Oblong Books & Music

 

Please join us for a reading and signing with Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age and Justin Taylor, author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever.

 

About Joanna:

Rakoff's mesmerizing debut opens with a wedding and closes with a funeral. In between, the novel provides a pitch perfect portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1990s. If this smart, thoroughly absorbing novel recalls The Group, it also recalls the seminal work of Anne Beattie in the seventies and Jay McInerney in the eighties. Like them, Rakoff captures a certain time and place with heartbreaking clarity.
-- Booklist (starred)

Joanna Smith Rakoff has written for The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College; an M.A. from University College, London; and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

About Justin:

“This spare, sharp book - Taylor’s debut collection - documents a deep authority on the unavoidable confusion of being young, disaffected and human … the most affecting stories in Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever are as unpredictable as a careening drunk. They leave us with the heavy residue of an unsettling strangeness, and a new voice that readers - and writers, too - might be seeking out for decades to come.”
Justin Taylor's fiction and nonfiction have been widely published in journals, magazines, and Web sites, including The Believer, The Nation, The New York Tyrant, the Brooklyn Rail, Flaunt, and NPR. A coeditor of The Agriculture Reader and a contributor to HTMLGIANT, Taylor lives in Brooklyn and is at work on his first novel.