Books Are Magic Montague 122 Montague Street Brooklyn
NY 11201 United States
Refund Policy
Contact the organizer to request a refund.
About this event
1 hour
Mobile eTicket
Event guidelines:
All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
A signing will follow the talk.
Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/VZwcROYl_qw
As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we’ll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact eventhelp@booksaremagic.net.
A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.
An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.
Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present.
Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary writer who was raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and has received first prize in short fiction from both American Literary Review and New South; she is a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award winner. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.