Whiskey Robber Meets Orientalist

Longtime FOB (Friend of Beatrice, not Bill) Julian Rubinstein has lined up an evening of "discussion, music, snacks, booze, [and] bank robbers" with Tom Reiss, who wrote one of my favorite nonfiction books of 2005, The Orientalist. See them in action at Housing Works Café tonight at 7 p.m.

Lincoln & Theater: This Time, They Mix Well

You know, I keep meaning to get out to the Miller Theater and its "Theater of Ideas" lecture series, but stuff keeps coming up. So I'm going to miss tonight's conversation between Bill Goldstein (the guy who put the NYTBR online) and Doris Kearns Goodwin about her new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. I started reading it a while back, and though I really need to find a week or so when I can read nothing else, the opening chapters of her exploration of Lincoln's cabinet were totally fascinating. If any of you go, you'll probably have a great time.

Go See My Friends!

Book blogger Lizzie Skurnick is going to be reading from her poetry collection, Check In, at Jen Bekman's hip SoHo gallery early tonight. Admission's free, but you'd better call ahead to see if they'll be able to squeeze you into the little storefront.

And tomorrow night, you can see Diana Abu-Jaber, novelist and Beatrice guest blogger, reading at The Next Stage in Greenwich Village.

Literary Comrades

My friends Elyssa East and Suzanne Dottino will be reading with Rivka Bernstein tonight at KGB for "Columbia MFA Night." Suzanne's usually the one setting up KGB readings—she runs the bar's Sunday night fiction series—so this is a chance to actually hear her own work! And another chum, Jennifer Sturman, will be reading from her second novel, The Jinx, tonight at Partners & Crime. Both events start at 7 p.m.

An Evening Packed with All-Star Poets

Remember our coverage of last year's reading by the chancellors of the Academy of American Poets? Well, it's time for the latest installment, so get yourself to CUNY's Proshansky Auditorium (34th & 5th) by 7 p.m. tonight for readings by C. K. Williams, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Frank Bidart, Galway Kinnell, Heather McHugh, Philip Levine, Robert Hass, Susan Howe, Susan Stewart, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

My First Bookstore Appearance!

Paper has the scoop on tomorrow night's event to celebrate the publication of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! at the Borders on the corner of Park & 57th:

"Ron Hogan and Joe Bob Briggs, author of Profoundly Erotic, come together to discuss the golden age of experimental filmmaking in the 1970s. Sure, this creative outburst was probably all fueled by lots and lots of fantastic drugs, but we’re not complainin'!"

6:30 p.m. See you there!

From Beatrice to Broadway

Wednesday night, I got to see my friend N.M. Kelby, who you've met on this blog before, make her Broadway debut as her short story "Jubilation, Florida" was read at Symphony Space as part of the Selected Shorts series. On her own blog, she reveals her feelings on hearing Patricia Kalember bring her words to life...and on watching the audience respond.

The rest of the show was pretty cool, too. Eli Wallach read a Simenon story, and Paul Hecht did a great job with an Aimee Bender tale. Plus the crew of One Story, which originally published "Jubilation," were handing out free copies in the back of the theater. Once people figured out that, yes, they were free, and they could take any or all of the six stories on hand, they really seemed to get into it.

I Need to Get Out More...

...or I need to call ahead a lot earlier. I'd phoned 192 Books this afternoon about the Frederic Tuten reading tonight, celebrating the reissue of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, but the man who answered the phone said they'd taken all the reservations they could. Well, perhaps it's for the best; I suppose I could use an extra night to recuperate from the cold I picked up last weekend. Heck, I can even start reading the book!

But I'm also missing out on a KGB reading for Behind the Book, a non-profit "dedicated to developing a life-long love of reading and writing in young people" by bringing authors to schools where they can interact with students. A.M. Homes and Adam Rapp are reading tonight; there will be further readings to come, but you can also donate directly to the group or offer to volunteer.

"Cool Customer:" Joan Didion at the 92nd St. Y

Asked whether she wanted an autopsy of her husband, Joan Didion said yes. She also wanted to be there, in the room, though she knows how gruesome autopsies are. Why? To know what happened; to be there; to see. This is also why she writes, and so The Year of Magical Thinking is a book written in order to know what happened, perhaps to absorb and believe it. It is possible that the human need to recite the details of trauma and grief is always a way of making it real. “Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks…I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them.”

Ms. Didion compared non-fiction writing to sculpture, in which you have a large unformed mass, your notes, your mountain of research, and your thoughts, at which you then chip away to give it shape. With fiction, she said, you have nothing, you have to make it all up. “You wake up every morning only with a smile and a shoeshine… You have to re-animate yourself every morning.” You ask yourself “whether the world really needs another novel, and does it need this novel. After which, you don’t get interested again in this novel until 5 p.m.”

And now I must go back to asking those questions of my novel.

Camaje to Host New Orleans Benefit

If you're reading this from the Beatrice home page, you may have noticed that I've already found an advertiser to take the first of the site's two adspaces. I'm mentioning here because it's actually a free ad that I'm running for a benefit event this coming Sunday organized by Beatrice guest blogger Emily Gordon:

Poetry, music,New Orleans reportage (first look at the forthcoming Harper's essay by contributing editor Matthew Power), and/or spontaneous collaborations by Oni Buchanan, Jon Woodward, Susan Brennan, Jeffrey Paris, Adam Golaski, Brandon Patton, Steve Roberts, and John Cotter; optional eats by oft-applauded naked chef Abby Hitchcock. Every dime of the pay-what-you-want admission, book and CD sales, and bribes goes straight to the MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund for displaced New Orleans musicians--it buys shelter, food, medicine, new instruments, and other necessities. Location: the celebrated neighborhood bistro Camaje ("cahm-ajh"), at 85 MacDougal St. between Bleecker and Houston (212-673-8184). If you've been reluctantly skipping Katrina-relief benefits because you can't swing the tickets or there's no chocolate soufflé on the menu, this is your chance.

Joe Bob Says Check It Out...

...at least I assume he'd say that; I haven't spoken to him personally yet.

Anyway, legendary film critic Joe Bob Briggs, most recently the author of Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies That Changed History, has kindly agreed to meet with me at the Borders on the corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan on Tuesday, November 15th at 6:30 p.m. We'll be talking about the sexiest movies of the '70s, but watch out, because we'll probably shift from Don't Look Now to The Harrad Experiment pretty quickly.

Words of Awe

I attended the W.S. Merwin tribute at the 92nd Street Y on Monday night (courtesy of Beatrice.com) and came away with the feeling that I’d heard our prophets speak. Each of the three poets who read, by way of introducing Merwin, has a particular relationship with him and the poems they selected reflected that. Naomi Shihab Nye, whose work I don’t yet know, read, among other poems, a Lucille Clifton poem dedicated to W.S. Merwin; Edward Hirsch, who has an interest in Sufic writings, read some of Merwin’s more mystical work, including one about his black dog Molly, animals being a frequent subject of Sufic poetry; Gerald Stern spoke of and read poems set in NYC, specifically the Waverly Place walk-ups in which he and Merwin once lived. And then Mr. Merwin himself stepped out and read a selection of poems that ranged from his earliest books to most recent, some not yet published. W.S. Merwin’s words, the meanings they made, his quiet attentiveness to the natural world, and most palpably, his celebration of what’s good in this world imparted a numinous quality not often experienced at public events, sitting, as I was, in a near full house at the Y’s Kaufman Hall.

W.S. Merwin’s, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press), is a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry.

Tonight, Tonight...

If you're in New York and in you're in the mood for a reading tonight, swing by the National Arts Club at Gramercy Park, where Mary Gaitskill will read from her newest novel, Veronica, and Christopher Sorrentino reads from Trance. Then work your way a little further downtown to Happy Ending, where NYT favorite Benjamin Kunkel shares the microphone with fellow first-timers Owen King and Marcy Dermansky.

Things to Do, People to See

As you all know, I have no problem recommending books by my friends, or readings that involve those books, so you might want to check out Phil Campbell as he reads from Zioncheck for President tonight at KGB. The only reason I'm not going to be there cheering him on in person is that we've got a joint book party coming up in early November--plus you'll undoubtedly be seeing him around these parts soon. You can already catch him at Maud Newton's site.

Also tonight: Paul Berman isn't a friend (because I haven't met him), but he's a great political writer, and he'll be reading at one of my favorite bookstores in New York City, BookCourt of Brooklyn Heights. And Rebecca Godfrey will be at another nifty little place, SoHo's McNally Robinson; I just got a copy of her true crime story, Under the Bridge, and Mrs. Beatrice already called dibs.

So Where Did I Go All Those Weeks?

I'll start with the most recent absence first and work my way back. Last weekend, I went down to Richmond, Virginia for the James River Writers festival. The schedule called for me to speak on two panels--a discussion of book reviewing with the staff of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and then a blogging summit with Reb Livingston and Caroline Kettlewell. On her own blog, Reb sums up the wisdom we imparted pretty well: "How does one get and keep readers? Answer: Be interesting. Write stuff people want to read. Update your blog on a regular basis." (At least, we hope it's that simple.)

Speaking was fun, but I also had a great time hanging out at some of the other panels. I listened in on Morgan Entrekin's explanations of how he and the Grove/Atlantic team helped Cold Mountain and Black Hawk Down to perform so well in the marketplace, heard a ton of great stories from Richard Price about his experiences researching in the field, and watched a fantastic interview with Edward P. Jones. Later on in the day, I was honored to have a drink in the hotel bar with Mr. Jones, along with his interviewee, festival co-founder David L. Robbins, and two other visiting writers, Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross. David and I had corresponded by email before the festival, but meeting him in person, and seeing his books on the display table, reminded me that he'd written one of my favorite novels of the late '90s, War of the Rats. It's the story of a duel between Russian and German snipers during the Nazi's siege of Stalingrad, and if that sounds like the movie Enemy at the Gates, well, that's because Jean-Jacques Annaud's screenplay is a blatant--and uncompensated--ripoff of the novel. (Now, granted, both are rooted in historical figure, but Annaud made the mistake of also copying the one major character David invented from wholecloth.) Over the course of the weekend, I also ran into old friends Susann Cokal and Colleen Curran, the latter of whom had her hands full making sure all of us were where we needed to be when we needed to be. And I made plenty of new friends, too, because everybody in Richmond was fabulously gracious and friendly. The panels were all well attended and the questions from the aspiring writers in the audience were for the most part very well chosen, quite a few steps above what I'm used to from sitting through dozens of bookstore signings over the years. (For example, not once did I hear, "Do you use a computer, or do you write on pen and paper?")

Now, JRW was the second time in two weeks I'd gone down to Virginia--the first time, I dropped by George Mason University for Fall for the Book. Again, I was speaking at multiple panels--including another blogging summit with Reb and, on that occasion, Wendi Kaufman. On the strength of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, I was invited to address one of GMU's film classes about Jaws and how it fit into the '70s film scene; I also was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to banter in front of an audience with Mark Winegardner about The Godfather and The Godfather Returns, the authorized sequel which came out in paperback just before the conference. I also ended up in front of an MFA class on magazine writing taught by my friend Mary Kay Zuravleff; that turned into a really great discussion about freelance life and about the realities of becoming a published writer. And I had an extremely brief conversation with Kim Addonizio, whose reading I had just missed. It was a much different scene than JRW--for one thing, it was conducted in rooms scattered throughout an already active student union building, as opposed to a set of library conference rooms--but equally enjoyable. Because when you get right down to it, people basically gave me a free long weekend to do something--namely, talk about my book and my website--that I'm already totally willing to do. And put me in touch with other writers as part of the bargain. Talk about your sweet deals!

Hello, I Must Be Going...

Yes, no sooner have I unpacked my vacation suitcase than I'm packing up my business valise to speak at the James River Writers conference in Richmond, Virginia. Friday morning I get to talk about book reviewing with Dan Neman, Melissa Ruggieri, and Jeff Lodge, and on Saturday afternoon I discuss the literary blogging scene with Reb Livingston and Caroline Kettlewell.

The one downside of this travel is that it once again puts me out of the city when exciting things are going on. Packing last night kept me from the Happy Ending reading with various contributors to The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, but at least I'll be able to see some of them in October. I won't get that lucky with the launch party for Tracy Quan's Diary of a Married Call Girl, or tonight's McNally Robinson appearance by former Litblog Co-op finalist Michael Turner, who'll be reading from The Pornographer's Poem. Or the Books of Wonder event with Allen Kurzweil, Julia Donaldson, and Dale Peck...or the Bloomingdale's appearance by Barrie Dolnick, who I met recently while researching an article on the changing New Age market for Publishers Weekly.

But I'm going to have such a great time, which I'll post about eventually... Until then, I've got some guest items I can post today and Friday, so I should be back into the full swing of things on Monday, when I'll have a rather special announcement to make. Don't worry; it's good news.

Ashbery Speaks!

So there's this tribute to Walt Whitman at the Strand tonight (6:30 p.m.), where Frederic Tuten is introducing a bunch of poets--Macgregor Card, Tom Devaney, Marcella Durand, Chris Edgar, Peter Gizzi, Robert Kelly, Lisa Lubasch, Joan Retallack, Lytle Shaw, and Elizabeth Willis--reciting their own Whitman-inspired verse, while Francine du Plessix Gray reads French tranlsations of Leaves of Grass. And that's all fine and dandy, but now word comes in that John Ashbery's joined the lineup as well!

Adjust your plans accordingly. If I didn't have a story due tomorrow...

Inner Monologues @ Club Apocalypsee

After getting the first draft of my latest article turned in yesterday, I met up with Nadine at an Alphabet City bar called Club Apocalypse, where her friend Alexis hosts a reading series called Inner Monologues that seems to be centered around young, as-yet-unpublished writers. At many of these events, that means wildly uneven quality, but Alexis put together a pretty good roster of writers dealing with the theme "Before the Fall." Plus musical entertainment from Jessy Delfino, whom Alexis fairly accurately described as "a cross between Redd Foxx and Jewel" (although I would've put Suzanne Vega in the second position, myself). And $3 Rheingolds in cans. So keep an eye on Alexis' blog and when she hosts "Scary Stories" in mid-October, you might want to drop by.

Party All the Time, Party All the Time...

I went out to another book party last night--this time for Jennifer van der Kwast's Pounding the Pavement. On the subway ride in, I read the opening chapters, and I'm quite impressed with the voice that van der Kwast establishes for herself; a lot of first-time chick lit writers can come up with plots but fall a bit short on characterization and tone, but she does a pretty good job of getting it right in what I've seen so far.

I had a great time chatting with Jennifer about her plans for next week's reading at the Barnes & Noble in Park Slope (don't be surprised if it turns a bit Andy Kaufman-esque, is all I'm saying), and also ran into fellow blogger Rachel Kramer Bussel and the writing team of Robin Epstein and Renée Kaplan.

Loiter with the Intellectuals

The n+1 gang are going to be hanging out in the Brooklyn Bridge Park tonight at 6:30 p.m., so all you struggling young publishing industry professionals can ditch work early and stop by on your way home (follow the link for directions).* Readers include Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen, and Marco Roth.

*Yes, I know not everybody in publishing has to live in Brooklyn. Some of us (and I use "us" loosely, given my freelance status) are in Queens!

A Night on the Town

Back in May, I had a delightful interview over ice cream with Jill Kargman, the coauthor of Wolves in Chic Clothing, so when she invited me to a reading last night that the W Times Square was hosting as part of a recurring series of artist events, I was all set to come. (I mean, a book party at a W hotel? Twist my arm already!) Stephanie Lessing and I had been looking for another occasion to get together and chat about writing (since she was understandably distracted at her own party), so I told her to come on down, and she brought along her agent and publicist for good measure, so I had a nice little enclave of people to talk to before and after the actual reading.

But before I'd even snagged my first cocktail, I met up with Nadine Haobsh in the hotel lobby. She and I had swapped a few emails since my comments about her media flap, and I was really glad to meet her in person. As you can imagine, she's been insanely busy since being outed as "Jolie in NYC," but she seems to be handling it all very effectively, and I'm sure we're going to be hearing more from Nadine down the line (and despite my earlier cynicism, I hope she's able to turn this blog thing into a good platform in some alternate media outlet). It was actually kind of neat to stand around with an actual celebrity--she ran into someone from her PR firm at the party, and was explaining her story to his friend, when a woman standing next to us said, "Jolie in NYC!" Plus, I think I may be the first to report that she's with the William Morris Agency as of that afternoon. Take that, Page Six! (OK, so I only beat them by a few hours--but that still counts.)

NYPost photo: Robert Miller

Another Night, Another Reading

I'd been hearing a lot about Charlie Huston lately--first about his thrillers for Ballantine, Caught Stealing and Six Bad Things, and how much butt they're supposed to kick, and most recently that he'd added comic books to his repetoire, scripting Marvel's Moon Knight revival. So when I heard Huston would be reading at Coliseum Books last night, I decided to drop by... and let me tell you, the guy knows how to open a story. I'm digging through my to-read stacks for the copies I know I have as soon as I'm done with this post.

Also in the audience: Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime and mystery doyenne Sarah Weinman, who I believe was headed uptown as soon as she'd had a chance to talk with Huston to catch up with Peter Spiegelman, who was reading from Death's Little Helpers at Black Orchid.

If You Go, Say Hi For Me!

I can't make it out to Kirby Gann's reading at McNally Robinson tonight, but if you want to support independent bookstores and small presses, you should totally drop by (at 7 p.m.) for the Ig Publishing Outsider Fiction night (which also features Robert Lasner). I met Kirby the last time he was in New York, around the time Our Napoleon in Rags came out, and we had a great lunchtime conversation about novel writing and his day job as the managing editor of Sarabande Books. Keep an eye on Kirby; you're going to be hearing more about him.

Things to Do If You're Not Reading Harry Potter

The Speculative Fiction Fair, a monthly Manhattan gathering of fantasy and science fiction fans, closes out its season Sunday with a reading by Hugo-winning author John Grant. They'll also be raffling off (for free!) what appears to be a master class in SF writing with Michael Blumlein. That'll be at the Interborough Repetory Theater in Greenwich Village. Later that evening, at KGB, my friends Robin Epstein and Renée Kaplan will be reading from Shaking Her Assets; I'm hoping I can get enough writing done this weekend to be able to see that!

Wonderful Radio, Marvelous Radio

For the next few weeks, Housing Works Café plays host to the "Liberal Arts" show, in which Al Franken's Air America co-start, Katherine Lanpher, talks things out with various authors and musicians for the next few Wednesdays. Tonight it's Chuck Klosterman and Dar Williams; later shows will feature Sean Wilsey and Jeannette Walls trading childhood horror stories and Melissa Bank being peppered with questions about how book reviews make her feel.

And while Housing Works has your attention, congratulations to New York's favorite used-bookstore-as-charity-fundraiser for its recent out-of-court settlement with New York City. (OK, late May's not so recent, but bear with me.) Nearly a decade ago, the Giuliani administration did its best to run Housing Works out of business for daring to publicly criticize Our Fearless Leader's AIDS policies. This settlement, which specifically covers his attempts to cut off the organization's social services contracts, puts an additional $5 million in Housing Works coffers. I mention this because I hope it's the sort of thing that will come up when Fred Siegel, the author of the recently Times-touted* Giuliani bio The Prince of the City, takes part in a public debate with Robert Polner, the editor of America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York at the Jefferson Market Branch of the NYPL (6th Ave. & 10th St.). It's just too bad Jack Newfield isn't around to throw a few more jabs at the "C-plus mayor... who has become an A-plus myth" as well.

* Contrary to James Traub's lead-in statement, "we" don't "miss Rudy" with unanimity; some of us are not only happy to see him gone, but take heart in the possible permanent stalling of his political ambitions by Bernie Kerik's chicanery.

The Author Is Really Speed's Missing Brother, Rex

Wednesday night, I ignored the rain and went to the National Arts Club to check out the Secret Society of Demolition Writers--or, at least, a few of the contributors to this anthology of anonymously published short stories. The book's conceptual mastermind, Marc Parent, brought along customized crash helmets (click on the blurry cameraphone pic for a larger view, including Anna Quindlen's autograph) for himself and the evening's three other participants: Benjamin Cheever, Jonathan Burnham Schwartz, and Daniel Menaker, the Random House editor who gave the project a publishing home--since his first acquisition as an editor was a little something called Primary Colors, he knows a thing or two about anonymity.

As was the case at an earlier Secret Society event Sarah attended, the authors may or may not have been reading from their own work. Cheever led off with a story narrated by a women's magazine editor, set in her workplace, that led me and at least one other attendee to speculate afterwards that this was Rosie O'Donnell's contribution ("It could have been highly cathartic for her," I proposed), after which Schwartz read from the excellent opening pages of "There Is No Palindrome for Palindrome." Menaker read an anonymous story he said had been handed to him just that afternoon; "Here" didn't impress me all that much, though--just another vaguely surreal story in an Aimee Bender/Kelly Link sort of vein in which the mild fantasy elements are proven to be symbolic of some psychological/emotional condition.

After the reading was over, I jumped in a cab to Greenwich Village, where Sarah Bushweller and Emily Morris, the writing team behind "Libby Street," were celebrating the publication of their first novel, Happiness Sold Separately. As servers passed through the crowd with trays of mini-cupcakes and pink snowballs, I chatted briefly with the crew from Romantic Times, then caught up with Downtown Press editor Amy Pierpont, who made sure I got to say hello to her two authors on their big night. "Libby" was featured in a recent Daily News story about product placement in chick-lit, which also gives a shoutout to Alison Pace.

OK, I've Gotten My Bearings Back

It took me a while to fully recover from last night--as it happens, even typing the word "martini" in the previous item's headline was enough to jumpstart my headache--but by this evening I was ready to head over to Black Orchid, where Sarah and I were among those coming by to celebrate Laura Lippman's new novel, To the Power of Three. Fellow writers Lauren Henderson and C.J. Carpenter also came around, and after the signing was over we all wound up walking over to a nearby restaurant for drinks and various antipasti. Back at Black Orchid, I'd gotten into a really interesting conversation with Laura's publicist and agent and one of the shop's co-owners about the sudden success of The Historian, which I really need to read soon, and when Bonnie (the co-owner) expressed her enthusiasm for historical fiction of all kinds, not just mysteries, I was able to plug one of my recent favorites, Mary Gentle's A Sundial in a Grave: 1610, a genuinely weird thriller set in 17-century France and England that has everything from mathematical conspiracies to wandering samurai. And a pretty strong dose of kink, thrown in for good measure. It's one of those 700-page books you keep reading until you've gotten to the end of another big chunk, and suddenly it's two in the morning...I think a lot of you would maybe like it as well.

If I Even See Another Martini, I'll Cry

Last night I got together for happy hour with Sarah Weinman and M.J. Rose. We talked a little bit about how the pledge drive was going (still plenty of books available when you contribute $20 or more), and M. J. filled me in on an idea so clever that if I had a paperback out, I'd do it in a heartbeat: "Is this blog worth $6.99?"

Then it was uptown to David Burke & Donatella for Stephanie Lessing's book party, where apparently I just missed a Julia Stiles sighting. Also celebrating the publication of She's Got Issues was BookReporter.com co-founder Carol Fitzgerald, who was once Stephanie's boss back when she was working in magazines.

Keeping My Fingers Crossed for 2010!

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't score permission to come help Poets & Writers celebrate its 35th birthday last night; apparently it was the literati event of the season and there hadn't been spare room on the guest list for anybody in ages. Gawker snuck in with a camera, though, and if I play my One Ring Zero CD while I look at the pictures, it's almost like being there--if I were nursing a drink in the corner because I was too shy to engage in literary chitchat, that is.

"Gay Vague" Is the New "Metrosexual"

I did some spend some time earlier this morning ragging on the slow book coverage at Salon, but I have to admit that they seem like sprinters compared to the laughably glacial pace exhibited by the NYT Sunday Styles section, which devoted yesterday's cover to the gay vague look, "a new gray area that is rendering gaydar...as outmoded as Windows 2000." What made it truly hilarious, at least for me, was the idea that there was any ambiguity left in the case of E. Lynn Harris.

Anyway, if you want to give your gaydar a good calibrating, or if you want to do something sophisticated with your loved one, Lincoln Center salutes Gay Pride this week, and tomorrow's event will feature readings by Paula Vogel, David Leavitt, and Allan Gurganus that touch upon "evolving concepts of family in literature and society."

Eric Bogosian Live on Stage (After a Fashion)

Anticipating a crowd for Eric Bogosian's reading, the KGB organizers moved the show down to the first floor and the Kraine Theater, but a good-sized crowd was in the bar beforehand waiting for tickets to be handed out. Bogosian came out at 8 p.m. sharp, and though his goatee had me doing a mental doubletake, the familiar voice came out quickly enough. The KGB appearance was the last stop on the tour for his second novel, Wasted Beauty, a tour on which he'd been experimenting by reading from some of his earlier monologues as well. So the first piece was actually the "ceramic tile salesman" from Drinking in America--and he went into character so quickly that, in conjunction with the facial hair, I might almost have been convinced that I was watching Sam Elliott up on that stage. A lengthier extract from Wake Up and Smell the Coffee followed, taking the audience from a failed audition for a wisecracking best friend role in a big-budget comedy to grandiose fantasies of celebritydom to a corrosive critique of society's obsession with fame...in the midst of which, somebody's cell phone rang. Bogosian calmly paused, smirking, then broadly opened his own jacket, pulled his own phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, and said, "Hello? Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Right. Uh-huh. OK. Great. Uh-huh," or words to that effect, hung up, and picked up the scene where he'd left off.

"I'm completely subverting the book reading portion of the evening here," he joked after this segment ended, "but they told me you people don't buy the book anyway." Then he gave us a scene of suburban voyeurism from Wasted Beauty, after which he opened the floor to questions, the first one of which was something like "do you remember that poem you read at such-and-such event?" "Yeah," he said, "I think I've got it here. You want me to read it?" And so he did. Subsequent questions reached back to comments he'd made in his opening remarks about why he'd given up solo performing. "Audience is what theater is," he explained, and for him much of the pleasure of performing came from being with a "tribe" whose "shared values" would enable him to speak about specific subjects and have the audience get what he was saying, rather than having to stick to superficial generalities. When the seats started filling up with people who didn't really understand where he was coming from, he continued, the fun went out of it. For that matter, he was pretty down on contemporary theater in general, especially the timidity of most companies to present truly challenging material. Books were so cheap to produce, he mused, that nobody was going to tell him they couldn't afford to potentially offend readers with what happened in the scene he'd read us (I'm being vague to preserve your sense of discovery). Add that to the fact that "something broke inside of me" on 9/11--he lives in downtown Manhattan--and he was simply ready to try another type of writing for a while. So far it seems to have paid off--prose fiction necessarily sets up a degree of remove, so there's slightly less immediacy than in the monologues, but it's also still very identifiably Bogosian's voice coming through.

Good Clean Fun on the Literary Circuit

Wednesday night, I made it over to Happy Ending, where Amanda Stern had turned the reins over to the NYTBR's go-to poetry guy, David Orr, for an evening of verse. (Full disclosure: I like David, and David likes me.) It turned out that all three of the poets David had invited were from the Princeton English department, starting with Paul Muldoon, who read a 13-sonnet cycle called "The Old Country," which, he joked halfway through, was "memetic of the very tedium it's embracing." (David quipped afterwards that this was a unique defense strategy he'd never encountered at a reading before.) Next up was James Richardson, who shared a number of short poems followed by a sequence of aphorisms--"the perfect form for people with compromised attention spans." Finally, Susan Wheeler read a poem from her new collection, Ledger, then segued into a poem she'd written about one of the characters in her novel, Record Palace, before giving us a few scenes from the story itself. Afterwards, I caught up with another Princetonian, Beth Machlan, and discovered that she's joined the blogopshere with "Subjective Correlative."

Last night, after birthday dim sum in Chinatown, Mrs. Beatrice and I walked to the Slipper Room where Vintage was throwing a book party for Colleen Curran's Whores on the Hill. I was glad to meet Colleen in person, since she'll be part of next week's Author2Author feature. And let me tell you, this was a party, emceed by Murray Hill with burlesque routines starring the Pontani Sisters. Plus three girls in tank tops and Catholic schoolgirl plaid skirts reading passages from Whores that would no doubt send Colleen's Amazon hate squad--you should see some of those reviews--into a tizzy.

Hitting the Lecture Circuit

So Tuesday night I was over at the Explorer's Club to hear ornithologist Tim Gallagher talk about his quest to confirm the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which he's written about in The Grail Bird. The reception before the lecture was packed, and once we all filed into the lecture room, the audience was hooked from the moment Gallagher turned the slide projector on to reveal a gorgeous painting of an adult ivory-billed in flight. For a half hour, he guided us through the bird's 20th-century history--a depressing story of the devastation of acres of Southern bottomland forest by the logging industry and other developers, such that the last recognized sighting of the bird in the United States had been in 1944. Somebody had claimed to see one in 1999, and though there'd be no official confirmation, "I didn't want to give up the dream," Gallagher said.

So when another report came in from Arkansas in January 2004, he went out to investigate and found himself canoeing in the bayou of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge where, eventually, he and his partner saw an ivory-billed fly right in front of them. One of the final slides was of "our fifteen minutes of fame" at the Department of the Interior conference announcing their findings--where, he joked, he felt "like the Mercury astronauts from The Right Stuff" as he fielded questions from eager reporters. He probably got a twinge of that from the battery of questions the Explorers had for him that night, too; I'd guess that the club allowed for about fifteen minutes of non-stop questioning, and it easily could have gone for another fifteen. I'm a few chapters into the book--it's fast reading, but more importantly, it's fun reading. Gallagher brings a very entertaining personality and sense of adventure to his account, and I think any nonfiction fan would get a big kick out of this.

Last night was a completely different sort of lecture, as I caught up to the release party for Alison McMahan's The Films of Tim Burton. She drew a pretty good-sized audience to the second floor of the Strand, which was decorated with a slew of posters from Burton films (all of which would eventually be raffled off) and though I wasn't completely convinced by her theory about Burton as a creator of "pataphysical films," I figure that any book which places great emphasis on Mars Attacks! as the turning point in his oeuvre deserves recognition.

Actually, it's not so much that I don't think Burton made "pataphysical" movies; my point of contention was with her idea that his influence was such that the pataphysical cinema would include The Mummy and The Day After Tomorrow. While those movies do share an emphasis on the use of special effects to create visual spectacle, I'd argue that they lack the fundamental absurdist attitude that defines Burton at his most "pata." Mars Attacks! mocks apocalyptic anxiety, subverting it at every turn, while The Day After Tomorrow embraces that anxiety. If I were to list films which followed in Burton's footsteps, I'd agree with McMahan on Barry Sonnenfeld's Addams Family, but then I'd probably add Rob Minkoff's The Haunted Mansion and Gore Verbinski's Mousehunt. And maybe the 1996 version of Wind in the Willows directed by Terry Jones, but then I love that film on general principle. Hmm...that's a lot of Disney; interesting coincidence? Perhaps I should add Joe Pytka's underappreciated Space Jam to the list...

Real Life Becomes a Rumor

It's been ten years since Mary Karr wrote The Liars' Club, which conventional wisdom tells us jumpstarted the memoir in the modern marketplace. Tonight she'll be sharing a stage (well, more like a row of chairs at the Barnes & Noble across the street from Lincoln Center) with one of her writing students, Koren Zailckas, who has come into praise for her memoir, Smashed, and Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (and, like Karr, an accomplished poet). The subject? "Truth and Life in Memoir."

Speaking of memoirists onstage, stand-up comedian Chelsea Handler has brought her act to New York City, performing a routine which, I'm told, draws upon some of the experiences recounted in My Horizontal Life, a "collection of one-night stands." I almost got to see her at a launch party last week at Club Monaco, except that review deadlines kept me home--maybe I can catch up to her at Henri Brendel's tomorrow. (Between those two pit stops and an upcoming gig at a hair salon, I'm wondering if this is a book tour or a transcontinental shopping spree...)

Steve, Dallas and an Opus
(Yeah? You Try Writing These Headlines, Smartypants...)

I ended up in a bit of a blogcluster at last night's Stephen Elliott/Dallas Hudgens reading at Lolita. Of course, there was Lauren Cerand, who's still booking events at the bar in the post-Cupcake era, but Dallas brought along his writing group partner, Wendi, and fellow Elliott fan Maud was accompanied by her friend, Dana. And then I saw New York City Mouse and Jenny, who told me that she'd also spotted Edward and Cheryl Mendelson...but I still trumped her on the celeb sighting front because I saw Sarah Vowell. (After all, the Mendelsons may be all that when it comes to Auden and home comfort, but how many opening weekends have they led the box office?) The basement of the bar was packed as Hudgens read a scene from his novel, Drive Like Hell, and Elliott--acknowledging that many of his friends in the room had already heard him read from Happy Baby repeatedly--shared an essay called "My Little Brother Ruined My Life" that will turn up in the next Best American Non-Required Reading.

Ever since I went to the 92nd Street Y Monday night, I've been meaning to mention that they've just launched their blog. Mostly it's a fun way to find out about upcoming events, but they do have other tidbits thrown in for readers' amusement. Anyway, I went there to see Umberto Eco read from his new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I think may be his most accessible novel ever (although LAT reporter Scott Martell, who I met before the show, assured me that I just hadn't gotten yet to the passage that would require my brain to do some heavy lifting). Eco read from the opening scene, in which the protagonist emerges from a coma with perfect recollection of the books he's read but no sense of personal history, not even his name, then skipped ahead to scenes from later in the story--including the grand climax (portions of which he read in Italian). I don't necessarily think it "gave away" the ending, though, because as arresting as the material was, I don't think it'll really make sense to me until I actually read up to that point. (I did flip ahead to those final pages, though, and the comic book-like collages interwoven with the text are fairly striking...)

After sitting on the tarmac at Logan for four hours, Ren Weschler got to the hall in time to handle some post-reading Q&A, and when he prompted Eco on the obvious surface similarities between author and narrator, Eco smiled and said, "Usually, to provoke my interviewers, I say my previous novels were all autobiographical, but this one..." (at which point the audience laughed heartily). He also revealed that he hadn't struggled to remember the cultural artifacts from his youth that eventually turn up in the novel; he knew exactly what he was looking for, and then it was merely a matter of finding it on the Internet. Weschler asked if he ever felt like "the Internet is your mind writ large." The answer? "Every intellectual, I suspect, thinks the Internet is nearly as large as our brain."

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.

All My Rowdy Friends Are Giving Readings Tonight

Well, okay, she's not that rowdy, but Pearl Abraham is part of an all-star lineup at the Brooklyn Public Library, all of whom are featured in the current issue of BOMB. Meanwhile, over at Junno's, Happy Ending host Amanda Stern, who's also not that rowdy but can be pretty feisty, finds herself on the guest end of the microphone for a change as she reads from a novel in progress, while Wendy McClure brings her memoir, I'm Not the New Me, to the Astor Place B&N. And he's not my friend yet, but since I'm told Alexander Parsons likes to walk around in cowboy boots, maybe there'll be a little rowdiness at the Greenwich Village B&N this evening.

What I've Learned Lately

• The other night I attended a Mediabistro seminar on memoir writing moderated by Susan Shapiro, who teaches quite a few journalism workshops for the organization. Her experts included Molly Jong-Fast, who recently published an account of her childhood called The Sex Doctors in the Basement, Simon Spotlight editor Ryan Harbage, and agents Ned Leavitt and Elizabeth Kaplan. The goal of the evening, Shapiro quipped, was to learn "how to finish your damn book and get it published," to which Harbage observed that if you buckle down and write the book, "the business will sort itself out." Kaplan pointed out that she wanted to see somebody's first 30 pages as evidence that they were talented enough to write the whole book, while Leavitt warned that in the proposal, "you don't ever write about what you're going to write" in the memoir, adding that from an agent's perspective, "If you're bored by the letter, you'll probably be bored by the book." (And Harbage added that he almost never buys first-time nonfiction of any kind, let alone memoirs, on proposals alone.)

  When Shapiro described her recent career as "a boring, mundane life where I sit around and masturbate with my past," Kaplan noted that "you may not need a dramatic story" to make a memoir work, "but you certainly need something to say." Molly (who I admit I've known for a while) had some insights into dealing with the reactions of family and "friends" to your writing, as well as the distinction between an "autobiographical novel" and a "fictionalized memoir." She also said that writers should think seriously about the market opportunities for commercial work, even if "everybody wants to be Jonathan Franzen." "Sure, they want to be Jonathan Franzen now," Harbage countered, "but nobody wants to spend eight years in a tiny Harlem studio typing blindfolded."

• Last night I dropped by the New York Society Library to hear Ellen Feldman talk about why she decided to write The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, in which she imagines what would have happened to Peter van Pels if he'd survived and fulfilled his vow to reinvent himself, only to confront his repressed wartime experiences as Diary of a Young Girl becomes a literary, theatrical, and cinematic phenomenon. She spoke mainly about the controversies that really did surround the adaptation of the diary into a stage play, particularly Meyer Levin's long-running obsession with being seen as the deliverer of Anne's story to the masses.

• Monday night, I was at McNally Robinson to hear Unbridled Books authors Edward Falco and Susann Cokal talk about the writing life and the positive aspects of being with a small, independent publisher. Falco observes that the rewards of writing come from the process itself, and that since "you can't control the publishing part," foregrounding it in your writerly life is just "a path to bitterness." He spoke frankly of his experience as a short story writer associated with university presses who tried to upgrade himself to more commercial houses with little success, and how Unbridled eventually wound up with his most recent stories (as well as some of his best earlier work) and even took a novel he'd written when he was trying to "break out" but had shelved--and didn't even necessarily want his new publisher to see at first. Cokal compared the experience of many authors to that of the miller's daughter in Rumpelstiltskin: tortured in spinning gold out of straw, with her final reward being marriage to her torturer. She pointed out, though, that life with Unbridled was completely different.
  

Reading the World: French in Translation

Last week, the French-American Foundation handed out translation prizes to Helen Marx, who published a new English-language version of the Jacques de Lacretelle novel Silbermann through her own imprint, Helen Marx Books, and to Arthur Goldhammer, who re-translated Democracy in America for the Library of America. Now, we've all seen de Tocqueville in a couple of editions, but Silbermann has never appeared in English before.

These Can Serve Double Duty:
"Reading the World" And Latino Books Month!

Tonight, Gregory Rabassa will be reading from his memoir at the Instituto Cervantes. This is the guy who brought English-language readers Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, and he might read from those or other books that he's translated as well as from If This Be Treason, which NYTBR praised this weekend. Tomorrow, it's Edith Grossman, the acclaimed translator of Don Quixote, speaking at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute.

I'm Pretty Sure He Doesn't Mean Me, Darnit

In a PW story, Salman Rushdie attributed the full houses at many of last month's PEN World Voices events to an "enormous amount of blogging." Frankly, I feel like I should have done more at the time; oh, I know I plugged it a couple days beforehand, but I didn't tell you about what it was like to see and hear the events. You can get some feel for it from the pictures and sound bites on their website, but they don't have some of the best bits of "The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?", which was the biggest thing I got to see (and I was very lucky that press seats opened up at the last minute). Frankly, I found Margaret Atwood nowhere near as interesting as Ha Jin or Shan Sa--though I am glad to see the archivists preserved Jonathan Franzen's comment that of course writing changes things and not always for the better. "For every Germinal," he pointed out, "there's a Protocol of the Elders of Zion." It's too bad they didn't also include Woye Soyinka's thoughtful reflections on the place of literature in the context of social change; he was one of my favorite commenters that evening. Anyway, if you weren't there, knock yourself out in the archives.

Insert Your Own "15 Percent" Joke Here

By Tuesday evening, I felt like I'd beaten my cold back far enough that I could venture out in public again, so I came into midtown for a panel organized by the New York WNBA chapter (that's Women's National Book Association; this is still a bookblog, after all). Broadway Books editors Beth Haymaker and Sarah Rainone took their first crack at moderating the organization's annual panel on agents, which promised we'd "meet the agents behind the hot deals." So there was Andrea Barzvi of ICM, who came into literary agenting after sports and film didn't work out and snagged He's Just Not That Into You when she was still an assistant (which you can bet she isn't now). Jay Mandel of William Morris boasted a pretty strong literary nonfiction client list, while Sterling Lord Literistic's Jim Rutman had the hottest fiction lineup (including Jon Fasman's recently published The Geographer's Library, about which I've heard some interesting buzz). And David Black was the hardened veteran, having run his own agency for the last sixteen years; he's the guy that brokers Mitch Albom's deals.

Authors who knew I'd been planning on going to this joked that I should take notes for them on what the "agents behind the hot deals" were looking for, but there wasn't really much divulged on that front...and the strong emphasis on nonfiction led to an emphasis on a strong book proposal for the agent to show editors. As Black put it, "a proposal that answers all the questions an editor would ask, before they think to ask them." Somebody wondered aloud if the publicity departments at major publishers were simply "scorched earth" at this point; my notes are sketchy, but I think that was Rutman, because I know he said that in the current situation, it was up to authors to take more responsibility for promoting themselves. Everybody agreed that if you want to be an agent, you should brace yourself for disappointment--not only is it your job to say no to most of the people who ask you to represent them, it'll be the editor's job to say no to most of what you show them. The Q&A period thankfully avoided the usual "how can I get my book sold?" queries--this is a pretty solid audience, most of whom are already industry pros, so they focused on things like whether anything can be done to squeeze more work out of the publicity department and whether you should take the first offer that comes your way. (Both of which, as you might imagine, can generally but not always be answered "no.")

Asian Art Museum Hosts Discussion of Novel
Set in Asian Art Museum

I went to the Rubin Museum of Art last week to see Mary Kay Zuravleff read from The Bowl Is Already Broken and then hear what museum curators Amy Poston (Brooklyn) and Joan Cumming (Boston), as well as retired art dealer Peter Marks, had to say about the novel. Moderator Deborah Solomon--yes, fellow bloggers, that Deborah Solomon--started the conversation by asking if curators were really as aesthetically driven and politically oblivious as Promise, one of the main characters in the book; Zuravleff pointed out that Promise was a character, not a type, and the pros let on that political considerations are always part of the equation. (In fact, politics would dominate much of the second half of the conversation, especially with regard to international trade embargos on artistic artifacts and the likelihood of Muslim-themed exhibitions at American museums in the current climate.) Poston, if my notes are accurate, had the evening's most direct comment on the novel itself, when she quipped that the characters all seemed like "thinly veiled" portraits of people over the years--but they were all people she was sure Zuravleff had never met. And there were plenty of great anecdotes about museum life--from the arcane restrictions on displaying items in the Smithsonian's Freer and Arthur M. Sackler galleries to an attempted robbery of priceless gold items from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

I have to admit that I was a bit nervous about having Mary Kay introduce me to Deborah Solomon afterwards, and it turned out she did know who I was, but she also remembered that I'd revised my opinions upward after hearing from Christine Schutt. Seeing her interrogatory technique in person added further insights--I could see how many of her questions seemed designed to provoke responses that spelled out all the subtexts that usually go unmentioned in canned answers. Anyway, she and I had a lovely chat about the Jonathan Safran Foer story, and about our mutual admiration of New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer (prompted by my reading of an advance copy of Character Studies, his latest collection of profiles). I just wish I'd gotten to the Rubin earlier: it's a gorgeous museum, but I only had fifteen minutes before the event began. I need to get back and see everything in it soon!

The Whirlwind Social Life of the Bookblogger

New York-based publishers, please note: If you're going to throw your authors a book party, I highly recommend The Works. This "non profit, full-service catering and events planning organization" is the latest charitable venture from the folks at Housing Works, and based on the spread they put out to celebrate the publication of Dianne Jacob's Will Write for Food, they've got a good thing going. (I especially liked the skewered guava-lime glazed shrimp with little slices of kiwi, but Gothamist's bar specialist, Martha Burzynski, made sure I tried the cheesecake, for which I am eternally grateful.) The scene turned out very bloggish: At one point I was chatting with both Andrew Hearst and Elizabeth Spiers. And I also ran into Ellen Geiger of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, who spotted my nametag and came over to tell me how excited one of her authors, Kris Radish, was about having written an essay that will appear on this site next week.

Then I had to dash off to the Bubble Lounge, where Robin Epstein and Renée Kaplan were having a party for their first novel, Shaking Her Assets. I hadn't even made it to the bar to get my first glass of champagne before I ran into a bunch of authors, including Alison Pace and Nic Kelman. Then, on my way to say hello to Robin, I ran into Em and Lo, who I hadn't seen in ages, and they introduced me to Melissa Kirsch, who co-created the "Girls On" website back in the '90s and then went on to Oxygen (which is how she knows Robin); these days she's finishing up what sounds like it'll be an entertaining girl's guide to everything. And then Suzanne Dottino, the director of KGB's fiction night, walked past, which reminded me that she'll actually be reading at KGB tonight with Rivka Bernstein and Mike Harvkey.

I Keep Meaning to Mention...

...that I wound up going to the very end of the Small Press Center's Round Table Writer's Conference, even though I hadn't quite finished the feature story I was working on, because I really wanted to hear what PW's Sara Nelson, Michael Cader of PublishersLunch, and Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House had to say about "the future of publishing." Dennis says it's an "exciting time" for indie publishers like him, because "the big guys are going to get bigger and bigger, but they're also going to get dumber and dumber." Michael advised writers to "ignore all trend pieces" in media coverage of the publishing industry because there never is an actual trend behind any of them, while Sara ended up talking a bit about the PW relaunch that was still a few days away then, correcting an audience member who had heard about the plans at Kirkus to take money to review people's books and thought it was going on at her magazine, and to point out that the "novels with gimmicks" trend (to which Dennis chimed in with Foer's name) was just the fashion of the moment and reminded us that Dan Brown is "very traditional in form and style." And, as Michael pointed out, the biggest demographic in the bookbuying public is the 50+ crowd.

The Q&A period got a bit silly at times--e.g., "Do you see books becoming shorter because people don't have time to read?"--but it was a pretty lively discussion, and the general consensus seemed to be that we'll have publishing around for a bit longer. Afterwards, I was chatting with Marie Mockett, who introduced herself as a fan of the site (which made me feel very cool), and she gave me some very good scoops on panels from the previous day in which several book reviewers claimed to pull back the curtain on how books get reviewed and on how Dave King's The Ha-Ha found its way from his desk to America's bookshelves. I also ran into Blair Tindall, who promised to send me a copy of her memoir, Mozart in the Jungle, as soon as the next batch of galleys are ready--can't wait to get my dose of "sex, drugs, and classical music."

Pages from My Social Diary

• First of all, I've been remiss in not mentioning this much earlier, but a little over a week ago I went down to Housing Works to hear Mitch Cullin talk about A Slight Trick of the Mind, his fabulous imagining of Sherlock Holmes as an old man. After his former writing teacher, Mary Gaitskill, chatted him up about what she loved about the novel, an audience member asked Cullin how he sees the novel fitting into the whole Holmesian fandom scene--i.e., what will the Irregulars (official or otherwise) make of it?--to which Cullin said that many fans "want Holmes to be flesh and blood," but reject certain re-imaginings of the character because "they don't want him to be human." (So then I asked him what he thought of the flurry of "literary" Holmes books, and he chalked it up to just one of those things; he was a little apprehensive when he first heard about Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, which also features Holmes in old age, but now he's looking forward to reading it.)

• If you can't have a Joseph Mitchell book party at McSorley's, Shaffer City Oyster Bar's a pretty good substitute, especially when you're celebrating the reissue of Old Mr. Flood. I met up with some of the MacAdam/Cage crew--including one of their contemporary authors, Samantha Hunt, and though I was able to catch a glimpse of Eli Wallach, who had come to read a passage from the book, unfortunately I had to leave before he took the stand...

• ...so I could get to the New School to see the tail end of the Poetry Society of America's annual awards. Marie Ponsot accepted the Frost Medal with a delightful speech about the roots of poetry in baby talk, then read a selection of works by other poets--from Djuna Barnes to Katherine Jaeger--before closing with two of her own poems. When I got out to the reception area, I found that the evening's other winners included Anne Winters, Lyn Hejinian, and Karen An-hwei Lee. Then I ran into the Unterberg Poetry Center director, David Yezzi, just as Paul Auster was walking away from him, then his wife caught up with us and introduced me to Molly Peacock...and when I went to go get a piece of cake, I ended up chatting with Tree Swenson of the Academy of American Poets--she didn't give up any hints about the site's impending relaunch, but I'm guessing it'll be very cool.

• And then Sunday night it was another awards show, as the Young Lions of the New York Public Library handed out their fifth annual prize for fiction by a writer under 35. I was fortunate to spy Elissa Schappell early on, so there'd be somebody I knew there, and she introduced me to Siri Hustvedt, who was acting as one of the judges, and then re-acquainted me with Jenny Offill, who I used to meet at my local indie bookshop when I lived in Brooklyn. Elissa and Jenny have an anthology coming out any day now from Doubleday, The Friend Who Got Away. The prize, as you may have seen on some of the other blogs, went to Andrew Sean Greer for The Confessions of Max Tivoli--I was rooting for Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby, but Oliver Platt did such a good job reading from the Greer that now I just want him to go record the whole book. (Other celebrity readers included Josh Lucas for Stephen, Griffin Dunne for Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Joan Allen for Aaron Gwyn, and Ethan Hawke for Marc Bojanowski.)
  

Roxana Robinson on Writing Spaces

Roxana Robinson drops in on the Happy Booker to talk about her writing spaces, including the guilty secret behind the best desk she's ever used. I mention this not just because it's a fun essay, but because she'll be reading from A Perfect Stranger and Other Stories at KGB this Sunday evening. (I don't know if they'll have the paperback of her last novel, Sweetwater, for sale there, too, but if you bring it, I bet she'll sign it.) She'll be joined by up-and-coming young writer Daniel Alarcon.

Sorta Like Watching the Detectives

When I got to the 60th anniversary celebration for the Mystery Writers of America, held at the quite fab New York Yacht Club, I kept an eye out for Laura Lippmann, as she's one of the handful of mystery writers I knew reasonably well. (If fellow bookblogger Sarah Weinman had been on hand, she could have guided me through the crowd, but she's unavoidably absent--but she's still got the best roundup of the week's events.) So Laura made sure to introduce me to Dave Walker, then I spotted Alafair Burke and waved her over to say hi, because I've been trying to line up a coffee date with her and Michele Martinez, because I figure you get two former prosecuting attorneys turned crime writers around a table and they're bound to say something entertaining, right? So look for that in mid-May...

The MWA folks (hi, Margery! hi, Carla! thanks for letting me in!) had set up some musical entertainment for the evening: a recital of songs from the murder-themed musicals Something's Afoot and City of Angels (no Nick and Nora, alas). They also auctioned off an autographed print of Gahan Wilson's illustration for this year's program cover, though I missed how much it went for. Ace publicist Shannon Byrne of Little, Brown caught my arm and made sure that I said hello to Michael Connelly, another writer I'd only spoken to over the phone, and filled me in on the novel he's got coming out this fall. I chatted briefly with Chris Freeburn, who told me about some of the great school programs her regional chapter of MWA takes part in, and then at the end of the evening, Michele made sure I met up with Twist Phelan and C.J. Carpenter...who's still looking for a publisher for her first novel, but the word on the street is that she's going to be "the female John Sanford," so if any of you editors reading this are ready to get in on the ground floor...

Mind you, I may be a bit biased in that endorsement, since C.J. invited me and Con Lehane to meet up with Jason Starr and Reed Coleman for drinks as soon as the party was over. (Jason and Reed were coming from the Nevermores party at Partners & Crime, and said it was a blast, the anniversary bash had cut into the usual standing-room-only crowd for the bookstore's mock awards show.) Being a literary crowd, we ended up at the Algonquin, which meant we got to see Karen Akers signing autographs in the lobby after her cabaret show ended. I stuuck around for a martini and some of Reed's stories of horrible mystery conference panels he has known, and then decided I'd better call it a night.

Oh You NASTYbook

I showed up at the Slipper Room just as Barry Yourgrau was starting to read the first of several stories from his new collection of twisted tales for children, NASTYbook. They take place in a world where the strange boarder really is a hideous monster, just like the precocious child suspects--and that's too bad for the child. Where a monkey's dreams go unfulfilled, and a bright young detective's career is ruined by a talking octopus with a librarian fetish. So what if you don't have kids: get it anyway, because it's definitely pure Barry Yourgrau, just like Leon and the Spitting Image was a perfect Allen Kurzweil story. (Come to think of it, how does Harper get all these great kid's books out of "adult" authors?)

After Yourgrau left the stage, I chatted up Fran Gordon and Wah-Ming Chang, the directors of the reading series at the National Arts Club--they'll be bringing him over in June, but before that in just a few weeks they've got Elizabeth Gaffney, Samantha Hunt, and René Steinke (so don't miss that). Later, Fran introduced me to former Paris Review editor Brigid Hughes and her friend, Roland Kelts, one of the contributors to Kuhaku, an anthology of essays on contemporary Japan published by Chin Music Press. He's also one of the contributors to the publisher's blog.

Short Notes from My Literary Social Diary

• Met up Wednesday morning for a late breakfast with Diana Abu-Jaber, who was in New York to read from The Language of Baklava at 192 Books. In addition to discovering that we're at the same literary agency, Diana and I both confessed that we were impressed at the literary savviness of the editorial folks at Real Simple; the month after running an excerpt from her memoir, the magazine published an original essay from Jonathan Safran Foer on how he became a vegetarian. (Diana's still on the road, and I think I may be able to get her to send me a report from a major festival soon, so keep your eyes peeled...)

• Wednesday night, Pearl and I went to the New School to see Amy Hempel and Francine Prose read from their most recent books. Turns out that the reading was on Al Green's birthday, so Hempel read the short story "Jesus is Waiting," in which the eponymous Green song features prominently, from The Dog of the Marriage, while Prose read a scene from A Changed Man in which the reformed neo-Nazi protagonist confesses "Al Green changed [his] life," specifically invoking "Love and Happiness." There were a few minor glitches getting the music tracks to introduce each reading, but otherwise the evening went off fairly smoothly, and the room was packed.

• Last night, the New York Public Library hosted a conversation between, in the words of events coordinator Paul Holdengräber, "two very naughty boys": cartoonist Robert Crumb and one of his biggest fans, art critic Robert Hughes, who's not just a snob, he joked early on--"I am, as they say in Australia," he boomed, "a fucking elitist." (Crumb, by contrast, described himself as "a total child of popular culture.") I was only able to stay for the first part of their discussion, where Crumb was describing his family background, but I have seen The R. Crumb Handbook, which was the underlying motivation for the event: heady stuff, and the room full of eager fans (the guys behind me in line were close enough readers to make "here comes Crumb's girlfriend" jokes about the thick-legged women in boots walking past us) undoubtedly snagged plenty of copies, as they were hanging on his every word when I ducked out...

• ...to dash to the 92nd Street Y in order to make it on time for an evening of classical poetry. Rachel Hadas introduced three translators of Latin and Greek verse, beginning with her mentor, Robert Fagles. "Homer is always with us," he told the audience, "especially in times of war," and apparently he was getting a lot of media requests last year as reporters tried to make some connection between the Iliad and the invasion of Iraq. "Is there a Rumsfeld in the Iliad?" one journalist asked, to which he replied, "Not that I know of, but isn't one enough?" But on to the poetry: Fagles read his stirring account of the death of Patroclus, then switched to the Odyssey for the underworld encounter between Odysseus and his mother's spirit, followed by the reunion between the returning hero and his wife.

  
  David Ferry came up with his new translation of Virgil's Georgics; he skipped around a bit--the passages dealing with disasters and portents particularly stood out in my memory--before closing with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Charles Martin played off that, as his extract from Ovid's Metamorpheses began with Orpheus telling of Venus and Adonis, with a metafictional interlude in which Venus tries to warn Adonis of the dangers of wild beasts by telling him the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, whom she turned into lions for failing to show her proper reverence. It was a lively passage; Martin's translation is a thing of remarkable panache, as funny as Fagles and Ferry were moving. (Well, there's probably some moving bits in Martin's Ovid, too, which I'll get around to discovering one day...)

• And while I'll be running around at a lot of PEN World Voices events this weekend, I wish I could be at Boss Tweed's Saturday night, where Kenneth Ackerman will be reading from his acclaimed biography of New York's greatest political organizer. Apparently there's even going to be nickel beers in Tweed's memory!
  

Ante Up for Charity

At the risk of seeming blatantly promotional of my friends and their books, I wanted to share the latest news from Toby Leah Bochan even though I just told you about her poker lessons, because there's a good cause involved as well. The Children's Aid Society is holding a Blue Jean Ball Saturday night to raise money, and it includes a Texas Hold 'Em tournament ($500 buy-in) for which Toby is donating lessons and copies of The Badass Girl's Guide to Poker as prizes. (The top five players will win nice long vacations in places like St. Thomas and Sun Valley.) I won't be able to make it, but good luck to any of you reading this who end up at the high-stakes table...

Free Culture Meets Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
(And Other Odds and Ends)

• I had wished that I was able to see Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig talk about intellectual property rights and the 'net last week, but a scheduling conflict kept me away. Fortunately, Andrew Hultkrans did go and wrote about the evening for Artforum, as did David Carr for NYT*. And Steven Berlin Johnson, who moderated the talk, uses his blog to point to the webcast of the event, though neither he nor I could actually get the thing to work.

• When I first saw Poesy Galore, I was psyched...and then I realized that the woman who writes it probably isn't that Emily Lloyd (and whatever happened to her, anyway?), but then I got psyched again because it's a very entertaining poetblog. Springboarding from there, I discovered more poets blogging: C. Dale Young (Avoiding the Muse, Dan Nester (God Save My Blog), and Kelli Russell Agadon (Book of Kells)--among others; start link-hopping and see!

• Backstory has been running essays from a good mix of writers lately. This week it was suspense guy Joseph Finder talking about how he managed to make his latest novel, Company Man, just different enough from his last one to keep himself excited while staying close enough to it to hang on to the fans it acquired; the week before, Kathleen O'Reilly described how a newfound love of Manhattan led to The Diva's Guide to Selling Your Soul.

• Everything Terry Teachout says in this post about why artists should take a serious approach to getting themselves online applies to writers, so I hope any writers here who haven't seen Terry's post already will read it.
  

*Lessig has his own thoughts about that latter article, as it happens.

One of the Few Times a New Yorker Can Say
"Liquor Up Front..." With a Straight Face

I've mentioned Toby Leah Bochan and her Badass Girl's Guide to Poker here before. And we know poker's hot now, because even NYTBR tells us so. So if any of the women reading this blog want to improve their games, and you're free tonight, $25 will get you into her "Ladies Only Absolute Beginner" class at the Baggott Inn. (Don't feel left out, guys, there's a co-ed class in two weeks.) I've played in a charity tournament with Toby, so I know how good she is, and I can safely say you're going to come away from the table a lot smarter about the cards than when you sat down.

Also, Proof That Male Librarians Are Attractive, Too

Dayne Sherman is a reference librarian at the Sims Library at Southeastern Louisiana University; he's also the author of Welcome to the Fallen Paradise. (You might remember his holiday gift suggestion from last winter.) He's using a state grant to underwrite a New York City tour--well, actually to visit a lot of bookstores in the area, including a reading at Brooklyn's Freebird Books, and make it possible for him to accept invitations to speak on library science at the Brooklyn Public Library this Thursday and teach a seminar on short story writing at the mid-Manhattan branch of the NYPL library Saturday afternoon. I'm sorry my week's already filled up; I'm sure any of these events will be entertaining and informative!

What to Do, What to Do?

There's so much going on tonight in New York from a literary standpoint. A.J. Jacobs and Dave King are reading at The Dekk in Tribeca, while Jorie Graham, Glyn Maxwell, and Charles Simic celebrate the tenth anniversary of National Poetry Month at the New School's Lang Center. Afschineh Latifi and Annie Nigh Ward read from their books at KGB, and René Steinke and Minna Proctor will be at Brooklyn's Book Court. You could also check out the International Center, where novelists Susan Choi and Akhil Sharma will be reading with memoirist Azadeh Moaveni as part of Immigrant History Week. (For starting times, check the websites; the International Center event isn't on their site, but starts at 7:30.)

And tomorrow's going to be just as fabulous. I'm probably going to go see Amy Hempel and Francine Prose at the New School, but Gary Shteyngart'll be taking part in KGB's "Novel Jews" with Joshua Cohen, and Steinke's taking part in Cupcake with Paula Kamen. Meanwhile, the Women's National Book Association has a special panel on book clubs, "the new cottage industry of the book business," with a panel that includes Adriana Trigiani.

"We Keep Our Mouths Full and Busy..."

A few months ago, I mentioned reading Sustenance & Desire, an anthology of poems and essays about food edited by Bascove and illustrated with her paintings. Last week, I went to the New York Public Library on 53rd Street, across the street from MoMA, to meet her in person and hear readings by three poets from the collection.

After an introduction by publisher David Godine, David Lehman began with an excerpt from Nabokov's Speak, Memory, then segued into a Katha Pollitt poem about mandarin oranges. Selections followed from Edna St. Vincent Millay ("a much better poet than some people condescendingly think"), Richard Wilbur ("another poet I think is greatly underrated"), and Jane Kenyon's "considerable" "Man Eating." Lehman then switched to some of his own verse from The Daily Mirror and his new collection, When a Woman Loves a Man.

Next, Vickie Karp read excerpts from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed; the passages about Ehrenreich's foray into waitressing led into an Ann Caston poem and then some of Karp's own poems. She concluded with part of Margaret Visser's essay, "The Artificial Cannibal," and then Charles Simic came up to read Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California," followed by work from Nobel laureates Wislawa Szymborska, Pablo Neruda, and Czeslaw Milosz. After a short poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, Simic closed by reading four of his own poems, including "Crazy About Her Shrimp." If all this whets your appetite, an exhibit of Bascove's paintings for this and other recent books will open next month at the Uptown Gallery; who knows but which authors might be showing up on opening night?

The Clues Are There in Black and White

I went out to KGB last night to hear Elizabeth Crane read one of the short stories in her new collection, All This Heavenly Glory, spurred on not just by my enthusiasm for her stories but that of several people I know in literary circles. "Howard the Filmmaker" certainly didn't disappoint--I know it's got to be a thinly veiled portrait of some semi-famous film director who has a reputation for using his oeuvre as leverage to get into women's pants, but since I can't think of anybody who's directed autobiographical stories portraying himself as a pickup artist or documentaries where women talk about orgasms, I guess I'll never figure out who it's supposed to be (shrug). It's a pretty hilarious story, though (and it turns out that if you subscribe to the "premium" edition of Nerve.com, you can read it).

Before Crane, Maggie Robbins read from Suzy Zeus Gets Organized, a novel in rhyme ("Suzy hails from Indiana / land of crops, of Fords and farms / Suzy lives in New York City / land of cops and car alarms"). The audience loved it, with the laughs increasing in volume as Suzy's story unfolded with each couplet.

Foer on the Floor

If I were feeling especially lazy, I could simply direct you to the NYT write-up of the Jonathan Safran Foer and William T. Vollmann reading at the 92nd St. Y (surely the only time we can expect to see Vollmann in an honest-to-goodness gossip column!) Monday night. But that would be cheating...besides which, I took all these notes, and I'm darned if I'm not going to put them to use.

It's worth noting that the auditorium was packed with a much younger crowd than I usually see at 92Y; in addition to the hipsters who caught the listing on Gawker's to-do list that afternoon, there were also several rows of high school students. I learned later that both Foer and Vollmann had spoken to the students as part of the Unterberg Poetry Center's Schools Project; I was slightly dubious at the thought of introducing high-schoolers to Vollmann's intense subject matter, but was assured that it all went very well.

So Michael Cunningham introduced Foer with a great story about trying to comfort creative writing students who feel like they've hit a wall by not letting the conversation turn to the "two revolutionary and beautiful novels" Foer's written at the age of 28, marvelling, "I know I could pick a Jonathan Safran Foer sentence out of a hundred others." Foer read from the opening chapter of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, noting that he was reading through his own deletions, which he'd made when he tried to whittle the chapter down to seven minutes to leave more room for the Q&A, before he learned there wouldn't be any audience questions. He had the crowd laughing along quite easily, and it was interesting to gauge their reactions as the chapter turned darker and the young narrator slowly confronted the trauma of 9/11 more directly.

With Vollmann's Europe Central, though, the hard stuff was foregrounded quite heavily. The two stories he read from, "The White Nights of Leningrad" and "Zoya," dealt with the Soviet experience of the Second World War; the second was particularly powerful, dealing with the execution of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and her subsequent transformation into a national martyr as seen through the eyes of a Soviet general. Vollmann was introduced by Melvin Jules Bukiet, who was downright enthusiastic about the bulk of Vollmann's tomes, declaring them as evidence of "a vision of enormity" in the tradition of "a literature of excess that seems almost forgotten."

I was chatting with friends afterwards, watching the long line of Foer fans, when one acquaintance commented that EL&IC was "a full-length tribute to Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai." Since I'd just started the Foer and, I admit, never read the DeWitt, I didn't really protest so much as offer an "oh?"; it was then pointed out that Foer himself had told Robert Birnbaum he considered her novel "the best book, for my money, published in the last five years or so." Whether this new theory can be reconciled with the interpretation currently making the rounds, which claims that Foer's novel is almost just like his wife's, remains to be seen.

Brooklyn Literati Come Together

PS 107, the John W. Kimball Learning Center, is a target school for math, science, and the arts in Park Slope. It needs a library. So when I met David Grand a few weeks ago, he told me about "Readings on the 4th Floor," a monthly series with some of the borough's best literary talents. Tomorrow (April 5th), for example, literary power couple Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt will be the featured attraction; the month after that, it'll be Jonathan Safran Foer and Jhumpa Lahiri. Tickets are $10 each, and they're for a good cause, so give these readings strong consideration, won't you?

A Mini-Domer Reunion in Chelsea

I went out to see my old college classmate Kevin Guilfoile do a reading from Cast of Shadows last night, and ended up running into a bunch of other Notre Dame alum I hadn't seen in about fifteen years. The book's a thriller rooted--and I'm doing this loosely so as not to give away much--in human cloning, so Kevin took the real-life tensions surrounding the abortion controversy, including the terrorist activities of Christian fanatics, and used them to describe the battle over cloning that takes place in his story, which he describes not quite as science fiction but an "alternative present." Thus, the first section he read was from the perspective of an anti-cloning terrorist, tracing the evolution (so to speak) of his violent ideology, while a second passage explored the increasing agnosticism of the doctor whose left-field reaction to his daughter's murder sets the book's plot in motion. Early in the Q&A period, somebody asked Kevin what the significance of the title was, and so he spent the rest of the evening flipping through the book between questions about how to create strong plots and characters, trying to find the "cast of shadows" passage. No such luck, even with helpful advice supplied by The Morning News Rosecrans Baldwin, who came with co-chief Andrew Womack to cheer on their contributing writer.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village

Employees Only, the hip Village dining spot of the moment, was certainly packed last night, as Lucky editor-in-chief Kim France threw a party to celebrate the publication of René Steinke's new novel, Holy Skirts. The crowd was a mix of literati, fashion folks, and music press (Steinke's husband writes for Blender), and I found myself chatting to Pia Catton, the NY Sun reviewer, who told me she loved the novel so much she was missing subway stops while reading it. I also spotted Steinke's cousin, Darcey, making her way through the crowd; she has a new novel out as well. And I ran into Galaxy Craze, who I interviewed back in 1999. She was kind enough to give me some tips about what City Hall's going to be like next month when the Significant Other and I go make things legal.

Nor Did I Meet Wonkette, Dammit

When I learned that Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, was going to be throwing a partyy for San Francisco novelist Eric Martin to celebrate the publication of Winners, my first reaction was to get all excited that maybe I'd finally be able to meet the head Gawker herself, but it was not to be! On the other hand, I did run into Julian Rubinstein, which was fortuitous, as Fresh Eyes had just published the third in a series of great articles about Ballad of the Whiskey Robber and why it's--I'm paraphrasing here--a cult favorite instead of the wild bestseller it ought to be. Julian also introduced me to Barry Yourgrau, who's got something darkly unusual coming out next month called NastyBook.

Turns out that Winners is set in San Francisco during the peak New Economy years, and the reason the party was at Denton's place, Martin explained during his brief welcoming (and thanking) remarks, was that Denton's initial reaction to the early chapters was to wonder if a dotcom executive was supposed to be him. (Eric assured us it wasn't, and pointed out that the question is one fiction writers will often wind up facing, "like from your parents whenever a scene involves bad parenting," or from your exes whenever a love scene goes wrong.)

Gilead and Pearl

Monday night I made another one of my periodic trips out to the 92nd Street Y, this time to see Marilynne Robinson read from Gilead. She was introduced by Meghan O'Rourke, who talked briefly about the experience of working on the NYT profile of Robinson she wrote last fall, after which there was prolonged applause as the author walked across the stage to the podium, to the point where I would not have been surprised if there had been a standing ovation.

Robinson certainly would have deserved one; the passages she read from Gilead, in which the narrator describes the process of falling in love with the woman who became his second wife, were incredibly captivating, and one felt a genuine humanness to the character's voice, both in the authenticity of his emotions and in their expression.

It was a rich and vivid peek into another person's life--and a markedly different experience, at least to my mind, than that offered by the second reader, Mary Gordon. The audience was told quite a few times, as Gordon introduced sections from Pearl, that "I wanted to talk about" what I'll call Issue X and Theme Y (a typical example of which was "what happened to the political faith of my cohort"). It's not that Pearl is a bad book--it's just that writing a novel because one wants to "talk about" something creates a fundamentally different end product than doing so because one wants, say, to tell a story, and I found both the passages Gordon read from the novel and the beginning chunks I'd read earlier that day to possess a certain detachment, to treat the characters as objects of study rather than vibrant presentations, a feeling that was intensified by Gordon's use of a first-person narrator of near-omniscience.

And I realized by the end of the evening that, as an individual reader, and at the broadest levels, I'm simply drawn more intently to novels in which--again speaking broadly, and from my own reaction of the portion of Pearl I've read so far, which is admittedly not the entire book, so I apologize for whatever disservice I may be doing both author and book--issues, if they exist at all, appear to emerge organically out of characters' lives, rather than those in which characters' lives illustrate issues.

It's a Rehearsal for the Edgars, Kind Of

Dozens of mystery writers from up and down the Eastern seaboard and other points east of the Mississippi will migrate to Manhattan's Black Orchid Bookshop tonight so they can see the start of Irish crime writer Ken Bruen's North American tour in support of The Magdalen Martyrs. Sarah Weinman has a pretty good idea about who all is coming, and she also passes along news of a conversation between Bruen and fellow author Duane Swierczynski that may reveal why his peers admire him so much:

"Editors tried to get me to fill out descriptive passages, like scenery. I said I don’t do scenery. And to tone down the violence and language. I said… no. I felt the day would come and the books would be of their time so I wouldn’t compromise...Noir can never be noir enough, but I hate the gore in many mystery novels—full on scenes of minute descriptions of skinning or cannibalism. I don’t think that’s noir. It’s pure sensationalism… and wasted space. Less is more and suggestion is almost more horrific. Set the scene and let the reader draw the horrible implication—works so much better. So the reader goes, what the hell, did he just?"

Sex in the Seventies

I took advantage of the great weather Saturday afternoon to take the long walk from the subway to the Brooklyn Public Library to see Lisa Dierbeck talk about One Pill Makes You Smaller with one of the cultural beacons of New York radio, Leonard Lopate. They discussed the process behind writing the novel, a dark story of the sexual awakening of an eleven-year-old who develops physically much earl