Sizzling Summer Reads | Cafe con Libros & Grand Central Publishing

Discover your next sizzling summer read and join us in discussion with Salma El-Wardany, Tia Williams, Meredith

Schorr, & Francesca Giacco!  First 30 purchases of books will receive a gift card from Cafe Kitsune!

Event guidelines:

• All attendees must wear a face mask at all times
• Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event; email us and we'll work it out.

About Tia Williams

According to NBC News, Tia Williams “is a writer’s writer with a fashionista twist.”

In 1997, the University of Virginia grad embarked on a career as a magazine beauty editor (YM, Elle, Glamour, Lucky, Teen People, and Essence). In 2004, she pioneered the beauty blog industry with her award-winning site Shake Your Beauty – and enjoys a career as an executive copy director (Estee Lauder Companies).

      Seven Days in June, Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget, and seven days to get it all back again… Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning novelist, who, to everyone’s surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their buried traumas, but the eyebrows of the Black literati. What no one knows is that fifteen years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. While they may be pretending not to know each other, they can’t deny their chemistry—or the fact that they’ve been secretly writing to each other in their books through the years.

About Salma El-Wardany

Salma El‑Wardany is a writer, poet, and BBC broadcaster. As a half‑Egyptian, half‑Irish woman her work focuses on telling the stories of women, especially women of color, that have for so long been ignored. She has contributed to the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa, and her writing has also appeared in Huffington Post, theMetro and she has given two TedxTalks.

 

   These Impossible Things, A *Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club pick* and razor‑sharp debut novel of three best friends navigating love, sex, faith, and the one night that changes it all. It’s always been Malak, Kees, and Jenna against the world. Since childhood, under the watchful eyes of their parents, aunties and uncles, they’ve learned to live their own lives alongside the expectations of being good Muslim women. Staying over at a boyfriend's place is disguised as a best friend’s sleepover, and tiredness can be blamed on studying instead of partying. They know they’re existing in a perfect moment. With growing older and the stakes of love and life growing higher, the delicate balancing act between rebellion and religion is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.

About Meredith Schorr

A born and bred New Yorker and lifelong daydreamer, Meredith Schorr fueled her passion for writing everything from restaurant reviews, original birthday cards, and even work-related emails into a career penning romantic comedies. When she’s not writing books filled with grand gestures and hard-earned happily-ever-afters or working as a trademark paralegal, she’s most often reading, running, or watching TV…for research, of course. She is represented by Melissa Edwards at Stonesong.  Meredith’s trade paperback debut with Grand Central Publishing/Forever, AS SEEN ON TV, will be published on June 7, 2022.

   As Seen On TV, Emerging journalist Adina Gellar is done with dating in New York City. If she’s learned anything from made-for-TV romance movies, it’s that she’ll find love in a small town—the kind with harvest festivals, delightful but quirky characters, and scores of delectable single dudes. So when a big-city real estate magnate targets tiny Pleasant Hollow for development, Adi knows she’s found the perfect story—one that will earn her a position at a coveted online magazine, so she can finally start adulting for real . . . and maybe even find her dream man in the process.

About Francesca Giacco

Francesca Giacco is a graduate of Barnard College and the MFA program at Columbia University. She lives in New York. Six Days in Rome is her first novel.

 Six Days in Rome, In this decadent, deeply evocative novel, a young artist travels to Rome to heal a broken heart, where she ​confronts loneliness and intimacy, rage and desire. Emilia arrives in Rome reeling from heartbreak and reckoning with her past. What was supposed to be a romantic trip has, with the sudden end of a relationship, become a solitary one instead. As she wanders, music, art, food, and the beauty of Rome's wide piazzas and narrow streets color Emilia's dreamy, but weighty experience of the city. She considers the many facets of her life, drifting in and out of memory, following her train of thought wherever it leads.