Reading & Signing with Mary Kay Zuravleff & Stephen Policoff

American Ending

 In an Appalachian coal mining town, Yelena is the first American born in her Russian immigrant family. Before the night’s bedtime story, Ma asks the children, “Russian ending or American ending?” This refrain haunts American Ending, a gritty, darkly humorous tale of immigration, a worldwide pandemic, and the fragility of American citizenship—100 years ago.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, which was chosen for Oprah’s Spring Book List. The novel was inspired by her Russian Orthodox Old Believer grandparents, who lived in Marianna and Erie, PA. Her novel Man Alive! was a Washington Post Notable Book, and she is the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award. She lives in Washington, DC, and is a recipient of numerous DC Artist Fellowships.

Dangerous Blues 

The story of Paul Brickner and his 12-year-old daughter Spring, who must learn to live without Spring’s mother, Nadia, who died a few months before the novel begins. To escape the sorrow of their empty home in upstate New York, father and daughter relocate to a NYU sublet in Greenwich Village.

Spring quickly takes to her new Manhattan middle school life, but Paul begins to fear that he is being haunted, not only by his memories, but by Nadia’s ghost.

He soon meets Tara White, a talented blues singer, and the mother of Irina, Spring’s new middle school pal.  But Tara, who grew up in a New England cult, is haunted, too, hounded by her brothers to return to the family, and to give back a shamanic Tibetan vessel, which they claim she stole from them.

An exploration of the dark yet comic interplay of family relationships laced with the supernatural, DANGEROUS BLUES presents a world where the glow of the present must constantly contend with the shadows of the past.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Policoff is the author of Beautiful Somewhere Else, which won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. He was writer-in-residence at Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, with whom he wrote Shipping Out, The Mummer’s Play, Ubu Rides Again, and Bound to Rise, which received an Obie. He was also a freelance writer for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, New Age Journal, and many other publications. He helped create Center for Creative Youth, based at Wesleyan University, and has taught writing at CUNY, Wesleyan, and Yale.  He is currently Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU, where he has taught since 1987.