Summer Shorts is back. Every other Thursday at 6 PM, we gather to read a short story together: silently, all at once, with nowhere else to be. The story is unveiled when you arrive. No preparation required. Just show up, settle in, and let the rest of your week fall away.

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Tonight we read Sigrid Nunez, who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and Staten Island, the youngest of three girls. Her father was Chinese-Panamanian and worked in Chinese restaurants his whole life. Her mother was German. The two of them met in occupied Germany after the war, when neither one spoke the other's language, and made a life together in New York. Nunez went to Barnard, got her MFA from Columbia, and landed a job at the New York Review of Books, where she met Susan Sontag, started dating Sontag's son, and eventually moved in with both of them on Riverside Drive. Sontag became her mentor, handed her reading lists, pushed her to write. Nunez couldn't write a word the entire time she lived there. Her first novel didn't come out until she was in her forties: an autobiographical book about her parents and the distance between their worlds.

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She won the National Book Award for The Friend at sixty-seven. Nunez writes about grief, animals, friendship, and the strange difficulty of being a person in the world. We'll read one together and see what there is to say about it afterward. Happy hour pricing at the cafe. No RSVP required, but it always helps us plan.

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