Pictures from Commonplace.NYC Last Week

This Week's Book Clubs Sep 20 – Sep 26

Here's what's happening with Commonplace.NYC book clubs this week.

Battle of the Genres

A one-time genre showdown at Brooklyn Book Festival where St. Francis College MFA faculty and students face off in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction — paired with Angus Fletcher's Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, which treats literature as a technology for solving problems science can't touch: how to live, love, and maintain courage in the face of death, tracing narrative breakthroughs from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante that alleviate grief, spark empathy, and engineer enhancements to the human heart.

Event details.

Battle of the Genres:

Monday, Sep 21 · 12:50 PM–2:00 PM EDT — 179 Livingston St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006)

A screening of Jia Zhangke's 2006 Golden Lion winner Still Life at Anthology Film Archives, set in Fengjie during the Three Gorges Dam demolitions — paired with Ezra Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, chronicling the pragmatic architect of China's radical economic opening who "creatively destroyed" much of the system he'd helped build under Mao.

Both works grapple with transformation's human cost: Jia's digital-video documentary aesthetic captures a town literally below the waterline, its buildings marked with red flood warnings, while Vogel disentangles the contradictions of a leader who lifted hundreds of millions from poverty yet ordered the Tiananmen crackdown.

Event details.

Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006):

Monday, Sep 21 · 7:00 PM–9:00 PM EDT — 32 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003

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Official Commonplace.NYC Meeting

An official Commonplace.NYC meeting at McCarren Park — come to New York's only book club that creates new book clubs!

Official Commonplace.NYC Meeting:

Friday, Sep 25 · 6:00 PM–7:00 PM EDT — McCarren Park, Brooklyn, NY, United States

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See the full schedule any time at https://www.commonplace.nyc.