Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT August 9, 2023
The Center for Fiction Café & Bar
Admission is free with a suggested one-drink minimum purchase from the Café & Bar.
Industry Night at The Center for Fiction Café & Bar: join us for a very special literary event all about the bar and restaurant world. We’ll hear from a talented group of servers, bartenders, and barflies (who are also poets, storytellers, and novelists) about the joys and horrors of the service industry. Featuring John Coletti, Nancy Huang, Nadia Pinder, Liv Stratman, and Kyle Lucia Wu. Hosted by Wesley Straton (author of The Bartender’s Cure and host of the NYDC Reading Series).
In Conversation
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John Coletti
John Coletti
John Coletti is the author of Peppermint Oil (PUSH, 2020), Deep Code (City Lights, 2014), Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further 2008), and Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the author of Skasers (Flowers & Cream, 2012).
Photo Credit: Kyra Simone
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Nancy Huang
Nancy Huang
Nancy Huang (she/they) grew up in America and China. Her poetry, plays, and prose have been published by the Offing, the Margins, Poets.org, and A24. She has an MFA from New York University. She works in a cemetery.
Photo Credit: Janelle Tan
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Nadia Pinder
Nadia Pinder
Nadia Pinder is a comedian, actor, storyteller and professional tie dye artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a proud and active member of the gig economy. You can follow her tie dye at www.stuydyed.com and you can hear her stories, comedic or otherwise, when the stars align and she posts flyers at @nadiapinder on Instagram.
Photo Credit: Bridget Badore
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Liv Stratman
Liv Stratman
Liv Stratman is a writer from New York. Her novel, Cheat Day, a dark comedy about disordered eating and desire, was published by Scribner in 2021. A veteran NYC service industry worker, Liv currently hosts Book Club² at the East Village’s Book Club Bar, where she also works as a bartender and a bookseller.
Photo Credit: Savannah Lauren
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Wesley Straton
Wesley Straton
Wesley Straton is a Brooklyn-based writer and the host and founder of the NYDC Reading Series. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, GQ, the Common, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Bartender’s Cure, was published by Flatiron Books in 2022.
Photo Credit: Bridget Badore
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Kyle Lucia Wu
Kyle Lucia Wu
Kyle Lucia Wu is the author of the novel Win Me Something (Tin House Books), an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the co-author, with Cathy Linh Che, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books 2023). Kyle is a former Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins fellow and works as the Deputy Director at Kundiman.
Photo Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff
Featured Books
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Deep Code
By John Coletti
Published by Citylights Books
Combining a bent lyric perception with a fragmentation redolent of French cubism, Coletti portrays contemporary urban experience, from power relations and personal loss to nights among city dwellers recording their convivial distress, glad and dissolute at once. Part teddy bear fleeing the cultish outlines of the American northwest, part Apollinaire in Brooklyn, Coletti culls his materials from the ether and assembles them into resonant structures at once intensely personal and strangely universal—a little outrageous—both confusingly lovely and apt in their ungainliness.
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Cheat Day
By Liv Stratman
Published by Scribner
Kit and David were college sweethearts. Now married and in their thirties, they live in Kit’s childhood home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. While David has a successful career, jetting off on work trips to exciting destinations, Kit is stuck in a loop. She keeps quitting her job managing her sister’s bakery to seek a more ambitious profession, but fear of failure always brings her back to Sweet Cheeks. Kit finds a fraught solace in cycling through fad diets, which David, in his efforts to be supportive, follows along with her. Their latest program is the Radiant Regimen, an intense cleanse, and Kit is optimistic about embarking on a new chapter of healthy eating and self-control.
Hungry in more ways than one, she soon falls into a flirtation with a carpenter named Matt who is building new shelves for the bakery kitchen. Unable to resist their mutual attraction, Kit and Matt soon begin a passionate affair. Kit suppresses her guilt by obsessing over her diet, pushing herself in greater extremes. Told in precise, intimate detail, Cheat Day is “an incredibly likable novel of hungers controlled and liberated, and marriage’s gray areas” (Booklist) that explores monogamy versus monotony, deprivation versus indulgence, and limitations of modern wellness.
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The Bartender's Cure
By Wesley Straton
Published by Flatiron Books
Samantha definitely does not want to be a bartender. But after a breakup and breakdown in San Francisco, she decides to defer law school for a year to move to New York, crashing on her best friend’s couch. When she is offered a job at Joe’s Apothecary, a beloved neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, she tells herself it’s only temporary.
As Sam learns more about bartending and gets to know the service industry lifers and loyal regulars at Joe’s, she is increasingly seduced by her new job. She finds acceptance in her tight-knit community and even begins a new relationship. But as the year draws to a close, destructive cycles from her past threaten to consume her again. Sam is increasingly pulled between the life she thought she wanted and the possibility of a different kind of future. How much is she willing to let go of to finally belong? Filled with cocktail recipes and bartending tips and tricks, Wesley Straton’s captivating, utterly original debut will quench your thirst.
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Win Me Something
By Kyle Lucia Wu
Published by Tin House
Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese American girl in New Jersey, Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly white school, and too white to speak to the few Asian kids around. After her parents’ early divorce, they both remarried and started new families, and Willa grew up feeling outside of their new lives, too.
For years, Willa does her best to stifle her feelings of loneliness, drifting through high school and then college as she tries to quiet the unease inside her. But when she begins working for the Adriens—a wealthy white family in Tribeca—as a nanny for their daughter, Bijou, Willa is confronted with all of the things she never had. As she draws closer to the family and eventually moves in with them, Willa finds herself questioning who she is, and revisiting a childhood where she never felt fully at home. Self-examining and fraught with the emotions of a family who fails and loves in equal measure, Win Me Something is a nuanced coming-of-age debut about the irreparable fissures between people, and a young woman who asks what it really means to belong, and how she might begin to define her own life.
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