powerHouse Arena

From the cutest event we’ve ever had. LOOK AT THAT...

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:11:44 -0400

From the cutest event we’ve ever had. LOOK AT THAT FACE.

Lola (with Dailo, attending the Maddie on Things book signing with Theron Humphrey): Maddie is my idol and so is Theron! Next to Mama, of course.

(at Powerhouse Arena, 37 Main St DUMBO, Bklyn)

www.powerhousearena.com

www.maddieonthings.com www.maddieontour.com

Lest we forget this day: www.dailola.tumblr.com/post/39522803162

louderthanhellbook: Come one, come all to the discussion and...

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:10:44 -0400

louderthanhellbook:

Come one, come all to the discussion and signing party for “Louder Than Hell: the Definitive Oral History of Metal. The event takes place May 13 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn. Don Jamieson, from “VH1’s That Metal Show” will moderate the discussion panel, which will feature “Louder Than Hell” writers Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman as well as photographer Stephanie Cabral. A Q&A session with the audience will follow the discussion. Drinks will be served. Again, this is a free event. Come talk metal with us.

ianbrooks: Street Lit Putting a message on a wall can be a...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:02:32 -0400

William Carlos Williams, "Red Wheelbarrow" photo by Mark LaFlaur

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince" photo via mes-hautes-montagnes.com posted by ianbrooks.me

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream" photo by mermaid99's flickr

George Orwell, "Animal Farm" photo via windshoes.khan.kr

William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" photo via baddogwhiskas' flickr

J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Fellowship of the Ring" photo by Gary L. Quay

Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five" photo by devianarts posted by ianbrooks.me

Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" photo by Dan Allison

"Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song" from Edmund Spenser's Prothalamion photo via rosetintdesign.com

J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Fellowship of the Ring" posted by ianbrooks.me

ianbrooks:

Street Lit

Putting a message on a wall can be a much more effective way to reach the masses than expecting them to go find a book and learn it themselves. Some men just want to watch the world learn, regardless of medium. This collection of street arts details some memorable lines from famous books, hit the pictures to see which author and title, if you didnt already recognize them immediately.

(via: BuzzFeed)

bookish: The bestselling author, playwright and creator of “The...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:20:47 -0400

bookish:

The bestselling author, playwright and creator of “The Vagina Monologues” reads from her new memoir in this audio excerpt.

"Security is elusive. It’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us...."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:20:30 -0400

“Security is elusive. It’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.”

- Eve Ensler

(via mymangotree)

Tomorrow night, Eve Ensler will launch her latest book at...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:13:00 -0400

Tomorrow night, Eve Ensler will launch her latest book at powerHouse Arena. The memoir, entitled In the Body of the World, recounts Ensler’s experiences visiting victims of sexual abuse in the Congo, as well as her struggle against uterine cancer.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet Eve Ensler in an intimate bookstore setting.

Shout out to everyone who attended last night’s paperback...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:57:00 -0400

Shout out to everyone who attended last night’s paperback launch for THIS IS HOW, by master confessional Augusten Burroughs. It was a super fun time, thanks largely to our rocking audience, who had the hutzpah to ask the author such questions as: How do you deal with feelings of vulnerability? And: Will you smoke a joint with us?

Also, this events coordinator would like to say that Augusten Burroughs was hands-down more deeply invested in our store photo than any other author to date—offering suggestions about where to stand for optimal lighting, and telling me to relax. Pretty much the nicest guy ever.

P.S. No, Augusten Burroughs will not smoke a joint with you. Pot makes him paranoid.

What Book Made You Love Books?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:36:00 -0400

Kris Poluchowicz, the brilliant designer behind powerHouse Books, talks ultra-charmingly about the feeling that drives you to read a book again and again.

“The book that made me fall in love with books is Karolcia by Maria Kruger. Written in 1959, it was hugely successful in Poland throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A few years ago, a movie was made based on the book. Karolcia is a story of a little girl who finds a magical blue bead that makes all the wishes come true. With every wish though, the bead is getting more and more pale until it becomes clear and loses its power. Karolcia and her friend Piotr use the magical power to help others, getting themselves into endless adventures. I’ve read this book over and over again, because every time I reached the end and the bead lost its power, I wanted it to be all blue again, so I would start reading from the beginning.”

Another book we’re thrilled to launch! On May 20th, meet...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:30:38 -0400

Another book we’re thrilled to launch! On May 20th, meet Lisa Hanawalt, artist behind these amazing images.

torontocomics:

My Dumb Dirty Eyes
by Lisa Hanawalt
Debuting at TCAF 2013! Author in attendance!

Published by Drawn & Quarterly
Flexicover, 7 x 9, 120 pages, full color
$19.95

Sharply observant, laugh-out-loud funny comics from The Believer cartoonist and New York Times illustrator.

My Dirty Dumb Eyes is the highly anticipated debut collection from award-winning cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt. In a few short years, Hanawalt has made a name for herself: her intricately detailed, absurdly funny comics have appeared in venues as wide and varied as The Hairpin, VanityFair.com, Lucky Peach, Saveur, The New York Times, and The Believer.

My Dirty Dumb Eyes intermingles drawings, paintings, single-panel gag jokes, funny lists, and anthropomorphized animals, all in the service of satirical, startlingly observant commentary on pop culture, contemporary society, and human idiosyncrasies. Her wild sense of humor contrasts strikingly with the carefully rendered lines and flawless draftsmanship that are Hanawalt trademarks. Whether she’s revealing the secret lives of celebrity chefs or explaining that what dogs really want is a tennis-ball bride, My Dirty Dumb Eyes will have readers rolling in the aisles, as Hanawalt’s insights into human (and animal) behavior startle and delight time and again.

This is awesome. Also, save the date for the TAIPEI book launch,...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:02:18 -0400

This is awesome.

Also, save the date for the TAIPEI book launch, at powerHouse Arena on June 5th, 7pm. DJ’d by Pitchfork. Tao Lin will be there too, IN THE FLESH. Promise we’re not just hosting a live group gchat with him, although that would be kind of fun…

vicemag:

Over the next two months, in celebration of the forthcoming release of Tao Lin’s latest novel, Taipei, we will be featuring a weekly selection of photos taken by the author during his recent trip to Taipei, Taiwan. While there, he took thousands of pictures with his iPhone, pictures which he has divided into albums titled things like “Taipei funny,” “Taipei food,” Taipei babies,” and “Taipei animals,” among others. The images were taken between January and February 2013 during one of his semi-yearly visits to the Taiwanese capital, where his parents live. This first selection is titled “Taipei babies.” All photos and captions by Tao Lin.

Taipei, will be released on June 4 from Vintage and is available for pre-order now. To read an early excerpt from the novel that we published in 2011 titled “Relationship Story,” click here.

confusion baby

bat baby

More babies

What Book Made You Love Books?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:17:00 -0400

Our friends at Publishers Weekly’s PWxyz recently posted a list of the books that made PW’s staff fall in love with reading. It got us thinking about the books that changed our lives—the books that ultimately led us to careers in book selling. We’ll be posting our staff’s answers to this question in the coming weeks. We’d love to see your picks in the comments!

First up, the man who started the powerHouse empire, CEO and founder Daniel Power.

“Frederick by Leo Lionni. I was little, and I was especially struck by these radical concepts: not all work is the same (in this case storing supplies for the winter); that stories can be themselves sustenance (that’s what Frederick’s skill set was for the mice crew); and that you can think and talk in colors. That last one was particularly mind blowing and stuck with me the most.”

alexoneill: Pratt Institute’s Photography Department...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:36:19 -0400

alexoneill:

Pratt Institute’s Photography Department Presents:

WHAT IS /WHAT MATTERS

A show featuring the work of students graduating from the B.F.A Photography program

APRIL 10-25, 2013

Opening reception Friday April 12, 6-8 PM

Closing reception with guest speaker KATHY RYAN (Director of Photography, The New York Times Magazine) Thursday April 25, 6-8 PM talk at 6:30 PM

THE POWERHOUSE ARENA

37 Main St. Brooklyn, NY

"Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey,..."

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:19:00 -0400

“

Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse—these were melee sports. You could make yourself useful by hustling and scrapping more than the other guy. You could redeem yourself through sheer desire.

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric—not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus picture, field verses ball. You couldn’t storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

”

- The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

powerHouse Arena + Penguin Classics present Pitching in a Pinch

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:00:12 -0400

powerHouse Arena + Penguin Classics present Pitching in a Pinch:

Tonight, we’re kicking off our new series with Penguin Classics. Join us at 7pm as Chad Harbach and Will Leitch discuss this definitive look at baseball from the inside. Can’t wait to raise a beer with you to celebrate classic lit, the start of baseball season, and bookstore/publishing house collaborations!

Do stay tuned for upcoming events in the series.

rachelfershleiser: For everyone who asked how the powerHouse...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:31:11 -0400

rachelfershleiser:

For everyone who asked how the powerHouse event was…

Evidence for skeptics: People love books, ya’ll.

Mia Couto gets some love from The New Inquiry

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:47:54 -0400

Mia Couto gets some love from The New Inquiry:

He’ll be here May 4th, 7pm, talking about his work with Vanity Fair’s Anderson Tepper. Big deal folks—Mia Couto rarely visits the United States. Don’t miss this chance to celebrate an author The New Inquiry calls “one of the most important figures in a global Lusophone literature that stretches across three continents.”

Children’s book specialist Jordan Nielsen photo bombs...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:21:02 -0400

Children’s book specialist Jordan Nielsen photo bombs Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen. Amazing.

Just finished this compassionate, insightful take on a tough...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:19:20 -0400

Just finished this compassionate, insightful take on a tough topic—what happens when a teenager makes one mistake and is then diagnosed with HIV. Jessica Verdi’s YA novel is utterly absorbing, and Lucy is the kind of character you feel, by the end, as if you’ve known forever. Great read for fans of YA lit. Major bonus: Jessica Verdi will be at powerHouse Arena on April 9th to launch the book with wine, reading, and lots of discussion.

bookaddict24-7:

My Life After Now, Jessica Verdi

Release Date: April 1, 2013

Genres: Young adult, contemporary

“WHAT NOW?

Lucy just had the worst week ever. Seriously, mega bad. And suddenly, it’s all too much—she wants out. Out of her house, out of her head, out of her life. She wants to be a whole new Lucy. So she does something the old Lucy would never dream of.

And now her life will never be the same. Now, how will she be able to have a boyfriend? What will she tell her friends? How will she face her family? Now, every moment is a precious gift. She never thought being positive could be so negative. But now, everything’s different…because now she’s living with HIV.”

Happy reading!

Fiona Maazel recommends "PU-239" by Ken Kalfus

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:38:32 -0400

We love this story almost as much as we love Fiona. “Pu-239” is feeling especially relevant right now (that means YOU, North Korea!).

recommendedreading:

Vol. 12, No. 2

EDITOR’S NOTE

My feelings about this story actually begin with a Ken Kalfus reading I attended many years ago. His second collection of stories, Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, had just come out. The place was packed with fans come to see this master storyteller, whose work is so versatile, you get the sense Ken Kalfus can do anything. The woman running the series thanked us all for coming and then asked us please to welcome the author of Poo-239. Poo—which was mortifying for everyone there and yet pleasingly apropos of the very thing Kalfus lampoons in the title story of the collection. I don’t want to say stupidity because I still feel badly for that poor woman, though there is no mistaking the ignorance and colossal blundering Kalfus sends up in “Pu-239.” Still, it would undersell the story to suggest it’s just a satire. No, this fiction has the higher aim of ennobling stupidity—of recognizing its power and aptitude for destruction. In this universe, which is, of course, our universe, thousands of people are dying every day because someone pushed the wrong button. Or the button was in Urdu. Or someone didn’t know her periodic table and couldn’t be bothered to read the book. Just a few weeks ago, I saw Obama on 60 Minutes say that when he took office, the first thing Bob Gates told him was to remember that at this moment, somewhere, somehow, someone in the federal government was screwing up. Which reminder asserted two things: One, that the president will always have someone else to blame, in essence: that deniability is king, and two, that incompetence is the currency most responsible for the buying and selling of our future. Want to know more? Read “Pu-239.” —Fiona

What I most enjoy about this story is its savagery. But what I most admire is how well it’s structured to flout one set of expectations while satisfying another. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to direct your attention to the story’s first few lines. Notice how long Kalfus takes to name our technician, our hero Timofey, by way of teaching us how to read the story, which isn’t about Timofey at all, but about what happens when institutionalized apathy meets hubris; about a particularly combustible time in Russian history when everything loathsome about the free market—greed, e.g.—mixed with the wonky bureaucracies of the East; about the smallness of our preoccupations and the enormities that proceed from them. In a story motored by the mean and petty ambitions of almost everyone in it, we still get lines like: “Plutonium. There was no exit for the stuff. It was as permanent and universal as original sin.” If private lives exist here, they do so only to serve universal catastrophe. Which is scary, and scarier still for being so funny in Ken Kalfus’s hands. Everyone I know who’s read this story walks away feeling like we’re doomed. I expect you will, too. Enjoy!

Fiona Maazel
Woke Up Lonely

Join us in supporting
free fiction

Pu-239

by Ken Kalfus

Recommended by Fiona Maazel

SOMEONE COMMITTED A SIMPLE ERROR that, according to the plant’s blueprints, should have been impossible, and a valve was left open, a pipe ruptured, a technician was trapped in a crawlspace, and a small fire destroyed several workstations. At first the alarm was discounted: false alarms commonly rang and flashed through the plant like birds in a tropical rain forest. Once the seriousness of the accident was appreciated, the rescue crew discovered that a soft drink dispenser waiting to be sent out for repair blocked the room in which the radiation suits were kept. After moving it and entering the storage room, they learned that several of the oxygen tanks had been left uncharged. By the time they reached the lab the fire was nearly out, but smoke laced with elements from the actinide series filled the unit. Lying on his back above the ceiling, staring at the wormlike pattern of surface corrosion on the tin duct a few centimeters from his face, Timofey had inhaled the fumes for an hour and forty minutes. In that time he had tried to imagine that he was inhaling dollar bills and that once they lodged in his lungs and bone marrow they would bombard his body tissue with high-energy dimes, nickels, and quarters.

Timofey had worked in 16 nearly his entire adult life, entrusted with the bounteous, transfiguring secrets of the atom. For most of that life, he had been exhilarated

by the reactor’s song of nuclear fission, the hiss of particle capture and loss. Highly valued for his ingenuity, Timofey carried in his head not only a detailed knowledge of the plant’s design, but also a precise recollection of its every repair and improvised alteration. He knew where the patches were and how well they had been executed. He knew which stated tolerances could be exceeded and by how much, which gauges ran hot, which ran slow, and which could be completely ignored. The plant managers and scientists were often forced to defer to his judgment. On these occasions a glitter of derision showed in his voice, as he tapped a finger significantly against a sheet of engineering designs and explained why there was only a single correct answer to the question.

After Timofey’s death, his colleagues recalled a dressing down he had received a few years earlier at the hands of a visiting scientist. No one remembered the details, except that she had proposed slightly altering the reaction process in order to produce a somewhat greater quantity of a certain isotope that she employed in her own research. Hovering in his stained and wrinkled white coat behind the half dozen plant officials whom she had been addressing, Timofey objected to the proposal. He said that greater quantities of the isotope would not be produced in the way she suggested and, in fact, could not be produced at all, according to well established principles of nuclear physics. Blood rushed to the woman’s square, fleshy, bulldog face. “Idiot!” she spat. “I’m Nuclear Section Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. I fucking own the established principles of nuclear physics. You’re a technician!” Those who were there recalled that Timofey tried to stand his ground, but as he began to explain the flaw in her reasoning his voice lost its resonance and he began to mumble, straying away from the main point. She cut him off, asking her audience, “Are there any other questions, any educated questions?” As it turned out, neither Timofey nor the scientist was ever proved right. The Defense Ministry rejected the proposal for reasons of economy.

Timofey’s relations with his coworkers were more comfortable, if distant, and he usually joined the others in his unit at lunch in the plant’s low-ceilinged, windowless buffet. The room rustled with murmured complaint. Timofey could hardly be counted among the most embittered of the technical workers—a point sagely observed later. All joked with stale irony about the lapses in safety and the precipitous decline in their salaries caused by inflation; these comments had become almost entirely humorless three months earlier, when management followed a flurry of assuring memos, beseeching directives, and unambiguous promises with a failure to pay them at all. No one had been paid since.

Every afternoon at four Timofey fled the compromises and incompetence of his workplace in an old Zhiguli that he had purchased precisely so that he could arrive home a half hour earlier than if he had taken the tram. Against the odds set by personality and circumstance, he had married, late in his fourth decade, an electrical engineer assigned to another unit. Now, with the attentiveness he had once offered the reactor, Timofey often sat across the kitchen table from his wife with his head cocked, listening to their spindly, asthmatic eight-year-old son, Tolya, in the next room give ruinous commands to his toy soldiers. A serious respiratory ailment similar to the boy’s kept Marina from working; disability leave had brought a pretty bloom to her soft cheeks.

The family lived on the eighth floor of a weatherstained concrete apartment tower with crumbling front steps and unlit hallways. In this rotted box lay a jewel of a two-bedroom apartment that smelled of fresh bread and meat dumplings and overlooked a birch forest. Laced with ski tracks in the winter and fragranced by grilled shashlik in the summer, home to deer, rabbits, and even gray wolves, the forest stretched well beyond their sight, all the way to the city’s double-fenced perimeter.

His colleagues thought of Marina and the boy as Timofey was pulled from the crawlspace. He was conscious, but dazed, his eyes unfocused and his face slack. Surrounded by phantoms in radiation suits, Timofey saw the unit as if for the first time: the cracked walls, the electrical cords snaking underfoot, the scratched and fogged glass over the gauges, the mold-spattered valves and pipes, the disabled equipment piled in an unused workstation, and the frayed tubing that bypassed sections of missing pipe and was kept in place by electrical tape. He staggered from the lab, took a shower, vomited twice, disposed of his clothes, and was briefly examined by a medic, who took his pulse and temperature. No one looked him in the eye. Timofey was sent home. His colleagues were surprised when he returned the next day, shrugging off the accident and saying that he had a few things to take care of before going on the “rest leave” he had been granted as a matter of course. But his smile was as wan as the moon on a midsummer night, and his hands trembled. In any case, his colleagues were too busy to chat. The clean-up was chaotically underway and the normal activities of the plant had been suspended.

“Gazing at the prints, Vera imagined the encounter. In a...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:02:00 -0400

“Gazing at the prints, Vera imagined the encounter. In a swirl of wind, an angel appears before a young woman. He opens his wings, blinding her with his brilliance. She blinks, tries to understand who or what has come to her, but she is too afraid to speak. The angel tries to comfort her, wrapping the terrified woman in his wings. There is a moment of terror and empathy and attraction. Vera wanted to feel it: the tangle of feathers and flesh, the heat of the embrace, the conflating of pain and pleasure and fear and desire.”

Danielle Trussoni fans—rejoice! She’ll be stopping by powerHouse on Tuesday, March 26, from 7 to 9 pm to discuss and sign copies of Angelopolis, her sequel to the beloved, bestselling Angeology.

RSVP now on our Facebook event page!

powerHouse Arena

From the cutest event we’ve ever had. LOOK AT THAT...

louderthanhellbook: Come one, come all to the discussion and...

ianbrooks: Street Lit Putting a message on a wall can be a...

bookish: The bestselling author, playwright and creator of “The...

"Security is elusive. It’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us...."

Eve Ensler

Tomorrow night, Eve Ensler will launch her latest book at...

Shout out to everyone who attended last night’s paperback...

What Book Made You Love Books?

Another book we’re thrilled to launch! On May 20th, meet...

This is awesome. Also, save the date for the TAIPEI book launch,...

What Book Made You Love Books?

alexoneill: Pratt Institute’s Photography Department...

"Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey,..."

powerHouse Arena + Penguin Classics present Pitching in a Pinch

rachelfershleiser: For everyone who asked how the powerHouse...

Mia Couto gets some love from The New Inquiry

Children’s book specialist Jordan Nielsen photo bombs...

Just finished this compassionate, insightful take on a tough...

Fiona Maazel recommends "PU-239" by Ken Kalfus

Vol. 12, No. 2

EDITOR’S NOTE

Join us in supportingfree fiction

Pu-239

by Ken Kalfus

Recommended by Fiona Maazel

“Gazing at the prints, Vera imagined the encounter. In a...

Join us in supporting
free fiction