Dinner Party Gossip! A City of Laughter Paperback Launch

City of Laughter, the debut novel by Brooklyn author Temim Fruchter, comes out in paperback on January 14th, 2025. City of Laughter is a celebration of storytelling and folklore in all of its most ancient forms, but it is also a celebration of the juicy, mischievous kind of storytelling you might do around the table at a rowdy queer dinner party. Come celebrate the launch of City of Laughter in paperback, sit down with a drink and a bite, hear a little bit from the novel, and then lean in for some dinner-party-quality tales from authors Julia Phillips, Sabrina Imbler, and Asha Thanki.

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, CITY OF LAUGHTER, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, is out now on Grove Atlantic.

Julia Phillips is the author of the bestselling novels and , which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Julia's work has been translated into twenty-six languages. She has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program. She is also on the board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center, a nonprofit that helps people heal from violence.

Sabrina Imbler is a science writer living in Brooklyn. They are the author of the chapbook Dyke (geology) and the essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches. Imbler is a staff writer at Defector Media, an employee-owned sports and culture site, where they write about creatures and the natural world.

Asha Thanki is the author of the novel A Thousand Times Before (Viking 2024). An essayist and fiction writer, Asha’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, Platypus Press’ wildness, The Common, Catapult,  Hyphen, and more. A Kundiman fellow, Asha has received support from Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature (Speculative Literature Foundation). She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Liz's Book Bar, 315 Smith Street, Brooklyn, United States