First Light Books

Hello, friends and readers. We’re unrolling a B-I-G run of author events this month. Take a look and RSVP w a friend or two. We love packing the house for writers celebrating their new books. 📚 Mon 5/11 — @annaryankonkle at the Baker School (sold out!) Tue 5/12 — @keilavall_author w/ @apuyana 6pm Thu 5/14 — Avigayl Sharp w/ @debolinunferth 7pm Tue 5/19 — @daikonoclast w/ @sunspotletters 6pm Thu 5/21 — @kerrydocherty w @mallarytenoretarpley 6pm

DEBUT NOVEL // This Tuesday, May 19th, First Light welcomes Sarah Wang to celebrate her debut novel, NEW SKIN. The book is the whiplash story of a mother and daughter’s path in California, part domestic drama, part body horror, navigating the beauty industry, reality TV, sketchy plastic surgery, and immigrant life in LA. It’s also a book about life on the margins and making a home. Joining Sarah in conversation is our friend @sunspotletters , author of Superfan and Four Treasures of the Sky—both award-winning titles with a dedicated readership here at First Light. This will be a buzzy night. RSVP at the link in our bio, or pop in night-of. Hope to see you Tuesday, 6pm. 📚📚📚 More about the author: Sarah Wang has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Wang is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2020 Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award and a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

May flowers @marykathrynpaynter

Happy Mother’s Day! 📚☀️💙

Kicking off May with an event close to our hearts: a conversation with @tom_junod and @pamela_colloff at @firstlightbooks . Tom walked us through his memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, before opening things up for a thoughtful discussion afterward. Thanks to everyone who came out and shared the evening with us. Keep an eye on the calendar to see what’s next. 📸: @alexparadox

It’s a biiiiigggg week in new books. Perhaps the year’s largest drop. Three that have our attn… 📚 Mac Barnett’s case for wonder and the reason (for adults) to lean into stories written w/ kids in mind. 🇮🇪 Douglas Stuart’s soaring follow-up to Shuggie Bain, his new one a novel about an artist son returning to the Scottish isle where his father lives. Complications of family swirl. ⚓️ Leaving Maine, Elizabeth Strout sails us to Massachusetts where a high school teacher learns a secret that changes his life. New month. New books. ☀️

This Sunday May 3, we’re kicking off the FIRST SUNDAYS series @firstlightbooks . Live music from @benjamin_dubenjamin and sushi rolls and omakase from @foodieytina . Wine and bevs from the cafe. We’ll start at 6pm and go til closing. Good times in the courtyard to close out your weekend. Same lineup in June and July. ☀️

The Solace of Open Spaces // “The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.” Gretel Ehrlich

It’s Saturday! And we have a shelf of books all about bookstores. Like holding a mirror to a mirror. How meta!

Who wants a holiday in Rome? Tonight something a little like that is happening at First Light. Katie Parla in Conversation w/ @tracymalechek Starting at 6pm. 📚👨‍🍳🇮🇹 Enjoy a Spritz or @drinklapos and hear from a premiere voice on all things Roma. More about this feast of a cookbook below: “From Italy’s leading culinary voice and New York Times bestselling author Katie Parla, Rome offers a sweeping portrait of the city’s food culture, past and present. Drawing on two decades of research, eating, and storytelling in the Italian capital, Parla shows how the Roman table has evolved from the Iron Age to today and why it remains one of the world’s most compelling. Rome launches with a thorough history through a culinary lens, beginning with its murky Iron Age origins, tracing the impact of conquests through the Roman Republic to the expansion of trade routes during the Empire and a scrappy period through the Middle Ages to ready Rome for its revival into the Renaissance era. Parla covers the political, societal, and economic shifts of the 18th and 19th centuries, from Napoleon to Mussolini and the post-war boom that introduced the “dolce vita” lifestyle, illustrating how people ate through the eras to bring readers into the mindset of present-day Rome. The book contains over 110 recipes, drawn from experts (home cooks, restaurant pros, and food artisans alike) and is organized with a thematic approach: fried snacks and starters; pasta and soup; fish, meat and offal; vegetables, salads and sides; pizza and breads; and desserts. While the city’s beloved supplì, cacio e pepe, and maritozzi traditions are well represented, Parla finds opportunities to showcase a wider swath of Rome’s dining culture with recipes such as a hearty fettuccine al sugo di coda oxtail pasta and a warming minestra di broccoli e arzilla, or romanesco and broccoli soup.“

The best thing I read this week… was a feature in @theatlantic about free bread. First off, it’s hilarious. The writer lets her wit run through a wheat field across thousands of words. Secondly, I found myself fully hooked into the premise, where will we find the best free restaurant bread in America? I have to find out. Last, and the reason why the story stuck, was that in being about this silly and wonderful thing — be it a basket of sourdough or Red Lobster cheese biscuits or fancy rosemary ciabbatta — the story slowly ushers you into rooms you aren’t expecting to enter. Turns out by breaking bread you can find a way to talk about everything. Bravo, Caity Weaver. More bready books in shop. ☀️