NYC Events: Martha Southgate & Peter Bebergal
Tonight’s my Blogger/Author reading series at Greenlight Bookstore, and I’m looking forward to introducing Martha Southgate as she reads from her latest novel, The Taste of Salt. It’s a story about a woman who’s done everything she can to get away from her past—specifically, the alcoholism of both her father and her younger brother—but of course that’s not going to turn out very well. After she reads from the book, Martha will field questions from Maia Szalavitz, a journalist who’s blogged for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today and has written extensive about both addiction and family conflict. It should be a very powerful conversation, and if you’re in the vicinity of Brooklyn, I hope you’ll be able to come by at 7:30 p.m. and contribute to it.
Then, on Wednesday (October 12), I’ll be at the New York University bookstore to talk with Peter Bebergal about his memoir, Too Much to Dream. Bebergal looks back at his “psychedelic American boyhood,” in which he basically gave over his teen years and a portion of his young adulthood to a combination of hallucinogenic drugs and “one part occultism, two parts magic, a healthy dose of gnosticism, and a mighty helping of hermetic philosophy.” It turns out that he and I probably crossed paths in Harvard Square at some point in 1987 or 1988—or, at least, that I would have walked past him in the crowd of punks hanging out in the Pit on my way to the bookstore. I’m looking forward to asking him about growing up in Lovecraft country, and about whether hallucinogenics really can open their users up to mystical experiences—and how, as a recovering addict, he feels about that if it’s true. Also, Robert Anton Wilson! Because it’s always fun to find somebody you can talk about Robert Anton Wilson with. We’ll be starting at 5 p.m.; come by if you get a chance!
10 October 2011 | events |
Extracts from My Social Calendar
Last week, on assignment for Shelf Awareness, I met up with Christopher Boucher, the author of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, a wonderfully surreal debut novel that’s been one of the pleasures of my holiday weekend. We got together to discuss his book tour—he had wanted to drive a VW Beetle from Los Angeles to Boston, stopping at bookstores along the way, but the care he picked out for the journey just wasn’t up for the task. (But he and his wife had a great time on the road, all the same.)
I’m lucky enough to be able to attend a number of literary events each month, so many that there isn’t always space in Shelf for every dispatch I send them. I thought I’d take a moment to share with you some moments from the last few weeks I haven’t told readers about yet…
Staking a claim to “the first fall reading” at Manhattan’s McNally Jackson bookstore last night, Rob Spillman introduced the short story collection Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House, which expands upon a 2007i issue of the literary magazine dedicated to women writing fiction that breaks away from realism and incorporates fantastic elements, including some from mythology and folklore, in the tradition of pioneers like Angela Carter and Ursula K. LeGuin. (And, at least in some critical readers’ eyes, these contemporary writers are doing an excellent job of it; the anthology came about when Spillman discovered that the magazine was being bulk ordered for use in college classes.)
Spillman’s wife, short story writer Elissa Schappell, pinch-hit for Karen Russell, who was stuck in Philadelphia after a train fell across the railroad tracks. They were joined by two contributors to the collection, Gina Zucker and Samantha Hunt.
5 September 2011 | events |
