Things to do on a Sunday in New York

As New York City's largest free literary festival, this annual celebration brings together hundreds of spectacular writers from across the globe for more than a week of talks and shopping to satisfy the borough's brainiacs.

Activities run September 20 through 28 with writers in a variety of genres: international and local, for adult and young readers, working in fiction and nonfiction, poetry, prose, and graphic storytelling. Events are free, but you’ll definitely want to bring some money to buy some new books to take home. 

While activities run for the entirety of the nine-day celebration, the centerpiece festival day on Sunday, September 27, takes place in the parks and plazas surrounding Downtown Brooklyn’s Borough Hall and other venues. Multiple stages will overflow with conversation as authors come together to converse, read and sign books throughout the day. Featured authors include fan favorite Joyce Carol Oates, Namwali Serpell and Douglas Stuart. There's also Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and journalists Quiara Alegría Hudes, Colson Whitehead, Tracy K. Smith, Cristina Rivera Garza, Julia Angwin and more. Festival Day also stages the largest book market in the Northeast with more than 250 publishers, offering readers the possibility to discover new authors, independent publishers and literary organizations.

Don't miss the Virtual Festival Day (Sunday, Sept. 20) and Children’s Day (Saturday, Sept. 26). Plus, more bookend events will take place across the five boroughs and online.

Here's the full schedule.

Refuge NYC is celebrating its first anniversary with three days of dancing and a 12-hour DJ set, giving anyone who forgot to buy a present plenty of time to show up. The Brooklyn club's 72-hour, nonstop party will take place at 366 Ten Eyck Street from Friday, September 25, through Sunday, September 27. Deep Dish will open the weekend with a 12-hour set on Friday and Brothers Macklovitch will close it out on Sunday night.

Saturday’s lineup features Refuge cofounders John DiMatteo and Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu, along with Ragie Ban and special guests who have yet to be announced. Victor Calderone takes over for a sunrise set on Sunday.

Check the club’s website for set times, tickets and entry details before heading over.

Jim Henson would have been 90 years old this year, and the Museum of the Moving Image is throwing him a four-day birthday bash from September 24 through 27. The celebration includes screenings of The Muppet Show, puppet workshops, fan-art displays, a Swa(m)p Meet of collectibles, panels, live music, a costume contest and plenty more puppet-themed fun. Highlights include a Puppet Tea Party, Frog Choir, a Tough Pigs podcast live event and Jim Henson’s Harmonious Hoopla. Permanent exhibit The Jim Henson Exhibition—featuring nearly 300 objects and 47 puppets, including Kermit, Miss Piggy and Rowlf—will also be on view.

This year more than ever, New York’s climate conversation is gonna get very loud. Climate Week NYC returns September 20 through 27 with more than 1,000 events across the city and over 100,000 expected attendees. Organized by Climate Group alongside the United Nations General Assembly, the week brings together global leaders, business executives, policymakers, activists and communities to talk about the climate crisis and, ideally, plan to do something about it.

Oktoberfestivities have kicked off at bars and beer halls all across New York City. Grab your beer stein, rev up your appetite and head on over to one of the many celebrations that are already underway.

Find your weekday, weekend or even weeklong plans on our list of the best Oktoberfest events happening this year.

Get a sneak peek at opera’s next generation of stars as Musica Viva NY brings together young artists from two of the world’s most prestigious opera houses. Singers from the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and Madrid’s Teatro Real's Crescendo Program join forces at All Souls NYC for an evening showcasing the voices poised for international careers. Artistic director Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez curates the 5pm, September 27 program and accompanies the singers on select pieces, making this a particularly intimate chance to hear exceptional talent before they inevitably start commanding much larger stages. It’s opera’s future, up close and personal.

Tickets for the event have sliding scale pricing. General seating costs $50, but students and art workers can get in for $30. If those prices are too steep, there's a $10 as well.

You have a few more weeks to take a fresh look at one of America’s most complicated artistic chroniclers with Thomas Hart Benton: A Picture of America in Its Entirety. It's the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York in more than 10 years. Spanning five decades of Benton’s career, the free Schoelkopf Gallery exhibition brings together major paintings, rarely seen works and studies for his celebrated murals, offering a sweeping look at his depictions of American life, labor, politics, race, industry and popular culture. The show also goes Hollywood, with two studies made for the 1955 Burt Lancaster film The Kentuckian, an original movie poster and a later Beam’s Choice bottle featuring Benton’s artwork. Coinciding with Schoelkopf Gallery’s 25th anniversary and the United States Semiquincentennial, the exhibition runs through October 16.

Rare works by French master Pierre Soulages are coming to the Upper East Side in a new exhibition at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery (19 E. 64th St.). Organized with the artist’s widow, the show features more than 20 paintings on paper, including works drawn directly from Soulages’s estate that have never been exhibited publicly. Spanning decades of work, the exhibition explores a medium he prized for its immediacy and unforgiving nature, using walnut stain, gouache, ink and improvised tools to experiment with light, texture and transparency. 

Forget space—the ocean is the final frontier. And see why as you dive hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface without leaving Chelsea at Twilight Zone: Hidden Wonders of the Ocean, opening September 19 at ARTECHOUSE NYC (439 W. 15th St.). Created in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the immersive exhibition uses real deep-ocean footage, biological research, sound, interactivity and ocean technology to explore the mysterious “twilight zone,” a rarely seen region where creatures produce their own light and billions of animals migrate each night. The experience highlights the deep sea’s role in ocean health and carbon movement while bringing its otherworldly ecosystems to life on a massive scale. 

A new exhibition in Times Square is looking back at the sex clubs, peep shows and adult theaters that once crowded the neighborhood.

Live Sex Acts opens Friday, September 18, at Times Square Space, bringing together photographs and artworks by Vivienne Maricevic, Scott Ewalt and Alix Vernet. Despite its name, the show features no live performances. It’s an 18-and-over exhibition about the adult venues that flourished from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s—and what happened when they disappeared.

Read more about the exhibit here.

Live Sex Acts runs through November 15 and is open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 6pm or by appointment. The opening event takes place September 18 from 6 to 9pm. Expect explicit imagery and mature themes.