Brooklyn Book Beat: Wednesday books: An evening with Granta and ‘The Middlesteins’
This Wednesday, Jan. 30, Cobble Hill’s BookCourt presents an evening with Granta, a literary magazine that publishes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Granta editor Patrick Ryan will host the event, facilitating a discussion on the Spring 2013 issue with André Aciman, Karen Russell and Jennifer Vanderbes – three of the issue’s featured writers – all of whom, in their new work, investigate the forms and functions of betrayal.
André Aciman, who has most recently published “Harvard Square,” chairs the PhD Program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and directs the Writers’ Institute. “Abingdon Square,” his piece to be featured in Granta, comes from his forthcoming book, “Moral Tales.”
Karen Russell was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007. She is the author of “Swamplandia!,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of The New York Times’s Top 5 Fiction Books of 2011, and of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” a collection of stories. “The New Veterans,” Russell’s piece featured in Granta, is taken from her newest collection, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” which will be published next month. In “The New Veterans,” a masseuse who works on an Iraq war vet becomes haunted by the horrors of war.