Though the end of summer is a sleepy time in the publishing world, August saw two authors rally their communities to celebrate a pair of debuts, and Film at Lincoln Center kicked off a bookish film series with the help of a cadre of indie presses.
August 12: Blue Afternoon Launch Party
The Moss NYC, a new Midtown social club for “intelligent leisure,” hosted a launch party for Bravo reality TV star Georgia McCann’s debut poetry collection, Blue Afternoon, on August 12.
The verse in the pocket-sized pastel volume, published by Los Angeles–based small press Dream Boy Book Club, is a constellation of glamorous scenes connected by heartbreak and longing. On the Moss’s fourth floor, McCann’s friends hand-sold copies in the doorway of a salon partly illuminated by candlelight, and partly by a screen displaying lines of McCann’s poetry scrawled on paper scraps. Within an hour, they sold out.
The party was buzzing, and the guests almost all knew McCann personally, including her brother, her former social media assistant, and plenty of one-time Dimes Square regulars.
McCann told PW that she chose the venue because she’s friends with Moss’s director Alexander Kellogg. Kellogg has worked at China Chalet, High Snobiety, and other luxury event production houses, and told PW that he’s interested in making the Moss a literary and cultural hub. In the salon’s adjacent barroom, replete with magazines and a pool table, guests could look out onto another of Moss’s art deco–style lounges, one of many in the multi-level building.
On season two of Bravo’s Next Gen NYC, which premiered earlier this summer, McCann is an entrepreneur leaving event planning to start a cleaning business, while navigating drama with her friends and co-stars. She was overheard at the party saying that she wants to maintain a separation between her TV and poet personae.
Later, she echoed this sentiment in brief remarks to the room: “I swear to god guys, I can do Bravo TV for cameras in my face, but giving a speech in front of friends is an issue.”
McCann, who is turning 27, continued to explain that she started writing these poems at age 19, and seemed uncomfortable fully claiming the words on the page. “I want to distance my voice from the narrator’s voice, so I’m not gonna be reading,” McCann said, “but the book is there if you wanna flip through it.”
August 22: Unprecedented Times Book Launch
Malavika Kannan’s adult debut Unprecedented Times, a 400-page Gen-Z coming-of-age novel published by Holt on August 18, has generated a lot of buzz, including a PW starred review and profiles in Vogue and Cultured for the 25-year-old Kannan.
At Funprecedented Times, a launch-event-slash-dance-party Kannan hosted on August 22 at the Brooklyn queer bar Oberon, it was clear that Kannan has just as much, if not more, support from her IRL community. After Kannan read from her novel—an excerpt about the perils of queer situationships—her Stanford classmate and drag performer Zz Chic took the stage, dancing between packed tables and taking advantage of a space in the center of the room to hit the splits.
Kannan also brought other friends onstage to show their talents, including novelist Bobuq Sayed; journalist bittnia; novelist Leah Abrams; and comedian Myesha Choudhury. Though she organized the party independently from her publisher, Kannan received support from Lyft and queer media company Autostraddle, which supplied free zines.
After, DJs urkanmani and srizzybeats, who Kannan billed on the party invite as the “tamil dreamgirl lineup,” spun electronic beats mixed with recognizable pop motifs as guests stayed and danced under a disco ball for several hours. Kannan, who was wearing a bright red dress and a swirl of hair on her forehead, flitted among groups, then stepped outside to catch friends before they left.
“I joked to my friends that this is the age that historically a lot of women would have had weddings, and instead I get to celebrate something different,” she said. “A lot of book launches can feel stuffy and inaccessible and I wanted this, above all, to feel fun and like an extension of the ethos of the book!”
August 25: Film at Lincoln Center’s Bibliomania Book Fair
To an outside observer, experimental filmmaker David Gatten, Nicholas Cage’s much-parodied performance as a cryptographer in National Treasure, and a Vatican conspiracy theory don’t have much in common. To directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker, who curated the Bibliomania film series at Film at Lincoln Center running from August 28–September 3, the thread is obvious.
On August 29, Auen, Walker, and FLC senior programmer Tyler Wilson convened a one-day book fair to support the series. Bibliomania showcases the films that influenced Auen and Walker’s new academic thriller Chronovisor (2026), out September 4, which takes place largely in dark libraries laden with onscreen text.
Auen told PW that the Bibliomania films, which include Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Howard Hanks’s 1941 Ball of Fire, all grapple with the serious question of how to translate the largely silent, internal process of archival research for the big screen, whether they come in the trappings of a “$100 million blockbuster” or an “early 20th century screwball comedy.”
A handful of indie presses including NYRB, Deep Vellum, and Archipelago held down the fort tabling with books in the Walter Reade Theater lobby as viewers streamed out of a 70mm screening of Indiana Jones. Deep Vellum staffers said that William H. Glass’s hulking 1995 metafictional work The Tunnel, reissued by Dalkey Archive this spring, was a popular choice among those in their post-Jones glow. At the book fair, Auen himself bought two titles: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Doctor Kevorkian.
Not present on the tables were the many rare books and magazines which are pored over by the film’s protagonist, fictional Columbia professor Béatrice Courte (played by real-life professor Anne-Laure Sellier) in search of the quasi-mythical chronovisor machine. Legend has it that the machine, rumored to have been invented by Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti in the 20th century, can visually render any moment from the past.
As Courte sifts through buried articles and arcane books on parapsychology—all of which are real, Auen said—sentences are highlighted and, when needed, translated for viewers, so that they can read alongside her.
“We spent the first few months just being fans of the conspiracy theory,” Auen said, “and it was sort of through that process that we were like, maybe we could share the feeling that gave us with the audience.”