Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for bradley_prepub.pngOn Tuesday night, I had the pleasure of attending a pre-publication party on honor of Betsy Bradley’s forthcoming book , Knickerbocker: The Myth that Made New York, which will be published by Rutgers on July 15. The party was sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities, which is cooking up some interesting events to celebrate what they call “the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial.” We’ll have more to say about those events in the days to come.

Meanwhile, you can hear Betsy talking about Irving and Knickerbocker on Penguin’s recently launched site, “From the Publisher’s Office,” which went live two days ago. Betsy is featured in the fifth episode of a series called “Penguin Classics on Air,” located in the “Radio Room” section of the site. Betsy is interviewed by Penguin Classics editor Elda Rotor in the first segment from the episode entitled “The Birth of a Knickerbocker.” Give it a listen!

The subsequent segments feature Alan Walker talking about Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants in “Reading the Classics from A to Z” and Stephen Morrison presenting the opening to Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle.” Earlier episodes of the Radio Room focus on Jane Austen, Jose Rizal, Mikhail Lermontov, and Sholem Aleichem.