How Did I Miss Liesl Schillinger?

So last night I was at the book party for Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps, which makes comedy out of stalking by about the only possible means: treating the subject matter so archly that its unreality nearly takes on fairy-tale proportions at some points. The opening chapters read like a cross between Mary Gaitskill and Woody Allen; when the Gaitskillian erotic aura fades, it's to be replaced by extreme, Palahniukian shifts in the storyline. Which makes for a fairly entertaining afternoon's diversion (although I felt the ending could've been a bit sharper).

Apparently, the party was quite the celebrity hotspot, judging by the pictures. And yet I only encountered about half of the people who show up in these photos. I met up with René Steinke almost as soon as I walked in the door, and we talked about an upcoming Author2Author chat she'll do with Susann Cokal. Then I caught up with Wah-Ming Chang and Fran Gordon about some upcoming reading at the National Arts Club, then they introduced me to Paul LaFarge and Sarah Stern, and when I moseyed over to the bar for another martini, I spotted Karen Quinn, then turned around and wound up chatting with David Amsden and Alex Mar. Then, much later in the evening, a mutual friend introduced me to Ben Neihart, who I didn't realize until this morning was the guy who wrote the story on Degrassi High for the NYT Sunday magazine a few months back.