NEXT EVENT:
3 pm, Sunday, May 4
JUST ADDED!!! Thomas Pynchon birthday bash

Mark your calendars for the literary event of the season: Thomas Pynchon turns 71 and Freebird Books and greater Red Hook won't let him forget it.

Join us for a backyard barbeque and fax-a-thon celebrating America's greatest literary cipher. We'll dine on foodstuffs famously vomited by Gravity's Rainbow's Tyrone Slothrop: burgers, homefries, chef's salad with French dressing, Moxie, after-dinner mints, Clark bars, salted peanuts, and "the cherry from some Radcliffe girl's old-fashioned."



April 24, 2008

Tonight Anya Ulinich read from her recent novel Petropolis and a new short story called "Mr. Spinich." Some of her artwork remains on display at the store.

Born in Moscow, Anya studied art at an early age before immigrating to the United States at age 17. Anya attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from the University of California at Davis. In 2000, she moved to Brooklyn, where she has pursued a career in writing. Petropolis is her first novel. Antoine Wilson in the Los Angeles Times called it "a sparkling debut, a unique comic novel of Homo post-Sovieticus. In negotiating the territory between coming-of-age and satire, the novel risks a great deal and succeeds, thanks in no small part to Ulinich's storytelling skills and pitch-perfect sense of the bittersweet."

To learn more about Anya, her book Petropolis and her art, check out this interview. She was also featured recently on Maud Newton's blog.

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Also, Brownstoner referenced a recent Observer article on literary Brooklyn (a subject generating a good deal of discussion in these areas) and illustrated it with Michael Dashkin's sepia-toned photo of the store, shortly after Freebird opened in November 2007. It's one of my favorite pictures and certainly deserves the attention. Here's another that he snapped the same day.
--Peter Miller