Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

Kahn-Bennett seems to have figured some things out, though, and has set down roots of her own, at the intersection of tourism and comfort food from home in Brooklyn. Her pizza shop, Brooklyn’s Finest, is close enough to hotels to service traveling Americans but has earned a loyal local following as well, due to Kahn-Bennett’s embrace of local flavors. “Mexico has the best peppers in the world, so we do lots of different combinations. My current favorite is a white pizza with queso Oaxaca and poblano peppers.”

Kahn-Bennett’s mothers, Jane and Zoe Kahn-Bennett, are still in Brooklyn, dividing their time between Brooklyn favorite Hyacinth and their new bakery, Hot + Sweet, but Ruby says that her family comes to Tulum at least once a year. “My moms love it,” she says. “They keep threatening to open a Mexican place back home.” As for Kahn-Bennett, Brooklyn’s Finest keeps her busy, though she does return to New York every summer, when she forces her mothers to cook her a proper Thanksgiving dinner. “I would come home for it,” she says, “but it’s our high season! Someone has to make the pizza!” And so Thanksgiving in July will have to do for now.

PROSPECT PARK YMCA MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Big Brothers Basketball Game Has All Winners

This month, our Big Brothers program capped off its summer season with the annual basketball tournament. Big Brother mentor and volunteer coach Andrew Marx said just after the game, “It was one of our best tourneys yet — the kids all played their hearts out, and everyone had a really good time. It was the highlight of the year for us, for sure.” (Pictured in photo: Big Brother participants and Andrew Marx, at center.)

HARRY MARX

BROWN UNIVERSITY

English Department Honors Committee

Thesis Proposal

Proposed Title: Friends and Neighbors

The novel will be inspired by the tropes of classic love stories such as Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde , set in modern-day Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with two neighboring families falling in and out of love simultaneously. My plan is to write a novel that both celebrates the youthful embrace of reckless love and the way that older people struggle with those same feelings some decades down the line. I plan to incorporate ideas from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as to draw inspiration from hypertext-based Internet platforms, which I think will provide an interesting juxtaposition with the somewhat old-fashioned and straightforward form of the novel.

Thank you for your consideration.

TIME OUT NEW YORK

Listings

Elizabeth Marx, Bowery Ballroom

In the year since the release of “Mistress of Myself,” former Kitty’s Mustache singer Elizabeth Marx has had a stunning resurgence, though “discovery” is probably even more apt, as few people ever heard any Kitty’s Mustache material aside from the song made famous by Marx’s former bandmate, who needn’t be mentioned here. Marx is promoting a new record, Modern Lovers , out this fall from Merge Records.

Enormous thanks to my glamorous agent, Claudia Ballard, as well as Laura Bonner and Tracy Fisher at WME, and to the whole team at Riverhead Books, especially Sarah McGrath, Claire McGinnis, Geoff Kloske, Lydia Hirt, Danya Kukafka, Jynne Martin, and Kate Stark. Thanks to Riverheaders emeritus Megan Lynch and Ali Cardia for their continued love and support. Thanks to my UK squad, Jessica Leeke and Cathryn Summerhayes. Thanks to the friends who loaned me their rich and varied expertise for this book: Rob Newton, Kerry Diamond, Bill Sheppard, Jo Anne Kennedy, Stephin Merritt, Meg Wolitzer, Lorrie Moore, the staff of Rookie, Ry Russo Young, Christina Rentz, and Isabel Parkey.

Special thanks to my family: the Straubs, the Royals, and my handsome husband, Michael Fusco-Straub, without whom I would be forever lost. Astonished thanks and total devotion to my two beautiful children, one of whom is still inside my body as I write this, but who is expected to make his entrance into the world before too long.

Thanks as always to my beloved independent bookstores, and their brilliant proprietors and booksellers, especially Mary Gannett and Henry Zook of BookCourt, Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein of Community, my sugarplum Christine Onorati of WORD, Jessica Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting of Greenlight, and Parnassus’ Niki Coffman and Ann Patchett. I would also like to thank Ann Patchett for being Ann Patchett.

And last, thanks and love to the old friends I’ve kept, and also to the friends I haven’t, with kisses unkissed flying toward them across time, space, and circumstance.