by | Mar 27, 2025 12:18 pm | Comments (0)
Author Boris Fishman: Hold the humor for a moment.
The Unwanted
By Boris Fishman
Harper
330 pages
I forgot to laugh when I read Boris Fishman’s new novel about a family escaping civil war and totalitarianism.
by | Mar 21, 2025 10:25 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos.
The Year of X Book Club selections at Possible Futures.
“Through individual agendas that battle oppression and in the uniting of efforts, Black women have found a way, even when seemingly impossible, to give life,” writes author Anna Malaika Tubbs in the opening paragraph of The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.
Tubbs’ book is the third to be discussed this year in Kulturally LIT’s monthly series, “The Year of X Book Club.” It had a major impact on the readers who came to Possible Futures to discuss it Thursday night with its insight into the lives of three women — Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin — who birthed, shaped, and influenced three of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
by | Mar 3, 2025 1:53 pm | Comments (2)
Mamadi Doumbouya photo
Reginald Dwayne Betts' new poetry collection, Doggerel.
When Reginald Dwayne Betts walks his dog at dawn, he knows that she’s “doing the guiding,” even though he’s the one holding the leash.
Some believe that humans are “masters” of their animals, he writes, “But I know I barely control/My wonder these days.”
That confession appears in one of my favorite poems, “What We Know,” from Betts’ new collection Doggerel, a book full of wonder that’s hard to resist. Published by W.W. Norton, Doggerel is Betts’ fifth published poetry collection. Like many of his other works, the book reflects in part on the eight years in prison he served from the age of 16 on a carjacking conviction. Norton is releasing the collection Tuesday on the 20th anniversary of Betts’ release from prison.
by | Feb 27, 2025 11:31 am | Comments (0)
Jisu Sheen photo
Bessie Flores Zaldívar takes audience to 2017 Tegucigalpa at Best Video reading.
High school senior Libertad’s brother, Maynor, is dead. As her family sorts through his room, she wonders: “How long can a space hold a memory?”
His memory is everywhere. She walks to the corner store and hears how Maynor once started a massive running tab for all the neighborhood boys to charge for food.
That was when Bessie Flores Zaldívar interrupted themself, addressing the audience directly: “That’s actually something my brother did do. He was, like, thousands of lempiras in debt because he was feeding the whole neighborhood.”
by | Feb 11, 2025 9:45 am | Comments (2)
Author Josaphat: The Panther story needed a novelist's eye.
Kingdom of No Tomorrow
By Fabienne Josaphat
Algonquin Books/Hatchette
Nettie Boileau had choices to make.
Should she sign up with the revolution taking shape in Oakland, the way her father fought back against Papa Doc in Haiti? Or should she pursue her dreams of becoming a doctor?
Which lover should she make a life with? Clia, who brought her into the Black Panther Party? Or Melvin, the magnetic rising party leader?
by | Jan 24, 2025 2:38 pm | Comments (3)
Allan Appel photo
Seth Godfrey and Andy Piascik at Thursday's book talk.
When she was a teenager in New York City, Ellen Rubin got to know the family of Andrew Goodman, one of a trio of civil rights workers whose brutal murder by the Klu Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964 fueled a growing national outrage that led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Those days and experiences sparked not only a social justice flame in her but also a career direction: “I became a nurse to learn first aid skills to help people in the revolution,” she recalled.
by | Dec 24, 2024 9:22 am | Comments (3)
Laura Glesby Photo
IfeMichelle Gardin shows off her James Baldwin earrings.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Then there are years marked by someone like IfeMichelle Gardin, who in 2024 “exposed the questions that the answers hide” — as artists do, according to James Baldwin.
Gardin is authoring a new chapter of New Haven’s literary history in the form of Kulturally Lit, an organization that blossomed over the past year during what would have been James Baldwin’s 100th year of life.
by | Dec 23, 2024 12:56 pm | Comments (1)
Allan Appel Photo
Ian Wollman with his finds, especially excited for The Jewish Guide to the Internet.
The People of the Book are getting rid of a few — and for one day you could get them wholesale, as many as you could stuff into a bag.
Continue reading ‘Jewish Historical Society Downsizes To Digitize’
by | Nov 18, 2024 8:42 am | Comments (0)
Abiba Biao photo
Sonal Soveni and Kathleen Griffith.
In a warmly lit room on Chapel Street, entrepreneur and business strategist Kathleen Griffith posed a question to her audience: “What’s your outrageous ask?”
by | Oct 7, 2024 5:02 pm | Comments (0)
Abiba Biao photo
Gracy Brown, with Kay Anderson: Saturday's Lit fest was filled with "kindness and community."
Inspired by James Baldwin’s commitment to telling the truth, Jacqueline Brown raised her hand to ask a question of the two literature scholars in front of her.
“In your personal experience, how has his work taught you to find joy? How has his work incited you towards action?”
by | Oct 1, 2024 8:50 am | Comments (1)
Do you have a mind’s eye, the ability to not just remember, but visualize the past? Do you have an interior monologue? Rich childhood memories, full of sights, sounds, and smells? For science writer Sadie Dingfelder — speaking to an audience of about a dozen Monday night at the Edgewood Avenue bookstore Possible Futures — the answer to all these questions and a few more like it were a clear no.
And until just a few years ago, she thought the same was true for everyone else. Until a fateful trip to the grocery store led her to become the subject of a few lab studies, and to the work of New Haven-area science journalist Carl Zimmer, and on and on — heading toward the edges of neurologists’ understanding of how varied the human experience can be.
Continue reading ‘Do We Know Each Other? Do We Know Ourselves?’
by | Sep 20, 2024 11:16 am | Comments (0)
Series co-organizers Shelton, Mattison, Czepiel, and Jessen.
A room full of writers and fans of the written word gathered Thursday night at Best Video for the first installment of the Sleeping Giant Reading Series, an event aimed at creating a space where authors not only share their works, but gather in community with others to offer support, make connections, and have a little fun.
Co-organizers Alice Mattison, Sandi Shelton, Kathy Czepiel, and Heather Jessen — all New Haven-based writers — will be curating a two-hour event every third Thursday of the month. The first hour will feature professional readings by published authors. The second hour will be dedicated to shaking away that oft-felt sense of isolation many writers have by sharing a “Writer’s Happy Hour” where they can chat with each other about their work and writing in general.
Continue reading ‘Sleeping Giant Readers Come To Best Video’
by | Sep 4, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery photo
Sam Carlson and Aug Stone.
“When we were, like, 15, 16, me and my best friend Trig used to go record shopping. And it was weird. Our local record store had this counter with all the cassettes behind it. The goods! You had to ask to see them,” a gregarious voice announces. “Trig was always after Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album. Week after week we’d ask, only to week after week be disappointed. Truth be told, Trig much more so than I. I didn’t know anything about Buttery Cake Ass. But that’s the beauty of music, of any sort of artistic creation — that another’s excitement for it can infect you like this.”
by | Aug 28, 2024 1:25 pm | Comments (0)
The History of Sound: Stories
By Ben Shattuck
Viking
July 9, 2024
306 pages
It’s a long story. And 12 short stories.
Ben Shattuck tells those dozen stories in his new collection called The History of Sound. The stories span three centuries. They interconnect in pairs — sometimes in passing, through an old painting or field recording buried under floor boards, sometimes more directly in traveling back in time to reveal the full story of a mystery that has been reinterpreted and rewritten by later generations.
In the process, Shattuck is telling us one story, about our legend-laden region of New England. And about telling stories, period.
by | Aug 5, 2024 8:23 am | Comments (2)
Maya McFadden Photo
Nathaniel Joyner and Damien, reading side by side at summer camp.
Nathaniel Joyner took a quick break from reading aloud to a group of middle schoolers to spin an imaginary basketball on his finger before passing it over to eight-year-old Damien — who dribbled the “ball” between his legs, and then picked up the book to resume reading with the group.
by | Jul 25, 2024 9:02 am | Comments (1)
Paul Bass photo
Author Joshua Perry at WNHH FM: Truth found in fiction.
Seraphim
By Joshua Perry
Melville House Publishing
262 pages
Ben is not Joshua.
by | Jun 20, 2024 9:16 am | Comments (5)
Author Brill (at right): "If we understand how truth has been so eviscerated, we can see how to restore it."
The Death Of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed To Destroy Trust and Polarize the World — And What We Can Do About It
By Steven Brill
Alfred A. Knopf
Villains abound in Steven Brill’s new call to arms to rescue truth from internet disinformation agents and “pink slime” peddlers. My favorite villain is a piece of legislation.
by | Mar 29, 2024 9:18 am | Comments (5)
artidea.org
Jazz vocalist Samara Joy, an A&I headliner this year.
Shakespeare in circus, choral fusion, climate activism and optimism talks, making your own empanadas: this eclectic mix of events and more is part of this summer’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which is returning with a full schedule of programming that covers just about anything an arts and culture lover would have a taste for — and maybe something they have never tasted before.
by | Mar 19, 2024 10:18 am | Comments (4)
John McDonald Photo
Ball & Socket Arts front view.
When asked to name the cultural hubs of the Northeast, most people would not consider Cheshire, Connecticut a part of that list. A group of enthusiastic artists and supporters of the arts are hoping to change that over the next few years, as Ball & Socket Arts, a complex located on West Main Street right along the Farmington Canal Linear Path, continues its efforts to create a central location aimed at encouraging ongoing creativity and attracting New Haven County residents and beyond to its galleries, performance venue, art education center, and more.
Continue reading ‘Ball & Socket Arts Turns Factory Into Gallery’
by | Mar 14, 2024 12:30 pm | Comments (1)
Paul Bass Photo
Author Biederman at WNHH FM, and her new book about a the underbelly of New Haven-Bridgeport's turn-of-the-century abortion trade.
Emma Gill’s severed foot and severed head washed up on a beach. Three boys stumbled across them.
That was in 1898. Might new such discoveries loom as a new era of abortion prohibition looms?
Continue reading ‘Tales From New Haven's Abortion Underground Yield Modern Warning’
by | Feb 23, 2024 5:11 pm | Comments (13)
A student gifts a book to the Little Free Library.
“Sometimes when you talk, the universe listens.”
That’s what Chris Walker, manager of the new LaundroMax on Whalley Avenue, said to me as we watched 25 kids sit still between rows of gleaming washing machines and a cacophony of dryers tumbling and buzzers going off — and prepare to hear a story read aloud at New Haven’s most innovative new branch library.
by | Feb 21, 2024 8:48 am | Comments (1)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Ross Gay: "The hope is to be unmade in the process.”
Ross Gay practiced what he preaches last night at Possible Futures, as the poet, essayist, and teacher offered a grateful crowd a selection of his work encompassing joy and tenderness that brought them from rapt silence to riotous laughter and everywhere in between.
by | Feb 15, 2024 9:12 am | Comments (4)
Bruce Oren Photos
Howard Gralla (pictured above; one of his books, below): A rare gift to mix beauty with utility.
Book designer Michael Russem gave the following eulogy at the recent funeral of Howard Gralla, a leader in the field who lived in Westville.
Yesterday morning I was in a used bookstore in Boston and spotted a book designed by Howard that I love: Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. It’s 9 × 12 inches, over 650 pages, and it weighs more than seven pounds.
This massive book had scores of Post-it notes poking out the top. The book was clearly well-used. Those Post-its were proof that Howard had done his job.
by | Feb 12, 2024 9:13 am | Comments (3)
Lisa Reisman Photo
David Daniels at author talk at Stetson Library.
The Sunday, Aug. 21, 1994, edition of the Connecticut Post pictures a young Black man in police blues holding a hangman’s noose. The man was David Daniels, a police officer. The noose was left on his patrol car.
by | Feb 12, 2024 8:58 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Members of the Urban Life Experience Book Discussion group.
As the temperature outside edged close to 60 degrees on Saturday, a warm and invigorating meeting of minds and hearts came together inside the Wilson branch of the New Haven Free Public Library for 2024’s first monthly installment of the Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series.
Continue reading ‘Urban Life Book Group Puts Heart Into "Home"’