Tottenville Blog

• Tottenville Mid-Summer Reads

  28 Jul 2010

  Our picks for the summer. Books by Michael Hastings, Evgenia Citkowitz, John Freeman, Manuel Puig and more…

• A conversation with Jennifer Egan and Jane Mendelsohn, hosted by Liz Moore.

  18 Jul 2010

  Word for Word, Bryant Park, 7.7.10

• Video: Liz Moore performs in Bryant Park, 7.7.10

  12 Jul 2010

  Followed by an afternoon talk with Jennifer Egan and Jane Mendelsohn.

• Jeffrey Rotter (Issue 2 Preview)

  19 Jun 2010

  Interview by Jason Porter

  Jeffrey Rotter’s 2009 debut, The Unknown Knowns, is a novel about water, museum displays, government agents, and obsessive hunches on human evolution that are not supported by the greater scientific community. The book is painfully funny and funnily painful, and has recently been released in paperback by Scribner.

• 20 under 40: Joshua Ferris

  15 Jun 2010

  “Once I had the voice, I knew I wasn’t going to fall off the bicycle. I tap right back into it. It really was like learning how to ride a bike—you never forget, and I was able to carry it along with some ease. I never encountered any stumping problems that left me not knowing what to do, so I was mostly able to hold my ground. Of course, I should mention that it took me a long time to actually acquire the voice; there were a lot of frustrated attempts along the way, revisions to long sections and versions of the book that I abandoned. So it took a long time, but once I had it, I had it.” –Joshua Ferris

  From The A.V. Club

• Tottenville Salutes Gary Shteyngart

  12 Jun 2010

  We fully endorse Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. He may just be THE funniest writer working today. (Will you just look at that title.) In literary comedy there’s a fine line between clever and funny, and Shteyngart always manages to keep us laughing from deep down, even when his worlds go dark and grim as the title most certainly suggests (Super Sad). Economic collapse, death, the broken love tales Shtyengart’s known for, it’s all here. Knee-slap ratio: 98%… he has it down to a science.

• Rivka Galchen named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under 40

  9 Jun 2010

  See her new story in the Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker“The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire”

  From her Tottenville Review Interview: “I feel pretty confident that there are certain types of people who get most of their pleasure from the way words are arranged. They’ve never been the dominant force of the culture, and they’ll never disappear. I think of it as a sort of high-incidence mutation.” -Rivka Galchen

• Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock, Boom

  23 May 2010

  Assaf Gavron has seized time as a metaphor for his funny, poignant, and nuanced look at the decades’ long conflict in the Middle East. If what you know about the Israel-Palestine dispute comes from reading newspapers, listening to pundits on television, or watching startling images of screeching ambulances, demolished homes, and the comet-like puffs of smoke from bombs exploding in the air, then you are in for a treat with Gavron’s novel, Almost Dead, the story of Eitan Enoch and Fahmi Sabich.

  Almost Dead by Assaf Gavron

  —Reviewed by Anand Mahadevan