Pete's Candy Store Reading Series

FREE - Every other Thursday at 7:30pm

Curated and hosted by Jillian Capewell and Brian Gresko

Over the course of 15 years, Pete's Reading Series has earned a reputation as Brooklyn's premier reading series, where today's literary icons and tomorrow's stars take the stage regularly.

PAST AUTHORS 

Colum McCann, Jonathan Ames, Tom Beller, Lan Samantha Chang, Jennifer Egan, Hari Kunzru, David Lehman, Sam Lipsyte, Francine Prose, Said Sayrafiezadeh, Gary Shetyngart, Colm Toibin, Justin Torres, Hannah Tinti

THIS SEASON'S SCHEDULE

Jan 19 – Leland Cheuk, D. Foy and Leopoldine Core

Feb 2 – Sari Wilson and Sam Allingham

Feb 16 – Reading for The Road Ahead: Stories of the Forever War with Chris Wolfe, Kristen Rouse, Nate Bethea, Lauren Halloran and Colin Halloran

Mar 2 – Ellen Umansky and Georgia Clark

Mar 16 – Idra Novey and Garrard Conley

Apr 6 – Katie Kitamura, Min Jin Lee and Priscilla Becker

Apr 20 – Melissa Febos, Sarah Gerard and Chloe Caldwell

May 4 - Kanishk Tharoor and Hari Kunzru

May 18 - Kia Corthron and Kate Daloz

Jun 1 - Hannah Tinti, Jim Shepard and Jessie Chaffee

Jun 15 - Julia Fierro, Alice Kaltman and Lisa Ko

AUTHOR BIOS

Jan 19

Leland Cheuk is the author of the novel THE MISADVENTURES OF SULLIVER PONG and the story collection LETTERS FROM DINOSAURS. Cheuk has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park Foundation, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared in publications such as Salon, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, [PANK] Magazine, and others. He lives in Brooklyn.

Leopoldine Core was born and raised in New York’s East Village and graduated from Hunter College. She is the author of the short story collection When Watched and the poetry collection Veronica Bench. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland, Open City, PEN America and Apology Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for fiction, as well as fellowships from The Center for Fiction and The Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in New York.

 

D. Foy is the author of the novels Made to Break and Patricide. His work has appeared in Guernica, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among others, and has been included in the books Laundromat, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and A Moment’s Notice.

 

Feb 2

Sam Allingham is the author of the story collection The Great American Songbook (A Strange Object). His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, American Short Fiction and n+1, among others, and has received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Full Stop, The Millions, and Monkeybicycle, and his essay "Art Garfunkel Lives!" can be found in the anthology Full Stop: the Book. He received his MFA from Temple University, and lives in West Philadelphia.

 

Sari Wilson is the author of Girl Through Glass, which is just out in paperback. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in literary journals such as Agni, Oxford American, and Slice. Sari lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the cartoonist Josh Neufeld, and their daughter.

 

Feb 16

Mar 2

Ellen Umansky has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of venues, including the New York Times, Salon, Playboy, and the short-story anthologies Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge and Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp. She has worked in the editorial departments of several publications, including the Forward, Tablet, and The New Yorker. She grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

 

Georgia Clark is the author of The Regulars (Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster), and the YA novels She’s With The Band and Parched. Her fourth novel, The Bucket List, will be published by EBB in summer 2018. A native Australian, she lives in Brooklyn with her girlfriend and a fridge full of cheese.

 

Mar 16

Garrard Conley is the author of the memoir, Boy Erased (Riverhead/Penguin 2015). His work can be found in TIME, VICE, CNN, Buzzfeed Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Writers' Conferences and has facilitated craft classes for Catapult, Grub Street, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown.

 

Idra Novey is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear, winner of this year's Brooklyn Eagles Prize and an NPR Best Book of 2016. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages and she's written for the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Paris Review. 

 

Apr 6

Priscilla Becker's chapbook, death certificate, will soon be published by Ugly Duckling Presse. 2 full collections have been published by other houses, including her first, Internal West, which won The Paris Review Book Prize. Her 3rd full collection, death re-tender, has been accepted by several publishers; she hasn't selected one yet. Many pieces of her fiction & essays have been published in journals, recently including Morbid Dyslexia, her self-diagnosis, and Fitting in Nowhere, Kicked outta Everything, feelings about her life. Her work has been anthologized by Soft Skull Press, Anchor Books, and Sarabande. 

 

Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist living in New York City. She is the author of A Separation, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and is a regular contributor to Frieze.

 

Min Jin Lee's debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was one of the "Top 10 Novels of the Year" for The Times (London), NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today. Her short fiction has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. Her writings have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, The Times (London), Vogue, Travel+Leisure, Wall Street Journal, New York Times Magazine, and Food & Wine. Her essays and literary criticism have been anthologized widely. She served as a columnist for the Chosun Ilbo, the leading paper of South Korea. She lives in New York with her family.

 

Apr 20

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart. Her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, Glamour, Salon, New York Times, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. 

 

Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cut, Bomb, and other journals, as well as in anthologies for Joyland and the Saturday Evening Post. Gerard writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City. She recently attended residencies at Yaddo and Tin House.

 

May 4

Kanishk Tharoor is the author of the collection Swimmer Among the Stars. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, the VQR, and elsewhere. His short story “Tale of the Teahouse” was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He presented "Museum of Lost Objects," a ten-part BBC radio series on cultural destruction in the Middle East. He studied at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, where he was a “Writer in Public Schools” fellow.

Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men, as well as a short story collection, Noise and a novella, Memory Palace. His latest book is White Tears, a novel. He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York City.

 

May 18

Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is the winner of the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. In 2017, she will be the resident writer at Chicago’s Eclipse Theatre, which will dedicate its three-show season to her plays. Awards include the 2016 Otto Award for Political Theatre, the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, and the USArtists Jane Addams Fellowship.

 

Kate Daloz is the author of We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, released this spring from PublicAffairs. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught undergraduate writing. She grew up in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, in the geodesic dome her parents built, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

 

Jun 1

Jessie Chaffee’s is the author of the debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy. She was awarded a 2014-2015 Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing to Italy to complete the novel, during which time she was the Writer-in-Residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her fiction has been published in The Rumpus, Bluestem, Global City Review, Big Bridge, and The Sigh Press, among others. She lives with her husband in New York City, where she is an editor at Words Without Borders, an online magazine of international literature.

 

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Achievement in Jewish Literature from the American Library Association and the PEN/New England Award for fiction, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Five of his short stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College.

 

Hannah Tinti’s short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her bestselling novel, The Good Thief, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. In 2002, she co-founded One Story magazine, and for the past 14 years has been its Editor in Chief, winning the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing and the AWP Prize for Best Small Press. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University’s MFA program and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Italy, which she co-founded. Her new novel is The Twelve Bullets of Samuel Hawley, out from The Dial Press.

 

Jun 15

Julia Fierro is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth. Her work has been published in The Millions, Poets & Writers, Buzzfeed, Glamour, Flavorwire, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Julia founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, which has grown into a creative home to 3,500 writers in NYC, Los Angeles, and Online.

 

Alice Kaltman is the author of the story collection STAGGERWING and the forthcoming novel WAVEHOUSE (Summer 2018). Her stories appear in numerous journals including Hobart, Whiskey Paper, Joyland, and BULL: Men's Fiction, and in the anthologies THE PLEASURE YOU SUFFER and ON MONTAUK. Her work has twice been selected as Longform Fiction Picks, and was recently selected as a semifinalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017. Alice lives, writes and surfs in Brooklyn and Montauk, New York

 

Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, a novel which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, Apogee Journal, Narrative, O. Magazine, and elsewhere.