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Holiday Book signing at Fuego 718 / Williamsburg
mara catalan
Dec 19, 2019
Join me this Saturday and Sunday December 21 and 22nd at Fuego718 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a special holiday book signing of Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home. Published by Red Hook Editions.
Mara Catalán’s first monograph, Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home, is a coming-of-age story of a Spanish immigrant who moved to New York in 1990 and stayed. Living in Manhattan from day to day, with little money and no concrete plan, Mara eventually found a cheap place to live and people who cared for her in Williamsburg, an industrial neighborhood in decline, across the bridge in Brooklyn.
Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home is Mara’s personal record of her life there between the years of 1994 and 1996. With a distinctive style, she beautifully weaves B&W urban landscapes, intimate portraits, and lyrical street scenes with stories, personal letters, and diary entries in both Spanish and English.
The book is at once a wonderful record of a particular epoch and a historical archive of many places in Williamsburg which have either radically changed or cease to exist. It’s a window into the life of a woman strongly connected to her changing and expanding world, and also very much tied to where she comes from. More than two decades later Mara continues to live in Williamsburg, a reluctant witness to the massive transformation and the disappearance of familiar places and faces. This book is her ode to what it once was, a place she once called home.
