:54pm

Book Parties

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Viva la Book Party! A Soiree for Che

In 1995, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about the C.I.A.’s involvement in the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia. Years passed — 16 of them — and Mr. Ratner forgot that he had ever sent the letter. But he was still living in the same apartment and one day some documents from the government began trickling in through the mail. With new information he now says definitively dispels “the myth that the United States was not involved in the order to kill Che,” Mr. Ratner decided to write a small book, joining forces with another attorney, Michael Steven Smith, to produce Who Killed Che? How the C.I.A. Got Away with Murder.

On Thursday night their publisher, independent outfit OR Books, held a party to celebrate the book’s publication at the somewhat unusual venue of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations. Read More

By Emily Witt 10/05/11 3:08pm

Book Parties

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Paul LaFarge’s Luminous Book Party

Paul LaFarge’s new novel, Luminous Airplanes, is both a regularly formatted novel and an online “hyperromance” (for more on what that means read the history he just wrote over at Salon). For his book party then, he decided he couldn’t just have cheese cubes, wine and the usual sidelong glances and gossip. Instead he organized a participatory experience of his work that was something between a haunted house and a contemporary art installation. Read More

By Drew Grant 9/30/11 10:38am

Book Parties

Michael Ellsberg, Julia Allison, and Tucker Max

The Education of Millionaires Book Party: Tucker Max Buys Julia Allison For $1,700

Last night author Michael Ellsberg sat us down on the roof of the Hudson Terrace and told us something we didn’t want to hear.

“Student loans are the only kind of loan that you can’t default and declare bankruptcy on,” said Mr. Ellsberg, wearing a crushed-velvet red jacket, “It was necessary in our parents generation to go to college in order to get a good job…I can’t tell anyone not to go to school, but now that the cost of a B.A. can go up to $50,000 a year, unless you plan on getting a law degree or go into medicine, I think smarter kinds can find other ways to gain real world experience.”

Mr. Ellsberg, promoting his latest book The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late, sounded like one of those wall street protestors, but the scene at the Terrace couldn’t be more different than that at Liberty Plaza. Read More

By Emily Witt 9/16/11 9:13am

Book Parties

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Celebrating Hurricane Harbach, Publishing Trades Baseball Cards at Brooklyn Brewery

What was most remarkable about Chad Harbach’s book party at the Brooklyn Brewery last night was the bonhomie. An agent pointed it out to The Observer as we stood around the indoor picnic tables drinking lager from plastic cups: it helps that Mr. Harbach is a nice guy from the Midwest (there was a lot of Midwestern pride in the room last night), but it makes everybody in publishing happy when a work of literary fiction by a talented first-time novelist not only gets a big advance but also sells well. For all of publishing’s sometime dysfunction, something actually worked. Read More

By Emily Witt 7/14/11 4:52pm

Book Parties

The artist David Foote, right, with models at the St. Regis.

The Origin of the (Book as a) Work of Art

Midway through a party for Thornwillow Press at the St. Regis Hotel last night, a book publicist brought up Heidegger. “It’s all about the thinginess of the thing,” he said gloomily, sipping champagne, after a discussion about why Montblanc pens was sponsoring a book party. His point was that nice pens, small letterpress books, the Read More

By Reid Pillifant 10/21/10 7:37pm

Book Parties

Cuomo Unveils, Autographs Volume Six: Urban Agenda

Andrew Cuomo unveiled his Urban Agenda this morning, surrounded by minority elected officials (and Bill de Blasio) on the steps of City Hall.

“One of the…victims of the state government’s dysfunction is we just went out of the urban development business,” Cuomo said, calling it a “fundamental role” of government.

Cuomo has been trying to Read More