Singers From Blondie To Appear At Hoboken Literary Weekend

HOBOKEN, NJ — Hoboken independent book store Little City Books will host its second Annual Hoboken Literary Weekend from April 3 through 5, famous novelists, New Yorker magazine journalists, artist Roz Chast, and even two backup singers for Blondie who have stories to tell.

The series of events will include talks, book signings, and parties with refreshments.

“Since this year is an election year, with everyone shouting at each other, we are featuring talks and performances that are pure entertainment,” said Kate Jacobs, who co-owns Little City with Donna Garban.

According to a press release, the weekend kicks off on Friday, April 3 with New Yorker writer Patty Marx and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast — and their ukuleles — in conversation about their new book, You Can Only Be Mad At Me For One Thing At a Time: Rules for Couples.

The two have been playing sold-out events across the country. Their talk will include live music, refreshments, cartoons, and a signed copy of the book.

“We opened a second bookstore in uptown Hoboken in January,” said Garban. “Our uptown neighbor, Mile Square Theatre, is partnering with us to host Patty and Roz, our opening event. It's a fun adventure being part of a developing neighborhood that includes an Equity house, movie theater, gorgeous cafe, Biergarten, and climbing wall.”

Obie-winning theater group Elevator Repair Service will perform at Little City Books the next day. The ensemble’s production of Gatz (a word-for-word retelling of the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald) won multiple awards and was called “the most remarkable achievement in theater of the decade” by New York Times critic Ben Brantley.

They will workshop a new play, Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, a verbatim account of the 1965 debate between author James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University on the topic “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.”

On Sunday, the bookstore will host painter, writer, and set designer Maira Kalman, with New Yorker correspondent Adam Gopnik on hand.

Kalman will talk about her new book, an illustrated edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. The book depicts life in Paris in the 1920s. Gopnik, the magazine's former Paris correspondent, will discuss the Parisian literary and social scene at the time of the book’s writing. Tickets to the event include a glass of wine and a signed copy of the book, and a short film will also be shown.

Other events during the Hoboken Literary Weekend 2020 include:

• Sisters Tish and Snooky Bellomo, who sang backup in Blondie in the '70s before launching their world-famous beauty line, Manic Panic.
• Pulitzer-Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, national baseball writer, and Jersey City resident Jared Diamond, launching his new book Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Home Run Revolution.
• Adam Wade, record-holding 20-time Moth Storytelling SLAM Champion, seen on HBO’s Girls and Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, will tell stories about the great people he’s met while living in Hoboken.

“Our first Hoboken Literary Weekend last year was very ambitious — 12 events in three days. It was a ton of work and madly successful,” said Jacobs. “People stopped us on the street for months afterward to thank us.”

Little City Books opened its first location on May 2, 2015, at First and Bloomfield streets in Hoboken, a walk of a few blocks from the Hoboken train station. Its second location opened on Jan. 15 of this year, uptown, in the back of Bwe Coffee. Read more about the second location here.

Events are still being added to Hoboken Literary Weekend. For more details including locations, times, and tickets, see www.hobokenliteraryweekend.com or you can call them (on the line...you can call them any, any time) at 201-626-READ.

Watch for updates and other Hoboken news at Hoboken Patch.

Got a news tip or release? Email caren.lissner@patch.com.