Goodbye to All That (Revised Edition) w/ Sari Botton & special guests
Event Information
About this Event
Community Guidelines:
By registering for this event, you agree to be respectful towards authors and other audience members and to refrain from inappropriate or disruptive behavior and/or harassment of any kind including, but not limited to: hate speech, spam comments, slurs, obscenities, etc. Any attendees who violate these community guidelines will be immediately ejected from this event and barred from attending all future Books Are Magic events.
To request accessibility accommodations, please contact assistant@booksaremagic.net.
About Goodbye to All That:
From Roxane Gay to Leslie Jamison, thirty brilliant writers share their timeless stories about the everlasting magic—and occasional misery—of living in the Big Apple, in a new edition of the classic anthology.
In the revised edition of this classic collection, thirty writers share their own stories of loving and leaving New York, capturing the mesmerizing allure the city has always had for writers, poets, and wandering spirits. Their essays often begin as love stories do, with the passion of something newly discovered: the crush of subway crowds, the streets filled with manic energy, and the sudden, unblinking certainty that this is the only place on Earth where one can become exactly who she is meant to be.
They also share the grief that comes like a gut-punch, when the grand metropolis loses its magic and the pressures of New York's frenetic life wear thin for even the most dedicated dwellers. As friends move away, rents soar, and love—still—remains just out of reach, each writer's goodbye is singular and universal, just like New York itself.
Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. She edited the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY and its New York Times bestselling follow-up, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY and for five years served as Essays Editor at Longreads. She teaches creative nonfiction courses at Catapult and in the MFA program at Bay Path University.
Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.
Emily Raboteau is the Stuart Z. Katz Professor of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York. Her books are The Professor’s Daughter and Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award. Her next book, Caution: Lessons in Survival, is forthcoming from Holt.
Lisa Ko's first novel, The Leavers, was a national best-seller that won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
Rosie Schaap is the author of Becoming a Sommelier and Drinking with Men: A Memoir. From 2011 to 2017, she was a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. She teaches creative writing in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency MFA program, and currently lives and writes in rural Northern Ireland.
Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. After making a bunch of cool things for the internet, he now writes books and lives in Brooklyn, New York.