Knowing that summer reads are as essential as sunscreen this time of year, FSG and Air Mail teamed up Wednesday night to turn up the heat on three writers’ work.
Upon arrival in Air Mail’s West Village store, guests first set their eyes on Susan Choi’s “Flashlight: A Novel,” Chris Pavone’s “The Doorman,” and Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Stories” before they spotted the authors in the crowd. That artistically arranged display at the entrance included other FSG titles like Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” This week passersby can catch the works in the window display along with a few banned books, which the Graydon Carter-founded Air Mail sells.
“Sex in the City” fans might interpret the initiative’s “Summer in the City” theme as a riff on the store’s proximity to the apartment Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw lived in. But FSG’s aim was to celebrate the indulgence of a good summer read — in the city. Choi, whose tome details a father’s disappearance across time, nations and memory, hopes that her characters will keep readers turning the pages “to not only know what happens to them, but also [to consider] what they’re thinking about and their idiosyncrasies,” she said.
BookTok, paparazzi shorts of book-toting celebrities, bookcase-adorned fashion ads and independent bookstores continue to boost interest in actual books. Choi said, “During the advent of the e-book, everyone I knew who was the type to prognosticate predicted the end of the physical book. Books are so far from over.“
Aside from books’ tactile and visual appeal, they can also entice people with just a new jacket, she said. Noting how FSG has reissued books by Georges Simenon, she said, “I already own a lot of his books, but I saw those jackets and said, ‘Ooh, I want them.’”
Having always wanted to write a New York novel about money, race and class, even before he was a writer, Pavone said he never really had an idea for what his version would be until he moved into a fancy full-service building for the first time. Immediately struck by “this almost bizarre ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ class system” that exists in some doorman buildings, he said, “All of the 25 people who work in my building are Black or Hispanic, and none of the people [who live there] are,” he said. That environment helped to set the storyline in motion. “The novel is about race, class and privilege and sex, ambition and murder, and it takes place in a building like my building,” he said.
That homegrown approach was intentional. “I don’t know if these issues of race, class, ambition and money have the same resonance for everybody across the country. But here, in New York, we live with those issues all the time, because we are all elbow-to-elbow all the time. Every subway car is like a miracle of human diversity. We don’t have gated communities — we’re just seeing everybody all the time,” Pavone said.
Maxed out on screen time, Choi spoke of how calming reading a physical book can be. Retrieving Geoff Dyer’s “Homework” from her tote bag, she was living up to that title. The Brooklynite will join Dyer and “Shuggie Bain” author Douglas Stuart on June 21 at the Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, N.Y.
FSG’s publisher Mitzi Angel mentioned how interesting and arresting bookcases can be. “If I look at someone’s bookshelf, I’m scanning it to see what’s in there, but also emotions are conjured up. The mere presence of books means something,” she said.
As for the ideal setting for a summer read, Angel prefers to be lying down by a lake or the sea. “For some reason, I find it very hard to read sitting up. If I have to read a manuscript, I really like lying down, which can be a bit inconvenient [laughs.] Or sitting on a bench in the park, which is what I did today. I was working full-on, but I took an hour to go to Riverside Park to read a manuscript.”
Shapton, a frequent swimmer at the Chinatown YMCA, immerses herself in writing in a different way. Doing laps in a lane of your own is true luxury, according to the author, who favors water polo swimsuits. She hopes readers who pick up “Swimming Lessons” will grasp the idea that the discipline of a sport can translate into an artistic discipline. “Training is training. And artists have to train, as much as athletes have to train,” she said. “There’s a rigor, discipline, and a stamina that artists have to have, and do have.”