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On four different nights, novelist Blake Butler will host a marathon reading of his new book, There Is No Year. Held in four different locations, a team of New York writers will help read the complete novel.

Click on the image embedded above for the dates and exact locations. Participants include: “Ben Greenman, Emma Straub, John Dermot Woods, Justin Taylor, Jo Weldon, Rachel Shukert, Melissa Broder, Jonny Diamond, Adam Robinson, Dorethea Lasky, Shya Scanlon, Lincoln Michel, Butler and his own editor [at] Harper Perennial, Cal Morgan.”

Butler edits the literary blog HTML Giant and two journals, Lamination Colony and No Colony. In 2009, he published a novella called Ever.

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By Sharon Zukin

Shortly before 8 p.m. on a warm September evening the High Line, Manhattan’s newest public park and the only one located above street level, is crowded.  Men and women, old and young, tourists from overseas and longtime New Yorkers have climbed the winding metal stairs to the former railroad freight line, now a mile-long, landscaped walkway, just to view the sunset over the Hudson River.  There are more people up on the High Line than down on the streets.  They are taking photos, chatting quietly, lounging on wooden benches and strolling between shallow beds of native plants, creating a new passagiata for the post-industrial city.

There’s a lot to like about the High Line.  It’s a gritty fragment of New York’s industrial past that was saved from demolition by feisty activists and wholesome volunteers.  It makes us think about how the city’s architecture was once built for function rather than for style.  It reminds us of what the rough West Side of Manhattan was like before a derelict Nabisco plant, where assembly line bakers manufactured the first branded American cracker, was transformed into the high-class bread shops of Chelsea Market.  And it recalls the days, not so long ago, when the Meatpacking District was a no-go zone for animal carcasses, blood-stained butchers and several kinds of street workers who made their nocturnal rounds, a far cry from the attraction for club kids and fashionistas it has become.

The High Line offers New Yorkers a novel way to indulge in two things that have become a passion since 9/11: spending time out-of-doors and hanging out in public spaces.  Maybe it reflects a hunger for community or maybe it’s a behavioral response to global warming, but this desire to be together in public flouts the ever-present eye of the surveillance cameras and revels in the diversity of strangers.  It’s the same passion that drives apartment dwellers to socialize on their building’s roof and eat lunch in the new “traffic-calming” islands that have been carved out of Broadway’s tumult.

While the number of people who use the city’s public parks has grown enormously in recent years, the High Line attracts a disproportionately huge number of visitors, as many as half a million in the first two months after it opened in 2009.

But this is what it took to “save” it:  A mayor – Michael Bloomberg  – who understands the value of attractive green space to brand the city for tourists and residents alike.  A city planning commissioner, Amanda Burden, who shares the city-branding vision and speaks the language of historic preservation.  A longtime strategy of “adaptive re-use” to find new business uses for old historic structures and an emerging strategy of “self-financing” for public parks, both of which rely on private funding.  Most important, saving the High Line depended on powerful backers in the “creative class” of art, media and fashion who have their own interest in redeveloping the neighborhood—in this case, the power couple of Diane vo

By Edward E. Curtis IV

Like Gettysburg, the National Mall, and other historic sites, Ground Zero is a place whose symbolic importance extends well beyond local zoning disputes and real estate deals. The recent controversy over a proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks away from the former World Trade Center shows it clearly: the geography of Lower Manhattan has become a sacred ground on which religious and political battles of national importance are being waged.

After New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission gave its approval for the demolition of the building now located on 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan, the Rev. Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice announced that it is suing to stop the project.

Though Robertson’s organization is supposedly dedicated to the “ideal that religious freedom and freedom of speech are inalienable, God-given rights,” it is not primarily concerned with religious rights, at least not the rights of Muslims. It is instead part of a loose coalition of Americans who have identified the presence of Muslims, both at home and abroad, as a primary threat to both the United States and the Judeo-Christian heritage.

Their Muslim-bashing has deep roots in American history. Since the days of Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan minister, many Americans have associated Muslims with religious heresy. In the early 1800s, as the United States waged its first foreign war against the North African Barbary states, politicians, ministers, and authors regularly used themes of oriental despotism, harems, and Islamic violence in political campaigns, novels, and sermons.

Later, when the U.S. failed to quell Muslim revolts during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in the early twentieth century, U.S. Army Gen. Leonard Wood called for the extermination of all Filipino Muslims since, according to him, they were irretrievably fanatical.

Islamophobia, an odd combination of racism, xenophobia, and religious bias, receded in importance during the 1900s as the specter of communism replaced it as a primary symbol of foreign danger. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, stereotypes about the Islamic “green menace” have once again become a central aspect of our culture.

This time Muslims are fighting back. Their civil rights and religious leaders are challenging this old American prejudice, in part through unprecedented interfaith community activism. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the group proposing the Muslim community center near Ground Zero, is one of them.

In response to questions about why he wants to build a community center so close to Ground Zero, Rauf has said that he wants the community center to be a source of healing, not division. Rauf also pledged that Park51, as the project is now called, will be a “home for all people who are yearning for understanding and healing, peace, collaboration, and interdependence.”

Rauf has powerful friends–or at least allies. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who choked up defending the right of Muslims to build the community center during a speech in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, argues that “we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves…if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.”

Those who agree with Mayor Bloomberg represent the other major faction struggling for the American soul at Ground Zero. For them, the American soul is imperiled when its founding ideals are cast aside. In this case, the ideal is the first amendment guarantee of the free exercise of religion. “Of all our precious freedoms,” said Bloomberg,

Lauren Appelwick, Publicity

Robert M. Geraci is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. In his new book Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, he examines the “cyber-theology” which suggests we might one day upload our minds into robots or cyberspace and live forever. Drawing on interviews with roboticists, AI researchers, Second Life devotees, and others, Geraci reveals that the idea of Apocalyptic AI is strikingly similar to Judeo-Christian apocalyptic traditions. Here, he shares 10 ways World of Warcraft, one virtual reality game, could help us survive the end of the world as we know it.

1. The dangers will be minimal…level 80 priests can provide universal health care.
President Obama plans to insure 32 million more Americans than are currently protected; but the area of effect healing spells of priests can jump from one person to another, healing them as they become sick and injured without need for hospital visits, insurance payments, etc. This approach to medical treatment has obvious benefits over the constant paperwork that federally mandated insurance will require.

2. When aliens come to take over the planet, they’ll get addicted to WoW and forget what they were doing.
Instead of world domination, aliens will hope to complete all four daily cooking quests for The Rokk. After they’ve already eaten Emeril, they’ll spice up their life with Super Hot Stew and realize that people don’t taste all that good after all.

3. Who needs indoor plumbing? You’re already used to peeing into bottles.
Your guild’s “friendly” three day race to level 80 has given you all the continence you need…and the willingness to do what you must when the time comes.

4. After countless hours of farming for minerals, herbs and animal hides, you’re well prepared for life after subprime mortgages collapse the economy.
Let’s face it, the economy is in shambles and no one knows when it will recover. On the other hand, while toxic mortgage securities provide neither housing nor security, a proper skinner can ensure that all the local children stay warm through the winter.

5. Gnomish engineers will program the robots to like you (though they can’t guarantee proper functioning).
It’s not the Gnomes’ fault that Skynet became self-aware…they didn’t think it would defend that off switch so vociferously! And to compensate, they’ll happily upload your mind into one of their inventions so that you can join the robots in their post-apocalyptic future.

6. As the value of the dollar declines, gold and mithril will remain safe investments.
Gold will shine through the darkest of times and foreign governments will always be content to buy it from you at the auction house.

7. Your family pet can take aggro for you while you lay a fire trap to destroy a zombie mob.
A lifetime of treats and petting repaid in one priceless moment.

8. Your potions of underwater breathing will let you grab the a