Past Events
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Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThe favored granddaughter of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson reveals a life of glamour, depressive battles, hard-won joy, and peace. It’s My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman’s deep effort to understand herself.
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Monday, October 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.”
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Sunday, October 15, 2017 - 2:30 PM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | By donation; advance registration required
Educator Blanche Siegal leads informal discussions of the works of the beloved Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope and selected contemporaries. This popular group is now in its seventh season. Tea and light refreshments are served.
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Thursday, October 12, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredJames Fenimore Cooper has been credited with inventing genre fiction from the Western and the spy novel to the high seas adventure tale and the Revolutionary War romance. America’s first crusading novelist, Cooper reminds us that literature is not a cloistered art; rather, it ought to be intimately engaged with the world. Dr. Wayne Franklin offers readers the most comprehensive portrait to date of this underappreciated literary icon. This event is the first annual Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. Lecture on Early American History & Literature.
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Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - 10:00 AM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredIf there’s one guarantee about becoming a writer, it’s that the journey will involve great doses of failure. How can you use criticism, rejection, and failure as sustenance for your journey rather than roadblocks? And how can you read Gooderads reviews of your precious debut novel without pulling your hair out? We’ll explore together with Jonathan F. Putnam, author of the Lincoln & Speed historical mystery series.
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Wednesday, October 4, 2017 - 11:00 AM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $60 for all sessions (recommended); $15 per session | Advance registration requiredPopular seminar leader Dr. James Kraft discusses canonical and lesser-known works by a formidable figure in American literature whose many excellent novels explore complex, controversial places and ideas.
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Tuesday, October 3, 2017 - 6:00 PM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $60 for the series | Advance registration required
A workshop in the art of reading between the lines—for nuances and implications, as well as subtext—in which attention will be paid to the author’s prose style and point-of-view as well as to the larger cultural context.
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Monday, October 2, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Performance | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $25 per person | Advance registration requiredThis full-cast staged reading tells the true story of a deeply contentious investigation into the treatment of American soldiers in the First World War. Are we ever allowed to say that a soldier died in vain?
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThis unique event brings together two cutting-edge historians on the era of women’s suffrage. Angela P. Dodson’s Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box documents the fight for women’s right to vote, drawing on historic research, biographies of leaders, and primary sources from books to buttons. Brooke Kroeger’s The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote is the untold story of thousands of men who involved themselves with the suffrage campaign.
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 - 12:00 PM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $60 for all sessions (recommended); $15 per session | Advance registration requiredBefore his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, John Milton aspired to be an epic poet amist the religious and political struggles of seventeenth-century England, dealing with temptation, religious ecstasy, the joys of learning, grief and loss. Milton’s shorter works reveal his high poetic achievement as clearly as do his epics.
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Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 5:00 PM | Reading Group | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | $60 for all sessions (recommended); $15 per session | Advance registration required; space is limitedIn 1971, Elizabeth Bishop led a Harvard seminar on letters “as an art form or something.” This seminar is inspired both by Bishop’s love of letters and by the surprising response—from people of different backgrounds, ages, and areas of the country—to Linda Winston’s New York Review of Books query “Seeking people who still write letters.” It will include a focus on the correspondence of poets and writers who describe their lives, feelings, art, and ideas in letters that are vibrant, fervent, sometimes lyrical, often immediate and unfiltered, and always seeking to connect with the other.
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Friday, September 22, 2017 - 11:00 AM | The Writing Life | For Members Only | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; no registration required
Get the creative juices flowing in these fun and instructive sessions. Participants will receive a prompt and will have twenty minutes to write freely, after which they are encouraged to share their writing with the group.
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Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredHis father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was Washington Roebling who built what has become one of America’s most iconic structures—as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. The literary editor of the London Times brings us an elegantly written biography with a compelling narrative sweep that will introduce Washington Roebling and his era to a new generation of readers.
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Sunday, September 17, 2017 - 3:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration required
Latino/a writers discuss issues in writing and publishing genre fiction and celebrate Latin@ Rising, a new collection of science fiction and fantasy stories.
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Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Performance | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $25 per person | Advance registration requiredSehnsucht is a play about our preoccupation with the past and the impact of propping it up, using vignettes of sibling reminiscing about being cavemen, an imagined empire with no recorded history (inspired by the reign of Chinese Dowager Empress Cixi), and Sigmund Freud's collection of historical artifacts. As modern life increases in rapidity and technology, there's a longing to understand what behavior, if any, is essentially human. We peer into history, trying to figure out when we were most ourselves. Sehnsucht is conceived and directed by Sarah Blush in collaboration with Brian Bock, Georgia King, and Michael Norton and produced by Rachel Christiansen. It will be presented as a full-cast reading, with an audience talkback following. This event is generously underwritten by Alexander Sanger in honor of Jeannette Watson Sanger.
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Wednesday, June 14, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
In this unique event, two writers who are scientists - and whose scientific interests converge on olfaction - discuss their work, the process and joys of science writing, and, of course, smell.
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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 2:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Reference Room | Free of charge | No registration required
Poet and performance artist Linda Ravenswood brings the tactile pleasures of typewriters to a drop-in poetry event. Ms. Ravenswood will share on-the-spot typed poems and lead visitors in creating their own hand/heart-made writing.
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Thursday, June 1, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredLong before archaeological excavations began to reveal the magnificence of the ruins at Persepolis, Ancient Iran was an object of enormous interest in the West. In connection with our exhibition Broken Beauty: Ruins of the Ancient World, one of New York's leading archaeology scholars introduces the tales, engravings, plays, and operas about Iran and its rules that circulated across Europe from the late 15th through the 18th centuries.
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Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | For Members and Guests | Whitridge Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredIn this new occasional series, experts on a current-events topic bring their knowledge to an informal presentation and discussion with readers who want to get beyond the headlines. This inaugural event features Lauris Wren, founder and director of Hofstra University's Asylum Clinic, in conversation with Jenny Chevez Urbina, a former asylum-seeker and staff member at the Central American Refugee Center.
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Wednesday, May 24, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredSpend an evening with beloved cartoonist Roz Chast, author of the multi-award-winning Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? This event is co-sponsored with Uptown at Night.
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Thursday, May 18, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | The Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThe New Deal promised to lift Americans out of the Great Depression through an expansive federal public works program that offered a grand vision of what government could be. Recent scholarship offers new considerations of this period and illuminates New York City’s pivotal role. Explore the city's dramatic transformation during the New Deal with Gray Brechin, founder of The Living New Deal project, and 20th-century American historian Mason Williams. Following their presentations, Brechin and Williams will be joined by MCNY curator Sarah Seidman for a discussion. This event is co-sponsored with the Museum of the City of New York.
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Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Reception | For members and guests | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration required
The New York Society Library Young Writers Awards honor excellent writing by young Library members. Award winners and participants are honored at a ceremony and reception.
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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredDuring the past thirty years, the editors of the Hudson Review observed a trend among the best literary essayists and reviewers to couch their criticism in a highly personal manner as opposed to the theoretical, technocratic work being produced in other venues. The Hudson Review became a home for this kind of accessible, memoirist writing. This event celebrfates the publication of an anthology of such essay/memoirs, introduced by William H. Pritchard and with a panel including Susan Balée, Sir Andrew Motion, and Igor Webb. These diverse contributions unite in the joy of appreciation, the pleasures of engaging with literature. The Writing Life events in 2017 are generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.
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Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - 11:00 AM | Reading Group | For members only | Whitridge Room | $25 for both sessions (recommended); $15 per sessionTo “justify the ways of God to men,” John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, in which the serpent got Eve and Adam exiled from Paradise. His Paradise Regained interprets an Old Testament prophecy given to that successful serpent, now identified with Satan. Frequent seminar leader Donald McDonough introduces Milton's lesser-known epic.
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Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | For members and guests | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredThe New York Society Library’s New York City Book Awards, established in 1996, honor books of literary quality or historical importance that, in the opinion of the selection committee, evoke the spirit or enhance appreciation of New York City.
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