Posts by Thomas Knowlton

This May, we've been reading Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue. This online book discussion is in conjunction with Reader's Den and NYC Summer.

Welcome back to our online discussion of Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue. Throughout May, we'll be discussing the book as part of both Reader's Den and NYC Summer.

For this month's Reader's Den, we'll be hosting an online book discussion of Will Eisner's The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Aveue. This is only the second time we have featured a graphic novel (the first was Joe Sacco's Palestine in October 2010).

This summer at Mid-Manhattan Library: revisit the vital, gritty streets of 1970s New York City on Film, discuss great NYC books online with Reader's Den, and relax as librarian Lois Moore reads you short stories from The New Yorker and New York-based authors during Mixed Bag.

All of these events are part of our summer reading program for older teens and adults called NYC Summer. Watch this space for announcements of even more events and book recommendations! You can also quickly access this page at: bit.ly/nycsummer2013.

Developed by Yager and published by 2K Games, Spec Ops: The Line (2012) has been one of the most-discussed video games of the past year.

Three Auteurs of World Cinema starts with six screenings of films by the highly-stylized Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai. In March, we move to the meditative works of Soviet/Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. And finally, throughout April and May, we'll explore the fantastical world of Italian director Federico Fellini through eight films spanning his entire career.

As we come to the close of another year, I always look forward to the "best of" lists and discovering interesting games I may have missed. Over the next several weeks, NYPLarcade will be showcasing six video game titles from 2012, which were not covered in our other game series this year: Jenova Chen, Horror Games, and International Games Day (Music Games).

On Saturday, November 3, libraries all over the world will celebrate International Games Day by playing games. This year, at Mid-Manhattan Library, we'll have a variety of board games as well as a special line up of music video games from 2012 in Room 101 from 1-5 p.m.

This week, I'll be delving into FTL: Faster Than Light, which was recently released for the Mac. If you haven't played it, the concept is a roguelike set in space, or "Firefly by way of Spelunky." Each time you play, you can expect permadeath, dangers lurking around every corner, and a new randomized world. So far, it's been a lot of fun successfully fending off space pirates and navigating asteroid fields, only to accidentally sacrifice my last crew member by leaving the airlock open too long. (In my defense, I was trying to get rid of hostiles who had boarded the ship.)

I'm currently working my way through Borderlands 2 as an assassin who almost exclusively uses Maliwan weapons. It's a lot of fun and (as most reviews have indicated) a nice improvement on the first game. The wacky humor, mindblowing variety of guns, and drop-in, drop-out cooperative play are all back again, but with a tighter story and pacing.

Our first NYPLarcade Game Club explored the works of thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen. In this six week series, we will look at a variety of horror-themed video games, from the terrifying Amnesia to the utterly bizarre Deadly Premonition to the experimental Dear Esther.

Our final discussion will cover Chapters 13 - 15 of The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. Mystery Summer continues in August with an online discussion of Dashiell Hammett's classic 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon. 

For our penultimate discussion, we will be taking a look at Chapters 9 - 12 of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare, which is part of both Mystery Summer and the New York Public Library's monthly online book discussion Reader's Den.

This week, we will be discussing Chapters 5-8 of The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton as part of the New York Public Library's Reader's Den.

If you don't have a copy of the book yet, please visit the first post for links to request a library copy or download the FREE ebook.

Welcome to the New York Public Library's Reader's Den, a monthly online book discussion. For July, we will be reading G.K. Chesterton's 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare as part of Mystery Summer.

Get a free copy of the book from any of the following sources.

This weekend, I'm planning to revisit the strange, haunting world of Dear Esther, which recently added Mac support to its Steam release. So far, the tone reminds me of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

I'm finally discovering what everyone loves about Minecraft through the recently released Xbox 360 Edition: the whimsical soundtrack, pixelated sunrises and sunsets, and surprisingly fun split-screen multiplayer keep drawing me back in. If you haven't tried it yet, the free, time-limited demo may win you over.

What is a game club? Think of it as a book club, but for video games. Together we'll play, watch, and discuss a selected title (following the schedule listed below) each week at the Mid-Manhattan Library.

Futuremark's Unstoppable Gorg is a refreshing take on the tower defense genre that swaps fixed turrets for rotating orbits, tweaks the typical resource management mechanic, and borrows its aesthetics straight from a 1950s science fiction B-movie.