Paperback Celebration & Book Signing: Lisa Ko & Griffin Hansbury

Hive Mind Books is thrilled to host a joint event to celebrate the paperback releases of novels by Lisa Ko and Griffin Hansbury. They will appear in conversation at Hive Mind Books, 219 Irving Avenue in Bushwick, to discuss their novels, Ko’s Memory Piece and Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In.

This event is free to attend. Book Tickets and donation tickets are also available. Please note that masks are required at this event.

Books will be available for purchase at Hive Mind Books the night of the event. We ask that all books signed at Hive Mind Books events be purchased from Hive Mind Books. If you already have the book(s) and would like to get them signed, we ask that you buy something else at the store while here, if it’s within your means. Thank you for supporting an independent queer bookstore!

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. "Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves," they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet's early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece, which was named one of the the best books of 2024 by NPR, TIME, Vogue, Literary Hub, and Electric Literature, and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Ko’s writing has also appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.

It's the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel's dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia's presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships--between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways.

Griffin Hansbury is the author of Some Strange Music Draws Me In, a novel, along with Feral City (a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction), and Vanishing New York (both written as Jeremiah Moss), as well as The Nostalgist and Day for Night, a collection of poems. His celebrated blog Vanishing New York (2007 – 2021) was frequently named a Best of New York by The Village Voice.

Host or Publisher Hive Mind Books